SA@TAC – Peter King’s Radical Ignorance
Peter Schiff: Japan’s Broken Window
Daily Bell Editor: IAEA is nothing but a nuclear energy cheerleader
Who are the poor?
When we hear of the poor, we envision a massive group of people without food and shelter. In reality, most of the poor in capitalistic countries such as the United States are not in such a state. Data from a recent census reveals that of the official “poor”:[1]
* 76 percent have air conditioning.
* 66 percent have more than two rooms of living space per person.
* 97 percent own at least one color television.
* 62 percent have either cable or satellite television.
* Almost 75 percent of households own a car (30 percent own two or more).
* 73 percent own microwave ovens.
* More than 50 percent have stereos.
* 33 percent have automatic dishwashers.
* 99 percent have refrigerators.
* Virtually none lack running water or flushing toilets.
* 46 percent own their own home, the average of which is a three bedroom house with 1.5 baths, that has a carport and porch or patio, and the average value of which is 70 percent of the median American home.
If we observe our presumably poorest citizens on our public transportation systems we see that they have cell phones, adequate clothing, personal audio devices, and are generally clean and free of disease and deformities. They also have the comfort of using a heated and air-conditioned transportation car that has carpet and flat-panel televisions for their amusement (paid for primarily by the wealthy, of course).
If you were to compare these American poor to the poor in Bolivia, Honduras, Cambodia, or India (or even to many of the poor in Mexico, Romania, Thailand, and Russia), you would see a stark difference. The poor in these countries often literally live in open-air huts with large leaves for roofs and stacked bricks that serve as a shared stove for multiple families. For the poor of the third-world countries, there is, for the most part, no money, no exchange of goods — just basic survival by subsistence farming or by hunting or fishing for food. To these people, American street sweepers and factory workers live a life of luxury.
(Read more from mises.org)
National City, CA stealing property with eminent domain fraud
DHS: We Have the Authority to Routinely Strip-Search Air Travelers
The Department of Homeland Security told a federal court that the agency believes it has the legal authority to strip-search every air traveler. The agency made the claim at oral argument in EPIC’s lawsuit to suspend the airport body scanner program. The agency also stated that it believed a mandatory strip-search rule could be instituted without any public comment or rulemaking. EPIC President Marc Rotenberg urged the Washington, DC appeals court to suspend the body scanner program, noting that the devices are “uniquely intrusive” and ineffective. (Read more from lewrockwell.com)
See Also: TSA propaganda shows off the puppies which will eventually be used to harass & intimidate travelers
SA@TAC – The Tea Party vs. Washington
* Hypocrite Congressional Republicans counter Democratic budget ($1.6 trillion deficit) with their own ($1.5 trillion deficit)
Ron Paul: A ‘No-Fly Zone’ Is an Act of War
Larry Summers: Natural Disasters boost the economy
A friend of mine: Any time you think that the government employs people who are in any way cognizant of reality…remember this: High ranking Obomba economic adviser claims tsunami could “temporarily boost” the japanese and global economy. Broken window fallacy…did anyone fail to learn this in econ 101? if you burn down your house and have to build another, are you better off?
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Tsunami an economic disaster? Not necessarily
HONOLULU (HawaiiNewsNow) – The natural disaster of a tsunami could actually provide a temporary boost to the global economy.
Larry Summers, former director of President Obama’s economic council and a former head of the World Bank, said rebuilding could temporarily boost the Japanese economy.
Summers suggested this in an interview Friday on CNBC. He added that the global economy is more resilient than most people think.
In Hawaii, disruptive weather events are good for some businesses but bad for others.
Stores that sell generators and hardware supplies experience a run on these items when a tsunami or bad weather approach; other retailers find their usual sales interrupted as people focus on evacuating and stockpiling essential supplies instead of their usual shopping.
HawaiiNewsNow correspondent Tannya Joaquin found three gas stations that had run out of fuel more than an hour before the first harbor wave was to have arrived.
The tsunami is an expense item for hotels, which have extensive plans in place to take care of guests’ needs, usually through “vertical evacuation,” escorting guests at least three stories up. Much of the expense comes from bringing in extra people to take care of guests. (from hawaiinewsnow.com)
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Larry Summers needs to take a break from corrupting the minds of Harvard students and see what the outside of classroom looks like. He can start by reading this:
Natural Disasters, It Turns Out, Are Bad
It seems that we may never rid ourselves of the broken-window fallacy.
Hurricane Katrina certainly did not stop economists from proclaiming the silver lining of natural disasters. On September 9, 2005, Labor Secretary Elaine Chao told USA Today that demand could create a labor shortage that could push up wage rates and that “We’re going to see a tremendous boom in construction.” On December 3rd, 2005, Nigel Gault, chief domestic economist at Global Insight, said, “We are now at the point where Hurricane Katrina’s effects are adding to job creation rather than detracting from it.”
And it’s not only that disasters just have a silver lining: economists have long believed that natural disasters and wars are actually good for the economy! Until recently they have not made any attempt to empirically test their views. However, in 2002 Mark Skidmore and Hideki Toya published a paper where they found a positive correlation between disasters and human capital, productivity, and GDP growth.
Now the good news. A recently published paper in Economic Inquiry by Cuaresma, Hlouskova, and Obersteiner brings the positive benefits of disasters into question. Not only does it counter the silver lining of new construction jobs, it also finds that disasters actually subtract from economic performance. In addition the paper provides clues to the entire confusion over this issue.
Economists have generally rested their case for the benefits of disasters on “creative destruction,” but our authors are quick to point out that Schumpeter’s view of creative destruction is one that is driven by competition, where those associated with disasters are not; they are just destruction. (Read more from mises.org)
10 Justifications for slavery and government
These are 10 arguments which were once used to justify slavery. Today, very similar arguments are used to justify government.
Slavery existed for thousands of years, in all sorts of societies and all parts of the world. To imagine human social life without it required an extraordinary effort. Yet, from time to time, eccentrics emerged to oppose it, most of them arguing that slavery is a moral monstrosity and therefore people should get rid of it. Such advocates generally elicited reactions ranging from gentle amusement to harsh scorn and even violent assault.
When people bothered to give reasons for opposing the proposed abolition, they advanced various ideas. Here are ten such ideas I have encountered in my reading. . . . (Read more from mises.org)
FLASHBACK: The 9/11 Confession
Pink Floyd band member Roger Waters joins a campaign of Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) against Israel.
from alternativenews.org
New York public employee compensation
A very informative editorial from the New York Times that gives you some idea of what is going in New York with public employee compensation.
The Times observes:
In all, the salaries and benefits of state employees add up to $18.5 billion, or a fifth of New York’s operating budget. Unless those costs are reined in, New York will find itself unable to provide even essential services.
To point out these alarming facts is not to be anti- union, or anti-worker. In recent weeks, Republican politicians in the Midwest have distorted what should be a serious discussion about state employees’ benefits, cynically using it as a pretext to crush unions.
But after you read the editorial, you may actually come to conclude that the political power of unions could have something–maybe almost everything–to do with the problem.
. . . .
In 2000, employee pensions cost New York State taxpayers $100 million. They now cost $1.5 billion, and will be more than $2 billion in 2014. Wall Street’s troubles are a big part of that. But so are state politics. The Legislature, ever eager to curry favor with powerful unions, added sweeteners to pensions and allowed employees to stop making contributions after 10 years…
The Social Snobbery of Free Trade
7 March 2011
Mr. Ian Fletcher
Dear Ian:
In your latest essay at The Huffington Post, you allege that supporters of free trade are guilty of “social snobbery” (“The Social Snobbery of Free Trade,” March 7). You offer three, and only three, pieces of evidence for this proposition. The first is a quotation from New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, and the second is a quotation from Barack Obama – each suggesting that working-class people too quickly blame trade for whatever economic misfortunes they suffer. The third piece of evidence is the fact that, while most members of the mainstream media are center-left on a majority of issues, they are well-paid and “lean right” on trade.
You masterfully massacre a straw man. Contrary to your explicit claim in the case of Friedman, and your implication in the case of Obama, the pronouncements of economically confused journalists and professional politicians aren’t even remotely appropriate examples of the best arguments for free trade.
Here’s a challenge for you. Search for examples of snobbery in the arguments for free trade made by scholars such as Adam Smith, Frederic Bastiat, Jagdish Bhagwati, Henry George, Daniel Griswold, Douglas Irwin, Fritz Machlup, Martin Wolf, and other economists and researchers who are recognized authorities on trade. You’ll come up empty. (Note: pointing out that many people do not understand economics is not an instance of snobbery.)
If nothing else, you have chutzpah to pin the label “snobs” on free traders – who argue that individuals ought simply be left free to spend their money in whatever ways they choose – while you promote a policy of giving third-party strangers in Washington the power to obstruct, for some allegedly higher good, these private, individual consumption choices.
Sincerely,
Donald J. Boudreaux (Read more from cafehayek.com)