Category Archives: politics

Victor Davis Hanson @ Town Hall : The Strange Case of Mexican Emigration

Posted on by
Reply

20130719-081327.jpg
The Strange Case of Mexican Emigration
Don’t always agree with VDH (though mostly I do) but he’s always got something thoughtful to say. There is a huge dichotomy in how the US and Mexico treat our borders in the general sense and a near infinite chasm in how we view our joint borders. Essentially Mexico promotes illegal emigration to the US, and treats illegal immigration as a serious crime….how is it they protest when the US gets fed up?

What is and isn’t happening with the NSA phone surveillance

Posted on by
Reply

Read more at: http://pjmedia.com/lifestyle/2013/06/27/the-science-of-what-is-and-isnt-happening-with-the-nsas-phone-surveillance/
Excellent, readable medium length piece on what the NSA ‘thing’ is all about and why it matters.

So, there’s this NSA thing. Since the stories about the NSA, Edward Snowden, PRISM, and so on have broken, there has been more misinformation, disinformation, bad information, speculation, ignorant commentary and flat out nonsense going around than any topic in recent memory. And to tell you the truth, I’ve been working on this article for two weeks and never finishing because there is always one more howler. Let’s see if we can clear some of this up.

Entrepreneurial Drought Limiting job and wealth creation

Posted on by
Reply

20130604-210243.jpgWhere are the entrepreneurs? More evidence the very heart of the US economy is failing
James Pethokoukis | June 3, 2013

In my opinion the culprits are easy to discern…..

  1. Uncertainty
  2. Regulation
  3. Taxes
  4. intellectual property law breakdown ( too much, too long, too easy)
  5. Healthcare
  6. Retirement
  7. Risk aversion by banks

I am also thinking that:

  1. the informal economy is more active than is accounted for
  2. people who are paid can in fact support more hangers on than one might expect
  3. especially away from the ‘urbs’
  4. significant numbers are hidden on disability of one sort or another

Which may be hiding lots of small scale entrepreneurial efforts.

But in the main what we are seeing is the aggregate effect of the first list which significantly suppresses the urge to grow. Many commentators miss that the way so much regulation is structured once you reach a certain size it suddenly becomes asymptotically more difficult / expensive / stressful to operate. This makes even starting much less attractive. It also means that we are suppressing companies just as they start to kick up into a realm where they could potentially quickly accelerate out of small business land into middle sized and become more consequential.

This is a socio-economic problem that has to be solved on a broad scale:

  1. Lower but still progressive taxes
  2. Brute simple tax code
  3. Individual focused health care
  4. Individual focused retirement
  5. Small business non interference focus in government rules setting
  6. Standards setting and supporting organizations for: health, safety, financial stability, etc, instead of regulatory administrations
  7. Return IP law to its small creator anti monopoly roots
  8. Support a couple of ‘international’ banks but return banking to moderate scale focus
  9. Eliminate subsidies
  10. Continue deep and wide science support with focus on stimulating commercial support like NASA’s ISS assured access program.

Both main parties need to develop their versions of this list, the massive scale, top down, big corporation supporting model both have devolved into has come to the end of its efficacy and we need to go back to our roots. Those roots are individuals acting on, in and through the small scale collective, which both Dem and Rep should be able to support. Of course the downside is that large scale pandering and petty corruption are less hide-able in such a polity.

Libertarianism – Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan… – non intervention may not be the lowest cost option

Posted on by
Reply

Richard A. Epstein, the Peter and Kirsten Bedford Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution
The las paragraph:

No Libertarian Panacea
There are larger lessons to learn from these foreign policy issues. The first is that libertarians, like Chapman and myself, can both be faithful to their basic principles, yet differ strongly on what should be done. The basic principle of libertarian thought is its blanket prohibition against the use of force (including the threat of force) and fraud to achieve personal gain at the expense of others. That principle translates easily into the international context to say that one nation cannot wage war against another.
However easy it is to state that basic principle, it is just that hard to implement it, especially in a world of self-help where there is no common sovereign to stop the use of force. It is easy to allow the use of force in self-defense, but difficult to prevent that excuse from being used by scoundrels for their own ends.
It is even harder to get to the bottom of the simple question of when and where one person (or nation) should come to the assistance of another. The basic legal rule is that such intervention is permissible but not obligatory, and only on behalf of the victim of the attack. The general private law rule that there is no duty to rescue a stranger in a condition of imminent peril from natural forces, even though there is an obvious right to do, carries over to the matter of self-defense.
The great tragedy then is that the clear moral principle can easily become overwhelmed by a series of subsidiary conflicts that extend from difficult factual disputes about the past to uncertain predictions about the future, all set against a background that allows for the exercise of good faith judgment without clear guidelines on how it is best exercised. I do hope that I am wrong, and that the President is doing the right thing. But all things considered, I think that there is a serious risk that his policy of studied disengagement may well turn out, down the road, to drag us into some larger conflict against our will.

More at: http://www.hoover.org/publications/defining-ideas/article/148476
Essentially the little wars and conquests prior to WWII made that war an inevitability. Whereas earlier action by the major powers might have prevented its occurrence though I have to say that it’s unlikely to have had a happy ending, war and civil war were inevitable. It might even have lead to a less pleasant world than the one we live in, fascism might have lasted longer, communism might as well, and lord knows the ‘west’ was not what we would see as freedom loving and inclusive.

Walter Russell Mead // jobs jobs jobs

Posted on by
Reply

As always lots of great thought at The American Interest read more at: http://blogs.the-american-interest.com/wrm/2013/05/22/jobs-jobs-jobs-2/

First, make hiring easy and cheap.
Second, put the service economy and especially small business and entrepreneurship front and center.
Third, we need to feed the state to the people even as we individualize its services.

That third one had me puzzled till I read the explanation, which is a good description of what the statesmen of the past have done.

A characteristic of American political economy going back to colonial times has been the use of the resources of the state to promote the welfare of what today we would call the middle class. For much of our history we “fed the state to the people” by turning over publicly owned lands at low and ultimately zero cost. The public lands, which once included virtually all of the continental United States, were a possession of almost infinite value, but it seemed wiser (and more politically sustainable) to the leaders of the day to make them cheaply available to the people rather than to hoard them or try to retain a larger share of their value for the public purse.

The Senatorial Launch System | Asteroid Capture | Clueless Politicians | Pork | Engineering Jobs + Corporate Welfare

Posted on by
Reply

20130427-221407.jpg

Broadly, the administration envisions sending a probe as soon as 2017 to capture a 25-foot, 500-ton asteroid and tug it near the moon – possibly to a spot about 277,000 miles from Earth that would use competing gravitational forces to allow it to “sit” there. Astronauts flying NASA’s new Orion capsule and Space Launch System rocket then would visit it to take samples and possibly set foot on its surface.

This plan is getting pushback because its not a return to the moon or a Mars landing plan. But the reality is that this idea is all NASA can afford given the cost involved with the Senatorial ( or Space, take your pick) Launch System A Saturn V + class heavy lift direct ascent launch system

The lack of resistance is tied to Senate support of the Space Launch System. Senators from key NASA states – Florida, Texas and Alabama – pushed President Barack Obama to build it, and the asteroid mission is seen as a way to give purpose to the rocket, once criticized as a “rocket to nowhere.”
Illustrative of that point was the initial reaction of Sen. Richard Shelby, R-Ala.
“NASA should continue to explore the universe and challenge scientific and technical boundaries,” he said in a statement. “However, NASA should maintain focus on its core mission and continue development of the Space Launch System so that it will be ready for any future NASA mission.”

So my question is, why the SLS, don’t get me wrong some of the SLS related work like resurrecting the Saturn V F1 engine (as I pointed to a few days ago) is a good thing, but reality is it should be part of getting a commercial venture to back development. NASA shoulddevelop Orion and its support module, but the booster should be gov’t sponsored / stimulated effort as part of a get to the moon, Mars, big asteroids plan, in support of the commercial civilian space efforts.
If you look at all the recently proposed and ongoing civilian efforts and roll in appropriate gov’mnt support you can see a very robust human and robotic space development plan emerge.
Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2013-04-nasa-chief-asteroid-agency.html/

20130427-221747.jpg

This is a Really Good question

Posted on by
Reply

From The American Interest || Walter Russell Mead’s Viameadia:

As is so often the case in American politics, those who produce MSM coverage and those who rely exclusively on it for news were the last to know what was happening. We’ve seen almost nothing but optimistic and encouraging coverage of gun control efforts, ending as usual in painful failure and disillusion. Many gun control advocates and their allies in the MSM are stupified and stunned by the votes.

“Is there really any point in throwing your political career away in order to give a few days’ passing satisfaction to New York Times editorial writers?”