Category: Current Events

Religion in France: Paris Bans Praying In Street

The Muslim tension in France has reached a new level. Praying in the streets has been banned in Paris, and it may be extended to the rest of the country. After reading several news articles, I learned that thousands of Muslims have been blocking the streets with their prayer mats on Fridays – apparently because there are not enough mosques – and the secular French have had enough of the weekly obstruction to their public roads. “The street is for driving in, not praying,” the French interior minister Claude Guéant said. This is only five months after France became the first European nation to ban the burqa, partly because the full covering undermined the French ideals of openness and equality.

It is well-known that the Muslim population is growing rapidly in Europe, due partially to the declining birth rate among Europeans and the very large birth rate among the growing Muslim immigrants. France is said to have the largest Muslim population, numbered at five or six million, and it’s fascinating to watch the unfolding tension between them and the sophisticated, secular French state.

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Huge Reduction In Child Mortality Across the World

When the report on a slight increase in U.S. poverty rates was released on Tuesday, I saw it on headlines every time I checked a news website or Google News. I saw it discussed across many political and economic blogs, and I made my own attempted contribution to the discussion. However, when UNICEF released an updated report on child mortality across the world, it barely made a ripple. I happened to notice it while checking Twitter’s top tweets feed, but I never saw it in news headlines or read any commentary on it. I want to bring it to your attention because it’s very good news, and I think we need to have a debate about what factors are contributing the most and how to help those factors contribute even more.

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Is Poverty In the United States Getting Worse?

The U.S. Census Bureau released an updated poverty report yesterday, and the headlines were plastered across the news media. “U.S. Poverty Rose to 17-Year High,” said the Washington Post. “U.S. poverty totals hit 50-year high,” said the L.A. Times. Like all statistics, it depends on how you count it and adjust for history, but the broad point was that the number of people living in poverty in the United States rose last year to some of the worst levels we’ve seen in a very long time, and it was headline news everywhere. The anti-Obama peanut gallery in the USAToday article pretended it was evidence of Obama’s personal failure, while those on the left tend to view it as evidence that government needs to do more to help the poor.

I read several articles and commentaries yesterday, but I wasn’t ready to offer my own opinion. They do say that the income level that defines the poverty line is adjusted for inflation, but I wasn’t sure if that properly counted technological progress. I knew that The Heritage Foundation report on poverty from July claimed that 99.6% of the “poor” have refrigerators, and 97.7% have a television. In addition, those televisions are probably of higher quality than the televisions of a decade or two ago, and the higher quality of technology is almost certainly enjoyed by the almost 40% that have personal computers or 55% with cell phones. If 30% of the poor own video game consoles, how poor can that 30% really be? My gut reaction was that this reported increase in poverty was not taking into account some very important things, but I know that gut reactions can be wrong, so I waited.

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The California Blackout And The Failure of Fail-Safe Energy

Thursday night my Twitter feed lit up with posts about a sudden blackout in San Diego. Apparently an error regarding a repair job by an electrical worker in Arizona led to a series of shutdowns that affected somewhere around four or six million people across California and Arizona. Many people were wondering how a single error in one place could lead to power problems of such a magnitude. Most intriguing to me were statements in news articles such as, “the safeguards that typically prevent an outage from spreading didn’t work.”

This eerily reminded me of coverage of last year’s BP oil spill with its “sequence of failures,” and this spring’s Fukushima nuclear disaster and its “failure of multiple back-up electrical systems.” The good news in this case is that, unlike the other incidents, the situation is not deteriorating and it looks like power is being restored. But all three incidents involved the failures of multiple systems that led to large negative outcomes which were supposed to be impossible. All three incidents also had to do with energy sources – from the private sector – and the failures spanned private energy companies in Britain, Japan, and the United States.

It’s a disturbing trend, to be sure. I’m sure progressive technocrats would say these energy companies need to be more heavily regulated (indeed, “Federal regulators” are going to “investigate” this latest incident), and I’m sure small-government types would respond that government is already heavily involved in the energy sector and that more involvement would only drive up energy costs without preventing any more disasters than they are preventing now. This may be true, but it’s also clear that any built-in incentives on the part of companies to prevent such disasters are failing as well.

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Should The Government Mandate Less Smog?

It is reported that Obama is being praised by Republicans for deciding not to toughen the federal smog regulations because the extra cost to businesses would hurt jobs in a weak economy. Now these reports must be false, because we all know that Republicans automatically oppose everything Obama does (okay, except for when Obama kills Osama). But Obama is taking significant criticism from the left for caving to Republicans, big business, polluters, and other bad guys. Apparently this is so bad that MoveOn.org members are wondering “how they can ever work for President Obama’s re-election.” I’m not going to make vacuous conjectures about whether or not Obama’s move will win him more votes from independents or fewer votes from the left, because vacuous conjecturing irritates me, but I will offer some background information for the uninformed reader and try to summarize the different political and economic arguments at play.

It all starts with the Clean Air Act, “passed in 1963 and significantly amended in 1970, 1977 and 1990.” Among other things, it requires the EPA to set new standards for pollutants every five years. One of those pollutants is “ground-level ozone,” or smog, which is said to be caused by things like power plants and vehicle exhaust. Last review time was 2008. At that time the ozone level was down to 84 parts per billion, but EPA scientists said it needed to go down to 60-70 ppb to properly protect Americans from negative health effects. Stephen Johnson, EPA head under the Bush Administration, didn’t quite agree, and set it at 75 ppb. Next review time isn’t until 2013, but since the last guy apparently didn’t set the recommended amount for good health, Obama’s EPA, led by Lisa Jackson, has been thinking about changing things ahead of time to correct the previous error. But apparently the latest unemployment numbers were too disturbing, because literally a few hours after they were announced we learned that any update to the mandate had been taken off the table until 2013. [Cue praise and dismay from appropriate parties.]

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How Ridiculous Was the Federal Raid on Gibson Guitar Factory?

Last week federal agents from the Department of Justice raided Gibson Guitar factories, on suspicions of using illegally imported wood from Madagascar (Gibson claims it has documentation to prove it is following all laws). The story is spreading across the Internet, and there are a number of serious accusations flying around that make this look like a ridiculous and infuriating raid. In summary:

1. The raid forced Gibson to send workers home and is hurting production, so the Obama administration is essentially destroying jobs at a time when it says it is trying to create them.

2. The charges against Gibson are not that they broke US law but that they broke Indian law, and the “action was taken without the support and consent of the government in India,” making it seem like the Obama administration cares more about following foreign laws than our own.

3. There are accusations that other companies like Martin import the same kind of wood from the same places but they have not been raided. The suggested motive is that Gibson is a big Republican donor while Martin is a Democratic donor, or that Gibson’s factories are in a right-to-work (anti-union) state, and that the Obama administration is engaged purely in political warfare against conservatives who might oppose his re-election.

4. To top everything off, Gibson was raided in a similar manner two years ago, but they claim no charges have been filed over that raid and the federal government still has the guitars.

That’s all pretty bizarre and infuriating… has our federal government really stooped to bullying its political enemies, even at the cost of destroying jobs? This looks like blatant corruption and a complete disregard for freedom if federal agents can accuse you of breaking a law, raid your business, keep your stuff without ever charging files against you, all because you support an opposing political party and your competitors happen to be on the right side!

Still, I’ve learned over the years that some things seem like ridiculous oversteps by the federal government and reverberate through the conservative blogosphere, but such accusations are later revealed as guilty of containing partial truth. Last year conservatives were freaking out about the EPA classifying spilled milk as oil so they could regulate it, although apparently the regulations only applied to farmers storing milk in giant containers of thousands of gallons and that such milk has been known to leak out and cause damaging externalities to the surrounding environment. (Not saying that this completely justifies the regulation, but having that contextual knowledge moves the regulation from “This is a preposterous power-grab by the government!” to a more civilized “I disagree with this action for such-and-such reasons…”)

So I’ve been looking for some more facts about this guitar raid, possibly by leftist sources, to at least make this raid not seem so much like… I don’t know.. a blatant move by a corrupt third-world government?

As for as the foreign law thing goes, it appears to actually stem from the Lacey Act (yes, one of our laws), and supposedly if the wood was finished in India it would be legal but if they import it to the states before it is finished, then it’s illegal. So supposedly our law means we have to respect India’s law, or something like that. So maybe that makes the law (or its interpretation) seem ridiculous instead of Obama’s Justice Department seeming ridiculous, and apparently we can blame all this on an amendment to the very old law sponsored in 2008 by a Democrat that affects wood products and endangers U.S. manufacturing. (The Economist has a short diatribe arguing about the ridiculousness of being expected to “abide by every plant and wildlife regulation set by any country on Earth.“)

But that still doesn’t explain the lack of charges from the old raid or the political accusations that the similar competitors are getting away with it. There are claims that Gibson doesn’t treat its employees very well, but that doesn’t have to do with the topic. I could find nothing about the raid on Think Progress, or any good answers from various forums.

Then NPR came to the rescue. In their feature yesterday on the Gibson guitar raid, they have a quote from Martin’s CEO claiming that the law is “a wonderful thing” and that they’ve committed to following it. This creates an interesting liberal narrative: The Democratic company has figured out how to follow the law and respect the environment, while the Republican company is breaking the law – and treating its employees poorly! Of course, this requires taking Martin’s statements at face value while accusing Gibson of lying when it says it’s not breaking any laws, either.

Today, the Wall Street Journal has a new piece on the controversy, bringing out some new facts that suggest that there may indeed be some evidence that Gibson broke part of the law – although it also notes that Gibson has worked with Greenpeace and other groups to “promote better forestry practices.”

It sounds like we don’t have enough facts yet to conclude very much yet. If it turns out that Gibson was breaking a law, and Martin uses a completely different importing process, then we could perhaps argue that the raid was justified  – although I’m still not sure I like the idea of federal agents swooping into factories and shutting down production because they suspect an imported package was fraudulently labeled. And my bias leads me to wonder if both companies aren’t breaking some minor laws but an arbitrary administration chooses to only enforce them on its opponents. But that’s just one scenario that fits the facts thus far.

For now we could still have healthy discussions about the costs and benefits of the Lacy Act itself, and what the proper balance is between respecting the world’s resources and exploiting them, and what side of that balance the United States currently falls on and whether or not that position is unfair if the Chinese are illegally importing wood, or many other such things. But we can’t yet say whether or not the federal raid on Gibson was justified or unjustified. I think we have enough facts to postulate some reasonable scenarios where the raid was not completely ridiculous, but we can also postulate scenarios where the raid was extremely ridiculous and infuriating. Let your bias choose…

Is Irene Evidence of Global Warming or Arrogant Journalism?

Sometimes I wonder if my posts are any good, or if I’m just spouting arbitrary digital nonsense that may not even be correct. But every now and then I see posts by noted commentators getting circulated around the Internet which are so bad that I am reminded that I started doing this because I thought l could do better.

I’m talking about Bill McKibben’s piece alleging that the huge force of Hurricane Irene is undeniable proof of global warming climate change.

Let me start out by saying that I try to consider myself a true “skeptic” about the whole issue. Folks like Anthony Watts and his crew like to say they’re skeptics but they are completely convinced that man-made global warming is utterly false just as many scientists are completely convinced that it is true, and a true skeptic is never completely convinced of anything. I’m glad Watts is here to point out when overzealous scientists or media are engaged in cherry-picking, but I’ve seen posts on his site that do the same thing in the other direction.

Anyway, let’s look at some of Bill’s claims. I believe his post is a shoddy piece of journalism which, most like most shoddy pieces of journalism, is built upon cherry-picked facts and compounded by arrogance.

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Why Is FEMA So Incompetent And Should It Be Abolished?

Ron Paul is, unsurprisingly, taking criticism for suggesting that there is no need for FEMA to respond to Hurricane Irene because it shouldn’t exist at all. Paul has a philosophical objection to federal intervention of this nature, but while progressives are pontificating that conservatives just don’t want to help people, they are forgetting that there is a very large difference between doing things that are supposed to help people and doing things that actually help them, and FEMA has a gross history of incompetence when it comes to actually helping people.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency is most infamous, of course, for its bungled response to Hurricane Katrina. Some progressives blame this on active actions by the Bush administration to handicap the organization or divert its resources. But while we can debate about the blame for the lack of preparedness or resources, it is also clear that even the resources that were available were often mismanaged (such as the luxurious abuse of the distributed debit cards). We can argue about why FEMA was slow to establish a presence in the affected areas, but it is also clear that even when they had a presence they were often preventing other people from assisting (There are scores of infuriating stories about FEMA stopping doctors from treating victims, turning away volunteer firefighters, prohibiting volunteer boats from entering the city, and preventing the Red Cross and Walmart from delivering goods to the needy – to name a few.)

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More on Keynesian Broken Window Disasters

Yesterday I tried to make sense of the Keynesian idea that breaking and replacing windows could be good for the economy. I found it interesting that soon after writing that broken windows could “increase growth,” Matt Yglesias linked to Nate Silver’s piece about the potential expensive catastrophe of Hurricane Irene. Nate says there could easily be billions of dollars of “incalculable” damage. So does Matt think that if Irene breaks a lot of windows, the money spent to replace them will still “increase growth”? Or are there scenarios where spending money to undo destruction actually leaves the world worse off than before? If the answer to that question is an obvious yes, than I wonder how the Keynesian knows when we have a scenario where spending money to undo destruction actually does “increase growth.”

I’ve been thinking about these Keynesian arguments over the last couple of days. I suppose I need to learn more about the concept of the liquidity trap. I can almost understand a scenario in Paul Krugman’s world where there’s a bunch of businesses that have a lot of money that they’re not spending like they usually would, and some disaster would force them all to spend that money on repairs, increasing demand and getting more money flowing through the economy and so forth. And, indeed, we are living in an interesting world where corporate profits are high but hiring levels are not. So, even without being fully educated on the argument, I think I can conceive of a theoretical scenario where a disaster stimulates the economy.

But when windows get broken in the real world, doesn’t it seem like a pretty big wildcard to expect an unfolding scenario of the stimulating variety? What if the disaster is so big that the repair costs are far greater than the present amount of trapped liquidity, and some companies go right out of business because they can’t afford to repair? Or what if they can, but the damage to the local community and infrastructure is so great that they lose some of their customer base? As far as I’m aware, the economic evidence from Katrina to Japansuggests that disasters lower economic growth.

And that’s common sense. If you have to spend money replacing your broken windows, when it’s all said and done you have the same window you had before but less money to spend on something else – just like Bastiat said a couple centuries ago. Now maybe there exists the possibility of precise scenarios (like an alien invasion in a liquidity trap?) where people who have stopped investing magically end up spending their extra investment money to repair things, and that stimulates the economy, but I think the burden of proof is on the Keynesian to prove that the convenient line of factors required to make that a net gain instead of a net loss ever conveniently line up in the real world.

 

Keynesians, Earthquakes, and Broken Windows

Keynesians like Paul Krugman, believing that government spending is needed in a recession to stimulate the economy, have been arguing that the previous round(s) of stimulus weren’t big enough. There has been some interesting discussion across the economic blogosphere in recent months, but in the past few days some of the discussions have been escalating almost to the point of parody.

Some of this recent debate has to do with the “broken window” idea considered by Bastiat a long time ago. The Keynesian argument (ok, Keynes came after Bastiat, but it’s modern Keynesians that are bringing up this broken window) is that if a shopkeeper’s window is broken, he has to spend money to replace it, which increases revenue for the window-fixer, who then has money to spend on something else, and it basically “trickles down” from there. Voila, stimulated economy! The Bastiat response is that this does not consider what is “unseen” – namely, what more efficient resources the shopkeeper might have spent his money on if he hadn’t had to fix his window. The Keynesians respond that while the shopkeeper may be losing short-term wealth he is shifting future consumption to present consumption which stimulates the economy now, and so on and so forth. At this point we start to get into complicated economic models where both sides rely on abstract theory and cherry-pickings from historical examples to prove their points.

But the Keynesians have been fervently arguing for the broken window lately. Paul Krugman actually suggested that preparations for a fake alien invasion would stimulate the economy.  Matt Yglesias just said that somehow you can increase growth by breaking windows but nobody ever said you could increase wealth that way. But here’s what tops them all: When the East Coast was hit by its largest earthquake in more than century yesterday, jokes went around Twitter that Paul Krugman said it wasn’t “big enough.” But then Krugman’s Google+ account actually said, “People on twitter might be joking, but in all seriousness, we would see a bigger boost in spending and hence economic growth if the earthquake had done more damage.”

Woah. That statement ignited the conservative interwebz! Was Krugman so attached to his Keynesian theories that he wished for greater natural disasters to stimulate the economy more?

Then we all found out that Krugman doesn’t have a Google+ account and that the whole thing was a hoax. But the lie in the hoax was that it made Krugman sound like a mean guy who wanted big disasters to stimulate the economy – not that Krugman doesn’t think big disasters really could stimulate the economy. The real Krugman’s response was that things like war aren’t “desirable,” but the idea that they do stimulate is still “correct.” Krugman doesn’t want a major earthquake to happen, but it sounds like he really does think it would stimulate the economy through all the money that would have to be spent to rebuild everything. (Krugman’s Keynesian fans apparently thought so, too, because before the hoax was revealed and the post was deleted, they were engaging in fervent comment debate about how the broken window fallacy is not really a fallacy.)

Now maybe I’m just a dumb armchair post-libertarian who doesn’t understand the nuances of the complicated economy (I hope I’m not adding to the misrepresentations of Krugman here), but if great natural disasters stimulate the economy, then why did interest rates immediately plummet after the giant March earthquake in Japan? (I remember this because we were house-hunting and we locked in a lower interest rate for a mortgage a couple of days later.) All the world’s investors didn’t jump out of stocks and into bonds because they thought growth was about to be stimulated.

But, hey, maybe the Keynesian technocrats are smarter than the world’s investors (irrational market theories and all that). Or maybe the broken window fallacy really isn’t a fallacy under certain conditions. But I’m not convinced that a 9.0 magnitude earthquake is one of those conditions.

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