Will N.E. Asia eclipse Caucasians by the end of this century?

It seems obvious that they will.  Japan and S. Korea are already rich and influential countries and China is just getting into its stride -- while economic growth rates in Europe and America are very sluggish.

And something I notice because I read a lot of academic journal articles across several disciplines is that there always seems to be an East Asian among the list of authors.  There are very few single-author papers these days.  So East Asians are already there at the heart of Western science. How soon will it be before the corresponding (main) author usually has an Asian name?

Prophecy is a mug's game unless it is based on clear extrapolations from the past and present and even then "Black Swan" events can upset the applecart.  But we are all interested in the future so at least we can attempt informed opinions.  My opinion is that China will once again be the centre of the world by the end of this century. So I want to look at why I might be wrong. No Leftist ever seems to do that but it is certainly in  line with conservative caution.

An obvious factor is the law of diminishing returns and the ogive curve that seems to describe most variations in biological phenomena.  Apologies for that bit of academic-speak but it will become VERY clear if we look at Japan.  For about 4 decades after WWII, Japan astonished the world by it huge economic growth rates.  It leapt to some sort of parity with European countries very rapidly and European countries were growing richer at that time too.

But it did not continue.  It just about hit a brick wall.  Japan has had negligible growth for around a couple of decades now.  A statistician might say that Japanese economic growth has approached an asymptote.  And lots of things do approach an asymptote.  It is normal for natural processes to have limits on how far they can change.  So Japan will almost certainly never again see high rates of econnomic growth.  It will probably stay on some sort of parity with Western countries but may never get further than that.  Could that happen to China too?  It is clearly possible.

It is also possible that the USA could get steam up again. Under Obama, huge numbers of Americans left the workforce, middle incomes stagnated and business was ever more tightly strangled by regulations. But that already seems to be going into reverse under Trump. And it's early days yet. The more Uncle Sam gets his fingers out of business, the more the economy is likely to grow. And in my reading we are in fact due for a boom under Trump.

It would be too much of a diversion to tackle the arguments of economists against Trumpenomics but let me just note that Trump does have an economics degree and America thrived mightily behind high tariff walls in the 19th century.

So if America booms again, it might be very difficult for N.E. Asia to keep up, let alone excel.

A standard criticism of E. Asians is that they are not creative.  They just use well what others have invented.  That might seem like stupid old racism but some recent work in genetics gives it some substance.  And it is in part the work of that intrepid  outspeaker, Edward Dutton -- a Briton who has been "exiled" to Northern Finland.  Maybe he just likes cold climates. His latest paper that I know of (2015) is below:


Why do Northeast Asians win so few Nobel Prizes?

Kenya Kura, Jan te Nijenhuis & Edward Dutton

Abstract

Most scientific discoveries have originated from Europe, and Europeans have won 20 times more Nobel Prizes than have Northeast Asians. We argue that this is explained not by IQ, but by interracial personality differences, underpinned by differences in gene distribution. In particular, the variance in scientific achievement is explained by differences in inquisitiveness (DRD4 7-repeat), psychological stability (5HTTLPR long form), and individualism (mu-opioid receptor gene; OPRM1 G allele ). Northeast Asians tend to be lower in these psychological traits, which we argue are necessary for exceptional scientific accomplishments. Since these traits comprise a positive matrix, we constructed a q index (measuring curiosity) from these gene frequencies among world populations. It is found that both IQ scores and q index contribute significantly to the number of per capita Nobel Prizes.

SOURCE


Linking Nobel prizes to genetics is undoubtedly clever and impressive so my objections to their conclusions are rather weak.  My objections may however be right.  The key statistic in their results is the variance explained by their q factor and IQ combined.  It is only 19%.  Many other factors could be at work.

And an obvious factor is history.  Nobel prizes are normally awarded late in the Nobelist's life.  And for something like 98% of the time over which Nobels have been awarded, China had not even got its boots on academically.  Among those Asian co-authors of academic papers today may be a majority of the Nobelists of tomorrow.  In other words, the criterion for achievement -- a Nobel -- may be too narrow.  I believe it is.

So where does that leave us?  All things considered, I suppose the future will be a lot like the present, with the new ideas coming mainly from people of N.W. European ancestry (including Russians, Britons and Americans) and Asia implementing those ideas even more effectively than we do.

I am still vastly impressed by China, however.  My only visit to China was many years ago but my son has been to China a couple of times on problem-solving missions and I have Sinophilic friends.  All tell me that China already dazzles in many ways.  My son is a software engineer and his verdict from contact with them is that the Chinese are unbeatable.  I am inclined to agree.  I am inclined to think that China will eventually pull ahead of the USA in most ways.  But I am also of the view that the USA will remain an indispensable second place-getter in many ways.

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United Airlines Flunks Economics 101



Supply and Demand: After forcing a paying customer off a flight to make room for an employee, United Airlines is catching hell, and rightly so. But what's really disturbing is that no one at United understood the most basic principle of free market economics.

The story goes like this. United overbooked a flight from Chicago to Louisville, Ky., on Sunday night. That's hardly unusual. But in this case, United wanted to make room for four employees who needed to be in Louisville the next day, and the next flight to Louisville wasn't until Monday afternoon.

According to news accounts, United offered passengers at the gate $400 and a hotel to give up their seats. But nobody took them up on it. After everyone had boarded the plane, United upped the offer to $800 for anyone willing to get off. Again, it got no takers.

So, the airline decided to do the "fair" thing and have a computer randomly pick four passengers, who were then told to get off the plane. When one refused, United called in cops. Another passenger recorded that man being yanked from his seat and dragged off the plane.

A high school student just learning about economics could explain what United did wrong. Namely, it tried to ignore the supply and demand curve and the market clearing price.

Clearly, the combination of an overnight stay and the reason for being bumped (to accommodate United workers) pushed the market price for giving up a seat above $800.

United spokesman Charlie Hobart said the airline tries to come up with a reasonable compensation offer, but "there comes a point where you're not going to get volunteers."

That's simply not true. Yes, United's contract of carriage gives them the ability to bump passengers. But United could have — and given the circumstances should have — continued to increase its offer price until it got enough volunteers. At some point, there would have been a rush to give up seats.

The result: Everyone would have gone away happy. The passengers who agreed to get off the flight would have received something they valued more than arriving on time, and United would have been able to get its own employees where they needed to be without raising a fuss.

Instead, United tried to impose its own form of price controls and then have the police enforce its nonmarket decision.

Does that sound familiar to anyone? It should, because this is precisely what happens when government interferes in any market, either by forcing prices higher or lower, or mandating businesses offer this or that, to accommodate some other alleged social goal — and then forcing everyone to abide by these rules. The result is economic inefficiency, rising animosity and a growing police state.

Price controls are why there were gasoline shortages in the 1970s and doctor shortages in Medicaid today. They explain why the individual insurance markets are failing under ObamaCare, and why Venezuelan grocery store shelves are empty.

Such economic illiteracy might be excusable among government regulators and bureaucrats who make their living telling other people what to do. But the fact that a private company — in an industry that is constantly changing ticket prices to meet even slight changes in demand — didn't understand this basic economic principle is really troubling.

Then again, it was the airlines themselves that fought to keep the government in charge of setting their routes and fares when Congress decided to deregulate the industry in the 1970s.

SOURCE

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Trump wins trade concessions from China in first meeting: Report

President Trump's first meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping reportedly made progress on trade issues with the world's largest country.

The Financial Times reported China offered to drop the ban on American beef, in place since 2003, and offered to allow foreigners to have majority stakes in Chinese investment and securities companies.

The former concession from the Chinese would allow American cattle producers to have access to a massive new market, while the Financial Times reported the latter is something that was discussed under former President Barack Obama but was received positively by Trump last week.

Trump and Xi met for two days of talks at Mar-a-Lago in Florida last week. Trump tweeted that he and Xi made progress on a personal relationship level but only time would tell about how the country's trade relationship would go.

SOURCE

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Democrat Russia narrative implodes



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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated),  a Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on THE PSYCHOLOGIST.

Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here  (Personal)

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What's Become of the American Dream?

Part of the problem is definitional. It isn’t just about houses, cars and material prosperity


Peggy Noonan
 
I want to think aloud about the American dream. People have been saying for a while that it’s dead. It’s not, but it needs strengthening. We should start by saying what it means, which is something we’ve gotten mixed up about. I know its definition because I grew up in the heart of it and remember how people had long understood it. The American dream is the belief, held by generation after generation since our beginning and reanimated over the decades by waves of immigrants, that here you can start from anywhere and become anything. In America you can rise to the heights no matter where and in what circumstances you began. You can go from the bottom to the top.

Behind the dream was another belief: America was uniquely free, egalitarian and arranged so as to welcome talent. Lincoln was elected president in part because his supporters brought lengths of crude split-rails to the Republican National Convention in Chicago in 1860. They held the rails high and paraded them in a floor demonstration to tell everyone: This guy was nothing but a frontier rail splitter, a laborer, a backwoods nobody. Now he will be president. What a country. What a dream.

This distinguished America from old Europe, from which it had kicked away. There titles, families and inherited wealth dictated standing: If you had them, you’d always be at the top. If you didn’t, you’d always be at the bottom. That static system bred resentment. We would have a dynamic one that bred hope.

You can give a dozen examples, and perhaps you are one, of Americans who turned a brilliant system into a lived-out triumph. Thomas Edison, the seventh child of modest folk in Michigan and half-deaf to boot, filled the greatest cities in the world with electric light. Barbara Stanwyck was from working-class Brooklyn. Her mother died, her father skipped town, and she was raised by relatives and foster parents. She went on to a half-century career as a magnetic actress of stage and screen; in 1944 she was the highest-paid woman in America. Jonas Salk was a hero of my childhood. His parents were Jewish immigrants from Poland who settled in East Harlem — again, working-class nobodies. Naturally young Jonas, an American, scoped out the true facts of his time and place and thought: I’ll be a great lawyer. His mother is reported to have said no, a doctor. He went on to cure polio. We used to talk about him at the public school when we waited in line for the vaccine.

In America so many paths were offered! But then a big nation that is a great one literally has a lot of paths.

The American dream was about aspiration and the possibility that, with dedication and focus, it could be fulfilled. But the American dream was not about material things — houses, cars, a guarantee of future increase. That’s the construction we put on it now. It’s wrong. A big house could be the product of the dream, if that’s what you wanted, but the house itself was not the dream. You could, acting on your vision of the dream, read, learn, hold a modest job and rent a home, but at town council meetings you could stand, lead with wisdom and knowledge, and become a figure of local respect. Maybe the respect was your dream.

Stanwyck became rich, Salk revered. Both realized the dream.

How did we get the definition mixed up?

I think part of the answer is: Grandpa. He’d sit on the front stoop in Levittown in the 1950s. A sunny day, the kids are tripping by, there’s a tree in the yard and bikes on the street and a car in the front. He was born in Sicily or Donegal or Dubrovnik, he came here with one change of clothes tied in a cloth and slung on his back, he didn’t even speak English, and now look — his grandkids with the bikes. “This is the American dream,” he says. And the kids, listening, looked around, saw the houses and the car, and thought: He means the American dream is things. By inference, the healthier and more enduring the dream, the bigger the houses get, the more expensive the cars. (They went on to become sociologists and journalists.)

But that of course is not what Grandpa meant. He meant: I started with nothing and this place let me and mine rise. The American dream was not only about materialism, but material things could be, and often were, its fruits.

The American dream was never fully realized, not by a long shot, and we all know this. The original sin of America, slavery, meant some of the oldest Americans were brutally excluded from it. The dream is best understood as a continuing project requiring constant repair and expansion, with an eye to removing barriers and roadblocks for all.

Many reasons are put forward in the argument over whether the American Dream is over (no) or ailing (yes) or was always divisive (no — dreams keep nations together). We see income inequality, as the wealthy prosper while the middle class grinds away and the working class slips away. There is a widening distance, literally, between the rich and the poor. Once the richest man in town lived nearby, on the nicest street on the right side of the tracks. Now he’s decamped to a loft in SoHo. “The big sort” has become sociocultural apartheid. It’s globalization, it’s the decline in the power of private-sector unions and the brakes they applied.

What ails the dream is a worthy debate. I’d include this: The dream requires adults who can launch kids sturdily into Dream-land.

When kids have one or two parents who are functioning, reliable, affectionate — who will stand in line for the charter-school lottery, who will fill out the forms, who will see that the football uniform gets washed and is folded on the stairs in the morning — there’s a good chance they’ll be OK. If you come from that now, it’s like being born on third base and being able to hit a triple. You’ll be able to pursue the dream.

But I see kids who don’t have that person, who are from families or arrangements that didn’t cohere, who have no one to stand in line for them or get them up in the morning. What I see more and more in America is damaged or absent parents. We all know what’s said in this part — drugs, family breakup. Poor parenting is not a new story in human history, and has never been new in America. But insufficient parents used to be able to tell their kids to go out, go play in America, go play in its culture. And the old aspirational culture, the one of the American dream, could counter a lot. Now we have stressed kids operating within a nihilistic popular culture that can harm them. So these kids have nothing — not the example of a functioning family and not the comfort of a culture into which they can safely escape.

This is not a failure of policy but a failure of love. And it’s hard to change national policy on a problem like that.

SOURCE

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Why Justice Gorsuch Will Have an Immediate (and Big) Impact on the Supreme Court
 
Relentless, harsh and wholly unmerited — such were the attacks against Judge Neil Gorsuch. Yet Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) held firm to his promise to hold a full-Senate vote on the judge’s nomination and today we have, once again, a full complement of justices on the U.S. Supreme Court.

Hopefully, Gorsuch’s confirmation means that the Court once again has the crucial fifth vote needed to sustain the Constitution as written and to protect fundamental rights like religious freedom, free speech, and the right to bear arms.

Once he is sworn in, Justice Gorsuch will arrive at the Court just in time to hear the April 19 oral arguments in Trinity Lutheran Church v. Pauley. It is a case of stark, blatant religious discrimination by the government.

The state of Missouri provides grants to help nonprofit organizations resurface their playgrounds with rubber from recycled tires. The goal is to provide safer play areas for kids. But Missouri denied a grant to the licensed preschool and daycare center at Trinity Lutheran solely because it is a church. Missouri said the grant would violate separation of church and state. In reality, it violated prior Supreme Court precedent.

Given the hostility to religious freedom expressed in prior decisions like Burwell v. Hobby Lobby (2014) (the contraceptive mandate case) and Town of Greece v. Galloway (2014) (the town council opening prayer case) by the four liberal justices on the Court, Gorsuch is needed in the Trinity Lutheran case to prevent an injustice from occurring. Excluding churches from an otherwise neutral and secular government aid program clearly violates the First Amendment.

Gorsuch may also make a difference in the Court’s decisions about which of the pending petitions it will accept for appeal. Each term, the Court accepts only a little over 70 of the roughly 7,000 petitions it receives. It will be helpful, therefore, to have another justice who understands the importance of constitutional issues and will vote to accept the most important cases for review.

 Among the petitions currently pending is Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission, an important case about an individual’s right to not be forced by the government to act in violation of his or her religious beliefs.

Another petition is Husted v. A. Philip Randolph Institute. In this case, the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals issued an erroneous decision, misinterpreting federal law to prevent the state of Ohio from cleaning up its voter registration list. This is an especially important case for improving election integrity — and one which Justice Gorsuch may be inclined to take up.

Another petition that could help assure election integrity is North Carolina v. North Carolina NAACP. Here, a three-judge panel of the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals erroneously threw out North Carolina’s voter ID law as well as numerous other election reforms.

Justice Gorsuch may also make a difference on petitions to come — such as the emergency appeals of the numerous injunctions issued against President Donald Trump’s executive order temporarily suspending travel from terrorist safe-havens.

As five dissenting judges from the Ninth Circuit pointed out, those decisions confound Supreme Court precedent and the constitutional and federal statutory provisions that authorize the president’s actions.

Neil Gorsuch should be the fifth vote needed to quash this judicial activism that interferes with the president’s authority as commander-in-chief to protect the nation.

SOURCE

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New Jewish conspiracy theory

From the Left of course.  It's the new "Protocols"

Chabad of Port Washington, a Jewish community center on Long Island’s Manhasset Bay, sits in a squat brick edifice across from a Shell gas station and a strip mall. The center is an unexceptional building on an unexceptional street, save for one thing: Some of the shortest routes between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin run straight through it.

Two decades ago, as the Russian president set about consolidating power on one side of the world, he embarked on a project to supplant his country’s existing Jewish civil society and replace it with a parallel structure loyal to him. On the other side of the world, the brash Manhattan developer was working to get a piece of the massive flows of capital that were fleeing the former Soviet Union in search of stable assets in the West, especially real estate, and seeking partners in New York with ties to the region.

Their respective ambitions led the two men—along with Trump’s future son-in-law, Jared Kushner—to build a set of close, overlapping relationships in a small world that intersects on Chabad, an international Hasidic movement most people have never heard of.

Starting in 1999, Putin enlisted two of his closest confidants, the oligarchs Lev Leviev and Roman Abramovich, who would go on to become Chabad’s biggest patrons worldwide, to create the Federation of Jewish Communities of Russia under the leadership of Chabad rabbi Berel Lazar, who would come to be known as “Putin’s rabbi.”

A few years later, Trump would seek out Russian projects and capital by joining forces with a partnership called Bayrock-Sapir, led by Soviet emigres Tevfik Arif, Felix Sater and Tamir Sapir—who maintain close ties to Chabad. The company’s ventures would lead to multiple lawsuits alleging fraud and a criminal investigation of a condo project in Manhattan.

Meanwhile, the links between Trump and Chabad kept piling up. In 2007, Trump hosted the wedding of Sapir’s daughter and Leviev’s right-hand man at Mar-a-Lago, his Palm Beach resort. A few months after the ceremony, Leviev met Trump to discuss potential deals in Moscow and then hosted a bris for the new couple’s first son at the holiest site in Chabad Judaism. Trump attended the bris along with Kushner, who would go on to buy a $300 million building from Leviev and marry Ivanka Trump, who would form a close relationship with Abramovich’s wife, Dasha Zhukova. Zhukova would host the power couple in Russia in 2014 and reportedly attend Trump’s inauguration as their guest.

With the help of this trans-Atlantic diaspora and some globetrotting real estate moguls, Trump Tower and Moscow’s Red Square can feel at times like part of the same tight-knit neighborhood. Now, with Trump in the Oval Office having proclaimed his desire to reorient the global order around improved U.S. relations with Putin’s government—and as the FBI probes the possibility of improper coordination between Trump associates and the Kremlin—that small world has suddenly taken on outsize importance.

More HERE

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated),  a Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on THE PSYCHOLOGIST.

Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here  (Personal)

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COMPASSION AND POLITICS

Nathan J. Robinson, a leftist writer with an apparently substantial educational background (He quotes Schopenhauer) has a recent article under the heading above.  I offer below some excerpts from it.  He comes across as someone who is genuinely concerned about the poor.  He also writes that many prominent Democrats don't give a fig for the poor and in fact look down on the poor.  And he is right to say that this is the opposite of the historic Leftist claim.

It is a article worth reading in full but, like most Leftist writing, leaves out half the story.  So maybe I should briefly allude to some of that other half.

He appears to think that Leftist elitism is a new thing. He seems to see it as something that came into the light only with the advent of Trump. That is hilariously wrong. Leftism has always been elitist. Karl Marx, for instance, was born into a middle class German Jewish family and was homeschooled by his father, the gentlemanly and rather admirable Heinrich Marx. He later studied at the universities of Bonn, Berlin, and Jena. He was fascinated by the ponderous writings of the near-incomprehensible German philosopher G.W.F. Hegel, regarded by many as the founder of modern Leftism. Marx was also a parasite, living off the generosity of his rich businessman admirer, Friedrich Engels. So Marx was not a man of the people in any sense.

The Bolsheviks too were overwhelmingly middle class.  And the prominent Leftists in prewar Britain were almost entirely prominent literary and intellectual figures, such as the Bloomsberries, the Webbs, J.M. Keynes, H.G. Wells, G.B. Shaw, Bertrand Russell etc.  They were also -- most amusingly but also most revealingly -- great believers in eugenics.  And that's as elitist as you can get: Wipe out the dummies!

And elitism on the American Left is not new to the era of Trump.  Expressions of disdain for the masses were equally prominent at the onset of the G.W. Bush presidency in 2004.  I in fact set up a blog to preserve such expressions for posterity.  Google has however taken most of that blog down for reasons unknown to me.  Never fear, however!  I have kept exact copies of all the posts Google has censored and have now uploaded them to a new site here.  So the whole gruesome episode is once again online for all to see.

Something else that comrade Robinson fails to remember is that G.W. Bush ran on a platform of "compassionate conservatism".  It may have been no more sincere than similar protestations from Leftists but it is the platform he ran on and which got him elected.  And if it is deeds not words that count, who was it who sent in the troops to break the racial segregation maintained by the Southern Democrats?  It was Ike, a Republican President.  And who was it that enlisted Chappaquiddick Ted to help set up the "No child left behind" attempt to improve black educational outcomes?  It was G.W. Bush.  The Republican record on helping the underdog is at least as good as the Democrat record.  I won't mention Woodrow Wilson's segregationist policies or FDR's antisemitism.

So comrade Robinson is pissing into the wind if he thinks it is possible for the Left to become genuinely egalitarian and compassionate.  Elitism is an integral part of what they are.  See here for more details of that. Leftists are as compassionate as their most famous exponents: Robespierre, Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot


Instead of heeding suggestions that greater amounts of empathy for working-class Trump constituencies might make Democrats less likely to lose these people’s votes, lately some liberals have doubled down. As Clio Chang pointed out recently in Jacobin, figures including Paul Krugman (“I try to be charitable, but when you read about Trump voters now worried about losing Obamacare it’s kind of hard”) and Markos Moulitsas (“Be happy for coal miners losing their health insurance; they’re getting exactly what they voted for”) have reacted to stories about hardships and deprivation in Trump-leaning communities with unqualified disdain. Ex-New York Times theater critic Frank Rich recently declared he had “no sympathy for the hillbilly,” and suggested that:

“Liberals looking for a way to empathize with conservatives should endorse the core conservative belief in the importance of personal responsibility. Let Trump’s white working-class base take responsibility for its own votes — or in some cases failure to vote — and live with the election’s consequences… Let them reap the consequences for voting against their own interests.”

This kind of thinking isn’t limited to media commentators. It seems to be a strand in liberal thinking more broadly. Matthew Stoller collected a series of Huffington Post comments on an article about poor whites dying from ill-health and opiate addiction:

    “Sorry, not sorry. These people are not worthy of any sympathy. They have run around for decades bitching about poor minorities not “working hard enough,” or that their situation is “their own fault.” Well guess what? It’s not so great when it’s you now, is it? Bunch of deplorables, and if they die quicker than the rest of us that just means the country will be better off in the long run.”

    “Karma is a bitch and if these people choose to continue to vote Republican and try to deny other [sic] from attaining the American dream, they deserve no better than what they are getting!”

    “I for one have little sympathy for these despairing whites. If they can’t compete against people of color when everything has been rigged in their favor, then there’s really no help for them. Trump and his G(r)OPers will do little to elevate their lot. If anything, these poor whites will be hired to dig grave pits and assemble their own coffins.”

SOURCE

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Today’s populist movements are not the first to challenge parasitic oligarchies

Their grip needs to be broken in order for their country to flourish, says The Rt. Hon, the Viscount Ridley

I am writing this from the Netherlands, where one of the most gruesome paintings in the Rijksmuseum, by Jan de Baen, depicts the eviscerated bodies of the de Witt brothers, hanging upside down after the mob had killed them and then roasted and eaten their livers in 1672. It is an episode mentioned in a new book published this week by Douglas Carswell, a British MP, called Rebel, in which he wrestles with an eternal dilemma: why populist revolutions sometimes bring tyranny.

The republics of Rome, Venice and the Netherlands all experienced the same thing: an inept populist revolt against the growing power of an oligarchy — by Tiberius Gracchus, Bajamonte Tiepolo and Johan de Witt respectively — followed by a counter-revolution that resulted in an even worse oligarchy that throttled prosperity, in the form of Sulla, the Council of Ten and William of Orange respectively. The coups that killed the French and Russian revolutions were similar, but more about new forms of tyranny than returns to old ones.

Carswell sees parallels in today’s populism. Despite a hundred commentators saying so, Donald Trump is not like Nero or Hitler, but he may be like Gracchus (“a cross between Jeremy Corbyn and Donald Trump”): an anti-oligarch insurgent who soon makes oligarchy look preferable. After Trump, Americans may fall back in love with the bicoastal elite. Faced with Le Pen, many French will feel that énarques are not so bad after all. Prime Minister Farage would have made us appreciate PPE graduates again.

It is the Dutch parallel that is perhaps most instructive. Mr Trump has seen off a Bush and a Clinton, just as Johan de Witt tried to prevent the stadtholder of the Netherlands becoming a hereditary position, owned by the House of Orange. The similarities perhaps end there. De Witt was a cultured doctor of law with a fascination for Roman history who believed in free trade, free speech and republicanism. Yet in the end he ushered in monarchy, bankruptcy and decline.

That decline was not, Carswell says, because the Dutch lost their entrepreneurial spirit, as historians sometimes lazily assert, but because the Orangist elite became closed and parasitical, living off the spoils of conquest and investing their regressively raised taxes in bonds issued by overborrowed government, rather than in ships and shops. By 1713, 70 per cent of tax revenue went on servicing debt. “A free-wheeling republic had become a restrictionist, rentier state,” as Carswell puts it.

There is a lesson here. Europe as a whole is heading down the same path: slow growth and far too many people living off redistribution rather than enterprise — in private, public and voluntary sectors. The goose that always lays the golden eggs of prosperity is the habit of exchange and specialisation: people doing what they are good at, and getting better at it with innovation, while swapping the results freely with others through commerce. (Disclosure: here Carswell draws on my own recent books to buttress his case, and he showed me the text before publication.)

Carswell reminds us that “every society that ever managed to sustain intensive economic growth did so by staying close to the free-exchange end of the spectrum”. Like a rainforest ecosystem, commerce is a self-organising system that results in spontaneous order and complexity. For instance, nobody has planned or is in charge of the job of feeding ten million people for lunch in London today, but this incredibly complex task will be achieved smoothly.

Yet history shows that free exchange is constantly at risk of being infected and captured by parasites and predators who live off productive people through taxes, tithes, rents, slavery, subsidy, war and theft. This is what killed the goose in ancient Greece and Rome, in Renaissance Italy and Holland’s golden age. From time to time anti-oligarch insurgents are needed to purge the parasites, expel the predators and free the economy from their burden.

Now, says Carswell, is such a time. Forget the Ukip debacle: he is as genuine a rebel as parliament contains, who wants to “rein back the emerging oligarchy”. One of the problems with most of the new radicals, whether a Trump, a Farage, a Wilders or a Le Pen, is that they seem to be in thrall to the myth of the big (wo)man, who will lead the people to the promised land. Carswell wants to challenge the myth of the Big Man who knows everything. Instead he would allow the organisation of society along bottom-up lines.

He would end the power of central bank bureaucrats, allowing customers to decide banks’ reserve ratios by choosing among different options with different risks and rewards.

In place of debased fiat currencies, he would have self-regulating currencies controlled by competition, not by officials, along the lines of Bitcoin. He would have corporations regulated by those who own them and those who buy from them, rather than by easily lobbied crony regulators and subsidy providers. He would have public services controlled by members of the public.

All easier said than done, of course. And in politics he would undermine the power and privilege of the cartel of the main political parties with their public subsidies, access to patronage and ability to gerrymander constituencies to preserve safe seats: “In Clacton, I have twice taken on and defeated the established parties by doing for myself, often on a laptop, what political parties spend millions failing to do well.” It is now possible to do politics without party. Trump, Bernie Sanders and Emmanuel Macron all ran almost independently of their parties.

Carswell is right that the left does not get this. He cheered when Corbyn was elected, but says that radicals on the left do not understand how free exchange has elevated the human condition or the way that redistribution ultimately sustains oligarchy. We end up with the spectacle of left-wing activists such as Owen Jones and Paul Mason campaigning alongside Goldman Sachs and Christine Lagarde on behalf of the oligarchs of Brussels.

You might ask what a low-grade oligarch like me is doing endorsing this insurgent philosophy against my interests. The truth is I spend most of my time exchanging prose for profit, or speaking up in parliament for innovation and free exchange, and against cronyism and subsidy, usually ineffectively.

So when the revolution comes, metaphorically at least, I will join Douglas at the barricades.

SOURCE

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated),  a Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on THE PSYCHOLOGIST.

Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here  (Personal)

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Hate-filled DNC Chairman Perez Doesn't Share American Values

"Republicans don't give a s**t" about you" - DNC Chairman Tom Perez, addressing attendees at a rally

Is this what public discourse has come to? The head of one of the two major parties uses potty mouthed language in public...and then goes on to say he doesn't care what people think about what he said.  Charming, isn't he...

Of course, we shouldn't be surprised...Perez was Obama's labor secretary. Anyone who worked for someone as virulently opposed to all of America's founding ideals and way of life as Barack Obama is bound to be infected with the same Alinksy inspired communist drivel.

Perez seems to be lacking when it comes to facts in general. In addition to his other "colorful" remarks, the DNC head claimed that "Donald Trump, you don't stand for our values."

Whose values? Those of Perez and the left wing loons that form the largest part of the Democrat party? Those values?

People may question how sincere President Trump is regarding his campaign platform, but the policies he ran on are America's values.

America First means having fair trade that helps keep and expand American jobs for American workers. Does Mr. Perez disagree with helping to expand job opportunities for American citizens?

America First means keeping out people who don't belong here, thereby preserving jobs for Americans. It also means to stop picking the pockets of American taxpayers who have been forced to support the cost of keeping up those who are here illegally. Mr. Perez apparently finds that not to be a value he shares with the majority of Americans, who do support Trump's policies.

America First also means keeping our people safe from those who mean us harm. Perez doesn't share that value either, as he apparently thinks the more potential jihadists flooding into the country, the better.

Actually Mr. Perez, it's a lot more than just "Republicans" or "Trump" who don't "share your values".

Donald Trump won the votes of millions of people who aren't "Republicans". They were independents, moderates, working class and yes, a lot of disaffected Democrats who like Reagan, said many years ago, "I didn't leave the Democrat Party, they left me".

While your party has sold out to a myriad of special interests and engaged in identity politics for the sake of getting votes, you left the middle class behind.

Because of that, those middle class "deplorables" find the current Democrat Party deplorable...That's why your party lost all of those rust belt states that you took for granted of all these years.

Now you have the nerve to open up that potty mouth of yours and insult the people who said enough of class warfare and the divisive Democrat Party.

You're right, we don't share "your values", because your values are rooted in a very deep anti-American hatred. Your values represent destroying jobs for Americans. Your values represent destroying the rights of Christians to worship and exercise their faith freely as outlined in the first amendment of that document that you so despise.

Your values mean a never ending cycle of poverty for the inner cities with continued high unemployment and crime in black communities, because you'd rather buy their votes with welfare schemes than empowering small businesses.

Your values mean attacking law enforcement and making those communities even less safe as a result.

I could go on, but the fact is you're right about one thing - we don't share your "values". What you call values are not values at all...they are nothing more than a not so subtle attempt to take down this country.

No Mr. Perez, we don't share your "values", and we never will.

SOURCE

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Another poisonous bureaucracy

What happens when a reckless, unaccountable arm of the administrative state collides head-on with a Congressional committee demanding answers for constituents who have been harassed, extorted, or ignored for more than five years?

In the case of yesterday’s appearance by Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) Director Richard Cordray before the House Financial Services Committee, that would be a call for his dismissal. Surrounded by a cadre of green t-shirt wearing “consumer advocates,” Cordray was greeted by Chairman Jeb Hensarling (R-Texas) with this statement:

“Under Dodd-Frank, you can be removed for cause. Either way, I believe the President is clearly justified in dismissing you and I call upon the President — yet again — to do just that, and to do it immediately.”

Harsh? Maybe. Undeserved? Consider Chairman Hensarling’s succinctly stated case against the CFPB:

“[U]nder Mr. Cordray’s leadership, the CFPB has shown an utter disregard for protecting markets and has made credit more expensive and less available in many instances; this is particularly true for low and moderate income Americans. What is also clear is that under Mr. Cordray’s leadership, the CFPB has acted unlawfully, routinely denied market participants due process and abused its powers.”

If the charges against the CFPB had ended there, Chairman Hensarling would have had enough reason for calling the agency and Cordray out on the carpet. But the CFPB has been tagged with a laundry list of other shady practices, including race and sex discrimination, political favoritism, the targeting of individuals, and extravagant advertising.

Of even greater concern is the CFPB’s total lack of accountability. Created by the Dodd-Frank Act, the CFPB’s only oversight requirement is to appear and report twice annually before the House Financial Services and Senate Banking committees.  Its funding comes from the Federal Reserve System, not Congress; therefore, it is considered “off-budget” and not constrained by the Congressional appropriations process. The CFPB is run by a single director, who does not report to the President and can only be removed for “good cause.” Recently, a federal appeals panel found this structure to be unconstitutional, calling the unelected CFPB director “the single most powerful official in Washington,” aside from the duly elected President.

This absence of agency accountability, combined with the CFPB’s unprecedented thumbing of its nose to oversight inquiries, reinforced an adversarial environment for the hearing.  Knowing that their opportunities to question Mr. Cordray were few and far between, committee members gave the CFPB director their best shots.  Sadly, committee members had more questions than Cordray had answers. Here are a few highlights.

Prepaid Cards

In October 2016, the CFPB issued a 1,689-page rule, regulating the issuance of prepaid cards, which have garnered popularity due to rising checking account fees and minimum balance requirements. Opponents of the rule say it endangers providers of these cards and the nearly 68 million Americans who use these products. Congressional threats pressured the CFPB to delay implementation of the rule. At the hearing, Rep. Roger Williams (R-FL) stated his intention to pursue legislation introduced by him and Senator David Perdue (R-GA) to use the Congressional Review Act to rescind the rule.

Small Dollar Lending

Last summer, the CFPB proposed a far-reaching rule regulating small dollar, or “payday” lending practices. Under questioning from Rep. Blaine Luetkemeyer (R-MO), Cordray mentioned that the CFPB had received more than a million public comments to the rule. But he passed on answering Luetkemeyer’s questions about alternatives for small-dollar loan users if the regulations effectively ban the product. Nor did Cordray respond to questions about when to expect a final rule, despite the public comment period ending six months ago.

International Remittances

Under questioning from Rep. Andy Barr (R-Ky.), Cordray stated that the CFPB could not exempt credit unions from its regulations, in spite of the fact that CFPB’s burdensome rulemaking has forced credit unions on military bases to stop offering remittance products to American military personnel. Cordray made his assertion, despite the disagreement of Barr and other committee members, including Democrats.The CFPB continues to review this regulation.

Questions were also directed at Cordray regarding potential law breaking by the CFPB during the issuance of indirect auto lending regulations and rules adversely affecting the manufactured housing industry. Throughout the hearing, Cordray hemmed, hawed, and otherwise neglected to give answers.

Congress is unlikely to put up much longer with the dilatory tactics of the CFPB to explain its heavy-handed and abusive “consumer protection” tactics. Last year, Chairman Hensarling offered “The Financial CHOICE Act,” which would overhaul the Dodd-Frank Act, severely rein in the CFPB, and build in greater accountability safeguards for the agency and its director.  With Hensarling preparingto introduce a 2.0 version of the Financial CHOICE Act this year and the possibility that President Trump could remove Cordray from his perch of power, the director may have to come up with some answers — while he still can.

SOURCE

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She Never Joined a Union. But Union Fees Got Deducted From Her Paycheck

ST. PAUL, Minn.—Patricia Johansen has worked as a home caregiver for her two special-needs grandchildren for about 10 years.

Since she never agreed to join the union that represents such Medicaid-eligible caregivers in Minnesota, Johansen was surprised to discover that union dues had been deducted from her benefit check for about four months.

In an affidavit, the Fergus Falls resident says she is convinced the union, SEIU Healthcare Minnesota, forged her signature so it could start deducting the dues.

Johansen’s story is one reason a state lawmaker is scheduling a hearing where she expects the head of the state’s labor relations agency, a political appointee of Gov. Mark Dayton, to explain how SEIU Healthcare Minnesota won a unionization election—and why it should continue to represent the home caregivers.

State Rep. Marion O’Neill, chairman of the Subcommittee on Employee Relations, told The Daily Signal that she wants the Dayton appointee to appear before the joint panel of the Minnesota House and Senate to address evidence of “fraudulent signatures, nonexistent voters, and ballot tampering” in a 2014 unionization election.

Johansen’s experience is one such discrepancy.

“We are going to have a full, robust hearing on how this process happened and have the personal care assistants come forward to talk about their experiences, and to talk about how it came to be that union dues were taken out of their paycheck without their knowledge or permission,” O’Neill, a Republican from Buffalo, said in an interview with The Daily Signal.

The SEIU affiliate collects $4 million to $5 million in annual dues from the Medicaid benefits paid to what Minnesota calls personal care assistants, a lawyer representing them estimates.

The state government considers residents who care for chronically ill or disabled relatives at home to be personal care assistants who are able to receive Medicaid benefits for providing that care.

As The Daily Signal previously reported, a relatively small number of Minnesota’s 27,000 eligible personal care assistants voted in favor of an affiliate of Service Employees International Union, or SEIU, becoming their representative in collective bargaining.

Now personal care assistants such as Johansen have banded together in an effort to set a new election to decertify SEIU Healthcare Minnesota, in part because of what their lawyers describe as questionable tactics and the evidence of fraud.

The Minnesota Bureau of Mediation Services, a state agency that describes itself as promoting “stable and constructive labor-management relations,” has denied the caregivers’ petition for a new election.

O’Neill wants Commissioner Josh Tilsen, appointed in 2011 by Dayton, a Democrat, to lead the bureau, to explain its pro-SEIU actions so far.

More HERE

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated),  a Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on THE PSYCHOLOGIST.

Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here  (Personal)

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An important victory



The media hopes it goes away unnoticed   ....  Another win for Trump, another loss for Chuck Schumer, the Libtards, and the media that said Trump couldn't get Gorsuch through the Senate.  But, he did, didn't he?

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Russia! Russia! Russia! from the Left -- A frantic attempt to cover up for the real crooks -- in the Obama administration.

And judging by his increased military preparations, the fact-free hysteria has caused concern to Vladimir Vladimirovich.  That most of the loud voices in America seem to be both insane and hostile must bother him.  He must wonder whether Trump can override it

BY: ANN COULTER

The Susan Rice bombshell at least explains why the Democrats won’t stop babbling about Russia. They need a false flag to justify using national intelligence agencies to snoop on the Trump team.

Every serious person who has tried to locate any evidence that Russia attempted to influence the 2016 election — even Trump-haters at the New York Review of Books and Rolling Stone magazine — has come away empty-handed and angry. We keep getting bald assertions, unadorned with anything resembling a fact.

But for now, let’s just consider the raw plausibility of the story.

The fact-less claim is that (1) the Russians wanted Donald Trump to win; and (2) They thought they could help him win by releasing purloined emails from the Democratic National Committee showing that the Democrats were conspiring against Hillary Clinton’s primary opponent, Bernie Sanders.

First, why on earth would Russia prefer a loose cannon, untested president like Trump to an utterly corrupt politician, who’d already shown she could be bought? The more corrupt you think Russia is, the more Putin ought to love Hillary as president.

The Russians knew Hillary was a joke from her ridiculous “reset” button as secretary of state. They proceeded to acquire 20 percent of America’s uranium production, under Hillary’s careful management — in exchange for a half-million-dollar speaking engagement for her husband and millions of dollars in donations to the Clinton Foundation.

More HERE

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Russia! Russia! Russia! no more?

Strike on Syria is Trump's most popular move yet -- Approval from around the world

One president blinked, the other didn’t. When Bashar al-Assad crossed Barack Obama’s famous red line by using chemical weapons against his own people, nothing happened to him. When he did it on Donald Trump’s watch, he got hit with 59 Tomahawk missiles.

The Syrians are outraged at Trump’s actions; so are the ­Iranians; so are the Russians.

All of this might be good for Trump politically and in defining the character of his still inchoate presidency.

This US missile strike will have real effects — it destroyed a ­Syrian air force base — but it is unlikely to change the underlying strategic dynamics in Syria.

Trump and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson have been at pains to say this does not represent a basic change of Syria policy from the US. The missile strike was a one-off — as Malcolm Turnbull puts it, a calibrated and ­proportionate response to a war crime.

It has three narrow purposes: to punish the Assad regime for using chemical weapons; to show Assad that such actions will have costs; and to deter him from doing such things in the future.  The missile strike has a very good chance of achieving all three of those aims.

It also has wider strategic ­consequences. It shows bad actors everywhere that for all his domestic troubles, Trump remains a dan­gerous President to cross.

Trump has appointed three generals to his cabinet. He loves the US military and plans to strengthen it considerably.

He is not indifferent to risk; certainly the generals around him will have all the characteristic military caution about unnecessary military action, but nor is he scared to exercise the military option.

The political success of this ­operation lies in its limited, proportionate nature.

Trump is not committing the US to any follow-up action, still less to large numbers of US boots on the ground and a central role in shaping Syria politically. He has switched from a few weeks ago believing that the identity of the ­Syrian leader was a matter of indifference to the US to saying now that Assad should go.

This is a real setback for the Syrian dictator who, despite the savagery of his behaviour throughout the civil war, had won a kind of grudging acceptance from realists in governments around the world.

Increasingly they had come to recognise that Assad could not be ousted while he had Russian and Iranian support. More than that, they were terrified of what might come after Assad.

The biggest risk in the missile strike was that it might unintentionally kill Russians and provoke some kind of hot conflict between Russian and American forces in Syria.

This was the greatest danger of escalation. The Americans have avoided that. They told the Russian forces on the ground what they were doing in advance and the strike was precisely targeted.

The Russians nonetheless don’t like it, but it is not in Moscow’s interests to escalate against Washington.

And it will be impossible for Trump’s opponents to argue any longer that he is secretly acting in Russia’s interests. That may be a liberation for Trump.

For all that, the Syrian tragedy will continue.

SOURCE

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Trump's statement about the strike:

My fellow Americans:  On Tuesday, Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad launched a horrible chemical weapons attack on innocent civilians.  Using a deadly nerve agent, Assad choked out the lives of helpless men, women, and children.  It was a slow and brutal death for so many.  Even beautiful babies were cruelly murdered in this very barbaric attack.  No child of God should ever suffer such horror.

Tonight, I ordered a targeted military strike on the airfield in Syria from where the chemical attack was launched.  It is in this vital national security interest of the United States to prevent and deter the spread and use of deadly chemical weapons.  There can be no dispute that Syria used banned chemical weapons, violated its obligations under the Chemical Weapons Convention, and ignored the urging of the U.N. Security Council.

Years of previous attempts at changing Assad’s behavior have all failed, and failed very dramatically.  As a result, the refugee crisis continues to deepen and the region continues to destabilize, threatening the United States and its allies.

Tonight, I call on all civilized nations to join us in seeking to end the slaughter and bloodshed in Syria, and also to end terrorism of all kinds and all types.  We ask for God’s wisdom as we face the challenge of our very troubled world.  We pray for the lives of the wounded and for the souls of those who have passed.  And we hope that as long as America stands for justice, then peace and harmony will, in the end, prevail.

SOURCE

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12,392,000: U.S. Manufacturing Jobs Reach Highest Level in 8 Years

The United States added 11,000 jobs in manufacturing in March reaching a total of 12,392,000 people employed in the manufacturing sector, according to data released today by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

That is the greatest number of people employed in manufacturing in the United States since January 2009—the month that President Barack Obama was inaugurated—when there were 12,561,000 people employed in manufacturing.

In February 2009, manufacturing employment dropped to 12,380,000—a number it did not exceed until February of this year, when it reached 12,381,000.

At the same time, according to BLS, the number of people employed in government increased by 9,000 in March, climbing from 22,309,000 in February to 22,318,000.

Since December 2016, the U.S. has gained 49,000 manufacturing jobs and 19,000 government jobs.

Government jobs in the United States in March still outnumbered manufacturing jobs by 9,926,000.

The number of manufacturing jobs in the United States peaked in June 1979 at 19,553,000. Since then, it has declined by 7,161,000 to the 12,392,000 reported for this March, according to the BLS numbers.

During the same time frame—from June 1979 to February 2017—the number of government jobs grew from 16,045,000 to the current 22,318,000, an increase of 6,273,000.

SOURCE

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Swedes not laughing now

Was Donald Trump right all along about Sweden's crime and immigration problems?

Just over six weeks after Donald Trump was mocked across the world for suggesting that Sweden was the victim of a terror attack, at least three people have been left dead when a hijacked truck ploughed into pedestrians.

The American president's proclaimed attack - which turned out to be fictitious - was linked to high levels of immigration and rising levels of crime in the country he said, later clarifying that he had based his comments on a Fox News report.

He was immediately ridiculed, with Carl Bildt, the former Swedish Prime Minister asking "what has he been smoking?" and the country's US embassy appeared to mock him on Twitter.

But yesterday the Swedish capital was hit by its own terrorist attack, with echoes of those in London, Berlin and Nice.

Integration has remained a problem in the country where the relatively high numbers of immigrants compared to a population of just under 10 million means it has one of the highest rates of immigration per capita in northern Europe.

The numbers have been rising steadily since the 1990s, and in 2015 Sweden accepted a record number of more than 160,000 refugees.

Meanwhile, in a report published in February last year the police "identified 53 residential areas around the country that have become increasingly marred by crime, social unrest and insecurity".

While the Government denies that these are "no-go zones", it admitted in a rebuttal to the claims of Mr Trump that police "have experienced difficulties fulfilling their duties".

SOURCE

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated),  a Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on THE PSYCHOLOGIST.

Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here  (Personal)

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Politics and IQ

Are smart people Left-leaning?  There is some recent evidence to say so, though the correlation is weak.  A paper by Michael Woodley is therefore of interest ("Problematic constructs and cultural-mediation: A comment on Heaven, Ciarrochi and Leeson (2011)").

He surveys the literature and shows that the findings go both ways.  On some occasions Leftists score highest while on others conservatives do.

He resolves that the way I do -- by saying that high IQ people are quicker to figure out what is currently socially acceptable and say that.  At the moment being conservative is likely to bring a ton of abuse ("racist") down on your head so it is no wonder that smart people claim to be Leftist

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US healthcare: most people don't know what they're talking about

The article below is good at debunking some myths about U.S. healthcare.  It points out factors that distort the national averages.  It skips over the big one, however.  National averages are a poor guide to the health of most Americans.  America has two big minorities that tend to have poor health and which therefore drag down the national averages. If the statistics for whites only are extracted, they show average health levels that are among the world's best

US healthcare is famous for three things: it's expensive, it's not universal, and it has poor outcomes. The US spends around $7,000 per person on healthcare every year, or roughly 18% of GDP; the next highest spender is Switzerland, which spends about $4,500. Before Obamacare, approx 15% of the US population were persistently uninsured (8.6% still are). And as this chart neatly shows, their overall outcome on the most important variable—overall life expectancy—is fairly poor.

But some of this criticism is wrongheaded and simplistic: when you slice the data up more reasonably, US outcomes look impressive, but being the world's outrider is much more expensive than following behind. What's more, most of the solutions people offer just don't get to the heart of the issue: if you give people freedom they'll spend a lot on healthcare.

The US undoubtedly spends a huge amount on healthcare. One popular narrative is that because of market failures and/or extreme overregulation in healthcare, prices are excessively high. So Americans with insurance (or covered by Medicare, the universal system for the elderly, or Medicaid, the government system for the poor) get the same as other developed world citizens, but those without get very poor care and die younger. A system like the NHS solves the problem, according to this view, with bulk buying of land, labour, and inputs, better incentives, and universal coverage.

But there are some serious flaws in this theory. Firstly, extending insurance to the previously-uninsured doesn't, in America, seem to have large benefits. For example, a recent NBER paper found no overall health gains from the massive insurance expansion under Obamacare.* A famous RAND study found minuscule benefits over decades from giving out free insurance to previously uninsured in the 1970s. In fact, over and above the basics, insuring those who choose not to get insurance doesn't ever seem to have large gains. Indeed, there is wide geographic variation in the life expectancy among the low income in the US, but this doesn't even correlate with access to medical care! This makes it unlikely that the gap between the US and the rest is explained by universality.

To find the answer, consider the main two ingredients that go into health outcomes. One is health, and the other is treatment. If latent health is the same across the Western world, we can presume that any differences come from differences in treatment. But this is simply not the case. Obesity is far higher in the USA than in any other major developed country. Obviously it is a public health problem, but it's unrealistic to blame it on the US system of paying for doctors, administrators, hospitals, equipment and drugs.

In fact in the US case it's not even obesity, or indeed their greater pre-existing disease burden, that is doing most of the work in dragging their life expectancy down; it's accidental and violent deaths. It is tragic that the US is so dangerous, but it's not the fault of the healthcare system; indeed, it's an extra burden that US healthcare spending must bear. Just simply normalising for violent and accidental death puts the USA right to the top of the life expectancy rankings.

This is what we'd expect if we approached the topic more honestly, and dug into the detail of healthcare stats. You might think—you might think!—that this is what international healthcare rankings like those from the WHO or the Commonwealth Fund do. Not so. The WHO just looks at a corrected life expectancy measure, but not one corrected for any of the factors which attempt to isolate the impact of healthcare. The Commonwealth Fund's is a mix of high level aggregate measures like physicians per capita and a survey asking people around the world questions like whether "Doctor or other clinical staff talked with patient about a healthy diet and healthy eating". Neither are useless, but they are not the real deal.

Academic papers that drill down into the detail find that the US does well in cancer survival, heart attack and stroke survival, and successfully medicating those with long-term conditions such as diabetes. In fact, when the Commonwealth Fund did this sort of analysis themselves decades ago, the US ranked among the best of countries. This is partly because the US has much more advanced equipment, partly because it funds more costly treatments in general, and partly because it funds the newest treatments, when their marginal costs are often stratospheric. This may subsidise medical research for everyone else.

Now this is not to say the US system works well. The fact that the US spends vastly more than everyone else, and only does a bit better, if that, makes the system pretty unimpressive. But it's important to understand why. The UK really does have "death panels" that refuse treatments because they're extremely costly relative to their tiny impact. The USA has a system where most people can buy—are even subsidised through the tax system to buy—insurance that is as extensive as they like, paying for ever more expensive and marginally beneficial therapies. Eventually you're spending a fifth of your GDP on it.

Maybe if the US government straightened things out—scrapped the incentives that push people to get too much healthcare and deregulated the system to increase competition and push down costs the US would spend a more rational share of its income on health. I think this is pretty likely. But I bet the gap wouldn't go away fully. Americans just have a lot of cash, and want to spend an increasing share of it on their wellbeing as they get even richer. As long as the system is mostly open, I'd expect that to continue.

SOURCE

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Levin: Progressivism, Statism 'Is a Poison for Power'

Talking about the judicial branch of government on his nationally syndicated radio talk show program, host Mark Levin suggested that the leftists would use the court to gain power, saying that progressivism, statism “is a poison for power.”

“[P]rogressivism, or as I call it, statism, but either way, is a poison,” stated Mark Levin. “It is a poison, and it is a poison for power.”

Levin’s comments come as Judge Neil Gorsuch awaits confirmation this week in Washington DC.  Below is a transcript of Mark Levin’s comments from his show:

“You need to know, and I know you do, that progressivism, or as I call it, statism, but either way, is a poison. It is a poison, and it is a poison for power.

“And you’ll learn all about it and a heck of a lot more in “Rediscovering Americanism,” but I want to stay on this.

“The leftists decided, the statists decided more than 100 years ago that the key institution that would be used to alter the American landscape, the constitutional landscape, the American culture with rugged individualism, the American psychology of freedom would be the courts.

“First, you needed an all-powerful president, and then you need an all-powerful president who would change the judiciary. And that’s exactly what happened – in big chunks, starting in the 1900s, the early 1900s, and then a massive leap with Franklin Roosevelt. “And it’s never stopped.”

SOURCE

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Benign neglect:  How Hong Kong prospered

The power of do-nothing government

Hong Kong could easily be described as the most neoliberal country in the world — a paragon of neoliberal success.

The story of Hong Kong’s growth is both long and fascinating, and could not be done justice in a mere blogpost. But there is one man who is worth mentioning, who has much responsibility for making Hong Kong into what it is today, and yet is all too often forgotten.

John J. Cowperthwaite is not likely a name that you will remember from your history lessons. In fact, it is not likely a name that you will remember at all. He is arguably one of history’s most unsung heroes, and that is a great shame, for he was absolutely instrumental in not only taking Hong Kong’s economy from strength to strength after the Second World War, but also in showing the world that laissez faire economics is workable and brings results.

Milton Friedman said “it would be hard to overestimate the debt that Hong Kong owes to Cowperthwaite”. But he was by no means a self-important man. He had a reputation for being shy, and as an appointed civil servant, he owed no favours to anyone. He arrived in Hong Kong in 1946 as the Assistant financial secretary, with instructions to “come up with a plan for economic growth”. But he came up with no plan, and yet the economy grew. It grew astoundingly. In the decade that he was financial secretary, wages rose by 50% and the percentage of those living in poverty in Hong Kong plummeted from 50 to 15%.

What did this son of a Scottish tax collector do to propel so many into prosperity? The answer is that he didn’t do anything. When a British executive approached Cowperthwaite to ask him to develop the merchant banking industry, Cowperthwaite politely palmed him off and told him that he had better find a merchant banker. Similarly, when a legislator suggested to Cowperthwaite that the government should prioritise the development of promising industries, Cowperthwaite refused and asked how the government could possibly know which businesses had potential and which did not.

Cowperthwaite flat out refused to collect most economic statistics, from fear that doing so would give bureaucrats and legislators an excuse to meddle in the economy. Of course, this caused upset in Whitehall, and when they commanded a group of civil servants to go over and see just what the hell was going on, Cowperthwaite sent them home as soon as they arrived. Yet still from 1945 to 1997 Hong Kong ran a surplus every financial year – surprising all involved because the surpluses were not planned. Rather, they arose as a result of the market being left free.

It was slightly unfair of me to state that John Cowperthwaite “didn’t do anything”. For though his success was largely down to his non-interventionism, ensuring that there was no intervention was backbreaking work. People were always trying to tinker with the economy. But Cowperthwaite maintained: “in the long run, the aggregate of the decisions of individual businessmen, exercising individual judgment in a free economy, even if often mistaken, is likely to do less harm than the centralized decisions of a Government; and certainly the harm is likely to be counteracted faster.”

Today Hong Kong has a GDP per capita at 264% of the world's average, which has doubled in the last 15 years. The World Bank now rates the “ease of doing business” in Hong Kong as the best in the world. It has no taxes on capital gains, interest income or earnings from abroad. Its overall tax burden is just half of that of the United States. Its people are rich and its government small, and for this reason, it makes a fitting cover for our latest paper, but for this reason also, we should be thankful to John J Cowperthwaite.

SOURCE

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated),  a Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on THE PSYCHOLOGIST.

Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here  (Personal)

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‘Shameful’ Media Defense of Susan Rice in Unmasking Scandal

 Liberals in the media are scrambling to cover for the revelation that Barack Obama’s former National Security Adviser, Susan Rice, unmasked Donald Trump associates in classified intelligence. Media Research Center President Brent Bozell issued the following statement:

“The liberal media’s ‘nothing to see here’ approach to Susan Rice’s politically-motivated unmasking of Trump associates in sensitive intelligence material is shameful. You’d think someone who lied to the press and the American people about her role in the unmasking just two weeks ago would invite more scrutiny. We have a smoking gun that points to criminal activity by President Obama’s national security advisor and the media have shown an utter lack of interest in pursuing the story. If this story is not a top priority for every news outlet, they are aiding and abetting a cover-up. President Trump has every right to be furious with the press and the American people have every reason to be disgusted."

SOURCE

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Limited Government is Important -- and Trump is actually limiting it

Fewer than 70 days into the new administration and some in the media are already writing and talking about the "do-nothing" Congress and presidential administration, which critics allege have yet to accomplish anything significant.

Regardless of what you might hear from their critics, you shouldn't believe these baseless accusations. In less than three months, President Trump and Congress have done a lot. Most of their early actions are getting relatively no attention, however, which is occurring for a number of reasons, including the fact most members of the mainstream media are big-government liberals who dislike Mr. Trump and Congress for what they've achieved.

The laws passed and executive orders issued by Mr. Trump and congressional Republicans are substantially different than those actions taken by most previous administrations. Rather than expand the size and scope of the federal government, Mr. Trump and the GOP have worked to reduce government's influence on society - in large part by reversing or blocking "midnight" regulations enacted by Obama administration officials before they finally made their way out the door at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue in January.

Republicans have long-claimed their party is the champion of limited government, but since Ronald Reagan was president in 1980s, they have done relatively little to back up the claim. Instead, Republican presidents have often pushed their own brand of activism that grew government, including No Child Left Behind, the creation of the Transportation Security Administration, the expansion of prescription drug coverage, a ban on imported semi-automatic rifles, and the creation of the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change.

When Republican presidents weren't busy doing their best impression of big-government Democrats, Republican-controlled Congresses repeatedly failed to block regulations they said are illegal and passed budgets that increased government's power and control.

Thus far, this trend seems to have halted with the Trump administration. Mr. Trump issued an executive order that ultimately ensured the completion of the Dakota Access Pipeline, a project President Barack Obama blocked in the waning days of his administration to appease his radical environmental allies.

Mr. Trump also issued an executive order to force reconsideration of the Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) Waters of the United States (WOTUS) rule, which would have greatly expanded the federal government's control over private property across the United States. Federal courts had previously stayed WOTUS, out of the suspicion it unconstitutionally ignored previous Supreme Court wetlands decisions. Now, Trump ordered EPA to reconsider the rule and has decided not to defend it in court.

Arguably the most far-reaching executive order Mr. Trump has issued is his directive for all administrative agencies to remove two regulations for each new regulation they issue.

On the budget front, Mr. Trump has proposed cutting the budgets of the vast majority of the existing regulatory agencies. For instance, he proposed cutting EPA's budget by more than 25 percent and reducing the agency's staff by 20 percent. In the process, Trump would end all of EPA's climate programs.

Other agencies and cabinet offices would also see significant cuts, including a nearly 29 percent cut to the State Department's budget and an approximately 12 percent cut to the Department of the Interior.

Mr. Trump seems intent to do what he has promised - which greatly conflicts with what other so-called conservatives before him have done - forcing government to focus on its core functions. No more funding for the arts, public television, green-energy boondoggles, or international climate programs on Mr. Trump's watch.

Congress has had the power to review and block major regulations since it passed the Congressional Review Act (CRA) in 1996, but it has rarely used it. CRA allows the House and the Senate to pass resolutions of disapproval to block major regulations issued by federal agencies. Despite tens of thousands of regulations being enacted in the 20 years since CRA passed, Congress has used it only three times to block new rules, and only once has a president signed the resolution. (Mr. Obama vetoed the two disapproval resolutions passed during his presidency.)

Mr. Trump's ascendance seems to finally have stiffened Congress' backbone, because the House and Senate are now using the CRA with a vengeance. Congress has sent more than a half-dozen CRA resolutions disapproving late-term Obama administration regulations to Trump for his signature, and, incredibly, he's actually signing them.

Using the CRA, Congress blocked a regulation forcing local school districts to adopt specific federal teacher-preparation programs and directions for how states and school districts must evaluate and report school performance. Congress also prevented regulations that would have taken away senior citizens' Second Amendment rights if they need help managing their finances.

In its first use of the CRA under Mr. Trump, Congress halted a rule imposed by Mr. Obama that would have unnecessarily threatened over one-third of the nation's coal-mining jobs. Despite the Interior Department's own reports showing virtually all coal mines have no off-site impacts and lands are being restored successfully under existing federal and state regulations, Mr. Obama tried to institute a so-called "stream protection rule," which would have forced the revision of more than 400 regulations.

Contrary to what is being reported, Mr. Trump and Congress are quickly working to achieve one of their most important goals: limiting the size and power of the federal government over people's lives. And in doing so, they are keeping the commitment they made when they took the oath of office, which requires they uphold and defend the Constitution of the United States.

Let's hope the progress continues.

SOURCE

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What Congress Can Learn From the Rhode Island Miracle

You’d be hard-pressed to find a more poorly designed program in the federal budget than Medicaid, the health insurance program for low-income Americans. The costs are shared between the states and the feds, which means that the more money a state wastes under Medicaid, the bigger the check Washington writes to the state. No wonder the program costs keep spiraling out of control.

Obamacare added nearly 20 million people to the Medicaid rolls, and the Left considers that a policy victory. Federal and state budgets are swelling.

Oh, to return to the days when taking people off of welfare — not putting them on the dole — was the goal.

Conservatives have argued that Medicaid’s management should be turned over to the states through a block-grant allotment of funds. When Republicans proposed this in their Obamacare replacement bill, liberals blew a gasket. They hate the notion of allowing governors to run the program in their states as the governors see fit, free of the thicket of cumbersome federal rules. The Left portrays the idea as heartless and a scheme to rip a hole in the safety net.

In reality, block granting Medicaid to the states would likely add a new incentive structure to control costs while holding state lawmakers accountable for delivering quality care. Medicaid doesn’t do that right now. It delivers subpar care, with many top hospitals and treatment centers refusing to take Medicaid patients.

We already have a wonderful case study of a state running its own Medicaid program, and Congress and the White House should aim to duplicate this success story.

I am referring to the under-publicized Rhode Island experiment of a few years ago. In 2009, Rhode Island received a waiver from federal Medicaid rules in exchange for a cap on federal costs.

It worked like a charm. A 2013 analysis by Gary Alexander, the former secretary of Rhode Island’s Health and Human Services, found that in the first four years the state’s annual cost increases dropped to less than half of the national pace.

When Rhode Island received its Medicaid waiver, 1 of every 5 residents was enrolled, and costs were growing by 7.5 percent annually. Under the waiver, the state’s official Medicaid documents show, costs rose an average of only 1.3 percent a year from 2009 to 2012 — far below the 4.6 percent rate in the other 49 states.

Rhode Island saved money by reducing the amount of emergency-room visits by Medicaid recipients for routine medical needs. The state saved even more by shifting the elderly out of expensive nursing homes, offering home-care subsidies and promoting assisted-living arrangements. Seniors often would rather avoid institutionalization, making this a win-win.

An independent assessment by the economic consulting firm Lewin Group concluded that reforms allowed under the waiver were “highly effective in controlling Medicaid costs.” The program was found to have “improved access to more appropriate services.”

Alexander has become the Pied Piper for Medicaid waivers. “This is such a terrific solution because in Rhode Island we reduced costs and provided better care. When the state had an incentive to save money rather than spend it, this changed everything.” He added, “State waivers are the way out of the Medicaid crisis.”

But the Left and the Washington bureaucrats don’t want to surrender control of the program. They want a universal, one-size-fits-all solution. We know from welfare reform in the mid-1990s (with work requirements, time limits and training programs) that turning control over to the states will lead to innovative solutions that improve people’s lives — and save money. Why can’t that success happen with health care?

Republicans should continue to insist on solutions to Medicaid that provide some federal funding but allow states maximum flexibility. The GOP block grant makes financial sense and will help ensure that Medicaid doesn’t bankrupt Washington and the 50 states.

The Trump administration doesn’t need to wait. It can start this program tomorrow, simply by putting out word that it will issue Rhode Island-style Medicaid waivers to states that apply. The White House has full authority to do this, and many states will line up for the offer.

One big advocate for this is Vice President Mike Pence. Back when Pence was governor of Indiana, he told me: “If Washington would give me 80 percent of the Medicaid money they now send Indiana but got rid of the red tape and regulations, I would take that deal in a minute.” Donald Trump should listen to his vice president and let the Rhode Island miracle take hold in every state in the nation.

SOURCE

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Liberal logic yet again



Hatred of the rest of us is all they know

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated),  a Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on THE PSYCHOLOGIST.

Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here  (Personal)

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