Michael Barone’s analysis of American political history sounds Chinese. Two steps forward one step backward. Forward of course is the direction of “progressive politics”. Backward is that momentary check that occurs when progressive politics takes the curves too fast. These actions alternate every decade or so. But Barone implies that for all the apparent flux one thing remains constant: it’s a brake and throttle world. The liberals hit the throttle and the Republicans sometimes step on the brakes. Republicans haven’t noticed the steering wheel. He’s wondering whether this time they’ll at least notice the carpet.
Liberal historians like to depict the past 100 years as a story of step-by-step progress from small government to big government, a progress they see as both inevitable and desirable.
But another way to look at it is to note that after each spasm of big government legislation, there has been a strong voter backlash.
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Backlashes don’t change the direction of cars. They only alter the rate of acceleration. With congressional victories staring the Republicans in the face Barone says they’re faced with the same problem as the dog that caught the car. “You know the scene. In the 1972 movie ‘The Candidate,’ the Redford character, having won the election, turns to his political consultant and asks, ‘What do I do now?’” The most likely answer for Republicans is hit the brakes. Some optimists think they’ll notice the steering wheel because this time things are so bad. As the Washington Examiner says the economy is in multiple organ failure and the old nostrums don’t work any more.
The economy is stalling, unemployment seems stuck at European levels of idleness, the federal deficit and the national debt are at historic highs, public confidence in Congress is at its lowest-ever level and big majorities of Mainstream Americans say Obama has the country on the wrong path. Obamanomics has failed miserably and it’s time for everybody in this town to admit it so we can move on.
The idea that ‘this time is different’ has been articulated by Victor Davis Hanson and Peggy Noonan. Both of them argue that something fundamental has changed in the tone of the motor. So something new is bound to happen. Sure, except that new thing might be that everyone will get used to misery. For example New York Times agrees with Hanson and Noonan but recommend accepting it as the natural progression of things, a sort of Kubler-Ross model of economics. According to the NYT, maybe malaise is the “new normal”. The car’s going downhill uncontrollably so relax and enjoy the view. It’s exhilarating.
The “new normal,” as it has come to be called on Wall Street, academia and CNBC, envisions an economy in which growth is too slow to bring down the unemployment rate, while the government is forced to intervene ever more forcefully in a struggling private sector. Stocks and bonds yield paltry returns, with better opportunities available for investors overseas.
In line with those reduced expectations, the pundits are talking about ways to keep the economy chugging along at an acceptably slow rate. Competence has been redefined as acceptable imbecility. When you come right down to it, failure is cool. It may even be Green. “The new-normal concept is gaining ground.”
Laura Tyson, chief economic adviser to President Clinton, counts herself firmly in the new-normal camp: “I think we’re going to have slower growth, a higher household savings rate and an elevated unemployment rate for several years. …
Roughly 1.4 million people have been jobless for more than 99 weeks, the point at which unemployment benefits run out. “The situation is devastating,” said Robert Gordon, an economics professor at Northwestern and an expert on the labor market. “We are legitimately beginning to draw analogies to the Great Depression, in the sense that there is a growing hopelessness among job seekers.”
All America has to do is wait for the new FDR and the new World War 2 and everything will be hunky-dory. The catch is that aspiring to keep things from getting no worse than a depression requires — guess what — more government intervention. Bond fund manager Bill Gross is quoted by the New York Times as saying that government must realize that it remains part of the solution.
“We think the coma will last for years unless government policy changes to restimulate the private sector and bring unemployment down,” he said. He wants Washington to invest billions on infrastructure improvements and clean energy, along with the expanded job training favored by Mr. Hubbard.
Despite his long-held belief in free markets, smaller government and lower taxes, Mr. Gross said politicians must recognize that this time, “government is part of the solution.” He added, “In the new-normal world, there are structural problems, which require structural solutions.”
Yet why can’t part of the solution be government dealing itself out of places it has no business in? Why, because it’s unthinkable. And for as long as the only conceivable “structural solutions” are more government the current policy universe will always remain in the brake and throttle world. Given Barone’s 100 year review of party politics the question must surely be if the Republicans haven’t noticed the steering wheel till now why should they ever see it at all? What’s so different about 2010 or 2012 that will somehow bring a new idea forth in the Republican mind?
It’s not exclusively a GOP problem. The liberals, though cognizant of the existence of the steering wheel are unware, insofar as can be determined, that it can be turned. Progressive politics is a locked steering wheel. Marx and Engels are Moses and the Prophets. And even when it points to the cliff nobody can bring themselves to say so. Tim Cavanaugh asks Can Christina Romer Get Her Soul Back? after endorsing this road to the ‘new normal’? “Maybe it won’t matter on the lobbyist/lecture circuit, but at some point a person must say, ‘I told all those lies and this is all I get for it?’”
But maybe they weren’t lies. Just things you had to say because you couldn’t say the opposite. Just couldn’t utter the words. It may take more than hard times to make a political paradigm shift thinkable. Economic disaster may be the necessary but not the sufficient condition for noticing the steering wheel and observing it can be turned. So many concepts have been ruled out of bounds by decades of liberal ideology that the first task must be to review the code of political blasphemy. Until that deadly paralysis of mind is shattered, it’s a brake and throttle world.
“government must realize that it is part of the solution”
Government is the solution. Government (the Political Class) recognizing that they are the ones with their hands firmly clasped around the neck of the goose which used to lay Golden Eggs.
Government could launch into a coherent program of rolling back the barriers to business expansion and job creation. Or Government can whistle past the graveyard — as money runs out to pay government workers and pensions, and more & more of the real economy goes underground — leading to the collapse of Government (with or without a big push from outside).
Reality wins in the end. It always does.
“Progressive politics is a locked steering wheel.”
Indeed. Faced with pressures from all sides, the politicians will go the only way they can – which is whatever direction they end up taking. The ruts in the road become the Big Plan. The failed power steering pump becomes a virtue because it exists. If you can’t get rid of a bug, advertise it as a feature.
Today Congress will vote to bail out the teacher’s unions health care plans. A few people are pointing out that maybe it is inappropriate for those plans to include free Viagra if the unions cannot pay for it. Other people say you have to provide Viagara if you are going to provide estrogen supplements and other uniquely female health care features. So that is that. It’s locked in.
The last thing that Peggy Noonam said that made sense was that if John Kerry had been elected he would have surrounded himself with very bright people, and they would study every foriegn policy problem very carefully and then do nothing. Because they would conclude the correct thing to do would be what the Republicans would do and they simply could not do that.
Well that same approach will be brought to every issue, foreign and domestic. We have seen the future and nothing works.
So give us some Steering Wheel stuff.
We’ll need some ideas to get started.
So the end state of all government is North Korea?
Evidently, government is not part of the solution at all. Government is the problem.
Bill Gross? The rent collector from the welfare state? This man makes a not inconsiderable living from buying and arbitraging government bonds and currencies. His proposed solutions are for the government to borrow more money (ie sell more bonds). Kind of like when farmers and agri processors in Iowa agitate for more ethanol usage. I’m not saying the man isn’t smart and successful and he certainly has a right to run his financial empire. It’s just that if he really believes in free markets and private enterprise he should be advocating for policies proved to re-energize those segments of the economy.
THEY want us to get accustomed to their “new normal” because the American ideal of a growing pie is inimical to a world dominated by government. Ultimately, THEY have lost faith in the nation and its citizens because THEIR policies have failed on a dramatic scale. Even the prospect of an electoral hanging has not concentrated their minds. Pathetic.
The first step is to starve the beast. We’ve known for years entitlements breed dependence, and dependents never see beyond their next installment. So first of all change that. Humanely but firmly phrase the dole out and down.
Second step is to do the same with public employment benefits and wages. Once again make their share equal to about 75% of the private sector’s. Not as punishment, but principle.
Third step is slash foreign aid by 90%. Only where we have proven results.
Fourth step is to make everything we use and everywhere we live business friendly. Free enterprise is not the villain here.
Since none of these steps appeal to “professional” republicans it will take something else – some other entity – to bring change about. I’m praying it will not need to be violent, but not holding my breath
The NYT represents an elite readership, and this elite readership already has resources that will allow its members to live well enough for some time. The rent-seeking arrangements in academia, government, Wall Street, and every regulated part of the economy (e.g., agriculture, energy, etc.) will continue to ensure that the elite and its supporting cast are not affected to any great extent by the “new normal.” Admittedly, this rent-seeking population is feeling strain (e.g., with super-easy-eligibility government student loans being questioned, you’re hearing a hull-creaking-under-pressure sound in academia these days. But elites are no more able than other folks to see a coming collapse; and, besides, ‘apres moi, le deluge.”)
The economic-government landscape includes multiple warlords. In a democratic society, these warlords are not immune from challenge, but that is true for any warlord in any society. Nevertheless, the warlords in American economics life are positioned as well as they can be in their fortresses.
Mancur Olson, U of Maryland economist (deceased) wrote a book entitled “Power and Prosperity: Outgrowing Communist and Capitalist Dictatorships” (2000)
http://www.amazon.com/Power-Prosperity-Outgrowing-Capitalist-Dictatorships/dp/0465051960
Olson posits a warlord model of economics in the first two chapters, which cover how a roving bandit becomes a stationary bandit, an autocrat. As democratic institutions develop, the society’s evolving forms of governance have a progressively more selfish interest in providing public goods.
Olson uses Stalin as his main research study. Stalin was particularly good at warlordism. The goal for any warlord is to strangle the golden goose of economic productivity but not kill it. Keep people working and struggling to survive and better their condition, but keep the boot on their necks. Take the golden eggs, and the goose will be happy enough just to be alive. Olson examines how Russia managed to survive as a super power as long as it did without a market economy, thanks to the terrifying ways Stalin manipulated the tax system to squeeze every last dollar out of the workers.
The final chapter identifies individual rights and a lack of rent-seeking factions as the two conditions needed for a steadily growing economy.
I didn’t get the impression that Olson was very optimistic.
Paul Ryan has a roadmap. So that’s something. I suspect Sarah Palin, with such a road map in hand, would like to take the steering wheel of a populist SUV and inflict some serious road-kill damage on rent-seeker deer-in-the-headlights elites.
Such are my hopes for a “new normal.” But the elites will survive. Their stupid street-troops, not the elites themselves, will be the road kill. Like vampires, the elites will be back for blood again and again.
I have read that it took the total devastation of Germany for Konrad Adenauer to be able to institute the changes that established the post-war economy there. Will it take the same for the US to wake up? Or will we enter a several centuries long new Dark Ages?
In a discussion with my left leaning brother-in-law, I saw this problem in another form. He believed that medical care had to be rationed because it was too expensive and there wasn’t enough of it to go around. I asked, “Why are you so easily accepting that we must live with shortages? Why not consider ways to increase the supply?” This was an unthinkable zone for him. He had already accepted this “new normal.”
This is so contrary to the pioneer spirit that predominated in America once upon a time. The ironies are amazing. Classical liberalism, AKA today’s conservatism, holds that human beings are flawed but that with individual responsibility and initiative, free people can make life better. Progressivism, AKA today’s liberalism, believes human beings are intrinsically good and that all evil comes from bad society, but wants to use government to force naive people into social programs that the enlightened elite prescribes for them.
Have we collectively determined that instead of possessing the vigor of youth and the energy and experience of maturity, we are on the edge of old age and decay? Why are we, across the spectrum, so easily accepting defeat and readying ourselves to accept its inevitability?
This is especially foolish, given that there are tribes nearby only too ready to go into their next energetic malignant expansion.
Conservatives are like Charlie Brown kicking the football. Every time they convince themselves “*This* time it’s going to be different!” But it never is.
The best thing conservatives could do is take a few years off and study the system. They can’t control it and they can’t change it because they don’t know what it is or how it works. Having made this study they may find the situation to be hopeless; I don’t see any plausible outcome other than semi-collapse into a sluggish tyranny.
Still it’s interesting to see the residents of Bell, California jeering and shouting down their city officials, who then sheepishly surrender their ridiculous pay packets. It’s possible for people to wake up; it’s just hard to see this being widespread.
I don’t like Barone’s metaphore, because it misunderstands the central problem, which is that the liberals have had the car in reverse.
Here is a better one: remember that psychology experiment from the ’60s where a guy put on lenses that turned everything he saw upside down? The big deal was that, after a couple of days or weeks, it all started to look rightside up to him.
That’s where we are after a hundred years of progressive swill dished out by the political and academic elites and media, those cultural edifices that were gradually infiltrated by the biggest upside-down ideology of them all: Marxism.
So the car is in reverse and large swaths of us have been trying to get it to go backward faster, thinking of that as progress.
What will happen is entirely predictable. As usually happens in life, major change will be orchestrated by external factors and not by intention. It’s too late to do anything by way of the steering wheel or even the throttle (which seems to me to have been, far and away, the most persistant theme played by BC’ers for well over a year).
Whether we drive off a cliff or into a wall or just into a ditch — thinking all the while that we’re heading away from those dangers — is really the only question.
The “new normal” concept would be laughable if it weren’t so tragic. Don’t these people realize that the new normal they propose will involve the deaths of many, many people? It’s like an airline captain coming on the intercom and announcing that the engines have stopped so the rest of the flight will be perpendicular to the intended direction.
Come to think of it, the new normal thing is just liberals realizing that reality has thoroughly discredited them, getting depressed, and then projecting that malais on the rest of us.
Here’s a question: What do Julian Assange, Vaughn Walker, Nancy Pelosi and Barak Obama have in common besides their political orientation? Each, in his or her own way, is obsessed with how history will portray them. Whether it’s a lone David who stood up to an arrogant and corrupt nation of Goliaths and speak truth to power, a judge who sought to end a thousands year old barbarous tradition and set the human race on the path of enlightenment, a congresswoman who aimed to change the role of Speaker of the House to something much greater than a mere legislator or a president who ambition is to transform a nation and help the earth begin to heal.
This is just four of what is an inexhaustible list of our
nation’sworld’s technocratic elite who are not content with making history, but also want to write that history; who dream that their names will be spoken in the same reverential tones that we save for the likes of MLK or Churchill today, tomorrow and 20 years from now.KRB
“struggling private sector”
No matter how long the private sector is in it’s struggle sessions with Obama, Frank, Summers, et.al., it will never confesses enough error to become free enterprise again.
Kae Arby @11: put another way, they’re all narcissists. They plan their actions based on how they look on the little stage in their head. Whatever gets the big ovation, is what they want to do. It’s actually a very efficient model for running one’s life. No heavy baggage like ethics or principles or even, in the true sense, self-awareness. Just that little fantasy show.
“Two steps forward one step backward.”
That’s hardly new.
It’s a long “Progressive” tradition.
Openly too.
Why bother to bring it up? The cliff is now in sight you say? What do you want from me? I and a few others have long saw that the cliff has been their destination from the start.
Next comes the irrationalities: inculcated in the young, they will abound like never before. Myself, and a good number of others here at BC, are too old to fight, and our talk will go unheard. We had our chance decades ago but accepted a silent role instead of believing Edward Bellamy and HG Wells were in earnest.
Steering wheel? HA! That’ll be the day.
Let’s speculate: Khmer Rouge and Green Bombers have been taken. What color will ours choose?
Economic activity obeys the Laws of Thermodynamics.
——-
We were able to get most of the way through the 19th Century without even knowing of them. Watt — working in the blind — dramatically improved Newcomen’s engine without really knowing why. If he had he would have further increased the performance of his own design.
The point being: substantial performance gains can be achieved even by blind luck.
That’s a pretty good snap-shot of ‘modern’ government structure.
We have an army of guessers trying to improve our government and society, the ‘do-betters,’ who have NO CLUE as to what direction is up or down. (Frank)
I have NEVER met a political wag who understands that government directed action follows system constraints THAT FLOW FROM NATURE.
This is why, in their frustration when their great idea doesn’t work out, they shift to blame seeking. The notion that their brainstorm was a brain fart is too much to bear: it’s a vanity lock-up loop.
When this type of rage gets going in a dictator the destruction rapidly gets out of hand. The last century was filled with absolutist follies.
The all-time worst idiocy must be the ‘Great Leap Forward’ (tm Mao). It was astonishingly destructive following some of the biggest brain farts in recorded history.
In the Rankine Cycle — as in any heat engine — best efficiency occurs when the temperature difference between heat in and heat out are as large as possible. For practical engines, heat out means dumping it into the ocean, a lake or local air. To get the highest heat the engine must push the limits of materials and fuels. With even just that much insight, improvements took off. What had been 2% efficient became 40% efficient in only a century!
That improvement drove practically ALL of what we think off as our modern world. Without it no one could afford to drive a car, truck or fly aircraft. Rockets would still be toys.
———–
Even with such improvements it is plain that 100% efficiency is never to be had in a practical engine.
Every time random motion is converted into directed force you run into the SAME MATH as thermodynamics.
———–
Government taxation with the point of re-gearing economic outcomes (redistributionism) places a hefty hair cut on system wide performance.
After enough such damage occurs, the engine locks-up. It doesn’t even have the good grace to slow down. Lurches from lousy to nothing at all the second the math is violated. Think cliff-function.
We all know how that works:
engine stops pronto with out fuel…
engine stops due to bullet holes in block…
engine stops due to oil failure and material failure…
engine stops due to critical component ‘leaving the system’…
engine stops due to falling into the ocean….
The point being that it is all staggeringly abrupt.
———–
That type of systemic abuse gave China the Great Leap into the Abyss.
We have had our own variation: counterfeit-credit leads to real-estate insanity. Whereas Mao ‘figured’ every village would be a femto-Pittsburgh; Frank figured that everyone in the country could ‘Carleton-Sheets’ her way to being a landlord.
By corrupting the prices, documents, banks, and government so that trading prices have left the private market far behind — Frank has brought Central Planning to America. Since residential real estate is at the heart of our middle class the bezzele was on them.
The full realization of which Frank is determined to delay as long as possible. Hence the Congressional real estate levitation acts of 2009,2010…
(Think first time home buyer credits, etc.)
Normality cannot return until Frank’s manipulation of real estate prices is stopped and the full magnitude of the bezzele is exposed. We have a problem in that J Schools preach economic insanity as part of their core curriculum. So, the MSM will aid and abet this regime no less than Tass and Pravda did Central.
As a side note: your typical journalist is upside down on real estate, personally. Imagine how that filters through his ‘objective’ writing.
The first step towards the cure is to stop doing further harm. The real estate bezzele machine has to be shut down.
Step 1) Go to 180 month amortization loans – 360 is too much for the markets.
Step 2) Stop increasing the complexity of home construction: greenness is killing us.
Step 3) Lift the personal exemptions dramatically for income taxation. All encompassing income tax rates were established to defeat Hitler and Tojo. I declare the war has been won. Even WWIII is over. WWIV is being paid for with currency exports – it doesn’t need rampant income taxation.
[Reducing the number of fillers is a boon. Even more importantly, it draws power away from the Ways and Meanies Committee which is forever adding complexity to the system. It is also proof that we have the best Congress that money can buy.]
Step 4) Increase tariffs on non-NAFTA oil. Nothing too severe, just enough to make sure that low cost swing producers can’t crush our energy industry. This also works to reduce our military exposure to OPEC’s follies.
Step 5) Revamp nuclear certifications towards that used for aircraft and discourage custom plant design. Place most base load generation off shore in mega-buckets that closely resemble a ‘keep.’
Step 6) Massively curtail the EPA which is now massively ‘over engined’ and which completely disregards economic effects. Cut research funding which at this time is now massively corrupted towards Gaia’ism. Do pursue fungal cures for toxins created by modern man – the one solution that should quickly bear fruiting bodies.
Step 7) Cancel AA – the flipside to Jim Crow. It’s a social time-bomb. Forty-one years is enough. Stop government mandated hazing of whites under the rubric of sensitivity.
Step 8 ) Phase out in short order mega-tariffs against sugar and restrictions on peanut farming, etc. The USDA has been captured. The chains must come off.
Step9) Phase out the Fed and the wholely captured SEC. Between Madoff and the meltdown – what are these players doing? Could they do any worse? NO!
Step10…Transform NASA into funding cutting edge research. Then farm out the projects to private industry. Stop staffing for Apollo. Privatize everything in sight. Nix Mars. Go for the asteroids: Augustine has it right. Economically, Mars is worthless, not so the asteroids which have staggering potential all the way around.
END of RANT
There is not a doubt that this bunch is incapable of steering its own course.
Because conservatism defines itself relative to the current position of its more liberal opponent, it has come occupy space that has been abandoned by a leftward-moving opposition–
Patrick Deneen
5. Steve C.
THEY want us to get accustomed to their “new normal” because the American ideal of a growing pie is inimical to a world dominated by government.
……..
Its not the government but rather ideas that spawn bureaucracies. Different bureaucracies become ascendant with each new administration. The current admin is anti growth– so the epa is ascendant.
One of the ideas that come from the late 1960′s concurrent with peak domestic US oil production was that we have limited energy and water resources.
This is false. We have unlimited energy and water resources. But each extractive technology has a limitation. The healthy growth of mankind depends on continually finding new ways to extract ever increasing amounts at a cheaper cost of water and energy from the world around us.
What needs to be different is the Republicans being elected. New faces that don’t expect to have a career in politics are required. The reason previous Repulican politicians have ignored the steering wheel is that it’s pointed in the direction of money and power for politicians and their friends. Yeah, there’s a cliff up there too, but big-government GOP insiders think they can coast to a stop before the edge and enjoy the perks. I don’t know if they’re too stupid to realize the Dems would eventually get back in power and stomp on the gas, or if they just couldn’t believe the Dems would be irresponsible enough to drive off the cliff. Either way, the government-is-my-meal-ticket conservatives need to go for us to turn the car around.
Preference Cascade. One is a comin’. It may already have happened. In fact, I suspect that a majority of the electorate has already made the shift and no longer gives a damn about the old blasphemies. A candidate could get elected on a platform that included all manner of heresies from ending Affirmative Action to abolishing the EPA to privitizing Social Security. The only thing holding such a candidate back is trust – in addition to the paradigm shift, voters are also now thoroughly cynical about the people they are voting for. One of the self-protective measures Progressive politics has taken has been to foster so much corruption that voters assume everyone is crooked. Honest people don’t want to tarnish their reputation by getting involved, and voters are left trying to pick the crook that will do them the least harm.
Perhaps the real paradigm shift we need is one that lets us imagine decent people holding office again.
‘What do I do now?’
Simple .. start with all the items that the Democrats have avoided .. like a budget and appropriations bills.
The Democrats foot dragging on the budget that resulted in a “deemed” budget means that without a real budget, there is no reconciliation for FY2011 because the “budget” contains the reconciliation rules. No reconciliation rules, no reconciliation process.
This means that a “lame duck” session will not have reconciliation to use, as will the first 9 months of calendar 2011, which should give the incoming Congress fits.
We can’t change the paradigm, by reciting the script word for word from the existing playbook.
1) “Liberal”
2) “Progressive”
3) “Mainstream”
We use an invented lexicon, swallow the bait, along with the hook…and wonder why we have pain in our mouths.
There is nothing “liberal” about “reidistribution” of justice, of wealth, of citizenship, of our very borders, laws and tax base.
There is nothing “progressive” about smearing, slandering and stealing from middle America.
There is nothing “mainstream” about burying truth, distorting facts and conspiring to slander, smear and steal on behalf of leftist seditionists.
Yet, WE continue to use THEIR words to describe our problems. We pay homage to the script they have written and infuse it with legitimacy each and every time we lazily slurp up more of the propaganda soft serve machine.
If we can’t call a thing what it is, we can’t ever get around to defeating it…certainly not if we are letting its sires define it.
A hole in the roof is not a “natural convertible”. A flat tire is not “air conservation”. A broken radio is not “noise abatement”. The vehicle is damaged and we are looking to drive it as if it is brand new, because the shady “dealers” on the left have told us that it has passed their “quality inspections” with flying colors.
It has an 8 track player and a holder for New Coke on the dashboard, why are we using their ad words to describe it? Are we lazy? Inattentive? Gullible? Easily taken?
Let me restate one of my very favorite quotes, one I read shortly after arriving at the Pentagon in 1988:
“If the Democrats proposed burning down the US Capital building, then the Republican response would be counter propose accomplishing the same things through a series of small fires.”
I don’t know who said it. But note the date. At the end of the Reagan presidency, and still the Republicans were like that. With a Reagan in office perhaps they could afford to be.
But then we had 4 years of the Bush presidency, which saw more Republican political flubs and more Republican policy triumphs. Before long the USSR was gone, the Warsaw Pact was on our side, the USA stood astride the world like a colossus, allegedly too powerful for everyone’s good.
Then came Bill Clinton, followed by the Republican takeover of the Congress by Reagan Era politicians, and what should have been the final dissolution of the old blue blood, lose-and-do-it-like-a-gentleman crowd.
And here we are today. Time to clean house in both parties again. As Wretchard says, you never can stop taking out the trash.
#3 Mike-
Step 1. Let go of notion that my kids and grandkids are bound to provide a better living for boomers than to themselves…cause that’s what’s at the root of our public and union pension mindset. And baby – what a wrasslin’ match that will be.
“Competence has been redefined as acceptable imbecility.”
Right on target.
I am going to lose my job in the next 6 – 12 months. No one is hiring on the outside, I have a family to feed, clothe and house. Wife is probably going to lose her job too. If the Ruling Class thinks that malaise will become the new normal (malaise for us, not for them of course), they should think again. More like: the scenes out of Afghanistan will become the new normal, only now on the local news.
Blert @ 15, (as well as Charles and cfbleachers and anyone else who’d like a way to explain to others how we are and have been manipulated):
It sure looks like you’re one who will understand my explication of how Social Engineering operates. (That link is to the WayBack Machine and takes a long time. What follow is a newer and hopefully clearer version.)
Ironically our mastery of the hard sciences provides a technique to understand social engineering.
Most all hard science engineering has a tool called “The Electrical Analogy” to construct mathematical models.
are the basic relative linearized equations of three engineering disciplines.
The general verbal expression of these relationships is potential difference provides the impetus to overcome resistance to flow..
Without difference between states there is no flow.
The greater the potential difference, the greater the flow for any given resistance. However, the electrical engineer adds fuses to his design to prevent burning down the house due to voltage surges.
Enter the power seeker’s most useful apparatchik, the social engineer. Do power seekers care if the house burns? Let’s see.
Unlike the engineer who deals with hard science (1 + 1 = 2, etc.), the SE deals with soft science (the probability that a given input will derive a target output).
Here’s my somewhat tongue-in-cheek SE electrical analogy:
where
D = dissatisfaction, whose unit is the scream,
L = Law or license: liberty or cultural mores given up to satisfy the screams, given in units of BST$ (blood, sweat, tears and taxes), and
R = the resistance to part with liberty and with what works, whose units are in groans.
The SE exploits differences; hence extremists are useful tools. Surely BC members have loads of examples showing how and why. I’ve more, as my question about circuit breakers suggests, if anyone cares to hear it.
Let me first stir your memories by sending you to this old Belmont Thread After the House Burns and its highlighted video Burning Down the House.
“The Way We Were” could have been the subhead of a Vanity Fair piece in which administrations heavies lament the passing of the old order.
This is the the view of “things are different this time” from inside the White House. Things are falling apart. The old magic doesn’t work any more. The media is running harder but it’s getting slower. What’s happening to the system?
The perplexity is real and like policy geniuses who really think the political equivalent of the idea that money comes from a hole in the wall are going to be jamming the ATM card in harder and kicking the terminal while cussing it out. ‘Damn it, you used to work back when I had just stolen this card. It must be somebody’s fault that it doesn’t work any more.’ By and by they may in desperation attach a tow truck to the ATM terminal and pull it from the building wall. And guess, what. No money. Witchcraft.
Hard times don’t necessarily bring enlightenment. Something else is needed to return the spark of understanding to a generation that’s been taught that food comes from the store, security comes from the UN, education comes from credentials and money comes from a slot in the wall.
That something else is a return to our senses. To believe in our lying eyes. The world is comprehensible. Believe it or not, we don’t need Walter Cronkite to tell us what it is. Now if that’s blasphemy, then so be it.
(Brake or throttle?)—
The front page of the Austin Daily Worker prominently noted that Bill White [running for governor] would not be meeting here in Austin with Obama, as he had commitments in Alvarado, Abilene, and somewhere else.
Waaaaaaahhhhhh!!!!
Believe it or not, we don’t need Walter Cronkite to tell us what it is. Now if that’s blasphemy, then so be it.
I just find that notion of Jarret’s funny. “Uncle Walter” lied about one of the most profoundly important issues during his heyday: He pronounced the Vietnam war “lost” after the terrible pounding the Communist took during the Tet offensive, thus helping set the psychological stage for eventual American defeat. Of lesser note, but also significant, he helped spread the canard that the Soviets were “never in a Moon race” with the U.S., even though reporting on the Apollo effort is one of the things he’s known most fondly for. The man was a fraud.
#8 batman – In the particular case of health care we have a problem.
The more advanced the treatment, the more expensive it gets. One assumption that is often made is that most people think it’s a bad idea for people to die because they are poor. Except that in the case of health care, with modern medicine, “poor” in this context often means “not a millionaire”.
Two examples are open-heart surgery and cancer chemotherapy. I happen to know the approximate cost of a course of chemotherapy, because I was told, for cancer – all in, the cost is about £50,000 or with today’s figures about $75,000. Open heart surgery costs about the same, I believe. And both just plain didn’t exist in 1950; if you had a condition requiring either, it didn’t cost you that. It cost you your life, instead.
There seem to be two alternatives here. One is just to accept that if you come down with a condition that’s expensive to treat, you die unless you are seriously rich – and you won’t be so afterwards unless you are Bill Gates. Another is to load extra expense on a much larger number of people to account for the people who become seriously ill.
The central core of Marxism is that Capitalism would lead to ultimate poverty, at which point the revolution would come. Of course, it did not. This infuriated the Marxists to no end. The essential thing for the Revolution was the economic and social collapse of Capitalism.
Instead we have the political ascension of Marxists over the economic underlay of Capitalism. They shall do by law and policy to Capitalism what Capitalism was supposed to have done to itself but didn’t have the manners and good grace to do for the benefit of those who styled themselves to be the future “dictatorship of the Proletariat.” The members of the current “Progressives” would cringe at that title but they are fully in tune and sympathy with the underlying meaning of the concept.
If Capitalism won’t fall on its own then force feed it treats full of arsenic claiming all the while that it is good and necessary for the body politic, and very good medicine for its recipient.
In the past they ladled the poison out slowly. Now in their arrogance they hand us the whole bottle and demand that we swallow the whole thing now.
How shall the play end? Will it be with the victim obediently swallowing the bottle or will it be the Progressive having his guts slit open with a dagger whining “How DARE you do this to me…HOW DARE YOU… don’t walk away from me. I could die! Come back!” while the hero shuts the door to the dungeon and calmly walks away.
Jarret epitomizes the depth of understanding throughout this administration, starting at the top.
This is one follow on to number 25. It partially explains my stance at number 14.
We remained silent for decades.
We stayed silent when Bushbots, habitually defending GWB from unfounded charges from the Left, harangued anyone who criticized GWB from the Right. And the ruling class kept marching on… Glory, glory, hallelujah….
As laid out in the video Burning Down the House, the SEC, FDIC, FHA, etc., all have “circuit breakers.”
But Congress, through CRA legislation, DEMANDED that banks loosen credit and reduce equity requirements — and then effectively tearing out all “fuses” and replacing them with pennies.
Barney Frank and Chris Dodd shouted down any regulator whose job it was to limit excesses like those disclosed at Fanny and Freddie [insert old video that made the rounds in the summer of 2008].
Then tell me: whose job was it to stand behind his regulator? Don’t beat around the Bush now.
Is Cloward-Piven single sided? Is our ruling class bipartisan? Is the Pope Catholic?
Fletcher Christian @29: so let me see. It used to be if you needed open-heart surgery, it didn’t exist, so you died. Now you can buy the procedure for, say, $75K. Or you can die. Most of us would find the money somehow. And most of us would probably agree to lend the money to somebody who said, “For a whole lot less than a house, I can buy myself say another decade or maybe two of life. Over which I can earn plenty to pay back this loan. With interest. And gratitude.” Sounds like a deal.
By the way, the more people took that deal, the cheaper the heart job becomes. No, it doesn’t scale the way microcircuits do; but it does get cheaper. And safer. Etc.
It’s called the market economy.
hey i’m at work so don’t have the time to do this subject justice, though to quote the old saw, it’s not justice it needs but mercy. but I agree, the future will not be like the past, and the government will have a much larger role in it than ever before, because maybe half the population will not be able to find real private sector jobs that pay a middle-class wage, except for overpaid government positions that are more make-work than anything else. This is not a distopia, not necessarily, if indeed the rest of the economy is so strong that it can be supported. And I think it could be.
The rest of the mechanics of this world … remain as an exercise for the users.
Larry Kudlow writes that panic is setting in at the White House. All the leechcraft they so confidently applied to the ailing economy is killing the patient. But nobody wants to admit that their prescriptive model is fundamentally in error. So they’re going to find the biggest monster mutant leech they can find and turn it loose on the comatose patient. That’ll do it. “With the disappointingly soft jobs report for July, and a faltering recovery overall, is Team Obama getting ready for some sort of new, liberal-left, Keynesian, big-bang stimulus package? Will they be desperate to ‘do something’?”
That something may include an amnesty on unpaid mortgages, or a new green spending bill. Anything but smaller taxes. Kudlow says, “My liberal friend Robert Reich is even talking up the New Deal’s Works Progress Administration (WPA), where the government employed millions during the 1930s.” The problem is that some people are so invested in this FDR, New Deal, Keynes ideology that, like a religious fanatic, they’ll walk off a cliff in the belief that the Angel Stimulus will save them. It’s a pity nobody reads the Bible any more. There’s a story in it that is all about not listening to the false promises of a tempter.
Will the Left ever nerve itself to admit that they just might have gotten it wrong? That there is something fundamentally wrong about wanting to turn stones into bread by a sheer assertion of power? That bread was made to be grown and worked for, not ordered into existence? Or will they cast themselves down from the highest point in the Temple, certain that the great Marx, Keynes and Engels will save them from the rocks? The scary thing is that they’re looking and you can almost hear them thinking: ‘of course I am right. I have always been right’. Because if they once they admit they are wrong then they were wrong and their whole world shatters: the world built on the principle that ‘not Thy will but Mine be done’.
What’d I miss about open-heart surgery and health insurance? While I can see that there are a number of circumstances where an insurance company may not pay for this and other procedures, isn’t it still typical in the U.S. that the larger part of the tab for most such surgeries are picked up by insurance?
I swear I haven’t been living in a cave, so, is there something I haven’t been paying attention to?
15. blert “Economic activity obeys the Laws of Thermodynamics.”
If economic activity obeyed the laws of thermodynamics, economic fluctuations would be small and Gaussian. Indeed, at true thermodynamic equilibrium there’d be no growth! In that idealist world, Long Term Capital Management would have been a success and not a failure. I suggest you read Nassim Taleb: “Fooled by Randomness” and “The Black Swan.”
Even our physical earth lives in a non-equilibrium state, and will remain that way until the sun goes out. The application of thermodynamics/statistical mechanics to physical systems held in equilibrium is a stunning success of the physical sciences. However, the analogous math applied to Human economics makes no sense.
regards,
C.W.
Wretchard says at #26: This is the the view of “things are different this time” from inside the White House. Things are falling apart. The old magic doesn’t work any more. The media is running harder but it’s getting slower. What’s happening to the system?
Peter Wehner at Commentary refers to the same VF article to note the tone of self-pity among the Obami:
“. . . what is striking is the degree of self-pity we find in Obama’s advisers, which is reflected in the president’s words and attitude as well. Team Obama sounds nothing so much as overmatched and overwhelmed, unable to understand what has gone wrong, and increasingly bitter toward the nation’s capital and the pace and nature of politics.
What we are seeing, I think, is a group of supremely arrogant people humbled by events. They are turning out to be a good deal more incompetent than they (and many Americans) ever imagined. They see impending political doom in the form of the midterm elections. Yet this is not leading them toward any apparent serious self-reflection; rather, they are engaging in an extraordinary degree of whining, finger-pointing, and self-indulgence.
It was said of President Kennedy that he was a happy president. ‘Happiness, [Kennedy] often said, paraphrasing Aristotle, is the full use of one’s faculties along lines of excellence, and to him the Presidency offered the ideal opportunity to pursue excellence,’ Theodore Sorenson wrote in Kennedy. ‘He liked the job, he thrived on its pressures.’
One doesn’t get that sense with Obama or his key advisers. In 18 months they appear to have developed deep grievances and an increasing unhappiness and frustration with the duties of governing.”
http://www.commentarymagazine.com/blogs/index.php/wehner/338666
Michael Barone and the NYT are so last saeculum. The politics and solutions -more government intervention- that they are proposing are what were proposed during the last Turning’s Crisis era. I say we go with a new, but old, solution: Freedom. There’s a paradigm shift for ya.
At the risk of oversimplifying the problem, one of the most dangerous aspects of the current crisis is the role ideology plays in it. When those in power are wedded to an ideology — indeed derive their power from it — then they have an existential stake in maintaining the truth of that ideology come what may. They are like Jim Jones in Guyana. Doomsday or heaven must come at the appointed time or the prophet is finished. Everyone goes home. Rather than endure the disciples going home the Kool-Aid must be served out to them first.
The strength of the left is that their belief system amounts to a secular religion. The weakness of the left is that their belief system amounts to a secular religion. The same thing that supplies their hideous strength also creates vast blind spots in their thinking. To become a true believer you have to disable large swaths of common sense. A truly “progressive” education is in fact a form of voluntary lobotomization.
While probably not more than a few people are fanatics, some of them are. And the ideology or ‘religion’ factor is going to play an important role in the coming months. The Left must either lose their faith or lose their pants. Before they come to that pass, they’ll take your trousers first. Only when everybody is buck naked will it dawn on them that they’ve been had.
VDH explains most of this in his most excellent way:
“Pity the Postmodern Cultural Elite”
Now it is up to us to change it.
“Defending Liberty”
Papa Ray
Rant Continued…
Kennedy, by Executive Order, permitted federal employees collective bargaining. This was a watershed decision of the first magnitude.
The fact is that all of such ‘negotiations’ are between fawning politicians and captured ‘arbitrators’ and activist full time totally plugged in government ‘anti-serfs’: the unionized civil service.
48 years have passed. In that time it stands revealed that all such ‘bargains’ are no bargain to the general public. Preferences towards internal promotion coupled to the impossibility of performance based terminations have created a promotion ladder filled with rejects from the lower ranks! Not surprisingly, the top ranks are stunningly politicized as the players there made it by out-of-the office contributions in time and money. In the fullness of time, perhaps they might even swap places and become presidentially appointed political hacks.
The trend line shows clearly that this ‘sector’ never participates in economic pain in any way during recessions. However, it has secured wages very substantially above the private sector — and pensions light-years beyond anything available outside government.
Effectively they’ve made everyone of their number millionaires upon retirement!
——
And thus pensions, particularly ANY pension however meritorious funded by government have been totally politicized. Retirement ages have NOT been adjusted rationally for actuarial realities. The pension problem is far larger than Social Security. It extends throughout government and those government hangers-on who derive cartel/ guild protections – such that they can claim ‘private sector’ while being government funded through various guises.
( Doctors, Nurses, the entire ‘healing arts’ plus Attorneys, Bankers, Primary Dealers, Federal Reserve employees, et. al.)
In the extended network you will find University Professors, Staff, Teachers, Staff… on and on it goes: the Federal Archipelago of Privilege.
Most of them have their own TV shows from Mash to Dr. Kildare to ER to Chicago Hope: sanctification on the little screen being essential to contract roll-over negotiations. The guilds are desperate for top dollar — but it’s beneath their dignity for lucre to burden their ethos.
On screen, even waitresses can’t even seem to get paid: either collect or get a tip. Such is Hollywood Communism!
( And for the longest time Hollywood couples had separate single beds. Even now, Hollywood films lovers holding up the sheets after a tryst. If that’s the scene make it XX or drop it. Modesty after a tryst — what planet are we on?)
So, too, attorneys are portrayed as non-predatory ( Perry Mason ) ; how about a legal reality show in the image of ‘Jon’ Edwards. ( All tryst and no trust ?)
The opening sequence would show his boiler room working target victims — dialing for misery. Then a fade into his impassioned plea before a jury packed with weepers.
Final shot to commercial: $1,000,000,000 pay day! Edwards -when you need to stick it to Big Pharma. ….
Back from commercial: “Why is my Viagra so expensive now?
Ans: you’re a bigger… than ever! I’m suing you for paternity!”
Cut away to bankruptcy leach: “Let’s go for our 1,551th continuance, the railroad can afford it and Yale is busting me out for my ‘legacy.’
“I told you never to send Flounder to Yale.”
“I know, but I wanted my son to be a respectable attorney. And if he can’t be respectable — at least be a politician.”
End of Rant II
“All America has to do is wait for the new FDR and the new World War 2 and everything will be hunky-dory.”
Well, we already have our FDR, and given his foreign policy, can a new World War be far? Happy Days are almost here again! Rejoice!
The problem with elites is that they feel that wisdom is their preserve. Economics at its core is the study of the desires of the heart. That is why it would do the wise well to admit what fools we are when -
Ecclesiastes:
15 Then said I in my heart, As it happeneth to the fool, so it happeneth even to me; and why was I then more wise? Then I said in my heart, that this also is vanity.
16 For there is no remembrance of the wise more than of the fool for ever; seeing that which now is in the days to come shall all be forgotten. And how dieth the wise man? as the fool.
I am afraid that economics is more like the weather. I am afraid that the stimulus may have no more value than that of the burnt offerings of old. Alas I am not wise enough to know as to whether those offerings made any difference.
Wretchard says at #40: The Left must either lose their faith or lose their pants. Before they come to that pass, they’ll take your trousers first. Only when everybody is buck naked will it dawn on them that they’ve been had.
Reminds me of Leon Festinger’s classic 1956 study of a doomsday UFO cult in When Prophecy Fails. Festinger outlined five conditions that he considered necessary for members of a cult [read "contemporary leftism"] to maintain or even commit more fervently to their belief system in the face of empirical disconfirmation:
“* A belief must be held with deep conviction and it must have some relevance to action, that is, to what the believer does or how he behaves.
* The person holding the belief must have committed himself to it; that is, for the sake of his belief, he must have taken some important action that is difficult to undo. In general, the more important such actions are, and the more difficult they are to undo, the greater is the individual’s commitment to the belief.
* The belief must be sufficiently specific and sufficiently concerned with the real world so that events may unequivocally refute the belief.
* Such undeniable disconfirmatory evidence must occur and must be recognized by the individual holding the belief.
* The individual believer must have social support. It is unlikely that one isolated believer could withstand the kind of disconfirming evidence that has been specified. If, however, the believer is a member of a group of convinced persons who can support one another, the belief may be maintained and the believers may attempt to proselyte or persuade nonmembers that the belief is correct.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/When_Prophecy_Fails
It will interesting to see whether leftist proselytizing continues to intensify in the weeks and months ahead. Per Wretchard’s remark that “The strength of the left is that their belief system amounts to a secular religion. The weakness of the left is that their belief system amounts to a secular religion,” it is worth noting that the leader of the doomsday cult in Chicago that Festinger and his graduate students infiltrated and analyzed in the mid-1950s had been previously involved with L. Ron Hubbard’s Dianetics (eventually Scientology) movement. According to another source, the founder first left the Chicago area after the collapse of her cult and went to a Dianetics center in Arizona. She then “lived in Peru for several years before returning to Arizona. In 1965, she founded the Association of Sananda and Samat Kumara. Under her new name of Sister Thedra, she continued to act as a channel for Sananda and was prominent in the UFO contact community until her death in 1992. The association that she founded is still active.”
http://drvitelli.typepad.com/providentia/2008/07/after-the-prophecy.html
Chicago seems to be a fertile source of all kinds of cults.
I stepped off the bus all you guys ride and had a good day.
have a nice ride over the cliff.
… in the coming months. The Left must either lose their faith or lose their pants. Before they come to that pass, they’ll take your trousers first.
With respect, wretchard, if the GOP retakes the House, and especially if it unexpectedly retakes the Senate, I’m not seeing the Left taking anybody’s trousers.
And I don’t see exactly who are the Left’s “boots on the ground” for taking any trousers, either. Who exactly is going to do this taking if they don’t fully control government? SEIU? Puhleeze. I hope they show up at Beck’s 8/28 event. There will probably be a couple of hundred ex-Rangers and SF there.
And those millions of rounds of ammo that have disappeared since 2008? I doubt 20% of them are on the shelves of Leftists. I think that fact scares the sh*t out of them; it’s one reason they’ve gotten so shrill.
The Left will only get really violent when we start dismantling their strongholds — academia, unions, and government. Let’s do it.
I may never get to read this article. Vanity Fair is just not my kind of publication. But here is a preview:
“The Increasingly Self-Pitying Obama White House”
But I’m pretty sure someone will put it on the net sooner than later.
You can’t hide much from the net for long.
Papa Ray
Don Rodrigo #37:
Ah, you poor man. You do not understand.
The symbol is the thing. If only ONE person is denied health care at what they consider to be a reasonable price, even if that price equals Zero, then it is the same as if such health care does not exist.
If only ONE person feels damaged by the possibility that the FBI monitored his call to Pakistan, then we are all in fact damaged.
If even ONE terrorist feels that his sacred human rights were violated by being read Harry Potter at Gitmo, then all our rights have been violated.
If even ONE lawyer feels that the terrorists are not being treated fairly by their not receiving full legal representation in a civilian court of law, all paid for by the U.S. taxpaper, then the U.S. justcie systme does not exist.
Lacking substance, the Left lives on symbols, and though such things grow scarce, fear not, they will never disappear, in mind if not in fact.
RWE…
You’ve defined Leftist exceptionalism.
—
Of course, perfection is the enemy of the good.
During the stagflation the Liberals gave us in the 1970′s (when they wanted to strip mine shale in Colorado to make oil), they acted like the causes of high inflation was a big mystery and that high inflation and high rates of unemployment were the “new normal.” But Reagan came in and said “There are simple solutions, just not easy solutions.” For instance, interest rates at around 20 percent.
Bond fund manager Bill Gross should look at the recovery under Reagan when tax cuts kicked in in 1983. But Mr. Gross has no doubt invested heavily in Euro and European Carbon Credits.
If the EPA restricts CO2 and unemployment goes above ten percent everyone who works for the EPA should be fired — and Laura Tyson as well. Let them try to find new jobs in the economy they’ve created.
After the election in 2008 and before we wasted a trillion dollars stimulating government, I suggested abolishing the Social Security taxes plus some business taxes and replacing them — over a two year period — with a phased in, revenue neutral, Sales Tax (done while holding down government spending). The cost of these taxes is contained in the price of products made in the USA so in the end the average “after tax price” would be about the same. But in one stroke these changes would have increased workers earnings, lowered the cost of labor for employers, simplified business taxes, improved business cash flow, made US products more competitive on the World Markets, and shifted some of the cost of Social Security onto imports.
Income taxes should be flattened and simplified with no deductions for high earners.
Total government spending at all levels should be brought down to no more than 30 percent of the Gross National Product.
The trade deficit is result of high government debt and low domestic savings. Cutting the budget deficit will help improve the trade deficit and make foreign trade less contentious.
51. hdgreene
The trade deficit is result of high government debt and low domestic savings. Cutting the budget deficit will help improve the trade deficit and make foreign trade less contentious.
………..
As well, from the other end, converting short haul busses and trucks to natural gas will collapse the demand for foreign oil and take a large chunk out of the trade deficit while cutting down the cost of oil world wide. Thus by defunding the bad guys, hardening the dollar, and promoting world wide prosperity with lower oil prices –the result will be that foreign trade relations will be less contentious.
the biggest monster mutant leech they can find
That would be Paul Krugman.
But as to the forward/back meme, Larry Niven expounded that in Ringworld, the puppeteers, much smarter than humans, always alternated between progressives and conservatives when choosing their leader, The Hindmost.
re: where’s the new guidestar?
Is the same as the old guidestar. Reward intellect and sound judgment. Discourage process. Shorten the time between action and consequence. Radically decentralize. Accept there will be failure as individuals, families, communities do things differently as they so choose and decide.
Conservatives take pride in devolving power with its risks and losses (including loss of life) that empower and energize the least-of-us, in hard contrast to the overweening and infantilizing left. Conservatives create environments for earned success and maximizing freedom (free-will). The Left cannot.
The Vanity Fair article shows that these weaklings have worn themselves out by their own conceit and grandiosity. And now not even verbosity flows from the lips, it gets stuck like a frog in the throat. They get sentimental about the way things are supposed to be, based on their ridiculous fantasies, and put off til yet another day, a reconning with reality. All they can think of is the praise they are not getting. That’s all they were ever capable of. *tears*, so sad. /Sarcasm off
Charles,
Unfortunately the environmentalist are trying to put a stop to natural gas development as well, so we will have to import the gas from Canada and Mexico to do the bus/truck thing. You’d think they;d finish bankrupting the Coal Industry before starting on oil and gas but these folks are ambitious.
40. wretchard
It’s not really voluntary if it’s being done to children.
“Will the Left ever nerve itself to admit that they just might have gotten it wrong?”
No. They will find some sort of excuse that makes sense to them but nobody else.
There will either be a revolution at the ballot box in 85 days or we will put to use all that ammo we have been buying.
Those feeling that bullet marked wall against their back still won’t admit that they have gotten it wrong. Impossible, can’t be. This isn’t happening to me.
37…
I’m just going to have to flunk you out of Thermodynamics Class.
Nothing in the theory requires steady-state. Indeed, most considerations revolve around non-steady-state applications.
Heat engines might be running practically stead-state. And then someone turns the key off, or they rev the engine up, or they slow down, or there is an explosion.
——–
Epic fail.
49erdweet at 6
I think it will be quicker to overfeed the beast than to starve it.
Ned
Ilya Prigogine is da man.
All the interesting stuff happens in dissipative systems.
FC @29: My initial reaction is to say that there are two surefire ways to cut health care costs and balance the budget. One is to outlaw all medications, procedures, diagnostic tests, and treatments created or discovered after 1964. The other is to kill everyone over age 80 who pays less in taxes than they consume in services. Either one seems to fit with your philosophy.
The reason civilization has moved to ever new heights is that most of us have not accepted the concept of static permanent shortages. Expanding supply, creating new ways to solve problems, inventing new devices and techniques, have been the path to a commensurate expansion in the wealth and the freedom of huge numbers of people. To be resigned to permanent shortages and to focus primarily or exclusively on distribution of scarce resources is a certain path to stagnation and decline.
Take your pick. As for me, I opt for expansion — of everything but government.
batman…
!
What do we do, Wretchard?
0bummer and his cronies continue to assault the economy from every direction. They attack it with over-regulation from OSHA regs to no offshore drilling. They poke it with ‘Cash for Clunkers’ and probe it with dubious green incentives.
Fannie Mae has been raped into a comma by Barney Frank and Maxine Waters. Obamacare is nothing but expensive snake oil. The tax code is manipulated so to increase taxes while providing nothing but waste for the tax payer.
Worse, 0bummer increases job strangling Czars who spew regulations while absorbing scarce funds – not to mention their obscene salaries. The whole governmental structure is impregnated with cronies who multiply like rats. The political class grows while tax payer gets starved to death. The cycle continues.
0bummer and his cronies are molesting the economy like sick pedophiles molesting a helpless young girl. It has to stop!
The answer is to drop-kick 0bummer and his cronies out of Office. The quicker that is done the quicker the economy will heal.
0bummer gets an “F” in economics and should go back to college. Until that time comes I think an immediate salary cut of 25% for all politicians and their staff is in order.
Democrats will try for a double surprise this August! Mortgage cuts and amnesty thru Presidential/Agency fiat, now you know why the “0” is not as worried about a Republican take over as the rest of the political and academia class is….
I’m not sure if the following offers any insight.
When my brother was a young child, he asked why cars weren’t designed so that you’d apply the brakes by pressing the steering wheel forward, since stiffly extending the arms is what a driver would instinctively do upon seeing that he was about to run into something. My father wrote to GM about it. They wrote back and said they had invented and patented it in the 1930s but had decided that it wasn’t a good idea.
The 4th world is in love with economic theories. So the rest of us suffer while they try out which ever theory is ‘sexy’ this year.
We need to skip the theory and go with the facts.
“It is better to have 1% of 100 men’s labor then 100% of 1 man’s labor.” IIRC, it was Carnagie that said that. Or maybe Rockefeller. One of the 19 Century moguls.
That is the foundation of Capitalism. You get rich by employing people.
Therefore it follws that the rich control employment.
One cannot punish the rich for being rich. They just either hire people to protect themselves or move. If you get them upset, they start hiding their money and stop hiring people.
The Obomination has both pissed off and scared the rich. So they are hiding their money. What they are not doing is hiring people.
Why should they? Why should they put THEIR capital at risk so the Obomination can tax THEIR profits? Why not hide your money until the Obmination is history?
Let the poor hire workers.
Adam Smith was correct. If everybody does what is in their best interest, then the overall affect will be in the best interest of society.
Some people will get screwed but that happens in every society. At least with capitalism, getting screwed is entirely ones own fault.
“There can be no real individual freedom in the presence of economic insecurity.”
Chester Bowles
US diplomat & economist (1901 – 1986)
I fear that there is something else at work here. Taqiyya leftism, begat our Taqiyya Media.
We, as a nation, have virtually no understanding of the game…because we are playing by rules that only we abide by and follow. Looking at what is happening and trying to predict what will happen in the future, by applying rules and logic that fit only OUR side of the fence, is like dropping your car keys in the back yard and going out front to look under the streetlamp, because that’s where the light is. It doesn’t work.
First, we have to study…I mean really study, “Redistribution Theory”. The aim of “Redistribution” is to take everything….EVERYTHING…that exists now, and turn it upside down.
First, you must “redistribute” the truth. And, facts are merely pieces of clay…to be molded as needed or discarded completely, if necessary. The Taqiyya Media is in NO WAY bound by truth or tied to any particular facts, if they prove to be obstacles to the Redistribution. “Truthiness”, “false but accurate”, conspiracies to use slanderous charges of racism, conspiracies to bury stories completely, forge documents, photoshop pictures…whatever…is the solemn duty of every JournoLista.
Propping up dictators and despots around the world, as long as they maintain Redistribtution tenets, is the job of redistributionists. Howard Zinn, Noam Chomsky, Ward Churchill and the like makeup Taqiyya teacher’s division. Michael Moore, Oliver Stone, Sean Penn and their ilk make up Taqiyya Thespians.
But, understanding Taqiyya legislation and the Redistribution Government is the most important lesson of all.
What looks like a piece of “legislation” and is packaged as a “stimulus”, really requires one to use a different set of eyes, a different thought process. When you see a Global Warming argument that has the net effect of “redistributing” trillions of dollars, you have to watch the money trail…not be mesmerized by the flowery language and he lexiCON tricks of the trade.
When you see your own government refuse to protect its borders and then turn on its own citizenry…do not be fooled by the charges of “racism” and the flowery language of “amnesty”. Understand the “redistribution” of land. The “redistribution” of privileges. The “redistribution” of rights. The “redistribution” of voting power. The “redistribution” of laws…and their prosecution and enforcement.
Imagine that you are a young child. Your mother is a hippie (or the precursor…a beatnik). She views religion as an ancient artifact to be studied as an oddity. Imagine your father is a Socialist, absent from your life. Imagine that you are left in seedy bars by your ne’erdowell grandfather, and placed on the knee of a Communist sympathizer who tells you as a child “not to trust the man”. Imagine you grow up in this Bohemian scenario and you are carted off to Indonesia to be taught the tenets of the Koran in Indonesia. Imagine that you go off to college and seek out your most virulent leftist professors. Imagine that you are taken under the wing of someone, who gets you into the Ivy League, despite your lack of required achievement…because they have clout in the leftist power circles.
Imagine that you sit for two decades in a pew of a church that rages fire and brimstone and anger and hatred, under the Marxist inspired Liberation Theology. Imagine that your circle includes aging Weathermen and Black Panthers from the Days of Rage. Imagine that you spend your time with ACORN and Edward Said and Rashid Khalidi and Ali Abuminah.
Imagine that you see the world through the prism of “community organizers”.
Close your eyes and imagine walking every of those steps.
Now, imagine you have the power to “redistribute” wealth, power, law enforcement, taxation, health care, ….you can treat Europeans (Britain, Poland, Baltic states) any way you want. You can treat Iran, Libya, …Hamas, Hezbollah…any way you want.
You can treat Israel…and Jews…any way you want.
You can “redistribute” justice…meted out as you see fit. Prosecute, don’t prosecute civil rights…at your whim. You can open up the borders and let anyone in you damn well please.
Imagine that the Taqiyya Media is willing to conspire to attack your opposition and to call them racist at your pleasure.
Now imagine, that you do all this…and tell everyone you are a centrist.
Now open your eyes. Welcome to the world of Redistribution. You are playing by a set of rules that no longer exists. You are a Taqiyya target. You are a dupe who keeps using words like “liberal”, “progressive”, “mainstream”. William Ayers wants to kill 25 million of you. George Soros wants to pull the puppet strings and take down your banking system. Michael Moore and Oliver Stone want your enemies to defeat you. And, your government…wants to “attrition” you out of existence.
The Puritans vs Dennis the Menace.
Batter up:
“Yogi Berra. I never blame myself when I’m not hitting. I just blame the bat and if it keeps up, I change bats. After all, if I …”
(brainyquote)
…-
“White House unloads anger over criticism from ‘professional left’
By Sam Youngman – 08/10/10 06:00 AM ET
The White House is simmering with anger at criticism from liberals who say President Obama is more concerned with deal-making than ideological purity.
During an interview with The Hill in his West Wing office, White House press secretary Robert Gibbs blasted liberal naysayers, whom he said would never regard anything the president did as good enough.
“I hear these people saying he’s like George Bush. Those people ought to be drug tested,” Gibbs said. “I mean, it’s crazy.”
The press secretary dismissed the “professional left” in terms very similar to those used by their opponents on the ideological right, saying, “They will be satisfied when we have Canadian healthcare and we’ve eliminated the Pentagon. That’s not reality.”
Of those who complain that Obama caved to centrists on issues such as healthcare reform, Gibbs said: “They wouldn’t be satisfied if Dennis Kucinich was president.””
“Just last week, MSNBC host Rachel Maddow described Obama political adviser David Axelrod as a “human pretzel” for his explanation of the administration’s position on gay marriage. Axelrod had explained that Obama opposes same-sex marriage but favors equal benefits for partners in gay relationships.
Attacks from liberal political groups like the Progressive Change Campaign Committee (PCCC), which raises money for liberal candidates and causes, are also frustrating to the White House.”
http://thehill.com/homenews/administration/113431-white-house-unloads-on-professional-left
Of course Obama cut the military’s budget. Did you expect him to cut Michelle’s vacation budget? Michelle in Spain, Clinton $5 million wedding, Kerry $7 million yacht, Obama $30k Birthday tickets. Pelosi jets back and forth on Air Force Three. But the GOP is the party of the rich, and if you don’t buy ObamaCare you pay a tax.
Yes, there is a steering wheel, and it can be turned, but it won’t do much good, ’cause that “change in the tone of the motor” is a thrown rod, and we’re about to come to a stop, a very very sudden stop, after a longish drop off the cliff the politicals all missed.
Won’t be any need to discuss the percentage distribution of all these underfunded pensions, ’cause there won’t be anything at all to pay them with.
Well, yes there is a percentage, it is ZERO.
Lame ducks all, and they fully recognize it. However, they continue to double down; because there are no consequences, except losing their office and retiring to a plush pension.
We haven’t provided them with a real escape path from the certain brutal destruction-reprisals they richly deserve. We are remiss in not defining the penalties we intend to impose as the 2010 majority, should they not ______________(insert your favorite here). They don’t feel their very lives are threatened. That’s odd. IIRC, most traitors used to grok that, and it’s not as if they don’t realize they’re traitors.
I know it sounds outragious, but I’d recommend putting on trial all those who betrayed their oaths by voting for a bill they hadn’t read. It’s at least RICO-worthy prosecution. Red and blue jumpsuits. Expand Gitmo. Publicize the military tribunals. Otherwise they’ll all get to go stealth, and then we have to rinse, repeat, rinse…. It will avoid lots of civil unrest and vigilantyism.
Yeah I’m just promoting justice, instead of mercy.
69. cfbleachers
CF does the writing job that I wish I had the talent to do -above-. Please go back and re-read what he has had the patience, talent and guts to write.
I spent all day, friday out among our American population, or at least most were American. Many I suspected were those nasty illegals that live amongst us.
Just as the pod people did in those long ago cheap SF movies that foretold of Americans, whose minds had been taken over and were under the control of the terrible beings that wanted nothing more than complete control.
But in reality,Illegals are mostly not so evil, or as evil as the terrible democrat, socialist forces at work destroying our Republic now.
But I still want to know…Where is the Movie?
OK, Kids at neighbors, lunch packed, water chilled, so it is back on the streets for me.
How about you?
Papa Ray
This notion keeps shoving itself into my thoughts too, and as much as I dislike it, the more I ponder it, the more I realize we need to do something like this. These people operate in a classic moral hazard environment, where it’s heads they win and tails we flip again in two years. We need to add some penalties for bad behavior.
It’s fraught with danger – there really is a fine line between prosecuting traitors and prosecuting people who simply lost an election. But, dangerous or not, we need to do it. Life is not a risk-free endeavor, and pretty much all of our most powerful, useful tools are incredibly dangerous if used carelessly (and sometimes pleanty dangerous even when used with the utmost care). So I think we’re going to have to suck it up, do a gut check, and prosecute some “public servants” for malfeasance.
We will need to do it carefully though, picking the worst cases and making the prosecution’s case thoroughly. No show trials, these need to be the real thing, and they need to establish not only that if you abuse an office of public trust that you will be punished, but also that if you make an honest effort you won’t become the target of some other politican’s trophy hunt.
Or, option 2 is to simply lynch them by the boatload in one big orgy of populist anger, hoping that it will subside before it becomes another Thermador, and that the memory of it will dissuade both future kleptocrats and future tyrants.
I like option 1 better.
Perhaps I’m the last one to figure this out, but anyway here goes. The liberals belief is in “wealth redistribution” because it is a tenant of their belief system that wealth is distributed, not created, since there is a finite, fixed amount. And what I’m discovering is the same underlying point of view applies to Health Care. That is, redistribute, i.e., ration it, (see Berwick) which has to arise from an unspoken assumption once again, that there is a finite, fixed amount.
Wealth can be created, where none existed before. Liberals don’t get this. But here I’m repeating it in terms of health care.
Anyway, please forgive me if I’m the last person on BC to discover this.
The creation of wealth is the cretion of new power, power that threatens the existing power of political actors.
Those citizens who create new wealth are therefore, rightly, seen as a threat to those who hold power, especially if acquired in ways other than through wealth creation.
This cycle, the political activists have grabbed a huge handful of power and seem to be working hard to prevent future challengers by shutting off the routes to new wealth creation through capital supply restrictions, new regulations, and higher taxes.
Maybe when the Republicans regain power, we could return the favor by closing all university departments of political science, ethnic, gay, and womyn studies and restricting political activities by those with government grants and welfare payments.
Norm @76: I think you got it figured out just fine. Wealth is not “piles of stuff,” it is “problems solved” for any one of us. Markets exist to solve problems by putting customers in touch with people who compete to give them better and cheaper solutions. That system not only distributes wealth (both parties to a voluntary informed trade are, by definition, better off than before), it creates wealth (see foregoing: net gain in welfare by trading; see also, “market signal” to innovators to come up with even better cheaper solutions). The thing about markets is, they don’t need a central boss. Sometimes they need referees and cops; but those guys are there to “manage by exception.” NOT to try to run the thing (“A, trade 5 of your widgets to B, in exchange for 7 gadgets, then swap 4 of those to C for 3 doohickeys…”).
Politicians generally dislike markets because there’s little place for them. And progressive politicians positively hate them.
IMHO.
Batman #8
“Have we collectively determined that instead of possessing the vigor of youth and the energy and experience of maturity, we are on the edge of old age and decay?
Why are we, across the spectrum, so easily accepting defeat and readying ourselves to accept its inevitability?”
Yes Batman, we surely have.
And accepting defeat has not been easy. But only the blind don’t recognize it when they see it. If, wish and hope are not effective weapons against fierce enemies. Those who thought they were surrendered sixty years ago.
Whom do you believe can or will change the reality we face as a nation? Tell us here and now if you know.
Blert #15
At least for today, you are the man. Or woman. Whatever. Wow!
67 smoking frog: that’s exactly how the hand controls for paraplegics work, except it’s a combination accelerator/brake manipulated with one arm. I’ve seen these built so nicely that they just bolt onto a steering column and actuate the existing pedals through linkages. This left the car fully accessible to non-handicapped drivers (ie family and caretakers) who would just drive normally. It was developed by the owner of a small company in Texas that does custom cars.
59. blert
Sorry, no. Thermodynamic states are only defined at equilibrium, and as a science is useful for computing differences between equilibrium states achieved by reversible processes. I can assure you the world economy is never in an equilibrium state. That said, to even attempt to apply thermodynamic equations in some analogy to economics you need to be able to precisely define economic analogs of energy and entropy. In physical systems these have precise meanings: Energy is constant obtained from the equations of motion. How would you define that in economics? Money? Seriously, money is worth whatever you think it is worth at some instant, it is not even a constant. Entropy in thermodynamics/statistical mechanics can be identified with our knowledge of missing information in a very precisely defined way. How you would define a rigorous entropy for economic systems? Without precise mathematical definitions for economic energy and entropy, you cannot bring to bear on economics the machinery developed, so usefully, for physical systems. Nor would you be able to apply the more powerful methods of statistical mechanics. To do otherwise is just hand-waving at best, self deception at worst.
Rather than flunking myself, I give you and anyone interested some suggested reading:
http://www.amazon.com/Entropy-Demystified-Second-Reduced-Common/dp/9812832254/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1281480700&sr=1-2
http://www.amazon.com/Farewell-Entropy-Arieh-Ben-Naim/dp/9812707077/ref=ntt_at_ep_dpt_8
http://www.amazon.com/Fundamentals-Statistical-Thermal-Physics-McGraw-Hill/dp/0070518009/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1281480776&sr=1-1-spell
The first two are not too expensive, the very first is accessible to anyone. The third is an old friend. Have fun!
A recuring theme I see in Belmont club postings is how humanity obtains or destroys optimal government systems that serve the common good. The ruling class in our American government since Wilson continuously has drifted to more an more government power as a solution to societies problems; I see leading to a case of Hayek’s fatal conceit. And pervasive unease reflected in Belmont Club postings.
I read these things with interest as an R&D guy, who works in the realm of the unknown. In an analogous role to policy makers, when faced with lack of knowledge and uncertainty, the natural tendency to is to seek more certainty – which I have learned can come at great cost. The US government wants total control of health care. Great, it will come at great cost to us!
It is a hard lesson to learn, but quite often the answer to uncertainty is not more certainty but instead adaptability and simplicity. Would that the ruling class would learn the same. Not more government, but smaller, more adaptable, simpler government. At the very top Richard posted that we are in a “a brake and throttle world.” Is that not a definition of an over-controlled system? Over-controlled is out of control and therefore, neither computable nor safe.
regards,
C.W.
Re: #15 “substantial performance gains can be achieved even by blind luck.”
Only for very simple systems. The more complex the system is the less blind luck is useful: try to cure someone or even repair your car or hard disk with blind luck.
“Economic activity obeys the Laws of Thermodynamics.”
It does not. Resemblance is superficial: there are no economic conservation laws. All talk about economic “temperature”, for example, is poetic license. Economic “expansion” or “contraction” has nothing to do with corresponding thermodynamic terms either.
Re. #82. colderwater
Time to edit my prev. post elapsed before I could read
yours. Sorry about that.
I fully agree with your points. However, wouldn’t your proposal: “It is a hard lesson to learn, but quite often the answer to uncertainty is not more certainty but instead adaptability and simplicity. Would that the ruling class would learn the same. Not more government, but smaller, more adaptable, simpler government.” if implemented lead to reduction in ruling class quantity and influence? If so, it is against their interest.
The universe is not a steady state system.
It still obeys the laws of Thermodynamics.
The heat engines that we use normally have a wide range of performance across temperatures and pressures.
Where in the world are you coming up with ‘steady-state’ conditions as a limit to the theory?
Thermodynamics rules up and down the power level whenever energy is transformed.
The properties of physical substances found by idealistic calculations have great engineering value.
But Thermodynamic Laws are telling us about the intersection between chaos and order.
Any discussion of steady state calculations being of any help in economic analysis is solely your assumption. They never entered my head.
Your mindset is too narrow.
‘Thermodynamic states’ are a concept regarding physically measurable states of matter.
The Laws of Thermodynamics go beyond that: the MATH also applies to chaotic systems that a transformed into DIRECTED FORCE.
The argument is on a MATHEMATICAL level.
In economics Maxwell’s Daemon is US. We intervene to direct outcomes.
A fuller proof and analysis is beyond this post. I’d rather write a book.
WE ALL LIVE IN A NON-STEADY STATE WORLD.
Here and there, for calculation simplicity, perfect inertial frames and ideal gasses and completely steady-state conditions are assumed. But Newtonian calculations have their limits, don’t they.
——–
I make no claim that you can map your formulaic structure back into economics.
IF the whole universe is subject to the Laws of Thermodynamics,
And we are inside that universe.
Then everything we do is also subject to those laws. QED
That the limits and transforms are TOTALLY different does not stop that.
grrr
Re: #15 “substantial performance gains can be achieved even by blind luck.” Only for very simple systems. The more complex the system is the less blind luck is useful: try to cure someone or even repair your car or hard disk with blind luck”
You’re killing me with that stuff. Both my doctors and mechanics use hunt and peck heuristics to cure all of their problems.
The medical field is PURE heuristics. They have NO over-arching theories. When was the last time you popped open the Journal of Theoretical Health and Medicine?
That’s right, the profession pulls heuristics out of statistics.
As for sophisticated understanding leading to a proper cure: over the millennia one Shaman after another discovered countless herbal cures.
As for mechanics, tradesmen, etc. : Good grief. They are even less insightful than the doctors. Unless the trouble is obvious to the naked eye, it’s back to guesswork. I know of at least one – dang near illiterate ( yet esteemed ) – repair mechanic who admits that he just starts swapping out components until success. He’s hardly alone.
Substantial performance gains ONLY occur when they are to be had. That is, when the current practice is far from perfection. In the early years of steam performance improvements came easy and rapid – and no one had a full understanding of what they were doing.
Today, with all of the knowledge and tooling available you’ll never be able to increase efficiency 50% above current baseline.
Gains can only come where they don’t violate the laws of physics. No matter how complex all innovators are working along one or two simple metrics of improvement. No one can even get to first base with truly complicates interlocked systems. Which is why medicine is forced back to heuristics.
Not withstanding the complexity of the human body substantial performance gains can be had by stopping blood loss and injecting blood plasma.
The killer problem with those who’d give us further government ‘help’ is that they ALWAYS pitch their schemes as if no one can game them. The opposite is clearly the case in recent times.
CRAPolicy was gamed into the ground, hence counterfeit-credit.
The entire flow of the Ways and Means Committee is to add complexity. That is it nature.
Lawfare is practiced in a commercial setting as well. Once we moved away from subsistence agriculture the complexity of human relations can’t go back. Wishing for such, puts you in idle.
It looks like you are mixing terms: “heuristics” vs. “blind luck”. I interpret “blind luck” as direct sort: with simple systems one knows little about one can look up most possible outcomes, but the number of outcomes grow up much faster (factorial mixed with power laws) than systems’ complexity (however one defines it). Hence heuristics and other approaches today instead of “just trying it” as your favorite mech. guy does.
However, if you mean heuristics when talking about blind luck and blind luck when talking about heuristics, my apologies.
It ultimately gets down to the sophistication of the ‘if-then’ book.
Below a certain threshold one might assume that we’re looking at blind luck.
Another, WRT Shamans, is their if-then book a text we refuse to acknowledge.
I wasn’t so long ago that western medicine was laughing at Chinese medical methods thousands of years old. “They were Idiots.”
A quarter-century later their techniques have jumped the pond and are now accepted in the West.
They are still not explained. Rationales have been advanced. That acupuncture has been successfully used in China for centuries was dismissed one day and accepted on its performance the next — yet until this day never reconciled to science. If you know of ANY scientific explanation for its nerve deadening success, please do post.
Blind-luck is a term indicating that the operator hasn’t a clue as to what he’s doing. I rarely see that. What I run across is unbelievably primitive ‘if-then’ rule sets, or pretty slick unreasoned rule sets that somehow still got the job done.
Mechanic’s heuristic investigation charts are now published for all and sundry. You’d be astonished as to how rarely practicing mechanics deign to read them. ( I’d swear that some can rarely read!)
That their rule set is stunningly limited, however, does not mean that THEY think that they are running blind. If you ask, all and every tell you, “I can handle it.”
As for Real Humans in Real Problem Solving: sorry to say we can only handle mild levels of complexity. That’s why everything in sight is calibrated towards linear math. I’ve NEVER seen tip sheets showing the troops power functions, exponentials and complex numbers.
BTW, that’s why so many electricians choke on polyphase power: they were raised on DC logic. You’ll find that virtually all of them think that DC circuits do NOT experience impedance — just pure resistance.
My friend, if that were really so, your computer and mine would not work. All modern logical circuits are based upon DC switching impedance. Have some fun and argue the point the next time you get a hapless electrician in your sights.
But that is NOT to say that such electricians can’t find your shorts. or run power from A to B.
If-then rule books span all manner of range.
—-
As for ‘my favorite mech. guy does’ — I regard him as a fool. Always did. He sure didn’t work on any of my gear! The point being, OTHERS thought highly of him. On an occasion when I deigned to help him, I read the instruction manual, he became rather unhappy. I solved the problem without even getting my hands dirty. It was a logical control problem on a semi-robotic device. That whole Boolean shtick was too much for him.
Sadly, his equivalent roams uneasily all over the repair bays of this nation. Detroit’s solution has been the computer chip diagnostic. What a boon to all motor kind.
Cheers.
81 Aaron
Thanks for the information. I didn’t know it (although I knew there was some means of a paraplegic to drive, so I should have). Anyway, as to the political analogy, maybe we should elect some paraplegics.
The point I was trying to make is that with advancing technology in the field of medicine comes greater expense. At least so far; I am quite prepared to believe that advanced robotics and/or nanotechnology might turn that tide.
Coupled with an aging population (meaning more health problems that are expensive to treat) leads to health care consuming more and more of the budget of any given country. And this happens faster than that budget grows, too. The question then occurs about who is going to pay for all that. Another related question is about efficiency of delivery; I believe it is well known that health care in the USA is much more expensive than it should be because of two problems; high insurance costs for the practitioners and “defensive medicine” – defined as medicinal procedures carried out to protect the doctor(s) from lawsuits.
So why does medicine consume so much of the GDP of the USA? Lawyers – who vie for bottom place in most people’s minds with bankers. Reform of the legal system would free immense resources for something useful.
And in any case, what about people who can’t afford health insurance?
“So why does medicine consume so much of the GDP of the USA?”
Because that is what we want to spend our money on! Health is critical to happiness and our medical system has been able to provide better health. Now, we can argue that marginal improvements in health come at increasing marginal cost but there are plenty of examples where that’s just not the case – we are getting more than our money worth.
Example #1 – Viagra
Example #2 – Lasik eye surgery
Example #3 – CAT scans
Wretchard put his finger on the core of the problem in #35 and #40, namely that the progressive left has failed the third test.
They have rewritten the commandment to “it is written: ‘worship the God Yourself, and serve Him/Her/It only’”. Having fallen down to the idol of themselves, it becomes self-apparent both why progressive liberals have such a great antipathy toward Christian monotheism (their brinkmanship sympathy of Islamic monotheism is another matter), and why they cannot–under any circumstances–change their minds.
They stand in their own temple and command the seas to recede. There they will drown, because to flee to the hills with the common working folk means they cease to be God, and what man once attaining that status would give it up alive?
–JC
I find the most interesting part of the VF preview this:
“It got so bad last December that President Obama and Emanuel would joke that, when it was all over, they were going to open a T-shirt stand on a beach in Hawaii. It would face the ocean and sell only one color and one size. “We didn’t want to make another decision, or choice, or judgment,” Emanuel tells Purdum. They took to beginning staff meetings with Obama smiling at Emanuel and simply saying “White,” and Emanuel nodding back and replying “Medium.””
Bush would never have shown such terrible decorum at a staff meeting. He would have understood how corrupting it is to know that POTUS himself is annoyed to be dealing with these problems. It is the worst kind of morale killer.
But even more, there is nothing about Cheney, Rumsfeld, or Bush that would ever lead anyone to say that they were *tired of making decisions*. These men, and their aides, might have been tired from being up at 4 AM and going to bed at 11. They might have been tired of the hate they received. They might have been tired of making decisions that they knew required some people to sacrifice their lives. But the idea that they didn’t want to make decisions anymore? Unthinkable.
They were grownups. The decider in chief isn’t tired of making decisions. That’s what executives do: they execute.
I wonder if the brilliant folk who knew how bright Obama was will ever admit to themselves that choosing someone who had no executive experience was fundamentally a disaster?