Does America hate bright kids? Kemal’s Brotherhood

View 807 Monday, January 20, 2014

“Transparency and the rule of law will be the touchstones of this presidency.”

President Barack Obama, January 31, 2009

 

Christians to Beirut. Alawites to the grave.

Syrian Freedom Fighters

I spent the day taking Roberta out to the doctors, and of course sort of recovering from this flu, which is debilitating. Apologies.

Capital accumulation is booming as witness the Dow; but unemployment is not shrinking, and in fact it appears to be a lot lower than it is, since those who just plain gave up on finding work are no longer counted as unemployed. We have no real way of measuring that number, but there are a lot, and of course that also includes “early retirement” people, middle managers whose jobs have mutated beyond their understanding, skilled workers replaced by robots and generally increased productivity.

There are a lot of reasons for this.

If you pay people not to work, you must pay them even more to get them to work; and given various welfare, disability, unemployment, food stamps, and other subsidies that can be expensive. It’s particularly for small capital enterprises whose owners have to eke out a living as they burn capital in startup ventures.

Small firms also have the regulation problem: compliance with all the various regulations is difficult for anyone, but larger firms can have compliance officers and other experts on the payroll. Little outfits can’t afford them. If you have only eleven employees, adding a compliance officer to tend to regulations ups your expenses in the order of ten percent.

And finally there’s this:

America hates…

Jerry,

http://www.newsweek.com/america-hates-its-gifted-kids-226327

Jim

It says little we haven’t been saying here for years, but the long term effect of ignoring the brightest 10% so that you can devote a larger portion of education to bringing up those just below normal up to normal is disastrous.

I have more on this, but it’s late and I’m tired. I will repeat: a quick way to stimulate small business and raise employment would be to raise the exemption levels: a single line of legislation that doubles the exemption levels. Regulations that apply firms larger than 10 no apply only to those larger that twenty. Similarly, regulations that don’t apply until you get to fifty employees now don’t apply until you have one hundred. This alone would create a very large number of jobs, and pretty well everyone knows it. The capital is out there. And probably no single measure would do more to add to the number of people employed, especially if you cut the amounts paid to people for not working.

Turkey has now fallen into the kind of corrupt state in which police power is used to protect corrupt politicians and protect criminals that Mustapha Kemal Ataturk envisioned when he charged the brotherhood of Army officers to protect the Constitution. They were strictly forbidden from BEING the government; they were instead to come out of barracks and restore honest government in cases of corruption. For a very long time they did that.

The current regime has dismissed the senior officers and interfered with the judicial system, and is now dismissing and jailing prosecutors who have found corruption at the highest levels. The senior officers have been cashiered or jailed; we will see whether the spirit of brotherhood that Kemal Ataturk imparted to his Young Turks survives in the junior officer corps.

 

 

winter that never ended — footfall? Dr. Pournelle,

The full article http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22129520.700-ad-536-the-year-that-winter-never-ended.html is behind a paywall, but io9 has a summary with excerpts at http://io9.com/what-caused-a-10-year-winter-starting-in-536-1505213873?utm_source=recirculation&utm_medium=recirculation&utm_campaign=mondayPM. The years-long winter that began in 536 is possibly caused by cometary debris left over from the 530 passing of Halley’s comet.

-D

Yes. It has long been pretty clear that something happened to the Roman Empire  (at that time divided into a Gothic Western Kingdom and Byzantium) in about that year.  Crops failed, production fell, plague came.  The Dark Ages descended.  Perhaps that was more literal than many think.

 

Freedom is not free. Free men are not equal. Equal men are not free.