Everything you want to know about Romney in one sentence

Throughout the day following Hurricane Sandy’s landfall, reporters traveling with Romney have asked him what he’d do with FEMA—they asked him 14 different times, according to this report—and he has refused to answer. 

According to Bloomberg News. The reason, of course, is that Romney was on record as wanting to do away with FEMA and now 60,000,000 Americans have an immediate stake in its existence.

I've said before that Romney is a coward. Who now could deny it?

Worse than a coward, really, because the rest of the paragraph in the Bloomberg story goes on to say:

The question is all the more awkward because Romney has recast today’s campaign rally as a “storm relief event.”

I have always thought that Americans basically vote on the basis of character . That is not a bad thing. No one can predict what issues a political leader will have to deal with.

Franklin Roosevelt ran for president on a platform of cost-cuttting and a balanced federal budget.But when he came into office, things had gotten much worse and Roosevelt reversed course. It took a great deal of character to do that. Only Washington and Lincoln as presidents have ever shown so much.

It is easy to imagine :Romney reversing course -- it is impossible to imagine him sticking to a position, if we ever knew what position he held. But doing so in a way that exemplifies a strong moral character?. That's harder.

Gamblers pick Obama

For the past week or so, I've been following the betting on the presidential election at Intrade, the Irish futures market, and to a lesser extent, the Iowa Electronic Markets. (IEM limits bets to $500, which presumably chases the big rollers away and, perhaps, distorts that market.)

The last week as been very volatile, although the plungers are uniformly leaning Obama-wards. The price of a $10 bet was about $6.10 when I first stopped in to look, fell as low as about $5.40 (for reasons I cannot guess), then bounced back to around $6.10.

This morning, it's taken a largish jump and is around $6.60 -- that is, you pay $6.60 to win $10. No limit, although judging by the number of shares offered at different prices, few bettors are placing  bets over $1,000.

Conversely, it costs around $3.40 to  bet to win $10 with Romney. A lot of the horse players I know won't bet on short odds. Dunno if political bettors act the same way. Is money flowing toward R. because the payoff potential is better? Or, as seems more likely, are bettors putting their money on the man they want to win?

Either way, I tend to think the so-called predictive power of a free market is oversold by the free-marketeers. (The IEM is set up as an educational tool to teach college students how markets work; I don't believe it is capable of doing that. I don't believe anybody knows how markets work.)

I prefer the kind of bet where the loser says he'll push a peanut down Main Street with his nose, but nobody seems willing to make those bets any more. Politics was more colorful in the old days, but the influx of money has made it duller in some ways.

UPDATE

In case it wasn't clear the first time, the reason  I am skeptical of markets in general and this market in particular is that it is hard to match the violent swings in the gamblers' odds with anything likely to be happening among the electorate.

The Obama wager is now over $6.90, a rise of nearly 8% in a day and of close to 15 points in a week.

Even if you argue that the outcome of the election (the wager) is on a knife's edge because it depends on the results in 7 or 8 closely divided states, it seems hard to believe that anything happened in those states so dramatic in a week that the odds should have shifted from 55% to nearly 70%.

Or perhaps once the odds in Obama's favor shifted past a certain point -- say, for the sake of discussion, when it passed 67% or 2:1 -- there was a rush of hot money to get in (late) on an almost sure thing.

I can imagine gamblers acting that way, but the way Intrade works, there has to be a counterseller on the other side of every buy. So there's still Romney money in the mix; the book hasn't just seized up.

Well, this is bizarre

Even though I was not following Sandy as obsessively as some people in the house yesterday, even I noticed a Facebook post about the New York Stock Exchange being under 3 feet of water. I've been there and I knew it wasn't true so I passed it by like all the other dreck on the innertubes.

Turns out there is a story there, though, and a weird one.

Somebody named Jack Stuef had nothing better to do than track down the source -- nominally an anonymous Twitter account, but with the Internet, you never can tell -- and found . . . a highly paid Republican campaign operative named Shashank Tripathi.

You might have supposed that this late in the campaign he (Tripathi) would have had more urgent things to do, but apparently not.

And he's a hedge fund analyst. Too sweet.

But that's not why RtO is taking time to note this wicked little lie -- which incredibly enough got onto TV, which is another reason I don't own a TV. No, it turns out that Republicans have serious problems with storms. I cannot guess why.

From another sourcesource, Republican hack Michael Brown attacked President Obama for paying too much attention to Hurricane Sandy. If the name rings a bell, it's from Bush II's "Heckuva job, Brownie" inanity. Yes, the same horse lawyer who didn't pay any attention to Hurricane Katrina.

What is going on with the Republicans?

Having a good time

From a Vanity Fair article about two German  art forgers who stole millions of dollars, got caught and are now in  what Germans amusingly regard as "prison":

The Beltracchis were five months into their jail sentence, and had few complaints about the conditions. Both had been assigned to live in “open prisons”—the equivalent of halfway houses in the United States, without bars, guns, or guards—and were working at Esser’s photo studio five days a week, often until nine p.m. They also had 80 hours of “free time” each month, 21 free weekend nights a year, and extra days off at Christmas and Easter. They had rented an apartment in Cologne to use during their vacation time. “This system of imprisonment doesn’t exist anywhere but here in Germany,” Wolfgang said with a grin, over a lunch of Wiener schnitzel and french fries at a restaurant in an old villa down the road from the loft. Prison officials did, however, insist on strict adherence to the schedule: if the couple reports back late three times in a single month, Wolfgang said, “they will throw us immediately into the closed prison—without any chance to appeal.”

The whole story is amusing if, like me, you think the spread between the best and worst of modern art is very thin.

Businesses Romney does not understand

I’ve been thinking about this post for weeks but putting it off because it’s pretty obscure. On the other hand, Mitt Romney goes around making statements along the line of, “Private business always outperforms government,” and that is wrong.

No one who knows America’s business history thinks that. Of course, the number of people who know America’s business history is very small.

In fact, huge sectors of business exist only because of government supervision or encouragement. In aggregate, most of the U.S. economy would either not exist at all or would be weak and puny without government interference. I don’t have time to list all of them, but let’s take life insurance as an example.

Life insurance is a big, big part of American business. It’s assets were $18,000,000,000,000 (that’s trillion with a T) and cash inflows were nearly $3,000,000,000,000 (trillion again) in 2009. That’s serious money. Without life insurance, capitalism would be hard put to it to find capital.

Yet, until government stepped in, the life insurance business was small, corrupt and disreputable; and, yes, America was starved of capital in those days.

Aside from a couple of benevolent societies (which tried to, gasp, socialize private charity for their members), life insurance was hard to find and often not worth finding in the early Republic. There were no regulations, so insurors did not have to maintain capital reserves. Since they didn’t, they had no need for actuarial science.

Life insurance was not then a form of saving. If you bought a policy, it might -- or might not -- pay off if you were lucky enough to die early. If you were unfortunate enough to live to a normal old age, most likely the original underwriter, figuring you were going to die pretty soon and he had nicked you for plenty of premiums over the decades, sold your policy.

This was legal, since life insurance was unregulated.

If the second buyer was honest (a dubious assumption), if you died on him, he still might not be able to pay off, since he hadn’t received many premiums.

In practice, policies of long-lived customers tended to change hands several times, with each marginal to desperate “insuror” betting that he could get at least one more premium  payment before the customer kicked the  bucket. Prices to buy contracts spiraled downward, and speculators hung around the doors of rich decrepit policyholders (ordinary folks didn’t have the option of life insurance), milking the servants for intelligence about whether Mr. Gotrocks might hold out for at least one more premium payment.

The odds that the holder of the contract when the customer expired would be able to fulfill the policy were remote.

It was, however, a nearly perfect example of an efficient market.

Mitt Romney would have loved it.

Pernicious, meddling politicians and  bureaucrats changed everything.

By regulating insurors, usually at the state levels, requiring adequate reserves and audits, they created a demand for a secondary service business, the actuary.

Once talented statisticians set up shop providing tables for insurance companies, other businessmen  took advantage of their skills for other purposes, and thus was born the multimegabillion consulting sector. It might have happened without government interference, but the fact is, it didn’t.

Other sectors that were created  by, or never thrived until government interference include road building and overland freight hauling, manufacturing using interchangeable parts, electronic computing and aviation.

Why shut down public transportation?

I'm not getting the authorities' reaction on Oahu during the tsunami non-event Saturday, nor on the East Coast anticipating Sandy.

If your goal is to move Americans to public transportation, then it seems to me you keep public transit going as long as possible, you don't shut it down at the first opportunity.

At some point, you've got to stop, but later rather than sooner.

It's already tough to have to rely on a bus system which, in most places, doesn't run 24 hours a day; compared with private cars which are good to go anytime. It just makes it tougher when the mayor shuts it down on a whim.

What did that accomplish on Oahu, other than to frustrate people?

Graham crackers

This is about Romney and evangelicals. Well, not Romney so much as Billy Graham, and not Billy so much as his scheming son Franklin. Billy is probably too senile to know what's going on.

Recall, though, that RtO predicted some evangelical woes for the Romney campaign because evangelicals -- or at least that fraction represented by Calvary Chapel and the like -- really, really hate Mormonism.(See Calvary Chapel and the Republicans, Sept. 17)

In typical sneaky fashion -- and unlike Jack Kennedy, who confronted his version of Protestant hate head-on in public by addressing a ministers' association -- Romney sought an audience with the ga-ga high priest of American Pharisaism (is any event less in tune with what Jesus said in Matthew 6: 5 & 6 than a football stadium full of Billy Grahamites bellowing their prayers?).

Liberty-loving Americans cried foul, that Billy Graham Ministries was using its tax-exempt position to push a political candidate, but though inassailably valid of course they got no response. No bureaucrat is going to tackle Billy Graham by pulling his IRS exemption, and if one did the president -- whoever he was -- would have his head.

But someone did pay attention when Franklin Graham reversed decades of Billy Graham smears by scrubbing the label "cult" from all mentions of Mormonism from the Billy Graham Enterprises websites.

Although Billy Graham was the all-time champion brown-noser of presidents, I am willing to imagine that were he still in possession of his faculties, he wouldn't have gone that far. Maybe I give him too much credit.

While the political cowards who tremble at the power of Christianity held their peace, the Christians themselves did not. The Washington Post reportsreports a sampling of evangelical hatemasters who are washing their hands (metaphor carefully chosen, you bet) of Grahamism.

It is hard to say how much of evangelicalism this little sample truly represents. No doubt it is common opinion at Calvary Chapel, but American evangelicalism covers a lot of territory. I cannot guess how many of them will sit on their hands this election because of Romney's Mormonism. But some surely will.