M. Porcius Cato
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Blog Comments posted by M. Porcius Cato
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Thanks, Nephele, for giving our Caecilia Metella a funny name. Now if only it *were* her real name, we could disentangle the fame she enjoys from her good name from the fame she enjoys as daughter of JFK.
In fairness, I should also link to THIS LIST of other, equally unqualified, candidates to the senate. Again, note the number of senators with nothing but name recognition as a credential (e.g., Bill Bradley of the Knicks).
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A word of protest from Nicholas Kristof. The comments are fascinating: some New Yorkers want a Caecilia Metella because she has "star power". Wow, almost a perfect translation of nobile.
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Sarah Palin must be Black Beauty, the Green Hornet's car. Because she took them all for a ride.
Good one.
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Lore Sj
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With family and friends in Iraq and with a Ron Paul sign in my window, I'm with you Nephele. Just to be clear: I'm not arguing on behalf of the war, only on the benefits of keeping a base in the region. A base would serve as a deterrent to the Iranians and thus as a safeguard against further deployments.
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After 5 years of this mess and the loss of more than 4,000 U.S. lives over there, I can't see the American people clamoring for any return to Iraq, should somebody new in the White House next year decide to bring the troops home.
You may be right about public opinion, but at least one of the implicit targets of Applebaum's claim (Barack Obama) has said that he wouldn't simply bring all the troops home and that he would be willing to send them back in if necessary. Given Obama's statement, I don't think Applebaum is fighting a straw man. It's arguably hypocritical of Obama to denounce McCain and Clinton for endorsing a limited presence in Iraq if Obama recognizes that some US presence is warranted.
Moreover, I do wonder whether pulling out of Iraq will keep us out for good. Certainly, we left Vietnam and never needed to return. The unsuccessful resolution of WWI, however, forced Americans back to Germany in less than 25 years, which I'll bet was the last thing anyone could imagine happening in 1918. My hope is that we can leave very soon--and for good, but I can easily imagine scenarios (e.g., an Iranian-backed Shiite government in Iraq supporting attacks on Israel or Saudi Arabia) that would land us right back where we started. We can pray that doesn't happen--or we can accept the Kurds' invitation to base some troops in the region to make sure it doesn't happen.
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What a pack of smears! Humorlessness and cluelessness has never seen a greater champion than this Zoe Williams. I'm sure she'd be appalled by Monty Python too (had they any modern equivalents).
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I would really like to see statistics which include the "value of circulating capital goods, intermediate non-durable products, or of capital goods which are not yet finished or if so, pass from one stage to another during the process of production," of which I believe a great share is imported.
But aren't those nearly the perfect imports since they're less profitable goods?
Consider the iPod. Analysts find (see HERE) that although almost the whole shebang--the hard drive etc--is made in Japan and Korea, Americans take $163 of $299 off of each unit--despite the fact that the iPod and its sundry parts aren't even made or assembled in the US. Given this, wouldn't you rather be Apple than Toshiba? I sure would!
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Is this measured in dollars? Is this nominal or adjusted? If adjusted, with what criteria?
Output is measured in inflation-adjusted dollars and indexed for the first year. The fed reports concern only recent monthly changes, which still reflect near record levels of manufacturing output.
Right now the Obama and Clinton camps are sniping at each other about the 'pain' in 'rust belt' states like Pennsylvania, which (last I checked) had an unemployment rate of 4.9%--a rate of employment that would be the envy of almost any industrialized nation on Earth--and a GDP comparable to the whole Netherlands.
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Nice summary of this lovely holiday HERE.
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However, when I was old enough to understand, and finally had it explained to me WHAT exactly I had been pledging for 6+ years, I was PISSED. Because, let it also be know, I do not take oaths and pledges lightly.
What was your objection to the pledge?
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I'm for the free market in education, but I should say that I don't think it's a panacea. If the state monopoly in education were ended, a wide variety of competing educational philosophies MIGHT be put into practice, but it could also result in many minor variations of the dominant philosophy of education (Dewey). Moreover, even in the best case scenario, there would still be the problem of knowing which methods were actually working and which ones weren't. My guess is that a free market secondary school system would resemble the university system, where the reputation of different schools depends much less on the quality of training delivered than on the quality of the process of choosing already talented and motivated students. Not that that's entirely a bad thing.
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I would not be opposed to the teaching of literacy -- the basic ability to read and to write -- being the sole occupation of our nation's public schools. Freedom is what our nation is about, and I don't believe that illiterate people can truly be free people.
Since illiteracy and innumeracy undermines self-sufficiency, they also undermine freedom. But shouldn't that be the argument against a state monopoly in education? Competition typically promotes efficiency and innovation, so if we want better schools for a free society, maybe freedom should extend to schooling itself.
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If domestic inflation were responsible for record profits in US manufacturing, how to explain record profits from exports? Is the idea that the weakened dollar increases demands for US goods that are cheaper abroad? If so, that should continue only until those exports drive up the value of the dollar.
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Am I correct to assume that, despite these manufacturing statistics, you think that these figures are not enough to offset our trade imbalance and growing service economy? Do you think that the levels of inflation that are not reflected in government statistics have in effect inflated these manufacturing numbers in terms of actual value?
I don't think that trade is unbalanced--in an ideal world, we could get $100 worth of imports for just $1 worth of exports (a pipe-dream, I know). Nor do I think that a growing service economy is bad either. More engineers designing robots and fewer people working like robots is a good thing--for workers and the economy both.
The last issue is an interesting one that I haven't given much thought. The problem is how to measure inflation that doesn't show up in government statistics. However that's done, it's hard to see why the manufacturing sector in particular should be reporting inflated earnings. Shouldn't hidden inflation boost everyone's nominal bottom line?
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Again, I don't see a broad problem for the economy unless the government does something really stupid like bailing out the losers who made these crappy mortgages in the first place or cranking up the Mint to paper-dollar over the losses.
Ha! Like the government would ever do something stupid like that!
Oh, wait ...
Maybe they'll come to their senses now that everyone from Alan Greenspan to Paul Krugman (see NYT today) recognizes that a bail-out is a cure worse than the disease.
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Thanks, Moonlapse. It's so refreshing to hear a Presidential candidate actually trying to apply Constitutional principles to current events.
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Is there any limit to this expansion? Do you think that one could conduct Wall Street's business today and how?
Absolutely there is a limit to the expansion of gold and thus to the expansion of prices. If we were to go back to the gold standard (at $733 = 1 gold dollar), there would certainly have to be a change in denomination, but there's no reason that one couldn't trade any number (or denominations) of proxies for gold reserves.
Once there were Gold Certificates issued by the Treasury or Fed (no longer remember) prior to the great Depression. They were in circulation. Didn't stop the Great Deflation.The gold standard doesn't protect against every deflationary pressure known to man. Obviously, if the sum total of goods triples overnight, the gold value of each of those goods will decline.
Buy the bye, did you delete TWO posts of mine, as is your privilege?Don't know. I just deleted anything that didn't have to do with the topic of gold. My general policy is to try to keep threads focused on one topic at a time and to purge all emoticons that I can find.
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How would a gold standard work? Assume that a bank has 100 ounces of gold (capital and depositor's gold). How would it go about making loans (and protect itself against 'runs')? Would it be a gyro bank?
Typically, banks made loans and conducted business via bank notes that were redeemable in gold, which were kept in deposit. This is really no different from the fiat currency that we all expect banks to disburse on demand. Then, as now, there was a short-term risk of runs on the banks, which banks dealt with then, as now, by borrowing from other banks. Of course, the cost of a panic isn't trivial, but the benefits of stable currency are well worth it.
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From Greenspan's new book:
pp. 480-481: "I have always harbored a nostalgia for the gold standard's inherent price stability--a stable currency was its primary goal. But I've long since acquiesced in the fact that the gold standard does not readily accommodate the widely accepted current view of the appropriate functions of government--in particular the need for government to provide a social safety net. The propensity of Congress to create benefits for constituents without specifying the means by which they are to be funded has led to deficit spending in every fiscal year since 1970, with the exception of the surpluses of 1998 to 2001 generated by the stock market boom. The shifting of real resources required to perform such functions has imparted a bias toward inflation. In the political arena, the pressure to make low-interest-rate credit generally available and to use fiscal measures to boost employment and avoid the unpleasantness of downward adjustments in nominal wages and prices has become nearly impossible to resist. For the most part, the American people have tolerated the inflation bias as an acceptable cost of the modern welfare state. There is no support for the gold standard today, and I see no likelihood of its return. [...]
We know that the average inflation rate under the gold and earlier commodity standards was essentially zero. At the height of the gold standard between 1870 and 1913, just prior to World War I, the cost of living in the United States, as calculated by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, rose by a scant 0.2 percent per annum on average. From 1939 to 1989, the year of the fall of the Berlin Wall and before the onset of the post-cold war wage-price disinflation, the CPI rose nine-fold, or 4.5 percent per year. The reflects the fact that there is no inherent anchor in a fiat money regime. What constitutes its "normal" inflation rate is a function solely of a country's culture and history. In the United States, modest amounts of inflation are politically tolerated, but inflation rates close to double digits create a political storm. Indeed, Richard Nixon felt the political need to impose wage and price controls in 1971 even though the inflation rate was below 5 percent. Thus, while political considerations mean that the gold standard can be ruled out as a way to suppress a forthcoming rise in inflationary pressures, ironically, politics driven by an irate populace just might accomplish the same purpose."
What follows is a very scary scenario regarding the combination of the collapse of social security and currently high inflation, requiring a rise in the interest rate in the double digits and a "return of populist, anti-Fed rhetoric, which was lain dormant since 1991."
Greenspan's book is definitely worth a read.
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If bank notes are redeemable in gold, there is no need for a national currency.
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In his new book, Greenspan repeats his views about the overwhelming benefits of the gold standard for a stable money supply. I'll see if I can find the original quote because it's quite revealing.
I should add that a gold standard doesn't mean that people would have to actually carry out transactions in gold. All that matters is that bank notes are redeemable in gold.
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Your unique way of formatting replies makes it difficult to reply to your point-by-point interjections.
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None of these questions have anything to do with the manufacturing sector, but they're all interesting questions anyway.
First, on the issue of job creation, I'd point out that the purpose of the economy isn't to produce jobs but to produce wealth. If we merely wanted to produce jobs, we could do that overnight by taking any job worth double minimum wage and split it into two minimum wage jobs. Would it produce jobs? Of course. Would it produce more wealth? Hell no. Clearly, the measure of a sound economy isn't merely the number of jobs produced. If we lived in a world of 100% unemployment, where everyone simply lived off the labor of their robots, I'd not complain--I'd be too busy reading Tacitus.
On the issue of the trade deficit, I again see no problem. Again, consider the worst case of a trade deficit--the world sends us all their goods, and we ship them nothing but portraits of dead Presidents in return. I'd call that a bargain! In fact, one can project that there will be trade deficits until the wages of foreign producers (adjusted by the exchange rate) rises to the level of their competitors. The problem isn't that we have an enormous trade deficit; the problem is that it won't last forever.
What about the problem of sub-prime mortgages? Again, I don't see a broad problem for the economy unless the government does something really stupid like bailing out the losers who made these crappy mortgages in the first place or cranking up the Mint to paper-dollar over the losses. Then there will be inflation, which--with high unemployment--is the worst thing that can happen to an economy.
The risk of inflation is largely driven by runaway government spending. Our national debt is nominally very, very high (though as a % of GDP not the highest ever) because the damned fools in Washington spend money like a drunken sailor. Of course, that's unfair to drunken sailors--at least they spend their own money.
I also have no problem with the concept of unions per se, and at one time, I was very active in my union, served on the bargaining team, and even sang a union song. The experience taught me that unions have a critical role to play in some cases but are also infected with Marxist ideology and ultimately propped up by physical force. The whole experience was totally Kafkaesque--we had a damned good case for higher wages, management recognized it, but feared raising the wages of our unit lest they be forced to raise wages for already over-paid units. Luckily, we cobbled together a method for recalculating the number of hours worked that gave us a whopping 30% increase in real wages while making it look like we got only a 3% rate increase (thereby keeping the other union off management's back). The Marxists screamed bloody murder about Labor solidarity blah blah blah, but the union members acted rationally and approved the deal.
The Real Me
in Aurelia's Insula
A blog by Aurelia in General
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To quote Vorenus, "I'll not deny it friend, I have a Gallic look about me, but I'm as solid a Roman as anyone!"