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View 684 Saturday, July 23, 2011

The news from Washington is depressing. The President has determined that he’ll continue the Deficit Dance, and he won’t accept any “temporary” solution. He wants something that will get the Debt Limit out of the way until after the 2012 election. I note that CBS News last night had linked features: a long screed about how awful losing Social Security would be to some very nice people, coupled to a replay of Obama saying he couldn’t guarantee Social Security payments after August 2 without a raise in the Debt Limit. There was no mention of the fact that the government has an income and could make the Social Security payments without borrowing more – provided that it made heavy cuts in government salaries and laid off some government employees. There was no mention of the fact that failing to make Social Security payments is defaulting on a government loan: the Federal Government is both the loan source (the Social Security Trust Fund) and the borrower (we have been taking the money out of the Trust Fund and “investing” in Treasury Bonds for generations), and thus Social Security payments are part of necessary debt servicing to avoid default. The story was simply about how awful it would be for these nice people when the government stops making Social Security payments.

Then, no big surprise, the next big advertisement was from the AARP.

When BYTE was at McGraw Hill there was a rigid wall between editorial and sales, and that kind of linkage between a big “news” item and an advertisement would have been cause for investigation. It was legitimate for editorial to let sales know about upcoming features. In this case, though, the two items were thoroughly linked. One should not be surprised, I suppose.

The President is behind in the polls. If the election were tomorrow he would lose to nearly anyone the Republicans could nominate. Rush Limbaugh insists that he would lose to Elmer Fudd, which may be an exaggeration, but the point is that Obama is desperate. He’s now playing for the highest stakes imaginable. He is certainly correct when he proclaims that a US default would raise the interest rates for everyone, US government and everyone else, costing us all money: and that the effect on the rich would be worse than more taxes. So give in: let taxes be raised. You’ll feel better. Those rich guys aren’t paying their fair share. We need more money and they are not paying it, and it’s all their fault. Of course we can’t get out of this mess with spending cuts alone, so give us some more money or everyone’s going to get hurt. Don’t make me do this to you!

In any context but this it would be called extortion. It’s a variation on the mob’s favorite game, protection racket. But when applied by the President of the United States it is, in these times, business as usual.

We continue to sow the wind.

= = =

View 684 Friday, July 22, 2011

It’s late, I have dental appointments, and I’m getting further behind.

Mark Steyn sitting in for Rush Limbaugh today brought up the Department of Education’s SWAT Team, and the notion that this might be a good time to eliminate a number of spending drains in the Federal government. I have some indication that people in the Limbaugh staff read this site. In any event, maybe this will get the idea to people in the Congress. There is a lot of discussion about just how much of the Federal Government is “discretionary” and how much is solid locked in entitlement, usually with the conclusion that you can’t reduce the annual deficits by cutting spending; there have to be more taxes, generally on “the rich”. The rich already pay about half the taxes collected, and the rich plus the middle class pay just about all of them already. Perhaps they will have to pay more – but surely we can at least cut bunny inspectors and Department of Education SWAT teams? Surely those are “discretionary”? Surely the Constitution doesn’t decree that once one becomes a Federal employee one is set for life including pension with health care? That no one ever gets laid off? If something can’t go on forever, it will stop. At some point the spending increases have to stop. At some point there have to be actual cuts in spending. We have to stop doing things we can’t afford.

We’re already cutting the space program, which didn’t amount to all that much per American. We could dispense with that, but we have to have a Department of Education that does – what? Isn’t that “discretionary”? What about bunny inspectors? I am sure every Congressman can find a project or activity that we can do without. Can’t we at least do that before we start raising taxes?

Your nook books

I actually purchased a couple of books attributed to you via the nook store already. In this case they were Red Heroin and Red Dragon. Not a bad pricing strategy there. 🙂 Any chance those were part of the list of novels you were expecting to put up as nook books?

Sincerely,

Chris Willoughby

I should have made it more clear: a number of my books are available on Nook and through iStore and on Amazon, through arrangements made by my agent. Those include Red Heroin and Red Dragon.  There are, however, some older works, long out of contract, which I have been putting up on Amazon myself and will now post on Nook when I can. Those are done directly by me, largely because I don’t expect the revenue to be very high. The most important of my eBooks have been done through my agent. We are doing very well with those, and I am well pleased. Go buy some!

Today I tried to call Nook and was informed that they’re confirming the information by hand and don’t need to talk to me. They’ll get back to me Real Soon Now. At some point all that will be done and I can upload a couple of books that Eric has put into Nook format, and I have some other works for that mill. We’ll be doing that over time. Eric has been a wonder at this.

And I am off to the dentist.

View 684 Thursday, July 21, 2011

· ObamaCare and Jobs

· Secrets of economic growth

· Death, Taxes, and Federal Service

·

I frequently get mail proclaiming its importance, but this time my old friend and correspondent Joanne Dow may be right:

This is the most important graph of the day courtesy of HotAir.com.

Report: Private sector job creation ground to a halt almost instantly after Obamacare passed "http://hotair.com/archives/2011/07/20/report-private-sector-job-creation-ground-to-a-halt-almost-instantly-after-obamacare-passed/"

Before April 2010 we see more than 67,000 jobs created per month. After that date it dropped to 6400 jobs per month.

{^_^}

Of course I can’t vouch for the data. I know little about this web site. Still, it seems reasonable: businesses were told that if you hire people you will have to provide healthcare for them or pay fines. That makes expansion of a company a risky business. The Republicans were pledging to repeal ObamaCare or to refuse to fund it, but that doesn’t seem to be happening. If this is anything like correct, it certainly is the most important graph of the day – and ought to be informing the Republican strategists who are busy participating in the next round of the Deficit Dance.

Los Angeles has a new law making it a hate crime to shout at a bicyclist who is trying to annoy you, and awarding them triple damages if they sue you for verbal assault, etc. The ruling class has decided. Motorists must pay for the roads. Bicyclists get to use them free, and lawyers get to shake the motorists down. Isn’t that fun? It’s neither democracy nor rule of law; it’s just the modern system.

If I seem in a bit of a foul mood, I wasted considerable time trying to set up an account with Barnes and Noble to publish some of my works for the Nook. I filled out all their forms, and got an email saying I had to confirm some of the details by telephone. After 43 minutes of being on hold waiting for “the next available agent” (I have no evidence that there was ever more than one, or indeed any at all) the phone system ceased making automatic announcements about all agents being busy and simply hung up on me. Redialing got me the message that the office was closed for the day, please call during business hours. I had intended to announce that you could get some of my works in eBook format for the Nook, but at the moment that is not true. I’ll try again tomorrow, but one wonders if B&N is not getting business advice from Borders.

The Last Shuttle has landed, and the United States is no longer a space faring nation.

Fortunately the world now knows one of the secrets of economic growth. I would have thought that cheap energy and lots of economic freedom would produce economic miracles, but there appears to be another important factor.

http://www.theatlanticwire.com/global/2011/07/chart-penile-length-leads-little-economic-growth/40117/

Steve Chu

And, we seem to have made another discovery. Something is as certain as death and taxes.

Death, Taxes, and a Federal Job?

Dr. Pournelle —

Apparently we can add a federal job to the list of certainties.

Some federal workers more likely to die than lose jobs http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2011-07-18-fderal-job-security_n.htm?loc=interstitialskip

"The federal government fired 0.55% of its workers in the budget year that ended Sept. 30 — 11,668 employees in its 2.1 million workforce. Research shows that the private sector fires about 3% of workers annually for poor performance, says John Palguta, former research chief at the federal Merit Systems Protection Board which handles federal firing disputes."

"The job security rate for all federal workers was 99.43% last year and nearly 100% for those on the job more than a few years."

"Only 27 of 35,000 federal attorneys were fired last year. None was laid off. Death claimed 33."

Getting rid of the bunny inspectors is going to be hard.

Pieter

Getting rid of the bunny inspectors will indeed be hard. It is set up to be hard, and no one is seriously trying to make it happen. The goal of the ruling class is to continue to raise revenues while borrowing more money, and “paying” with promises to cut spending Real Soon Now. Death and Taxes and Federal Service. Das Buros immer stehen. The Iron Law prevails.

And I see I have spent the day trying to get set up with Barnes and Noble, to no avail. Thanks to all those who have recently subscribed and renewed subscriptions. That helps a lot.

View 684 Wednesday, July 20, 2011

· The Deficit Debates: outcome

· Doom, Gloom, and the future

· Albert Jay Nock on liberty

Things to Come

The Deficit Dance will continue. When it’s over, we will raise the deficit limit. We will pledge to cut spending, and there will be a great deal of self congratulations over the pledges. Some programs will not increase quite so much, and that will be called a big cut. We will raise taxes in order to get the pledge to cut spending.

The Department of Agriculture will continue to send out inspectors to see that stage magicians who use rabbits in their acts have Federal Permits to do so. People who sell rabbits as pets will continue to be shaken down for Federal Permits, although those who raise rabbits for restaurants, or who sell rabbits as food for serpents, do not need the permit. Incidentally, the simplest way to continue to sell rabbits out of your back yard is to get each purchaser to certify that this rabbit will be fed to a snake or a komodo dragon or a human gourmand, but will not be loved and kept as a pet. Show that to the Federal Inspector, and contemplate that the Inspector probably makes more money than nearly anyone who is selling rabbits out of his back yard. And probably more than the stage magician.

The Department of Education will continue to maintain a Special Weapons and Tactics team, which it can use to raid people’s houses at dawn in search of education fraud perpetrators whether they live at that house or not. It will probably hire some new people as the Department gets automatic increases.

Whoever enforces the Consumer Products “safety” standards will hire more people to harass bicycle and toy makers, driving what little manufacturing that still exists in the United States out of the country. Retailers will be harassed as the standard goes from the present 300 parts per million of lead in bicycles to 100 parts per million, and those involved in the toy industry, already shaken by the imposition of the 300 parts per million rule on everything in their inventory will have further burdens as they try to prove that everything they have in stock meets this new standard. More inspectors will be hired. The number of firms they inspect will decrease as more are driven out of business. Big companies will absorb the new costs, and chuckle as their smaller competitors fold. Toy prices will rise. Employment in the toy industry in the United States will fall.

The unemployment rate will continue to be officially at 9% or so; the real rate will continue to be higher as more people stay unemployed year after year.

More regulations will be promulgated. More federal employees will be hired to enforce them. No one will ask much less answer the question “Is this something we ought to be borrowing money to do? Could we get along without this?”

All over the government life will go on. Some government workers will get less overtime and will have to find other income or actually cut back on their standard of living. All will get smaller cost of living increases, but they will keep their jobs and pensions and health care.

Taxes will rise, and the economy will continue to suffer from high energy costs and excessive regulation.

Gloom

I don’t mean to be excessively gloomy. This is what will happen this year. The only remedy to this mess is a return to sanity. The present Administration believes that hope and change means more government control, and that any cut in government is a threat to meaningful change; bunny inspectors are part of progress, as are inspectors to be sure that children can safely eat bicycles and children’s books, and unsafe old CAT IN THE HAT volumes printed before the new benign regulations will be destroyed. Government is good, and more is better. So long as this sentiment prevails in the White House, the Kabuki theater will continue.

Obama will insist on strings to be attached to any permission to raise the debt limit; those strings will let him spend more money, not do drastic cuts in spending.

I don’t know the details of what will happen, but we will survive it. America is going to get the government it deserves and it will get it good and hard. We are going to have to take an economic dose of salts. We will have to stop Washington from spending all that money. If something can’t go on forever, it will stop.

As to our overseas adventures, if something cannot go on forever, it will stop. The Kabuki dance can’t go on forever. Hope and Change can’t go on forever.

If you have not seen Albert Jay Nock’s essay on just what happened with the New Deal, it may provide you with some illumination as to what is going on now.

I believe that when the historian looks back on the last 20 years of American life, the thing that will puzzle him most is the amount of self-inflicted punishment that Americans seem able to stand. They take it squarely on the chin at the slightest provocation and do not even wait for the count before they are back for more.

True, they have always been good at it. For instance, once on a time they were comparatively a free people, regulating a large portion of their lives to suit themselves. They had a great deal of freedom as compared with other peoples of the world.

But apparently they could not rest until they threw their freedom away. They made a present of it to their own politicians, who have made them sweat for their gullibility ever since. They put their liberties in the hands of a praetorian guard made up exactly on the old Roman model, and not only never got them back, but as long as that praetorian guard of professional politicians lives and thrives – which will be quite a while if its numbers keep on increasing at the present rate – they never will.

There is considerably more. Nock understood that freedom is not free.

You wrote: "America is going to get the government it deserves and it will get it good and hard."

I vehemently and strenuously disagree. America — or more correctly my generation and the next few — will get the government the Boomers deserved. It takes time for decisions to take effect

Joshua Jordan, KSC

Nock would disagree: the decision to trade in liberty for something else was made long ago. There were several opportunitied for recovery and trend reversal, particularly with Reagan, and later with the Gingrich recovery of Congress, but the opportunities were squandered in favor of “big government conservatism” whatever that is. Now we continue to learn: freedom is not free. Free men are not equal, Equal men are not free. The universe is not always fair. All too often

the race is not to the swift or the battle to the strong, nor does food come to the wise or wealth to the brilliant or favor to the learned; but time and chance happen to them all.

We believed that with enough government all things would be possible: that inequality is a “social problem” and all social problems can be “solved” with government action. Alas, the only actions government can take involve creating bureaucracies and spending money. Bureaucracies act in their own manner through the Iron Law of Bureaucracy. Once created they may or may not do what they were created to do, but they will do. They will continue to do long after the need for their original creation has vanished. They will do even if their very existence harms the purpose for which they were founded. They will protect their existence at nearly any cost. Das Buros stehen immer.

The prevailing sentiment in this country, both the Boomer generation and yours, appears to be that there are “problems” and they can be “solved” by government; that government is the answer, not the problem. Over time some become enlightened. Perhaps we are learning. Perhaps we can cease to sow the wind; but the current Deficit Dance is not encouraging. The only encouragement I see is that more and more of the population is beginning to understand that not all “problems” can or even should be “solved” by government action: That that is not only a limit to the power of government to fix things, but good reason to believe that too much government breaks things. There may be a trend back toward freedom. We’ll just have to see.

In one of my science fiction series I postulate the CoDominium, a formal arrangement in which the United States and the Soviet Union divide the world (and the small part of interstellar space accessible to them). They hate each other, but they fear outsiders more. They have devised a system to maintain power. One part of it is the Bureau of Relocation, which moves large groups of people, sending some out to interstellar colonies. There is also a Bureau of Science whose task is to suppress inventions that might threaten the CoDominium. Unlicensed scientists may be turned over to BuReloc.

Now it appears that the demise of the Soviet Union may not have precluded the formation of BuReloc.

CoDo BuReloc?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/
environment/2011/jul/20/
un-climate-change-peacekeeping

Jim. crawford

Note that once such a Bureau is created, it will be governed by the Iron Law. Will our Legions be involved in enforcement? We may be sure that we will not invade China to close unlicensed coal plants, of course; but an international bureau would be happy to use the US Courts to accomplish the same thing in West Virginia. It is not known what will be the fate of AGW Deniers under the new peace keeping mandate. Could Deniers be charged and transported to The Hague for trial and imprisonment? One is tempted to laugh at such absurdities, but stranger things have happened.

Incidentally, there is an explication of the Iron Law in action in a discussion of net neutrality here. Participants include John Dvorak, Leo Laporte, Larry Magid, and me.