Friday Morning Ramble, 08.04.16

 

“Requiring that employers pay the minimum wage to severely disabled workers is a great way to make sure those workers cannot be employed.”
Feeling good, doing harm – revisited – Eric Crampton, THE SANDPIT
Jerry Brown: “Economically, the Minimum Wage May Not Make Sense” - Daniel Bier, FEE

“Another voluminous report into CYF; a long-winded ministerial response; multiple cabinet papers and a proposed radical overhaul promised. But when will the system that turns children into careless accidents or meal tickets be radically overhauled?
Because until then, none of these other investigations and re-inventions will matter a damn. There have been welfare reforms but the number of children being born into beneficiary families remains at the same level.”
CYF overhaul: crux of the matter overlooked again - LINDSAY MITCHELL

“’If I was asked what single measure the Government could take to raise living standards in New Zealand, I would without hesitation answer, ‘Reform the RMA’.’ However, the proposed [reform] legislation was ‘pitifully limited” and would do little to resolve the existing problems, Brash said.
    “’By widespread consent, these reforms barely scratch the surface of what is needed.’ In addition, the ‘extremely modest’ changes had been ‘bought at the cost of greatly extending the rights of those with a Maori ancestor to have a preferential involvement in the decision-making process.’
    “The proposed legislation would vastly extend the preferential treatment already offered to Maori in the RMA process through the iwi agreements, Brash said.”
Don Brash attacks 'preferential treatment' for Maori in RMA reforms – STUFF

Just.
At least we’re beating Mississippi! – KIWIBLOG

Krugman makes a brief surprise guest appearance as an economist:
"But building policies in our major cities, especially on the coasts, are almost surely too restrictive. And that restrictiveness brings major economic costs. At a national level, workers are on average moving, not to regions that offer higher wages, but to low-wage areas that also have cheap housing. That makes America as a whole poorer than it would be if workers moved freely to their most productive locations, with some estimates of the lost income running as high as 10 percent.
    “Furthermore, within metropolitan areas, restrictions on new housing push workers away from the center, forcing them to engage in longer commutes and creating more traffic congestion."
Cities for Everyone – Paul Krugman, NY TIMES

Heroine …

“Until Muslims choose to stop taking Islam seriously, or are forced to stop doing so, Muslim profiling will be a practical and moral necessity for lovers of life and liberty. We should accept this fact and articulate it unapologetically.”
Muslim Profiling is Not Racism but a Moral Necessity – Craig Biddle, OBJECTIVE STANDARD

What drives Middle-East violence?
Tribalism Drives Middle East Violence – Philp Carl Salzman, MIDDLE EAST FORUM

“"If ever there was a time when we needed a serious, mature President of the United States, with a depth of knowledge and a foundation of personal character -- a grownup in the White House -- this is that time. But seldom a week goes by without Donald Trump demonstrating, yet again, that he is painfully lacking in all these prerequisites."
    "Instead of offering coherent plans for dealing with the nation's problems, Trump skips that and boasts of the great things he will achieve. Those who dare to question are answered with cheap putdowns, often at a gutter level."
Dangerous Donald Trump – Thomas Sowell, TOWN HALL

“In real life, Guevara was an equal-opportunity jailer, torturer, and killer. Whether it was advocates of free speech, homosexuals, those in favor of freedom of religion or who liked rock and roll music, business owners, or ideological enemies — and whether men, women, or children — he favoured imprisoning, tormenting, and murdering them.
    “’To execute a man,’ Che once said, ‘we don’t need proof of his guilt.’ In the early days of the Cuban revolution, Che wrote home to his father about shooting a peasant guerrilla: ‘I’d like to confess, Papa, at that moment I discovered that I really like killing.’ Much of the story is very ugly.
    “So how did a killer become a fashion icon?”
Our Che Guevara Problem – Stephen Hicks, THE GOOD LIFE

“Dressing up economic protectionism, white supremacism, and tribalism isn't a defense of western civilisation.”
Yes, the Alt-Right Are Just a Bunch of Racists – Robert Tracinski, THE FEDERALIST

“‘I alone can solve.” Donald Trump, who can barely communicate in his native language, is the candidate of the social-media era, and the above sentiment — proffered to the electorate via Twitter in regard to Islamic terrorism — is in fact indicative of the breadth and depth of his thinking. Trump is an example of the Stupid Psychopath Problem.”
Donald Trump: The Stupid Psychopath Problem – Kevin D, Williamson, NATIONALREVIEW.COM

“Lincoln’s Republican party has dramatically changed since it was his. If there is a Trump as its presidential nominee in 2016, would Lincoln still be in it?”
Abraham Lincoln vs. the Republican Party – John C. Waugh, HISTORY NEWS NETWORK

Q: “Which character (or characters) from Ayn Rand’s novels does Donald Trump sound like in these passages? Feel free to form hybrids…”
Which Ayn Rand Villain is Donald Trump? – OBJECTIVE STANDARD

This is what happens when the dog catches up with the car.
9 things Bernie Sanders should’ve known about but didn’t in that Daily News interview – WASHINGTON POST
TRANSCRIPT: Bernie Sanders meets with News Editorial Board – NY DAILY NEWS

Why Bernie Sanders and most other people are wrong about Sweden - in one minute …

 

“The precautionary principle emphasises the “better safe than sorry” mentality but risk is on a spectrum, not binary.”
Syrian Refugees and the Precautionary Principle – Alex Nowsareth, CATO

“One of the least controversial ideas in our culture is ‘resource conservation’: the idea that we should prioritize conserving resources for future generations lest we leave them with nothing….
”[Yet] the more resources our ancestors created, the more resources later generations had to start with.”
The Truth About 'Future Generations' – Alex Epstein, FORBES

“Superb overview of protectionism and international trade.”
Truth About Trade – NRO

“When a climatologist presents a model as evidence, he is playing a kind of game. He wants you to think, by dint of computer wizardry, that he has drawn for you a picture of the world as it is. But he hasn’t."
Twenty Two Ways to Think about the Climate-Change Debate - FEE

“Predictions that a warmer ­climate will lead to more rain for some but longer droughts for others might be wrong, according to a study of 12 centuries worth of data.”
Climate Model Predictions On Rain And Drought Wrong, Study Finds – GWPF

“’In Africa there is a humanitarian emergency unfolding that has largely escaped the world’s attention. It is a prodigious drought …’” Actually, it’s not. It’s a rulling Marxism-Leninism front. “’The front views liberal democracy and free market capitalism as decadent…’ That would be the kind of decadence that lets us feed ourselves when the weather is bad.”
 It’s not about the drought – Rob Fisher, SAMIZDATA

“Although the Spanish Inquisition ended almost 200 years ago, the American Climate Change Inquisition appears to be just getting started. By threatening legal action and huge fines against anyone who declines to believe their climate theories, the attorneys general in this coalition are trying to end the debate over climate change, declaring any dissent to be blasphemy regardless of what many scientists believe.
    "This strikes a serious blow against the free flow of ideas and the vigorous debate over scientific issues that is a hallmark of an advanced, technological society like ours."
16 Democrat Atoorneys General Begin Inquisition Against ‘Climate Change Disbelievers’ – DAILY SIGNAL

“A good example of the seen and the unseen.”
'Panama Papers' Underscore the Crucial Importance of Tax Havens – John Tamny, REAL CLEAR MARKETS

“China is the Ultimate Crony State. There is the ruling class (a “communist” ruling class) and there is the rest of the country. Graft is built on graft. Bribe begets bribe. In a country of 1.3 billion that’s a lot of shadiness. And such a situation contributes to instability, economic and political.”
The Panama Papers Leave Red Faces Among China’s ‘Red Elite’ – AGAINST CRONY CAPITALISM

“At last, Corbyn has found a foreign troops deployment he would support…” ` Jim Rose
UK could impose direct rule on tax havens, says Jeremy Corbyn – GU.COM

“Identifying the Large Companies that Dominate US Federal Subsidies.”
Uncle Sam’s Favourite Corporations – GOOD JOBS FIRST

“Every week the US government adds US$12 billion to its debt pile in order to meet its budget obligations — they call that a recovery… It’s a scam and a sham….
   “It won’t matter a jot whether it is double-dealing Donald or contemptible Clinton in the Oval Office; the US is on a one-way path to an economic Armageddon.
    “Welfare payments, interest costs (on the existing US$18 trillion debt pile) and defence spending just keep compounding. I have no doubt the Fed will at some point take the US into negative interest rate territory. This is the only way the powers that be will contain debt-servicing costs.
    “But negative interest rates are destructive to capital… ‘Investors cannot make money when money yields nothing.’’”
A Financial System Controlled by Insiders, Looking after Insiders – Vern Gowdie, MONEY MORNING  AUSTRALIA
“What a country wants to make it richer, is never consumption, but production” – Steve Kates, LAW OF MARKETS

“As a decade of stimulus, quantitative easing, and zero or below-zero interest rates has now proven to be an absolute failure, helicopter money is once again being discussed as a potential central bank action, by central bankers who have no idea what to do and who are grasping at straws…”
Dumb and Dumber – From Negative Interest Rates to Helicopter Money – Paul Martin Foss, MISES WIRE

The record of the US Federal Reserve Bank: ‘Created just before the outbreak of World War I, the Fed helped finance U.S. participation in that war by generating the highest rate of inflation in American history outside of the two hyperinflations during the American Revolution and in the Civil War Confederacy. After the war, it orchestrated the most rapid rate of deflation in U.S. history, so severe that it makes the mild, benign deflation of 1867 to 1896 look like price stability by comparison. During the Great Depression, the Fed presided over the most massive banking panic not just in the history of the U.S. but in the entire history of the world, despite being created to prevent such a catastrophe. It also contributed to the recession of 1937, in the midst of high unemployment lingering from the Great Depression; and it followed that with another bout of inflation during World War II, severe enough to inspire comprehensive wage and price controls. During the postwar period, the Fed was responsible for the Great Inflation of the 1970s, which hit double-digits and was accompanied by the country's first inflationary recessions. And let's not forget the financial crisis of 2007-08.’ So, other than that, Mrs. Astor, how was the ocean voyage?
How the Fed Was Born. – Jeff Hummell, REASON

He really was a frightening thinker.
Keynes in 1939: The Coming War Will Solve our Unemployment Problem – MISES WIRE

“Why has the dismal science been dragged through such mud? Pedro Schwartz believes he's arrived at an answer. This month he begins a journey tracing the decline of classical liberalism. In this installment, he turns back to the 19th century, where he believes classical liberalism took its first major wrong turn.”
Pedro Schwartz, The Erosion of Political Economy and the Retreat from Freedom – Pedro Schwartz, ECON LOG

“When Thomas Piketty published his tome on inequality, “Capital in the Twenty-First Century,” he pronounced it inevitable that wealth inequality would grow. What he didn’t explain in any depth was why — even

“This is an excellent book—its sensible and precise refutation of the doctrine of equality is very well-timed. In this review I have tried to provide a general feeling of the book’s contents and its major arguments….”
Book Review - Equal is Unfair by Don Watkins and Yaron Brook – Anoop Verma, NEW INTELLECTUAL

And of course, the same goes for everything else for which we say people should be left alone …

 

“Students who take notes by hand outperform students who type, and more type these days, new studies show.”
Can Handwriting Make You Smarter? – WALL STREET JOURNAL

“The reason contemporary philosophers and intellectuals—including ‘New Atheists’ and ‘secular humanists’—have been unable to bridge the ‘is-ought gap’ is that they have not been trying to derive morality from reality. Rather, they have been trying to derive altruism from reality—and there simply are no facts that give rise to the need of self-sacrifice.”
The Is-Altruism Dichotomy – Craig Biddle, OBJECTIVE STANDARD

“Your child’s anxiety is not your fault, but it’s possible that some of the parenting practices you’re most proud of are actually making things worse.”
6 ways good parents contribute to their child’s anxiety – Karen Bane, WASHINGTON POST

“It is a gross misconception to view multiculturalism as an effort to enrich education. By reshaping the curriculum, the purveyors of "diversity" in the classroom calculatedly seek to prevent students from grasping the objective value to human life of Western culture — a culture whose magnificent achievements have brought man from mud huts to moon landings.
”Multiculturalism is no boon to education, but an agent of anti-Western ideology.”
Multiculturalism’s War on Education – Elan Journo, ARI

 

[Hat tips & quips: David Henderson, Peter Namtvedt, ProLiberty, Reason Matters, Jeffrey Perren, Yaron Brook, Mahurangi Montessori Primary Trust, Anoop Verma, Louise Lamontagne, Michael Strong, For New Intellectuals, Charlotte Cushman, Marsha Enright, Lawrence Reed]

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