Racism found in rightwing; who knew?

It turns out that, in accord with leftwing suppositions, rightwing economics is all about stupid racism, ain't it? See, for example, Jason Richwine, rightwing Harvard Nazi, forced by the light of publicity to resign from Heritage, although I have not seen that Heritage is also withdrawing his disgusting "study" of immigration. Somebody named Berkeley Bear sums up the situation better than RtO can: "When I first heard this story, I was sure the bombshell allegations were buried somewhere in Richwine's PhD, or were tangential to the main argument. But nope - the Abstract is a love letter to the Bell Curve, only with Messicans for African Americans. He even gives a sloppy shout out to Charles Murray in the Abstract. "Harvard continues to prove that the easiest path to prominence in academia is to be a committed contrarian right wing dick. Because somehow it would be less than fair for the critic of Murray on his committee to torpedo the little shit for being a racist nut, instead of going along and signing off on the slanted ravings of a guy utterly unqualified to comment on psychology because they were dressed up in the right terms to satisfy academic discussion. Irony is he'd have had a lot less chance getting a degree at a 'lesser' institution, one that can't afford to keep a little subsect of reactionary and largely worthless faculty around to the help provide 'balance.' "Never mind that all that effort is for naught, as these assholes go on to work at AEI, Heritage and all the other rightwing 'think tanks' that then attack Harvard as a commie cell."

Free lunch tomorrow!

A long tome ago (I meant to wrote time but tome works also), RtO set out to learn how economics works. In terms of insihs gained vs. time invested, it was one of the most unprofitable investments ever, ad RtO never found an equation that was not, like the famous Drake equation in exobiology, all unknowns. But one line stuck, and it is as relevant today as in 1933. Objecting to the fantasies of the invisible handers, who promised we would all be better off in the long run if we would just take a dose of their snake oil today, Harry Hopkins said, "People don't eat in the long run They eat every day." The preposterous public statement of the star long-ender Niall Furguson (see previous comment) has produced a lot of comment, including this very good one from Lord Skidelsky, biographer of J.M. Keynes:

The principle of not sacrificing the present for the future can be seen in Keynes’s intolerance of persistent mass unemployment — sacrificing the current generation of workers to secure long-term improvements in the labor market. It emerges in his rejection of “debt bondage” — the imposition of crushing long-term obligations on borrowers, undermining their prosperity. “The absolutists of contract,” he wrote, “are the real parents of revolution.”

But please read the whole thing. That pretty much sums up where Paul Krugman and Joe Stiglitz have adopted their critique of the beggar-they-neighbor policies of Teconomics. (Stiglitz got his education in how tha works while watching the destruction wrought by the World Band and IMF and is, to my mind, more persuasive for that reason than the academically-oriented Krugman.

A last Naill in the coffin of rightwing economics

The Tea Party has been quiet on Maui for a while. Now I know why. A letter to the editor of The Maui News today from local Tea Party hostess Rhonda Glass says she has shaken the red dust of Maui from her feet and moved to the "Republic of Texas," which she likes way better, because of no income tax. Good, she can use that money to rebuild her house when the fertilizer plant next door blows up, because no zoning and no regulation, either.

It's been a bad week for Teaconomics. Not only is oil acting funny (see previous post), Niall Ferguson made such a stupid remark about John M. Keynes that he had to apologize, but everybody is calling him a creep anyway.

Matthew Klein has an outstanding commentary on the hoof-in-mouth disease of rightwing superstar  Ferguson. Read the whole thing, including the comments, which are by no means all pro-Klein.

However, RtO wants to add a historic footnote to this. Klein quickly switches his fire over to Greg Mankiw, who was George Bush's Teaconomist and teaches at the same rightwing academy in Cambridge as Ferguson.

Klein, in defending, basically, the New Deal, cites some economists who, unlike Ferguson and Mankiw, do not get the vapors over a little deficit spending. For example: "Gary Gorton and Guillermo Ordonez have even argued that 'government bonds are net wealth' because they can always be used as collateral." Unless they are tsarist bonds.

However, the point RtO wants to make is, do you know who else used to make that argument? Ronald Reagan's economists, that's who. The Internet does not reach far back enough for me to dredge it out, but when Reagan was running up the national debt, the Wall Street Journal was describing the deficits as "savings."

Really.

I don't think many leftwingers can be found describing borrowing as "savings," but it was the coin of the Republican realm back in the dear dead days of Ron. We were also assured then that the Savings and Loan collapse was really a great opportunity, because the money had been used to build all these empty office buildings, and while the notes behind the construction had been magickally disappeared, the buildings were still there, ready to accommodate an expanding economy.

And you know what? For once, the rightwing economists were right. Houston at the time had empty Class A office space equal to ALL the office space in Des Moines, Iowa. (The reason I know this extremely obscure factoid is that I was writing business news in Des Moines but visiting my father-in-law in Houston at the time.)

Sure enough, in not too many years, the empty skyscrapers of downtown Houston were pretty full.

Of course, the original owners were no longer owners and were probably mowing the lawns of the current owners (just kiddin', of course they weren't. Immigrants do that in Texas.)

MORAL: The eternal verities of rightwing economics are neither eternal nor veracious, but they can be surprising.

Peak oil

We were assured that US oil production has passed its peak, never to recur. Then this:

U.S. crude inventories probably rose from a 82-year high as domestic output remained near the most in two decades and demand fell, a Bloomberg survey showed.

Meanwhile, gasoline demand is way down.

However, although demand is way down, and production is way up, "Imports jumped 602,000 a day, or 8 percent, to 8.17 million barrels, the most since Jan. 4."

That old invisible hand works funny.

RtO is not looking for $10/barrel oil any time soon, though. Robert Precter was, as recently as August 2009:

Aug. 13 (Bloomberg) -- Crude oil may plunge to less than $10 a barrel in the next decade after surging to a record $147 last year, said Robert Prechter, who achieved fame for cautioning on Oct. 5, 1987, that stocks would crash.

Oh, well, at least we won't have to go to war for oil again, although RtO doesn't recall that a) we got any oil the last time; or b) Syria has a lot of oil.

There are different ways to measure inflation. Measured by what reporters are paid at The Maui News, oil that was $10 in 1987 would be around $18 now, in constant dollars. Today's crude price is around $95. Hmmm.

Golden boys

When it comes to sex, the Air Force is descending rapidly into territory that had been owned by the Catholic Church.

Today in Washington was a twofer, first,  the newly appointed commander of the Sexual Assault Prevention and Response command was arrested:

A police report says that the 41-year-old Krusinski was drunk and grabbed a woman’s breast and buttocks. Police say the woman fought him off and called police.

Hours later, another three-star general was revealed to have arbitrarily overturned the conviction by court martial of  another fighter jock/rapist.

RtO will forbear to restate the obvious on this one, as no doubt you've already seen it several places and thought of it yourself. It's that obvious. However, there is something else obvious about these cases, and so far as I get around, I have not seen it stated, so let's go on with it.

The reason lieutenant generals won't uphold a conviction of the pilot of a hot fighter plane is that the USG cannot afford to replace experienced fighter pilots. Although you will never hear Lindsey Graham of the Judge Advocate General corps (reserve) say so, a veteran fighter pilot is about as expensive for the taxpayers as Solyndra.

It costs at least tens of millions and probably hundreds of millions of dollars to produce a fighter pilot with, say, 2,000 hours flight time in hot jets. Those hours don't come cheap. If the military started washing out pilots just for being drunken rapists, the Fed couldn't print bonds fast enough to pay for replacements, not to mention that it takes some years to replace a lieutenant colonel, even if he was a straight arrow.

You would think this would be obvious, but apparently not. Perhaps it wouldn't have been obvious to me had I not subscribed to I.F. Stone's Bi-Weekly back in the late '60s.

For those youngsters who never heard of him, Stone was a widely admired commie reporter (and also a capitalist small businessman, publisher of I.F. Stone's Bi-Weekly out of his Washington apartment).

He was admired not for his communism -- despite what you've heard, the average American newspaper reporter is and always has been anticommunist -- but for what he discovered.

Stone went deaf. Although newspaper publishers believed that reporters could get all the calories they would ever need from the free lunch counter of the saloon that lay just outside the newsroom door in every city and town, reporters have to eat regular.

When deafness foreclosed Stone's career as an interviewer, in desperation he began reading government reports. He learned, as he used to later teach us cubs, that the government does not have any secrets. It publishes everything it knows, somewhere. You just have to find it.

Stone was soon exploding bombshell after bombshell under the government, and although he could  be and was ignored by the people who owned the big presses, he couldn't be contradicted. He was, after all, just quoting official sources.

Stone was perhaps the only American reporter who understood the Vietnamese. In particular, there was a time in 1968-69 when those paladins of morality, the Nixonians, were denouncing the Viet commies as moral lepers for refusing to an exchange, even up, man for man, of prisoners of war.

Few if any newspaper editorialists of the time thought that was anything less than fairplay and humanity. In the Bi-Weekly, Stone, ever market-oriented, revealed the truth of the matter.

The US was paying $600,000 to train a combat pilot (here Stone way underestimated the ability of the Air Force and Navy to spend money), while a Vietnamese infantryman cost approximately nothing. Being poor, the Vietnamese wanted to bleed the US Treasury dry, so that we would give up, which they did and we did.

The sums are different today but the calculus is the same.

This also explains why the Navy was unwilling to do anything real about the Tailhook scandals.

Parking, parking, who's got the parking?

North Market Street is an intreresting place to do business in many ways, but it was even better before the county started eliminating parking spaces. It's got the old Main Street vibe that old folks like me recall before the rise of malls.

(I spent my early teen years living about 2 miles from the first shopping mall in the country, Lennox Square. Unlike real Main Streets, malls empty out when the management makes the stores close.)

Saturday,I went out to see what more parking means for business. The locale: the Upcountry farmers market.

The market used to be held at the Eddie Tam Community Center in Makawao, near my house, which has maybe a dozen parking stalls. And it used to attract about 6 vendors and perhaps two dozen customers over the course of a couple of hours every Saturday morning. 

If somebody was setting up the meeting room in the center for a baby luau or birthday party, which was usually the case, there was even less parking.

Over a year ago, for reasons unrelated to parking, the market was moved to the private parking lot next to Longs at Kulamalu Town Center. 

It took a while for people to get used to it, but nowadays, the farmers market draws at least 5o vendors and I don't know how many customers. But last Saturday, the parking lot -- RtO didn't count, but it has probably 300-400 stalls -- was full. Overfull. 

People wanting to get at the locally-made jellies, just-picked avocados, fresh greens and sausage biscuits (among many other things) had to park along the access road, and the overflow of cars reached nearly to Maikalani (the offices of the Institute for Astronomy).

I cannot think of a clearer example of what you need for business stimulation.

Whatever the anticar people think, Americans are not going to start riding bicycles to work and shop. Ain't gonna happen as long as they want to go to Costco and come up with 240 disposable diapers, 48 rolls of toilet paper and 6 gallons of picante sauce.

Invisible hands

I'd like some free marketeer to explain to me why the following statement could be made:

Any continued improvement in working conditions will depend on companies working with the Bangladeshi government, said Ferdows, the Georgetown professor. A March decision by Walt Disney Co. (DIS) to stop production in Bangladesh was “wrong- headed,” he said.

It's from one of Bloomberg News' excellent explanatory reports, this one on factory conditions in Bangladesh.

It was inspired, of course, by the collapse of Rana Plaza and the 600-plus dead workers, mostly poor women.

Also from the story, there is this:

 “If you look at industrial history across the world, for better or worse, this is what early industrial revolution looks like,” said Pietra Rivoli, a professor at Georgetown University in Washington and author of “The Travels of a T-Shirt in The Global Economy.” Bangladesh is “still a desperately poor country, and we shouldn’t minimize what a steady job with a steady paycheck means to a poor woman.”

No, we shouldn't. We should emphasize the workings of the untamed market and how it -- according to Professor Rivoli, and anyone who knows economic history will agree with her -- always yields this result.

Why is that?

If you read the rightwingers, you will often find references to an "invisible hand." Never, or very seldom, to the invisible hands who are immolated in the name of efficiency.

Why cannot the invisible hand take care of the invisible hands?