Negative Railroad

When did “earning your keep” lose its dignity?

http://cleveland.cbslocal.com/2013/05/16/buckets-of-kfc-chicken-smuggled...

A new company has emerged in the Middle East that smuggles fast food from an Egyptian Kentucky Fried Chicken to Gaza residents through a tunnel.

People in the conflicted region can now satisfy cravings for food from the Louisville-based fast food headquarters by ordering through a company that charges the American equivalent of $30 for smugglers to bring the greasy goods from Al-Arish in Egypt to the doorsteps of hungry customers.

They tell me the grilled chicken isn’t greasy.

The State of Minnesota has passed legislation to legalize same-sex marriage. Still just between two partners, and between people who are not already related.

There is a massive emotional outpouring of joy. The law is not a surprise, so there is really only perfunctory statements of grief from opponents of SSM and opponents of any kind of government involvement in marriage.

A few comments on Facebook have coalesced into a recognition.

For all the happiness and love I see from and for homosexuals today, they are still a shadow. A same-sex couple will never get to experience the joy produced by the birth of a child conceived in a loving union between bodies and souls.

No earthly power can overrule God’s design.

I would like to be happy for the gay couples I know who now might legalize their relationship. And I can be happy for them. But after awakening to this essential difference, I will probably regard every same-sex couple with at least a hint of pity.

It is a sad day. Not for the loss of traditional marriage, but for the acceptance of delusion as truth. If Satan exists, this is how he would want his world to function.

You can't tell the truth to strangers.

Quoted from: Sippican Cottage

Sippican Cottage muses on the difference between working and making:

Unlike most of the world, I am not allowed to have the Process be the Product. At the end of the day there has to be something tangibly different with the world or we don't eat. Sometimes we don't eat anyway. Most of the world we inhabit now is all Process and no Product. What is Twitter, or Tumblr, or Facebook, or a million other things you could name that consist solely of: This is how I go, when I go like this.

The federal government thinks the process is the entire product. The public school system can produce only public school teachers. The EPA is now supposed to protect the air from humans. The Department of Energy doesn't make any, and would prefer you didn't as well --or else. Cities like Detroit are trying to exist with no population now. Search your mind. You'll have to search hard to find exceptions, not examples.

As I have complained more than once, talking about jobs and creating jobs misses the point. What matters is creating value. Not just something you value, or that has an abstract value, but something that has tradable value. Something you can exchange for food and shelter.

The speedometer doesn't make the car go faster. Showing up to a job is no guarantee that the effort is genuinely adding to the global wealth. Process is a cost, an expense. It may be necessary, but keeping busy isn’t a sustainable strategy. The process must lead to a product. Otherwise, after all the effort, somebody ends up more hungry than if we didn’t go through the process at all.

Posted by a Facebook pally:

Regarding Lance Armstrong: If I wanted to listen to the opinions of smug assholes who ride bikes and do way too many drugs, I'd move to Northeast Minneapolis.

Bazinga!

http://voxday.blogspot.com/2012/11/the-art-of-reframe.html

In the same way that tax revenues are not maximized by maximizing tax rates, as per the Laffer curve, freedom of action and opportunity is not maximized by maximizing legal freedom for everyone on the planet.  Podhoretz, for example, would not be more free if Hamas were legally permitted to set up Jew-baking ovens in New York City, just as Americans would not be more free if 50 million Mexicans were legally permitted to enter the country and begin voting for the sort of policies they are accustomed to voting for when choosing between the Partido Revolucionario Institucional and the Party of the Democratic Revolution, both of which are members of the Socialist International.

Since freedom is not easily mathematically quantified, it is not as simple to construct a Liberty curve as a Laffer curve, but the logic is the same.

Having the heart of an anarchist, I understand the case for eliminating government. It fails, like all theoretical utopias, when applied to imperfect men in a world open to evil.

http://chicagoboyz.net/archives/32489.html#more-32489

Far from being the natural outgrowth of a broad philosophical commitment to the idea of self-ownership and control of our own bodies, the Democrats stance on the right to abortion is the sole and glaring exception to an ideology that otherwise treats the bodies of women like the bodies of government owned cattle.
…

A party that tells women what size of soda she can buy doesn’t actually believe that women control their own bodies.
…

Once you no longer have enough freedoms to marshal the resources to defend yourself politically, they won’t have to humor you anymore and they will suddenly discover that your inability to choose your own soda size, cough syrup and cancer treatments also means you don’t have the ability to choose whether to have or refuse an abortion…

Death is the lowest-cost option for treating many diseases. Applying that treatment pre-birth saves even more money.

“A society, in order to progress, must not be burdened by the avoidable demands of unfortunate genes.

The reality is that it just doesn't matter very much at all whether Barack Obama serves George Bush's fourth term or Mitt Romney serves Barack Obama's second term.

Quoted from: Kn@ppster

via: Aretae

Here’s a metaphor for how I see the economic debate in the current election:

Imagine the economy is a bridge. The bridge has begun to groan and sway. Two engineers have proposed plans to strengthen the bridge.

The first engineer believes that more traffic moving faster over the bridge is the best solution. The second engineer proposes cutting away some of the bridge’s supports.

Obviously, neither one will fix the bridge. And either one will almost certainly bring it closer to failure.

In the midst of debunking arguments for organic foods, a Missouri farmer points out something recent headlines have missed:

Yes, this summer’s drought, which hammered the production of both organic and conventional foods, has led to a decrease in yields, but it’s worth noting that this year’s disappointing corn yield would have been a record yield just 20 years ago. The worst drought in nearly a century, and a national corn yield that would have been a record in 1993!

Food prices will still rise, since there’s not much slack in demand for corn and the stuff corn is used to make. But the underlying story is one of optimism and abundance. Similar drought conditions starved people in the 1930s. Thanks to advances in all the technology used by agriculture, we can weather the worst weather.

My lefty pallys on Facebook have alerted me to the imminent loss of a treasured restaurant in St. Paul:

Business is down for Mai Village Restaurant, and it is facing foreclosure. It's scheduled for a sheriff foreclosure sale at the end of October 2012.

Mai Nguyen and Ngoan Dang, owners of Mai Village, have put everything they have into the restaurant. Every single minute of their lives revolves around it.…

Mai and Ngoan were refugees from Vietnam. 22 years ago, they used all their savings to open Mai Village, one of the first restaurants to open on Saint Paul's east University Avenue…

But now, because of the economic recession and light rail construction, many customers are not coming to Mai Village like they used too.…

Albeit a minor comeuppance, it still amuses:

Apple is [most recently] famous for accusing Samsung of “slavishly copying” the design of its iPhone. The copying claims led to a long-running legal battle that ultimately resulted in Samsung owing Apple about $1 billion. It seems Apple has been doing a bit of copying designs of its own.

The Swiss are famous for clocks and watches. Switzerland has long been the source of some the most iconic watch designs and beautifully intricate timepieces in the world. The Swiss Federal Railway service has accused Apple of copying its iconic railway clock.

Clearly looking at the two clocks side-by-side, they are identical save for the Swiss clock’s logo.

Government policy always has economic impacts. Over time, these impacts accumulate and multiply upon one another. This leads prices of goods and services away from what they would be under a “freer market”. Distorted prices create distorted allocations, which may be good or bad, depending on how one feels about government manipulating markets in the first place.

At some point, though, the relative prices of things get so far away from “natural” prices that the system of valuation breaks down. This breakdown is what I call “The Great Repricing”.

Captain Capitalism runs a thought experiment which illustrates how relative prices have lost touch with relative values:

I’ve been saying that economic forces will precipitate a Brief Period of Violent Upheaval. Commenter “Knarf” at Vox Popoli reminds me that socio-political frustrations are another source of ignition:

If Obama has his reelection stolen from him by The Man, the oppressed underclass of color will erupt in a convulsion of righteous anger and there will "Rodney King"-grade riots, looting, and burning in every major city in the country.

However, if Obama wins reelection, the people will erupt in a spontaneous joyous celebration, and there will be "Detroit Pistons win the NBA Championship"-grade riots, looting, and burning in every major city in the country.

In meatspace I’ve been seeing an unusual amount of anger lately. From all factions. Two months of Presidential campaigning is unlikely to soothe anyone.

Arnold Kling strays from economics to politics and concludes:

This year's pre-election hatefest is already out of control, in my opinion. It will not end well.

I agree. We differ by his belief that a Brief Period of Violent Upheaval is unlikely, while I say it is inevitable.

Although I see it precipitated by economic issues, his sketch fits in my frame.

http://chicagoboyz.net/archives/31607.html

On August 12, 1812, the Middleton Railway put two steam locomotives into regular service, marking the beginning of the railroad era—the social, economic, and political consequences of which would be vast.

Indeed.

Still too busy to blog. But I wanted to get on the record for a thought about Chick-Fil-A day (or Chickenstock, as described by one participant).

The upcoming period of violent upheaval could take the proportions of a civil war. If so, it will be fought between liberty-minded individualists and post-modern theophobes. In a sense, gay is the new black.

If so, Chickenstock may have been the Harper’s Ferry of our next civil war.

I enjoyed wasting a lot of time playing the original version of SimCity. It simply but reasonably modeled the basic problems in city planning. As my town’s population grew, roads got so congested that commerce started to fail. So, like a good planner should, I would build transit lines.

Using cheat codes to give my plans an essentially unlimited pile of tax revenue to spend, I built block upon block of high-density buildings. Eventually, all the roads were replaced by transit lines. That allowed further increases in density, but, eventually, even the transit lines were choked by all the demand for traffic.

What I saw on my computer screen in 1990 is happening to Boston today:

[R]eal hiring is a function of real demand, which in turn is a function of purchasing power.

Quoted from: Karl Denninger