Syria - Barack! Please, stay cool man.

I am in complete agreement with President Obama's restraint on Syria.  I wish he hadn't set up the chemical warfare trip wire.  Secretary of State John Kerry's assertion that the odious Assad regime is responsible for this past weekend's hideous attack on civilians could be a chess move that only the gullible fall for.  I am prepared to put a high probability factor toward defecting army officers setting up the regime.  Think about who wins when the United States takes an action that is tantamount to a declaration of war.  I believe it is those wishing for chaos.  Barack!  Please, stay cool man.

September 1 Postscript

Obama Seeks Approval by Congress is the headline I wanted.  Thank you, thank you, thank you.  I wish these decisions for war were more often referred to the Congress as the Constitution declares it should be, none the less Barack you are a good man.  This rush to war has the feel of Barbara Tuchman's Guns of August, and a time out to to consider an irreversible course toward death and despair is healthy and necessary.

Teach your Children Well

"I've given up on politics," Mr. Bottum said, as we sat on his wide porch after lunch.  "I'll vote Republican because I am a Republican.  But I don't believe a change in culture can come from politics. It can only come with re-enchantment with the world."

Bingo! This blog's point exactly.  Using politics to change culture is authoritarian and not persuasive. In order for the Republican Party to get off it's intolerant exclusionary suicide trip, it needs to back off legislating morals and concentrate on persuasion. Isn't that what Evangelicals do well?

Diane Feinstein is a NSA Mouthpiece

Reading today's "N.S.A. Said to Have Paid E-Mail Providers Millions" is just one in many instances where Senator Diane Feinstein is putting her reputation on the line for a rogue intelligence agency. How can she say that there has been roughly one instance per year where an agent has willfully broken surveillance rules? Really? It's not hard to imagine the NSA folks laughing at the credulity of the dumb bitch.

Grover Norquist on Immigration

Grover's recent Open Borders and Racist Immigration Policy interview at Freedom Fest by Reason TV shows him to be thoughtful, intelligent and Libertarian! Not surprisingly, it's a much better opinion of Grover than what I get from my daily read of the New York Times.

Egypt again

Thomas Friedman "Close to the Edge" editorial in the New York Times has got me thinking about dictators, good and bad. As a libertarian blogging about the merits of individual freedom and decrying the authoritarians who would take our liberty away, it is difficult to understand how there could be a distinction between good and bad dictators. True that all dictators are odious, but Pinochet of Chile is an example of the very best and Fidel Castro of Cuba of the very worst on the dictator scale for two reasons. First, one leaves voluntarily after losing a democratically held election which the other never holds and perpetuates his reign with nepotism. Second, one embraced economic freedom that brought prosperity to his country while the other took a path of slave labor to poverty and despair.

In an earlier blog I hoped for the possibility that the Military leaders of Egypt might see the path of economic freedom as a solution to the economic malaise that forever holds back a sustainable democracy. Their actions now, while odious, does not preclude them getting a good dictator result, though the courage and clarity of thought to eliminate subsides and deregulate the economy hasn't shown it self yet.

August 25th comment

Today's "Other Nations Offer a Lesson to Egypt's Military Leaders" in the New York Times uses Turkey and Pakistan as polar opposite results that can be expected. Why bother with using Pakistan as an alternative model when the Nasser through Mubarak version is the same?  I posit that Turkey's better result is from an economy that is relatively free of damaging subsidies and central control.  If the Egyptian Generals get a sense of "it's the economy, stupid," then Egypt's path will divert toward the Turkish model. Otherwise Egypt can look forward to continued poverty and despair.

Politicians do not create jobs

A political claim that x number of jobs were created because of a bill sponsored by the politico making the claim is the worst lie.  It's is such a turn off that anyone making such an argument: be they candidate, proxy, promoter or supporter, falls through the credibility gap and lands on a giant pile of excrement.
Sunday's Economic View by Robert Schiller in the New York Times "Why Innovation is Still Capitalism's Star" appreciates the government grants that got him thinking about his commercial venture, but his experience makes the point that a self financed start up that tests the market is the best bet.  My perspective is if a project can't get private financing, then the taxpayer funded proposition is sure to be a loser.

Kansas and Al Qaeda

Thomas Friedman's editorial in Sunday's New York Times describes Kansas mono agriculture and Muslim fundamentalist monoculture in the middle east as forces weakening the very systems they are promoting.  Much the same could be said about the GOP's  intolerant, anti-puralistic and anti-diversity monoculture direction.

Milton Friedman

I am a Milton Friedman Libertarian and not a von Mises Austrian School one. I am a supporter of Ben Bernanke's leadership of the Federal Reserve because it is a apparent the he read MIlton Friedman and Anna Schwartz's Monetary History of the United States.  He took careful note of the Fed's misguided Austrian School thinking during the Great Depression, which made it substantially worse than it needed to have been, and successfully steered a course toward moderate growth.

FED Chairman Alan Greenspan's tenure, on the other hand, was a disaster in spite of his Ayn Rand libertarian philosophical predilection because he forgot that free markets do not work as described by Adam Smith in a system spiraling toward concentration of economic power. The mix of government intervention and laissez faire economics is particularly noxious, and Alan presided over a witches brew that as a Libertarian I will not forgive.

Larry Summers is in the  same camp with Alan.  He promoted concentration by killing Glass Steagal and sided with rapacious Wall Street by brow beating down Brooksley Born on her attempt to regulate derivatives at the CTFC.  I am on record as of approving of two women in finance, one being the before mentioned Ms. Born as well as former FDIC chairperson Sheila Baird, so much so that I am prepared to support Janet Yellen, the current Vice Chairman of the FED, without really knowing too much about her.

Over Criminalization & over Federalization

According to this Cato video of Molly Gill the temptation to regulate at the federal level is too easy, thereby leaving us with a plethora of useless overlapping laws.  For example car jacking is a federal crime.  Most states never got around to making it a state crime since murder, abduction, assault, auto theft and a myriad of other felonies in every state's criminal code pretty well cover car jacking as a crime without need of another statute. It got enacted after a particularly egregious assault in Detroit drew enough publicity so that Congress enacted a Federal Law in 1992 to solve the problem.

Really?  According to Gill it is currently impossible to catalogue the laws currently on the books and they are impossible to find since they are so thoroughly scattered over a century's worth of Congressional records.  I would like to see a Grover Norquist type pledge developed for legislators, which I call the Pac Man pledge; where for every law enacted ten are eliminated.  I wouldn't mind a politician making a pack with the devil just as long as he eliminates ten laws.  If such a pledge were in force it would take decades before we got to a lean and workable criminal and civil code.

Egypt

It would be too much to hope for a Lee Kuan Yew of Singapore or an Ataturk of Turkey to come forward as the father of a post modern Egypt, but one is required.  Egypt needs to remove state subsidies for food and energy.  This requires the generals in charge to be authoritarian and just do it. Much like the authoritarian Pinochet  of Chile they should call in the Chicago Boys to develop a free market economy. The generals will have to have courage and allow the economy to de-centralise in a cronyism free manner. A five year gestation is required for Egypt to adapt to a subsidy free economy so that results will give strength to freely elected politicians to stay the course and never fall back on poisonous subsidies, a tool of dictators to placate the masses.