Economics, grass roots approach:
If you wander until you find yourself a piece of unclaimed wilderness; and then clear the land with a flint axe you’ve chipped out yourself; and then made a tool to put seeds into the ground; and then collected seeds and planted them; and if the rains failed, or came at the wrong time, you either added water from a bucket you made yourself or ditched to take off the excess water. Then you harvested whatever grew from those seeds and sold the produce.
Continue until you’re rich.
And do all this while feeding yourself and any family you’re responsible for. Also, protect yourself, because there are those who will take the easier approach and simply take your harvest.
Doesn’t sound very practical, does it?
But if you’re not going to clear the land by yourself, then you’re going to have to pay someone to do it for you, perhaps with a share of the crop. If you need water or ditching to protect the field, you’ll need someone to do that. And if you want to send that crop to a market, then someone must build the road. And if you want warriors to protect you and the other workers, you must also pay them.
They now expect a share of the crop, because they’ve done their part in seeing that it got to harvest.
If you want to get rich, you’re going to have to take more than a proportional share. You’re going to have to exploit the others who helped you.
Or you can come in afterward, plant a field, and then use a road that someone else built and have your fields protected by someone who’s there. And whine about taxes because you didn’t hire those warriors or road builders or educate the workers to raise your crops and harvest them.
And in time, you can manage your affairs by hiring others to do the work. But by this time, you aren’t doing any of that work yourself. And invariably managing others begins to seem more important than simply working in a field or at a bench, so you must take a larger share for yourself.
You can also apply this logic to mining or manufacturing or whatever. Oh, and if you’re manufacturing, you might want someone to protect you from competition. Government will do that, if suitably bribed. Somehow, it seems more macho to bribe government officials than to meekly pay taxes.
Here’s the kicker: if you followed the first example, doing everything yourself, you won’t ever get rich. Peasants proved this over the thousands of years that primitive farming existed. The practice was called ‘subsistence farming’ for a reason; the farmer was lucky if indeed he managed subsistence. The work required is dawn-to-dusk. Children are needed to help with the work and to care for parents if they survive beyond working age.
The other corollary is that generally speaking, if you get wealthy, you got that way by exploitation.
‘Nobles’ exploited serfs, basically land-slavery. Manufacturers exploited workers. Instead of paying a proportionate share of what’s produced, find desperate people and employ them for much less. Or buy slaves and provide minimal housing and clothing and poor food.
Or you can exploit by trade; pay a pittance to the weaver of carpets and then ship the carpets to a place where they can be sold at a profit. The less you pay to the weaver, the higher your profit.
And of course always avoid any taxes; after all, it’s YOUR money, right?
You earned it all by yourself.
Grass Roots Economics
March 11, 2013Suicide by Drone
March 7, 2013I hate to waffle on a comment; as a general rule, I don’t believe that there’s a valid excuse to target an American citizen in America. If law enforcement knows the location of the person, then arrest him/her and take them in for trial. But…
That said, I can foresee circumstances. Suppose the person is involved in attempting assassination of a political leader or other criminal acts; and normal means of apprehending him/her are not available. Say this person is surrounded by a militia or other armed group, AKA David Koresh and the Branch Davidians, which is prepared to resist legal efforts to arrest their leader.
How many law enforcement persons are to be sacrificed in the attempt to arrest this person? Or put another way, at what point does law enforcement effort become military effort?
And how much right does an accused person have to resist arrest?
Once an accused is notified that he is being sought by law enforcement, if he refuses to submit to arrest then I consider that anything that results from this are his own fault. An accused person is often permitted to surrender at some nearby facility and to be accompanied by their lawyer when they do so; happens all the time.
Failure to comply with the law, for example when police tell someone to drop their weapon, is likely to get you killed. It’s called “suicide by cop.” Add “suicide by drone” to that label.
If an accused refuses the surrender option, then I would see no blame for a president or even a sheriff or police chief or FBI supervisory agent in applying whatever force is necessary to carry out the neutralization. “Neutralization” means, in this context, arrest if that’s reasonably possible, or targeted killing if that option isn’t present.
I’m much more prepared to see the accused killed than I am to see law enforcement agents killed. It’s not uncommon nowadays to see cops targeted by accused individuals, or as happened in California, to be the object of revenge killings. Once the accused was located in a cabin (as happened), why send in cops to winkle him out? Notify him that he must come out with his hands in the air, with no weapons on his person, and if he refuses, send in the machines. In California that meant machines to begin dismantling the cabin. A drone strike does the same thing. If it saves the life of a cop, I’m for it.
Austerity
March 3, 2013There’s a fellow I know who’s already been advised that he will be getting a pay cut. Forty percent; he’s the worker, and they are about to have their first baby, so there’s no possibility of a second job anytime soon.
They have a mortgage.
Probably a car payment.
And a new arrival any day now.
What effect will that 40% cut have? What kind of stress will this introduce into their lives? They should be happily celebrating, but instead, they have to be worrying.
Not the bankers, of course. They won’t lose, regardless. And defense contractors? They can easily weather the storm until payments get back to normal. But there are going to be a lot of worried people who don’t have that cushion. They won’t be spending as much, even if they have the money.
There will also be new unemployed to add to the already high levels. Companies won’t be hiring; instead, they’ll be laying people off because there’s less money out there to buy things as the cuts begin to kick in. People won’t be buying new cars; they’ll make the old ones go another year or two.
While the politicians wrangle and posture, the economy will slow, and then begin to recede once again. People caught in that will get more desperate. A period of two years or so when the recession began to slow and unemployment dropped is about to reverse.
It’s not as if we don’t have a good idea what will happen. Just look at Europe. Look at Greece and Spain and Portugal. Look at 25% unemployment overall, and 50% unemployment among young adults.
Look at the happy TeaPublicans that have demanded this. Remember that they’ve demanded those cuts while their sponsors, the Koch brothers and others who’ve funneled all that cash through Rove and Norquist have gotten richer all the time. But also realize that even those won’t be happy; they gain riches through an active economy.
Remember the Great Depression. Remember that Republicans were in charge and pushed austerity as the way to get out of the depression. Remember that it took Democrat-led government spending to do that, New Deal spending followed by wartime spending, to finally end the depression and bring on the postwar boom. The Great Depression also had the Dust Bowl to fuel it, but don’t be too happy; we have had a succession of droughts already. Last year those droughts reached into the Midwest. And Phoenix had a succession of dust storms that rivaled those of the Dust Bowl. The west and other areas too had wildfires; austerity means no new planes and fewer firefighters. We don’t need those guys; Mr Romney said so.
But hey, recession is good for us. OK, austerity is good for us; gotta reduce that deficit! Your TeaPublican leaders tell us so.
Comes the next election, I think I might want to tell them a thing or two. At the ballot box.
No Republican. Never again.
Pity the Poor Fed
February 12, 2013Economics, and politics. Pity the poor Federal Reserve.
Taxation, and spending. Taxation removes money from the system. Government spending replaces it in the economy. Done right, taxation can slow uncontrolled growth and spending can stimulate a sluggish economy. In so doing, taxation and spending can damp the boom-bust cycles that plagued the economies of nations a century ago. Cycles are still there, just not so damaging as the Great Depression turned out to be. Upturns and downturns we have; but we can generally prevent people from dying due to famine.
But taxation and spending are driven by politics.
Political interest is in turn driven by self interest; how to acquire money, and what is the money you’ve acquired worth? Inflation (adding money to the supply) decreases the value of the money already out there. Inflated money is easier to acquire but invariably buys less. That’s why inflation tends to hit people on fixed incomes, that is incomes that can’t adjust via such things as pay raises, hardest. It also means that people who have acquired money and squirreled it away really hate inflation; that money slowly loses value. Interest paid on saved money helps, but currently interest is actually less than the rate of inflation, so savings in the US lose value instead of gaining.
So politics ties up government as one group urges us to spend more and thereby stimulate the economy. Another group urges that we spend less and not borrow or tax to raise money that’s being spent. These two groups are usually driven by self interest at some level instead of the needs of a rationally managed economy.
And then there’s the Fed. Their purpose is to manage the economy. They attempt to do this by increasing or decreasing the money supply, and have been using something called Quantitative Easing to increase the money supply and thereby stimulate the economy. And even as they do this, politics is working to counter their activities by REDUCING the amount spent by government. Cutting spending is the mantra of the TeaPublicans in Congress, and even the Democrats are buying into this idea. According to Robert Kuttner, the Obama administration is committed to reducing government expenditures by $1.5 trillion over the next 10 years.
Note the problem here, which is the problem of government in general: no flexibility. The reduction is to take place regardless of what the economy is doing. The Fed at least meets quarterly and attempts to make adjustments based on what the economy is doing at the time; but political rhetoric is not so agile. Having convinced your supporters that taxation is the problem or that government spending is out of control, you’re not going to be able to change their minds.
Even if the politicians who use this to get themselves elected really do understand economics. And most of them are about as ignorant as the people who vote for them.
So it’s not so much that the right hand doesn’t know what the left hand is doing in our government; it’s that the right hand is actively countering what the left hand is up to.
Pity the poor Fed.
More about Cosmology, Mass, and Dark Matter
January 13, 2013I kept thinking about this. I don’t think astronomers pay enough attention to the time factor when they analyze the universe. I know that they’re aware of it; but do they truly analyze galaxies and other objects based on their assumed age?
Let me illustrate: from our point of view, everything out there is older. We think the universe is about 14 billion years. Our solar system is about 4.5 billion years old. It’s estimated that the sun is somewhere in the middle of its cycle of existence, so for argument consider that mid-level stars such as Sol last about 9 billion years.
Our closest neighbor star is Proxima Centauri, about 4.2 light years. So when we observe that star, a part of a binary system, we’re seeing it as it was 4.2 years ago.
We extrapolate to describe this star, based on what we know of stars in general. That’s what we do with all stars, including our own.
But not much happens in a year, so far as a star is concerned. So we can assume that we’re observing P. Centauri as it is now. By contrast, the most distant objects we’re seeing are protogalaxies and gamma-ray burst objects (structure not defined; just something that’s emitting a lot of energy) that are 13 000 to 13 370 million light years away. So we’re looking at those as they were back when the universe began.
Objects in between are intermediate in age.
Consider a mind experiment, if you will. Say I was to surround myself with people, organized in layers, from about 5 meters to perhaps 1 000 meters. In the first layer, I put teenagers. The second layer would be 20-somethings, and in the third layer there would be 30-somethings, right up to a final layer of centenarians.
I would then try to describe this thing called ‘human’ by looking at those people. Could I truly do so without considering the effects of age?
And yet, that’s what astronomers do. When they describe a galaxy, do they take approximate age into consideration?
Extrapolating from this, can they describe the universe without considering that each ‘layer’ contains objects that are young, middle-aged, and old?
To really describe the universe, I would think that we need to break down the universe according to ‘age’. And since stars age in billion-year time frames, perhaps we could use a hundred-million light-year ‘slice’ of the universe. So anything up to a hundred light years would be about the same age, from P Centauri to 100 light years out. Slice two would run from about 100 to 200 light years. These are only off-the-cuff ideas; perhaps slicing by 500 million years or even a billion years would work better in practice.
The next thing would be to attempt to extrapolate what would likely be happening in those older sections. If we’re observing them a billion years ago, what would they be like in half a billion years? Would they have collided with another galaxy, or most of their bigger stars gone nova/supernova and reformed into smaller stars? Would they have more or fewer star systems within the galaxy?
Do all that, and then we might get some idea of how much mass there really is in the universe.
Say there are X galaxies in that oldest slice, 1 000 mly or more. Say further that there are X+Y galaxies in the slice 900 to 1000 mly distant. Calculate that there are X+?Y galaxies in the 800 to 900 mly slice. Continue until done.
Then graph the numbers. We can decide whether the process of galactic formation is increasing, remaining the same, or decreasing over 100 my time segments.
That, in turn, should give us an idea of about how much normal matter there is in the universe.
I don’t think this has been done. If you’re aware of something along this line, feel free to correct me.
Cosmology, Dark Matter, and Assumptions
January 13, 2013Written in answer to a comment by my Australian friend Gavan. FWIW, we’re both members of International Mensa and he’s a believer in currently-accepted theories in Cosmology. I’m a skeptic.
I’ve heard that, Gavan; but at the same time, I maintain that there is much ordinary matter that has simply not coalesced into something that’s visible to us here in any of the spectra that we can detect. As evidence, I cite the emergence of new galaxies and within galaxies, new star systems. And we also keep discovering dim, barely visible items that only our new, more powerful, viewing instruments can detect.
Consider this, as well: most of what we view is seen through a time machine. We’re looking at the events of billions of years ago. We have no way of viewing things that happened this year, or a hundred million years ago. The radiation from those distant events won’t be here for another hundred million or billion years.
So estimating the current total mass of ordinary matter based on an unimaginably ancient photo is simply silly. It’s similar to looking at human populations on the Earth of 1 million b.c. and estimating the current human population…and then declaring that our estimate must be correct, without regard for change that might take place over that time.
We might as well use gravitational influences, which we can detect, as indicators that there was much more unconsolidated matter a billion years ago than there is now.
I could, for example, pencil in a few million new galaxies, enough of them to actually balance the estimates of mass and the observed gravity. And point out that we won’t see them for another billion years, because they’re that far away, and have only begun emitting energy within the last few million years and so aren’t yet visible because the energy hasn’t arrived yet. Is that less logical than claiming that perhaps 90% of the gravity in the universe is due to some invisible, undetectable (at least, so far) ‘matter’?
Those new star systems and such that we observe in the process of formation and describe with great excitement because they just became visible this week? That happened a few hundred million years ago.
So apply Occam’s razor; there are masses in the universe that we can’t yet see because they’re so far away, or there is some sort of undetected invisible matter that’s here because we need something to balance the equations?
That’s my problem with the math of the universe; the equations may well be right, but the assumptions and estimates and interpretation are much less certain.
Political Economics in the 21st Century
January 12, 2013Written in answer to a series of comments by a friend:
Gavan, I have a different take on this. Those governments didn’t loan money in good faith.
They INVESTED money in US bonds with the expectation that they would be paid back, and that this investment was in their economic self interest. They’ve also been permitted to ride along as the US economy boomed, investing in American companies and even buying some outright. Diversification, in effect the financialization of national economies, has protected all the world’s economies to an extent.
The Constitution requires that we pay our debts. Any bondholder who faces default on American debt has the right to sue in federal court to get paid. And our courts would have no option but to force payment on the debt.
Meantime, we’ve got a political party that’s in the minority but which is willing to stop the US Government in order to force their vision on our politics. And they appear not to care at all whether other nations get paid. Regardless of the Constitution they claim to respect.
But the US is a sovereign nation, not bound by such things as Euro Union entanglements. Many have advocated simply creating money by fiat, as our laws permit (and also the laws of Australia and Canada and Britain, I think). That possibility was always there, and the nations and individuals who purchased US investments knew it when they invested. They did so, invested their money, with no assurance other than the belief that the US Treasury Bonds (German bonds, too) were the safest places in the world to invest. That’s why interest rates, set by auction, are so low on those bonds. Lower, in fact, than the rate of inflation.
So what’s being discussed is an end run around that arguably-insane political party. They, the Republicans and specifically the Tea Party Caucus of the Republican Party, are willing to see the government shut down rather than tax their wealthy sponsors. They also insist on cutting health care and unemployment and pensions paid to old persons, people who’ve been paying into the system for years already. They aren’t really about paying off the deficit, so much as they are about cutting payments to people they consider to be ‘freeloaders’. And the people who are sponsoring them, the real freeloaders who game the tax system to avoid paying taxes, are happy for this to go on.
Congress first votes to spend the money; they then refuse to raise taxes to fund the projects they’ve agreed to spend money on, and also to raise the debt ceiling to borrow money to spend on what they’ve agreed to fund. Get the picture? Only Congress can vote to spend money, and only Congress can set the tax rates. The debt ceiling is a fairly recent maneuver. There are a couple of other Congressional maneuvers they’ve used, as well; our two-party system allows the Speaker of the House, the leader of the majority party in the US House of Representatives, can block legislation from being voted on. He represents the majority, and sometimes a minority of that majority can force their will on the others. That’s what the Tea Party has done. They call it the ‘Hastert Rule’, after a former Speaker.
And so our Congress is paralyzed by this minority.
But there are a couple of ways that the President can bypass them. Rather than shutting down the government, he can either issue scrip coupons that could be bought by exchange houses, who would then make money by discounting those scrip coupons. They would be the ones to profit by Congressional gridlock, while people like me would lose because of the discounting. Or the Treasury could simply mint one or more platinum coins, in any denomination they wished. Those coins would then be deposited with the Federal Reserve, and an equivalent amount issued to government agencies to pay their bills or even pay off the debt. This has the advantage of not incurring any debt at all. Normally this course might be inflationary; but our inflation rate, because of the economic ills of the world, is quite low. Economists such as Paul Krugman, a Nobel winner, think it’s too low. So if the injection of money into the economy via government spending were to slightly raise the inflation level, that would be a good thing if it also stimulated the economy to begin producing.
And the restaurant owner gets paid, too.
Huckabee, and Other Nonsense
December 19, 2012Mr Huckabee thinks the murders in Connecticut are because schools are schools, not churches. Make that Christian fundamentalist churches; no others will serve. Oh, and don’t allow any gays or such in. That’s sinful too. And his version of God is against sin, whatever Huckabee decides that sin is.
Good thing God’s got Mike to help him, right?
Makes you want to believe in reincarnation. Really; can’t you just imagine High Priest Huckabee standing on top of a pyramid in Mexico and bellowing “This disaster is because you haven’t provided ENOUGH HUMAN SACRIFICES!”
That made me think about this. A fairly obscure Middle Eastern sect was the one who realized just how mighty and all-powerful their God Yahweh was. Yep, this same all-powerful God didn’t have any prophets in the Americas. Maybe he didn’t speak Aztec or Mayan. No prophets in Asia. Or in Europe. At least, not then. There were probably a few later. You know, after a human priest told them about it? Meantime, they got along with Druids, and High-Lord-Heart-Cutter-Outer. And Odin up in the mountains somewhere, amusing himself by tossing lightning bolts, and bunches of Greek Gods who played flutes and drank wine and fornicated with human women and the odd animal or two. A God of War, and one for the oceans, even. And in Asia, probably someone who claimed to speak for the Wind God, for all I know. Pity the Japanese; they couldn’t think of imaginary beings, so they had to make do with their ancestors and the current Emperor.
I don’t expect anything better from Huckabee, or even Santorum. But the news reporters are supposed to be educated and be able to think. I suppose that there are some who think Huckabee is more than a man with early-onset dementia.
Which, now that I think about it, might well describe most of the ancient prophets.
Gun Control, and Why You’re Not Likely To See It.
December 19, 2012To all my progressive friends: I regret having to throw cold water on your efforts to enact gun control legislation.
What are you willing to give up in order to get that?
The same political figures that constitute the ‘opposition’, the ones who oppose government programs that protect the poor and support the middle class, are the ones who will spinelessly roll over for the NRA.
So if you’re a young Mexican, brought here illegally by parents when you were a small child, are you willing to trade any immigration reform for better gun laws?
If you depend on Social Security or expect to do so when you retire, are you willing to give that up?
Health care? Would you want to go back to pre-Obamacare conditions?
Unemployment, even in a recession? How about SNAP, the food stamp program?
Tax hikes on the wealthy? Tax reform that will perhaps force huge corporations and very rich people to begin paying a fair share of taxes? Or would you let them continue to profit obscenely as the middle class shrinks and the only jobs available are working in fast food or perhaps a temporary job at Walmart?
ALL of these are things that Republicans support. And we’re watching the politics continue even as I write this. The President, who ran on a campaign pledge to raise taxes on those with incomes above $250 000 and to not cut Social Security benefits, has already signaled agreement to trade those things away, and the deal isn’t done yet. He may yet trade even more. And the people who LOST the election are still in the driver’s seat. I’m disappointed; even after winning his last election, he’s apparently not able to break out of the community-organizer mold. Or in other words, cooperation at any cost. Even when the cost is to be borne by the people who elected him.
Don’t expect much to happen. And that’s a shame.
We needed a Lyndon Johnson or a Harry Truman. We didn’t get one.
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