Alarming News: I like Morgan Freeberg. A lot.
American Digest: And I like this from "The Blog That Nobody Reads", because it is -- mostly -- about me. What can I say? I'm on an ego trip today. It won't last.
Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler: We were following a trackback and thinking "hmmm... this is a bloody excellent post!", and then we realized that it was just part III of, well, three...Damn. I wish I'd written those.
Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler: ...I just remembered that I found a new blog a short while ago, House of Eratosthenes, that I really like. I like his common sense approach and his curiosity when it comes to why people believe what they believe rather than just what they believe.
Brutally Honest: Morgan Freeberg is brilliant.
Dr. Melissa Clouthier: Morgan Freeberg at House of Eratosthenes (pftthats a mouthful) honors big boned women in skimpy clothing. The picture there is priceless--keep scrolling down.
Exile in Portales: Via Gerard: Morgan Freeberg, a guy with a lot to say. And he speaks The Truth...and it's fascinating stuff. Worth a read, or three. Or six.
Just Muttering: Two nice pieces at House of Eratosthenes, one about a perhaps unintended effect of the Enron mess, and one on the Gore-y environ-movie.
Mein Blogovault: Make "the Blog that No One Reads" one of your daily reads.
The Virginian: I know this post will offend some people, but the author makes some good points.
Poetic Justice: Cletus! Ah gots a laiv one fer yew...
Damn it. I know I was thinking that, I believe I forgot to write it down anywhere. But, yeah that pretty much captures it doesn’t it? The Solyndra Economy. That’s what we’ve got. A capitalism crazy-quilt, with enough panels removed and replaced with command-economy knitting that the original only continues to exist in a halfassed hodge-podge unrecognizable mishmash of what it was.
The more we learn about the Solyndra solar-company debacle, the more the Obama Administration leaps to defend the $535 million loan guarantee. “There were going to be some companies that did not work out; Solyndra was one of them,” President Obama told reporters Thursday. Earlier in the week he told ABC News “if we want to compete with China, which is pouring hundreds of billions of dollars into this space…we’ve got to make sure that our guys here in the United States of America at least have a shot.”
And there you have America’s Solyndra economy, as the White House understands it: Washington allocates capital, and taxpayers pick up the tab if those choices go bust. Through this political lens, the August bankruptcy of the Fremont, Calif. company was a necessary casualty in the greater campaign to steer the U.S. economy toward Mr. Obama’s noble goals. Private competition that winnows out losers is so yesterday.
As it happens, we’re getting a look at what this world of political investment entails thanks to Administration emails released last week by House Democrats on the Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations and the White House. Democrats say the emails reveal a “vigorous internal debate” about the Solyndra deal and dispel accusations of crony capitalism.
The opposite is closer to reality. Solyndra received federal help in 2009 and never turned a profit. In March 2010, PriceWaterhouseCoopers raised questions about the company’s solvency. The next month, a White House Office of Management and Budget staffer worried that the Department of Energy “has one loan to monitor and they seem completely oblivious.” Another said it was “terrifying” to consider that some of DOE’s next projects would make Solyndra look “better.”
To be fair about it, “pure” capitalism already saddles us with an endless procession of sad situations in which resources are allocated according to who’s-friends-with-who, rather than what would be best for consumers and other stakeholders. But a centrally planned economy does nothing to fix this, if anything it exacerbates the situation. When you have a free economy and the consumer is in charge, there’s always some corrective force applied to it. It doesn’t win out at the end of the day, true; it doesn’t even win most of the time. But at least the corrective force intensifies as the problem gets worse, and it’s easy to forget that what we see of the problem is really just the remnants of it after the unacceptably odious parts of it have been quietly cleaned up.
A command economy lacks this clean-up device, and so, over time, the problem has to get worse. It can’t do anything else.
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A command economy lacks this clean-up device, and so, over time, the problem has to get worse. It can’t do anything else.
Yup. The reason leftist “economics” don’t work is because the left not only fails to understand the big picture, they don’t even understand the basic components of that picture.
For instance, a “price” is really just information. It’s the number that quantifies demand. You know how, whenever there’s an economic bubble and a Republican is in the White House, the left keeps bringing up the Dutch tulip bulb craze from back in the 1600s? They look at the price of tulips (very high), and the underlying commodity (a pretty flower), and immediately assume that somebody’s behind it — the sinister forces of Big Tulip, conspiring to artificially inflate prices for something nobody would rationally want.
Conservatives, on the other hand, don’t flip out, because for us, there’s no moral component to a price. Whether people should want tulips is immaterial; all that matters is that they do. This is due to the inherent humility of conservatism — even if I’m smarter than you (doubtful) and morally superior to you (even more dubious), I simply can’t know all the factors that go into your desire for tulip bulbs.
I lack, in other words, some essential information. The only information I have at my disposal is price — what you are in fact willing to pay, for whatever reason, for tulip bulbs.
The left rejects this on principle, because they feel the cash value of something should be relative to how necessary an item it…. “necessity,” of course, being determined by some neutral yet omnipotent third party. And who is more neutral than the left themselves? I mean, you can’t wear tulips, but you can wear shoes, and so shoes should be worth a lot more than tulips, right? And if you disagree and value tulips more, well that’s just “false consciousness,” comrade. We can fix that right up for you… for your own good, of course.
Economics is not ethics. Nor are climatology, engineering, geoscience, history, or medicine. But since the left is long on sanctimony and short on math skills, they will continue to insist that they are, because that’s the only way they can speak on these subjects without getting laughed out of the room by people who actually know what they’re talking about. And, of course, it’s the only way they can keep their hands on the levers of power, which allows them to mandate the way we’re allowed to talk about these things.
- Severian | 10/10/2011 @ 10:37I wonder where all the computerized robotic systems for the “manufacturing”
(assembly, that the nice folks at Solindra “needed” to succeed, was purchased from?
“It doesn’t matter why people want them…”
I believe that the highly lucrative “Pet Rock”, Zenith television, original Ford, were entirely produced, with raw materials entirely from, the US (unlike the current extra-constitutional placeholder in chief?)
- CaptDMO | 10/10/2011 @ 12:01The latest electric/electronic gizmo or appliance?
The hippest, coolest, “green” car?
The trendiest “kitchen table” economic theory?
Not so much.
You would think with 1/2 a million dollars this struggling company would have put more money into either efficiency or marketing trashier than in whistling robots and spa showers. But similar to college kids with women’s studies degrees they somehow think that once they have you on the hook, you’ll just stay there.
- tgoon | 10/10/2011 @ 13:12I’ve been involved in many such discussions regarding the self-correcting nature of true free-market capitalism. I have yet to see anyone give valid examples of where cronyism ever succeeded in the long or even the moderate term and was not itself also corrected fairly quickly. So, no, I totally disagree with the assertion that pure capitalism, if by that you mean a free-market system, has ever saddled us with any sad situations where resources were misallocated for any serious length of time.
Yes, some people will attempt to engage in crony capitalism, and in a sense it can work as long as all the parties involved continue to maintain integrity. Crony capitalism only survives when supported by some form of government.
I can hire a friend of the family to do a job over some other qualified person, but if the friend fails to do the job, eventually the business, MY business is going to suffer. The suffering is usually immediate and apparent to everyone involved. In the famous book, The Millionaire Next Door, the research brought out one fascinating point: What all self-made millionaires have in common without exception is integrity. They can always be trusted to do what they say they will do.
Government can mask such things under layers of bureaucracy and delays and obfuscation for seemingly long periods of time or indefinately.
- Moshe Ben-David | 10/10/2011 @ 16:35