ALTERNATE HISTORY: 9/11: What Would President Gore Have Done?
Archive for 2011
September 10, 2011
HE THINKS THIS IS SOMETHING TO BRAG ABOUT: Jimmy Carter: ‘We never dropped a bomb. We never fired a bullet. We never went to war.’ But, of course, his craven and inept example encouraged all our future problems in the region, where a firm response would have quashed them. If only he’d been as tough with hate-filled terrorists as with marauding cats.
JONATHAN ADLER: Doesn’t Anyone In The White House Know History? As a commenter noted the other day, Obama doesn’t even remember that his first stimulus was a flop.
WANT MORE JOBS? The Low-Hanging Fruit Is Energy.
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UPDATE: Link was busted before. Fixed now. Sorry!
A. BARTON HINKLE: Obama’s Crony Capitalism: What the Solyndra debacle reveals about Obama’s economic strategy.
Viewed in isolation, the Solyndra story is mildly troubling. But it is nothing Washington has not seen before. The late, great columnist Molly Ivins wrote some crackerjack pieces about the return on investment that corporate sharpies used to get from their campaign donations to Republican politicians. The Solyndra story sounds like the same old, same old.
Except it isn’t. The Solyndra story encapsulates a much bigger issue than mere crony capitalism, bad as that is. Because Solyndra is not alone. The Obama administration has sunk billions into loan guarantees for dozens of other renewable-energy companies as well.
This is known as the political allocation of economic resources, and it entails all kinds of problems. The first and most basic: It’s wrong. Government should not be picking winners and losers in the marketplace.
Problem No. 2: corruption.
Whether that’s a bug or a feature depends on your attitude. Consider this passage from Holman Jenkins’ more-honest rewrite of Obama’s jobs speech:
I am not anti-business. I get a supreme sense of satisfaction when business leaders approach me and, in a deferential manner, ask for subsidies and regulatory favors that will determine whether their companies succeed or fail. Like solar subsidies. This is the kind of job creation I’m interested in.
My administration has taken flak because of our “investment” of tax dollars in a solar company that last week filed for bankruptcy. Don’t be misled. If such companies were profitable and could survive without subsidies, they would not be fit objects of government charity, nor would their leaders approach me with a deferential mien.
Their dependency is what makes them loyal constituents, generous with a campaign donation, willing to go on CNBC and praise our policies. You can always count on me for job creation when it means taking money from independent businesses, those that are answering the call of the marketplace, and giving it to dependent businesses, those that are answering the call of government.
That does capture the spirit pretty well.
UPDATE: Reader Scott Adcox emails: “What disturbs me most about the gov’ment picking winners and losers its uncanny knack of picking mostly losers. Someone should start a mutual fund that does nothing but short companies this administration talks up.” You’d probably be investigated by the SEC.
MORE JOBS CHASED AWAY: Savings.com sends Dear John letter to California. “Two months ago, Governor Jerry Brown signed the Affiliate-Nexus Tax bill, which requires Internet retailers with a relationship to California-based businesses to pay sales tax on all related transactions. The state government figured that Amazon and other retailers needed the California market too much to bail out of it. Instead, those retailers have cut off their affiliate relationships, which puts thousands of small businesses in California at risk of failure. One of those small businesses, Savings.com, sent a letter to its California customers saying that they will pack up and leave — and take their 100 or so jobs with them. . . . Well, who needs those 100+ jobs anyway? Er, California does, since it has one of the highest state-unemployment rates in the nation at over 12%. Obviously the state of California is more focused on collecting new taxes than in promoting small business, and just as obviously, the small businesses that work with Internet retailers can relocate more easily than most others.”
GENDER STUDIES PROGRAMS: A hostile environment for men?
CHARLES LANE: Another Job-Killing Obama Proposal:
President Obama did not mention it in his speech last night, but his American Jobs Act contains one really bad idea that will probably destroy jobs in a misguided effort to save them. I refer to his call for a ban on what some are calling “unemployment discrimination”: the alleged practice by which some companies refuse to hire applicants because they are unemployed, or even announce in their job postings that they don’t hire applicants who aren’t currently working. . . .
Subjecting companies to the risk of job-discrimination litigation is justifiable in the case of pervasive, historically rooted evils such as race or gender bias. But burdening the private sector for this dubious new purpose, in these difficult times, would be a big mistake.
“I agree that there are some rules and regulations that put an unnecessary burden on businesses at a time when they can least afford it,” Obama told the Congress. So why the heck would he create another one?
The most charitable explanation revolves around ineptitude.
IS IT WRONG FOR A WIFE TO HAVE TO DO “Man Chores?”
BESTSELLERS IN automotive safety.
PHIL BOWERMASTER: JOBSOLESCENCE?
CNN asks a question that we can expect to hear more and more in the coming years: are jobs obsolete? . . .
Maybe what’s becoming obsolete is not jobs per se, but the idea that they are something that you simply find.
Increasingly, perhaps, a job is something that we each have to create. We can’t count on someone else to create one for us. That model is disappearing. We have to carve something out for ourselves, something that the machines won’t immediately grab.
That sounds difficult, maybe even a little dangerous. We’re all comfortable with the idea of “finding” a job. We search for them; we hunt them; we land them. All of these images assume the job already exists.
But to create something new…what does that even mean?
Read the whole thing. The problem is, lots of people aren’t up to creating their own jobs. What will they do?
SMUGGLING DRUGS across the blood-brain barrier.
UNEXPECTEDLY! — ELECTRIC CAR EDITION: Mitsubishi raises price of all-electric i by an “unforeseen” $1,135.
OUT TODAY: The second issue of Modern Ink magazine. See it here.
TOM MAGUIRE ON THE PRESS’S shocking lack of interest in Obama’s Lincoln gaffe, compared with its treatment of similar errors by Republicans. It’s like they’re covering for him or something!
DIMITRI B. PAPADIMITRIOU: The Die-Hard Recession Heads Off The Charts. “You can see at a glance that the pink line indicating the current recession — yes, that one down near the bottom of the chart — is an outlier in the group. It shows that by the 43rd month of the downturn, the ratio stood at just over 58 percent, meaning that 58 percent of the population was employed. That figure is 4.6 percent less than at the recession’s start, when more than 62 percent were working. And it means that this employment decline is steeper, deeper, and longer than in any of the previous five recessions by a long shot. Even in the two worst recoveries during the past forty years, this ratio never before declined by more than three percent.”
ATF GUNRUNNING UPDATE: Gunwalker Explodes: FBI Hid Weapon, Tax Dollars Subsidized Murder. “The depth of the scandal dramatically widened yesterday. . . . Every American, regardless of political ideology, should be livid that the FBI gave at least $70,000 of “seed money” to murderous felons so that they could buy firearms. The FBI knew these weapons were destined for narco-terrorists, and that they would be used to target not just other murderous cartels but to terrorize innocents. . . . The fact that every U.S. agent gunned down in the line of duty was fired upon with weapons recovered from apparent gunwalking operations in the Dallas and/or Houston Field Operations areas — not to mention the revelation of an domestic gunwalking operation in Indiana dubbed ‘Gangwalker,’ and now ‘Grenadewalker’ — suggests a widespread program to arm violent felons.”
Well, I can see some budgets that need cutting, I guess.
CARTOON: Solyndra For Dummies. All explained in five panels. Here’s one of ’em.
ROGER KIMBALL: Shut up, he explained. “Sobering isn’t it? It’s an unmitigated litany of failure, evidence of economic illiteracy, political incompetence, and ideological extremism. What a legacy.”
Here’s the scorecard:
USHA RODRIGUES: Scamlaw: Paternalism vs. Prudence.
It is wrong for law schools to lie. About anything in general, and about placement statistics in particular. Wrong, wrong, wrong. I’m in favor of the Law School Transparency Project. Like I tell my students: lying is bad. Courts don’t like it, law schools shouldn’t do it, and you shouldn’t do it, either.
OK, now that we’ve gotten that out of the way, the gravamen of the LawScam beef seems to be that students are incurring crippling debt and can’t get jobs that will make that debt manageable. I think that this is a bad situation. I feel bad about it. Even though, as I blogged 2 years ago, I think that state law schools in general–and Georgia Law in particular–come out looking pretty good. . . . Law schools are a form of social sorting. If you likewise agree, that means doing away with T3 and T4 schools means doing away with access to the legal profession for a whole swath of people. Maybe most of them shouldn’t be lawyers in the first place. That argument has lots of resonance now–and forever if you think, like Larry Ribstein, that the legal market is permanently changing. But if the market shifts again, and lawyers are back in demand, then without these T3 and T4 schools, there will be a lot of people with their noses pressed up against the glass, clamoring to be lawyers and mad that they can’t be.
I’m inclined to agree with Ribstein, but this is a good point. Meanwhile, they’re having a whole symposium on the topic over at The Conglomerate, so just keep scrolling.
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