Negative Railroad A Collection of Breaks in the Line

Bastiat’s concept of a negative railroad involved unneccessary breaks in the line that would provide employment to porters and baggage handlers. The same principle applies to duties and tariffs imposed at borders:

Just think how many jobs Congress could create by encouraging states to erect their own tariff walls? High-taxing and heavily regulating states would then be able to protect their workers from states with lower taxes and less-burdensome regulations. California wineries would never again lose market share to rivals in Oregon and Washington state. Michigan autoworkers would never again be displaced from their jobs by workers in Tennessee and South Carolina.

An item from last May:

Thousands of Americans are receiving federal stimulus checks in the mail, this week. Only problem: many of them are deceased.
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The Social Security Administration, which sent out 52 million checks, said some of those checks mistakenly went to dead people because the agency had no record of their death. That amounts to between 8,000 and 10,000 checks for millions of dollars.

If Unicorn Care screws up your medical history and you die, at least you might still get your handout. A win-win, I guess.

Subject line reference.

While pseudo-intellectual elites are wringing their hands about globalistical warmening threatening to drown worthless places like Tuvalu, the actual climate is freezing people off Peruvian mountaintops:

For alpaca farmer Ignacio Beneto Huamani and his young family, life in the Peruvian Andes, at almost 4,700m above sea level, has always been a struggle against the elements. His village of Pichccahuasi, in Peru's Huancavelica region, is little more than a collection of small thatched shelters and herds of alpaca surrounded by beautiful, yet bleakly inhospitable, mountain terrain.

The current President said:

job losses have diminished substantially since the depths of the recession when the economy was hemorrhaging jobs a rate of 700,000 a month.

"It is true that we, as a country, are in a very different place than we were when 2009 began," Obama said, saying there was evidence of a "positive trend" in the November employment report released on Friday.

Here’s what he’s accomplished in his first year:

Citizens in the U.S. are supposed to be protected from the government interfering with peaceable assemblies. We’re also supposed to be able to petition our government for redress. But a crafty landlord can use property law to nullify those principles:

The Jefferson Area Tea Party has been officially banned from the area around Congressman Tom Perriello’s office. The landlord of the building where Perriello’s office is located, Lisa Murphy, has convince the local officials that recent protests outside the office is negatively affecting the other tenants in the building.

The headlines say the worst is over. The $700B TARP program, for example, stabilized the financial industry.

How does this square with that picture?

Hunkering down by the fire, I snuggled up with H.R. 4173, the financial-reform legislation passed earlier this month by the House of Representatives.
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It authorizes Federal Reserve banks to provide as much as $4 trillion in emergency funding the next time Wall Street crashes. So much for “no-more-bailouts” talk.
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Good craftsmanship depends on good tools. The orthodox conception of economics holds that government can craft better outcomes than we would have if the rabble were left to their own devices.

Tools can be divided into two broad classes: working tools and measuring tools. First (and second, if you follow the maxim) the craftsman must measure. Then he cuts. Without good measurements, the quality of the working tools and the skill of the craftsman are moot.

I’ve read much speculation about Senator Reid’s motivation to rush voting on the health bill by Christmas. One idea I haven’t seen was that the lefties’ 60-vote majority could vanish on January 19th, 2010. That’s when Massachusetts votes to fill Ted Kennedy’s former Senate seat.

If the Republican candidate pulls off an upset, righty filibusters will stand (until Reid buys off one of the Maine ladies again, anyway). Congress reconvenes on the 5th of January. There would be procedural delays associated with reconvening, and the righties’ parliamentary delaying tactics would start with a fresh clock.

Governments at all levels are in financial trouble. Colonel Obama says the Federal government is facing a wall. The Governator has been zig-zagging California toward a cliff. Visits to Detroit’s decay are a regular feature on NRR. But the City of the Century may beat them all in the race to failure:

My latest hero, Ebenezer Scrooge, is an example of a pervasive fallacy:

The widespread notion that free markets are corrupting is rooted at least in part in the innocent truism that for the market to work people must act according to self-interest. Without the motivation of self-interest, there would be no profit seeking, no price competition, no production and exchange. True enough, the market requires self-interested behavior.

But many make an illogical leap from this truism to a falsehood: that if one is self-interested, one cannot be other-interested. Many see an either/or choice. Scrooge can care about Scrooge, or he can care about others: the poor, his clerk Bob Cratchit, Cratchit’s family, including lame Tiny Tim, and so on. He cannot do both.

A significant part of the public, perhaps a majority, has made diversity a fetish. The differences observed and celebrated are superficial. This example lifted from Facebook:

I was assisted in un-sticking my car from a lake of slush by: the guy from Hershfield's with the old-tymey mustache, a whisper-thin Somalian woman, and a Mexican couple. I love my neighborhood!!!

Why is it better that aid was rendered by a rainbow of faces? If this person had been helped by a trio of Nuns as wan and pasty as the writer, would the charity and neighborliness be tainted?

One might legitimately presume from skin, grooming and garb that these Samaritans operated in different subcultures. Their cooperation might be valuable as a study of how those of different traditions found means to work together. I doubt this is what happened. The event was pushing a car out of snow, not a philosophical roundtable, or even a small matter of local politics.

It is no longer a fringe view, I think, to say that Congress prefers to ignore both the Constitution and the will of the people. And if executive over-reach is a fringe view, it is found on every edge of the political cloth, dependent on which team occupies the Oval Office.

Lefties, Greenies, and the current President tout a new “green” economy as a solution to today’s dysfunction. Escaping the carbon cycle will save the polar bears. Eliminating fossil fuels will clear the air and cut the legs out from under “evil regimes” that “don’t like us very much”.

We’re being manipulated and coerced into spending huge sums of borrowed money on a raft of unproven ideas aimed at taking the U.S. toward a vision of blue skies and unicorns.

It sounds beautiful. Until you look into the details behind the technology that will drive the Clean Energy Economy:

Minneapolis City Hall has recieved a partial repayment of loans made to a failed developer for a failed downtown retail project. The $29.4 million was:

a far cry from the more than $66 million the city once expected to collect in principal and interest on the three loans. Brookfield defaulted in 2002 on two loans involving the first phase of Gaviidae that included Saks, and the city took over the Saks property.

"This is an example where the public-private partnership has created something positive," said David Sternberg, who heads Brookfield's Minneapolis office.

“Positive” must have a different meaning in the subsidized development world:

Thanks to a recommendation at Maggie’s Farm, and to a pally who knows how to work a Netflix queue, I watched a 1951 version of A Christmas Carol. (The film’s credits actually show the title as “Scrooge”.)

I’ve never read the Dickens. I’m really not that familiar with all the details of the story. But watching the film led me to think we’re not fair to Mr. Scrooge.

We think he’s a bad guy. A humbug. And for most of the film, it is hard to imagine a more heartless jerk. But that ignores the moral of the story.

Scrooge finds the Spirit inside himself. And once he did, we are told there was not a more generous or loving man in all of London.

Keeping in form, the Failed Obama Administration™ touts benefits while ignoring costs:

Both Obama and the Treasury Department keep talking up the TARP as if it is a money maker for taxpayers, when nothing could be further from the truth. Obama tried this stunt in his anniversary of Lehman speech, and the Treasury continues with the theme, of implying that results for the firms that paid back are representative of what the final results would be.

If this logic were generally true, that would mean subprime bonds were a good investment too. After all, most borrowers did make good on their mortgages. A late September Moodys mortgage survey that a reader sent me estimated that total losses on subprime RMBS will be about 26%, which means that 74% were money good.

Recall that the FOA™ promised it wasn’t going to interfere with GM’s operations. More lies:

The WSJ reports:

Starting Jan. 4, General Motors Co. plans to do something unprecedented in the U.S. car industry: It will run its assembly line here around the clock on a permanent basis.

South Carolina is again leading the fight for State sovereignty:

Looks like the steadily growing list of constitutional, ethical and political outrages that constitute the Harry Reid version of Obamacare is sparking a rebellion in the states, as AP reports South Carolina's attorney general plans to investigate the vote-buying that surrounded the proposal in the Senate majority leader's office.

H/T: Maggie’s Farm

Most Leftists of my acquaintance, or whose words I have read, seem to live in a world entirely made of emotional images, not facts, not reality, not reason, and whatever the loudest or most alluring emotional images is that persists in their brains, that is how they deem reality (to them, a flexible and plaint substance, like clay) can be molded.

The act is symbolic: none of them have read the bill, not even the people who voted for it. I suspect each part was written by a lobbyist in the pay of the Insurance company concerned with whatever particular advantaged them--and even they did not read the entirety. Passing this bill is merely voodoo, like sticking a pin in a wax doll, an action done to satisfy an emotional image, nor a reasoned response to an alleged political economic inequity.