HT: Helen Dale
Foreign policy in an uncontrollable world alert: Who was Obama arming today?
03 Sep 2014 Leave a comment
in politics, politics - USA, war and peace Tags: interventionist foreign policies, Obama foreign policy, The fatal conceit, unintended consequences
HT: Helen Dale
Canada, U.S. to tighten security between ‘cross-border’ library
29 Aug 2014 Leave a comment
in law and economics, politics - USA Tags: borders
The line is the border. People can cross border inside buildings without reporting to customs.
Via http://en.m.wikinews.org/wiki/Canada,U.S._to_tighten_security_between‘cross-border’_library
Fact check: conspiracy theories aren’t just for conservatives
29 Aug 2014 Leave a comment
in F.A. Hayek, Marxist economics, Milton Friedman, politics - USA Tags: Anti-Science left, conspiracy theories, conspiratorial left, FA Hayek, GMOs, Milton Friedman, Mont Pelerin Society, neoliberal conspiracies, neoliberalism, precautionary principle
Respondents were asked whether they agreed with four statements:
- “Much of our lives are being controlled by plots hatched in secret places,”
- “Even though we live in a democracy, a few people will always run things anyway,”
- “The people who really ‘run’ the country are not known to the voters.”
- “Big events like wars, the current recession, and the outcomes of elections are controlled by small groups of people who are working in secret against the rest of us.”
Source: monkey cage
American conservatives distrust science in part because they identify it with the regulatory state. When science means nuclear weapons, innovation and winning the space race, conservatives love it. When they associate science with the EPA, regulation, and global institutions, they hate it.
Just as climate science is unpalatable for the Right, the Left is uncomfortable with, for example, genetic modification and nuclear power. Research into risks and benefits of these technologies are met with suspicion by the Left.
I find it bizarre the right wing politics is considered more conspiratorial than the left wing – a left-wing that is currently obsessed with the comings and goings of the top 1%.
A gentleman by the name of Karl Marx had a conspiracy theory of history, that the bosses were conspiring against the workers, there is a ruling class pulling the strings from behind the scenes, and there is an inherent inequality of bargaining power between workers and employers because the bosses plot to keep wages down.
It should be mentioned in this connection that Karl Marx himself was one of the first to emphasize the importance, for the social sciences, of these unintended consequences.
In his more mature utterances, he says that we are all caught in the net of the social system. The capitalist is not a demoniac conspirator, but a man who is forced by circumstances to act as he does; he is no more responsible for the state of affairs than is the proletarian.
This view of Marx’s has been abandoned – perhaps for propagandist reasons, perhaps because people did not understand it – and a Vulgar Marxist Conspiracy theory has very largely replaced it. It is a come-down – the come-down from Marx to Goebbels.
But it is clear that the adoption of the conspiracy theory can hardly be avoided by those who believe that they know how to make heaven on earth. The only explanation for their failure to produce this heaven is the malevolence of the devil who has a vested interest in hell.
Karl Popper
Don’t let me start on how the Left over Left goes on about neoliberal conspiracy with Hayek and Friedman ruling the roost through the truly obscure Mont Pelerin Society.
The IMF, World Trade Organisation and trade negotiations are riddled with conspiracies if I am to believe my friends in the Left over Left.
Mention multinational corporations to a member of the Left of good standing and conspiracy theories pour fourth.
It would be unfair to bring up GMOs to remind the left of how anti-science it is. Don’t kick people when they’re down. The whole point of the precautionary principle is to allow the Left to reject good science.
At bottom, what call the barricades works if it’s not sexed-up with a conspiracy theory?
Inequality and Web Search Trends – NYTimes.com
21 Aug 2014 Leave a comment
in liberalism, politics - USA, population economics
The most informative attack ad in US presidential campaign history
18 Aug 2014 Leave a comment
in politics - USA Tags: Attack Ads
Why it’s going to be hard for Democrats to win back the House this decade, in one chart
18 Aug 2014 Leave a comment
in politics - USA, Public Choice Tags: gerrymanders
Less than 30 per cent of the entire Congress runs in competitive districts and the trend towards non-competitive congressional districts seems to be getting worse, not better.
West Wing on the fight for privacy
17 Aug 2014 Leave a comment
in politics - New Zealand, politics - USA Tags: blogosphere, privacy, The information age
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pj4PwyfDNuI
HT: Whale Oil
The criminally large difference between leaks to the media and hacking
14 Aug 2014 Leave a comment
in liberalism, politics - New Zealand, politics - USA Tags: espionage, media leaks, phone hacking
There is a difference between hacking and leaks.
For example, Julian Assange is unlikely to face charges under American espionage laws because the FBI would have too pop down and arrest everybody at the New York Times and Washington Post and the U.S. offices of the Guardian and more than a few famous book authors.
U.S. media organizations could be prosecuted for printing leaked classified information under US espionage legislation, but that prospect is unlikely because of official aversion to running afoul of the First Amendment.
If the government were to prosecute the recipient of classified information – as opposed to the individual who leaked it from within the government such as Bradley Manning – mainstream media would fear that they could face prosecution for reporting information they routinely receive from government sources. There is no way to prosecute Assange for publishing information without the same theory being applied to journalists.
Assigned is in criminal law trouble only if he assisted Bradley Manning to leak the information as distinct from simply receive it from him. An example might be advising Manning on how to get around computer security at his Defence Department workplace.
Hacking involves breaking into someone else’s place in the full knowledge that this is prohibited under computer crimes laws. Heavy penalties apply in the same way as physically braking in and stealing the documents. There is no moral or legal distinction.
The outrage against the phone hacking scandal in the UK was based upon breaches of computer crime law and corruption of public officials through bribes. The moral outrage in that scandal was topped up by the glee which some papers had at the fall from grace of their commercial and ideological rivals.
Housing affordability is all about local government restrictions on the supply of land
04 Aug 2014 Leave a comment
As evidence mounts, it’s getting harder to defend Edward Snowden – The Washington Post
04 Aug 2014 Leave a comment
in politics - USA, war and peace Tags: Edward Snowden, spying, treason
The evidence is mounting that Edward Snowden and his journalist allies have helped al Qaeda improve their security against NSA surveillance.
In May, Recorded Future, a predictive analytics firm, published a persuasive timeline showing that Snowden’s revelations about NSA’s capabilities were followed quickly by a burst of new, robust encryption tools from al-Qaeda and its affiliates:
via As evidence mounts, it’s getting harder to defend Edward Snowden – The Washington Post.
Stephen Williamson on Marginal Taxation
03 Aug 2014 Leave a comment
in applied welfare economics, fiscal policy, income redistribution, politics - New Zealand, politics - USA, Public Choice Tags: envy, Stephen Williamson, taxation and entrepreneurship, taxation and human capital, taxation and investment, taxation and labour supply, top 1%
He says a lot. I’ll try to address piece by piece.
Next, some people have shown interest in this paper by Diamond and Saez. A key result that seemed to get these people excited is the calculation of a top optimal marginal tax rate (including all taxes) of 73%, relative to the current rate of 42.5%. There are two key assumptions that Diamond and Saez make to come up with the 73% optimal rate. First, we should not care about the welfare (at the margin) of the rich people. This argument is based solely on the notion that marginal utility of income is low for the top income-earners. Second, Diamond and Saez use a “behavioral elasticity” of tax revenue with respect to the tax rate of 0.25. To see how this matters, if you use their formula and an elasticity of one, you get an optimal top tax rate…
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