OUTRAGE OVER FORFEITURE, ON THE OTHER HAND, IS NOT: CATO: Outrage over Forfeiture Reform Is Unjustified.
Archive for 2015
August 2, 2015
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HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: WANT TO SEE REAL “INCOME INEQUALITY?” LOOK AT CALIFORNIA HIGHER EDUCATION:
The UC Regents approved 3 percent raises for 15 of the University of California’s highest-paid executives. The new pay scale for the five UC chancellors are: $772,500 for UC San Francisco’s Samuel Hawgood; $516,446 for UC Berkeley’s Nicholas Dirks; $441,334 for UCLA’s Gene Block; $436,120 for UC San Diego’s Pradeep Khosla; and $424,360 for UC Davis’ Linda Katehi, the Los Angeles Times reported.
Also included in the raises were $231,750 for Anne Shaw, chief of staff for the UC regents, to $991,942 for Mark Laret, chief executive of UC San Francisco’s medical center. Many of them had salaries well above $400,000 before the new increase.
These are public employees who also can look forward to rich pensions and lifetime health care in retirement… unless the system goes broke. But that’s another story. These people will live as millionaires in retirement, courtesy of the taxpayers. A $770,000 annual retirement for 30 years is $23 million. Is anyone really worth $23 million in retirement for something they did not build themselves?
Others on the UC pay raise list include the UC system’s chief investment officer, Jagdeep Bachher, whose salary now will be $633,450; UC’s general counsel, Charles Robinson, $441,334; and UC Davis’ medical center chief executive, Ann Madden Rice, $848,720.
Kevin Sabo, board chairman of the UC Student Association, denounced the pay raises as “shameful” and said the raises would hurt future lobbying efforts in Sacramento to boost state funds for UC. He’s right, but no one is listening. They really don’t care.
Academics assume that capitalists are callous exploiters of those who work for them, because the people that academics work for really are that way. . . .
FROM BORING TO BAFFLING: Theodore Dalrymple on The Economist:
The anonymity of the articles was intended to create the illusion that the magazine spoke from nothing so vulgar as a perspective, but rather from some Olympian height from which only the whole truth and nothing but the truth could be descried. It is the saving grace of every such magazine that no one remembers what he read in it the week before. Only by the amnesia of its readers can a magazine retain its reputation for perspicacity.
I found its style dull, too. How was it that correspondents from Lima to Limassol, from Cairo to Kathmandu, wrote in precisely the same fashion, as if everything that happened everywhere was fundamentally the same? Walter Bagehot, son-in-law of the founder of The Economist and its most famous editor, was a brilliant prose stylist and a wonderfully witty literary critic, among many other things; but The Economist has long been about as amusing as a speech by David Cameron. Its prose was the literary equivalent of IKEA furniture, prefabricated according to a manual of style; it tried to combine accessibility with judiciousness and arrived only at portentousness.
Who now reads it, and what for? I suppose there is a type of functionary who does not want to be caught out in ignorance of the latest political developments in Phnom Penh, or the supposed reasons for the latest uprising in Ouagadougou. The Economist is intellectual seriousness for middle management and MBAs. To be seen with it is a sign of belonging to, and of identifying with, a certain caste.
See also: the election of 2008, which the Economist went all in to manufacture, and continued to run worshipful covers of Obama posing Ever So Seriously in the years since. But as Mark Steyn wrote in 2009, when the bloom was first rubbing off the era of Hopenchange:
This is the point: The nuancey boys were wrong on Obama, and the knuckledragging morons were right. There is no post-partisan centrist “grappling” with the economy, only a transformative radical willing to make Americans poorer in the cause of massive government expansion. At some point, The Economist, Messrs Brooks, Buckley & Co are going to have to acknowledge this. If they’re planning on spending the rest of his term tutting that his management style is obstructing the effective implementation of his centrist agenda, it’s going to be a long four years.
And for the Economist (and the similarly corporatist Bloomberg “Unexpectedly” Business) the “fun” continues, as the blinders never came off.
(Found via Kathy Shaidle.)
DOUG WEINSTEIN WANTED TO BUILD SOMETHING LIKE THIS, ONLY DEEPER, AS A TOURIST ATTRACTION, BUT I DON’T THINK HE EVER FOUND ANY BACKERS: Homeowner Builds $2 Million Scuba Diving Pool In His Backyard. “In addition to having a water slide, wading area, grotto and other amenities, the pool in Springville, Utah is 140ft/43m long, 60ft/18m wide and at certain points 26ft/8m deep. The US$2 million pool — which holds about 360,000 gallons/1.4 million liters of water — was built so the avid scuba-diving owner could practice his skills without having to travel.”
IT’S ALWAYS NICE TO MAKE TWITCHY: Instapundit deflates Jon Stewart’s final ‘Daily Show’ appearance with one tweet.
THE CAREER ARC OF THE OBAMA TOADY IS BRIEF, BUT IT BENDS TOWARDS SCATOLOGY: Neatly summing up her brief career as an MSNBC show host/Democrat operative with a byline, “‘Woo! Sh*t!’: Alex Wagner Jokes and Curses in MSNBC Show Farewell,” just after the camera faded to black, but the sound hadn’t yet been cut.
FIRST WORLD PROBLEMS: I Did Hot Yoga With 98 Degrees and It Crushed My Teenage Dreams.
UNEXPECTEDLY: Seattle CEO who set firm’s minimum wage to $70G says he has hit hard times:
Dan Price, 31, tells the New York Times that things have gotten so bad he’s been forced to rent out his house.
Only three months ago Price was generating headlines—and accusations of being a socialist — when he announced the new salary minimum for all 120 employees at his Gravity Payments credit card processing firm. Price said he was doing it, and slashing his $1 million pay package to pay for it, to address the wealth gap.
“I’m working as hard as I ever worked to make it work,” he told the Times in a video that shows him sitting on a plastic bucket in the garage of his house. “I’m renting out my house right now to try and make ends meet myself.”
The Gods of Copybook Headings could not be reached for comment.
WITH THE BEST COMMANDER IN CHIEF EVER, HOW COULD THIS BE HAPPENING? “As sergeants and young officers depart, the institution is breaking for a third time in my lifetime. The personal tragedies that attended the collapse of a soldier’s spirit in past wars are with us again. Suicide, family abuse, alcohol and drug abuse are becoming increasingly more common.” Who knew the armed services were so full of racists?
CREATIVE DESTRUCTION: Don Boudreaux: Uber vs. Piketty.
Problems galore fill Piketty’s book – including his failure to recognize that market-driven innovation and competition are incessantly creating new capital while reducing or even destroying the value of older capital, all in ways that move new flesh-and-blood people into the central ranks of the ‘capitalists’ while moving others onto the periphery of those ranks. (Twelve years ago Mark Zuckerberg, the son of a dentist, was no one’s idea of a capitalist. He’s now worth close to $40 billion.)
While working together earlier this week on a business trip to California, my Mercatus Center colleague Ashley Schiller and I were chatting about Uber and the assaults that governments are now launching on this amazing innovation. Ashley had a brilliant insight, which I share here with her kind permission: Uber (and other ‘sharing economy’ innovations, such as Airbnb) allow ordinary people to turn their consumption goods into capital goods.
Uber enables someone who would otherwise drive his or her car only for personal use to drive his or her car for paying customers – that is, to drive his or her car in an income-earning (and, hence, wealth-enhancing) manner. Uber enables a consumption good to easily become a capital good for however long the car owner chooses to operate as an Uber driver. For whatever number of hours car owners use their personal cars as Uber (or Lyft) cars, part of value of those cars becomes part of the value of an economy’s capital stock even if formal statistics do not yet register it as such.
Uber and other sharing-economy innovations create more productive capital and create more capitalists.
Ah. That explains why lefties hate them so much. It all makes sense now.
August 1, 2015
SHOT: Smallest U.S. Wage Increase on Record Muddies Pay Picture. “Signs of a nascent pickup in U.S. worker pay proved fleeting as wages and salaries climbed in the second quarter at the slowest pace on record. The 0.2 percent advance was the smallest in data going back to 1982.”
Chaser: Clintons earned nearly $141M from 2007 to 2014, tax returns show. On Facebook, John Steakley comments: “Recessions are for the little people.”
I AGREE: Trump’s Success Shows How Much The GOP Base Hates The GOP Leadership. If I were in the GOP leadership, this would give me pause. Or, perhaps, since this gives me pause, I wouldn’t be in the GOP leadership….
SO, BASICALLY, THE OBAMA ADMINISTRATION ARMED THE GUNMAN WHO TRIED TO KILL PAM GELLER: Assailant in Garland, Texas, attack bought gun in 2010 under Fast and Furious operation. More and more, I’m doubting that this federal gun-smuggling operation was “botched,” or a “fiasco,” except to the extent that people found out what was going on.
THIS IS MODERATELY AMUSING: Man Describes All 50 States If They Were Actually People In A Bar.
AFFIRMATIVE ACTION “CRITICAL MASS” THEORY DOESN’T APPLY TO MEN: A Washington Post op-ed argues for extending Title IX to college admissions.
[O]ne of academia’s little-known secrets is that private college admissions are exempt from Title IX’s ban on sex discrimination—a shameful loophole that allows some of the most supposedly progressive campuses in the nation to discriminate against female applicants.
Consider my own alma mater, Brown University. In 2014, 11 percent of men were accepted at Brown versus 7 percent of women, according to U.S. Department of Education data.
Brown is hardly the only, or the worst, offender. At Vassar College, the 34 percent acceptance rate for men was almost twice as high as the 19 percent rate for women. At Columbia University, the acceptance rate was 8 percent for men versus 6 percent for women. At Vanderbilt University, it was 15 percent versus 11 percent. Pomona College: 15 percent versus 10 percent. Williams College: 21 percent versus 18 percent. This bias in private-college admissions is blatant enough that it can’t be long before “gender-blind admissions” becomes the new campus rallying cry.
Colleges won’t say it, but this is happening because elite schools field applications from many more qualified women than men and thus are trying to hold the line against a 60:40 ratio of women to men. Were Brown to accept women and men at the same rate, its undergraduate population would be almost 60 percent women instead of 52 percent—three women for every two men. . . .
Today’s [admissions] officials . . . fear though that if enrollments reach 60 percent women, it will scare off the most sought-after applicants, who generally want gender balance for social reasons. “Once you become decidedly female in enrollment, fewer males and, as it turns out, fewer females find your campus attractive,” Kenyon College’s dean of admissions, Jennifer Delahunty Britz, wrote in The New York Times in 2006.
So suddenly liberals/progressives are in love with merit-based admissions? That’s mighty funny.
This argument for admitting more women to elite colleges–based on their higher objective academic credentials (GPA, SAT/ACT score) is more than a little ironic, given the liberal/progressive argument for race-based affirmative action is exactly the opposite. In race-based admissions, the liberal/progressives assert that white and Asian applicants’ objective academic credentials, although higher than Hispanic or black applicants, should not earn white applicants any admissions preferences. When it comes to race, in other words, academic merit shouldn’t drive admissions.
Instead, the liberal/progressive argument–that has been constitutionally legitimated by the Supreme Court–is that there is a compelling government interest in achieving the goal of racial “diversity” in college admissions, and this goal requires admission of a “critical mass” of black and Hispanic students with lower academic credentials.
Apparently, according to the liberal/progressive view of the world, there is no need for a “critical mass” of men, at least not white men. We don’t need to hear their “views” for purposes of “diversity,” and having gender balance– as opposed to a racial balance–is not a worthy institutional goal. Indeed, in the liberal/progressive mindset, we don’t really need men anyway.
What a mess we’ve created with the Equal Protection Clause. To paraphrase George Orwell’s Animal Farm, “Some people are more equal than others,” I guess.
LEGAL EDUCATION: New Law School Courses Explore Nietzsche, Guns and Bible. Hey, I was taking students to the shooting range back in the 1990s, though after I let them shoot the MP5 and got stuck with a several-hundred-dollar ammo bill my enthusiasm waned a bit. The women in particular seemed to enjoy full-auto.
LIFE IN OBAMA’S AMERICA: Reporter expelled from public university ‘Black Lives’ event for not being of ‘African descent.’
And this remains evergreen, alas:
Worst president ever.
YES, WE’LL BE HIRING AT THE UNIVERSITY OF TENNESSEE COLLEGE OF LAW THIS FALL: Here’s the info.
A LOOK AT the new Tesla Model X.
THE SCIENCE IS SURPRISINGLY UNSETTLED: How Far Can the Human Eye See a Candle Flame?