I dream of living in ... a World Without Dictators! I'm a Libertarian Paternalist in Slovakia - Freedom with Responsibility - 10% of income into your own Pension; Tax Loans for education, health, housing; now supporting Employment Maximizing Companies!

blog posts on immigration at The Truth Laid Bear

I've been to Matthew Yglesias' blog before, but now it's on the blogroll.  He's also watching the Bush Hatred stuff.

I think Bush did a good thing getting rid of Saddam.  I'm almost certain that the winner of the 2004 pres. election will be claiming that America did a good thing in Iraq.

Irrational Bush Hatred almost always gets paired with an anti-war position, which basically means preferring to have left Saddam in power rather than the US attack.  Despite the neocon desire not to, Bush did try the UN route, but our enemy's friend France (enemy of the second kind?) made sure that there was no final ultimatum with UN agreed force against non-compliance.  The options were Bush's war or Saddam.

Most of the criticisms of Bush seem true; he's terrible.  But NOT conservative; more corporatist elitist (with a human face) (a chimp face?).

The Dem outrage needs to be redirected at changing the dem party.  Those folk who believe in a big, kind, helpful gov't, and are pro-life, need to be welcomed back.  Those who believe in human rights around the world, and national security (like Michael J. Totten), need to be welcome to stay, not booted.

When outrage turns into an exclusionary purity police against any "not real Democratic" because they disagree with some PC party line, the outrage insures both a Bush reelection AND little real pressure to get better.

So this libertarian sees Bush Hatred as particularly counter-productive ... unless one wants corporatism to get so intolerably bad everybody hates Bush.  It sort of, kind of worked with commies -- but only have decades of suffering.

Step 1: admit, openly, that Iraq liberation was good, for the Iraqi people and the world.  (But I'm afraid most ranting dems can't get to first base.)

Posted by: TomGrey at 09/26/03 23:29 | link | comments

http://www.janegalt.net/blog/archives/004394.html

Most income diff due to immigration?  so says Jane (Megan Mcardle?).  In comments, Kevin (Calpundit) makes this point: "

Really, folks, Krugman is hardly some far left radical, he's a pretty mainstream liberal economist. And he almost certainly doesn't think the middle class was better off in the 50s, he just thinks that it would be nice if the middle class had shared more in the tremendous prosperity of the past 20 years. If you disagree, and think it's wonderful that practically all of the GDP growth of the period has gone to the top 20%, you really ought to explain why.

On the other hand, Krugman sure does hate Bush, I'll give you that."

http://www.danieldrezner.com/archives/000734.html

Huge comments on Daniel's site about PK, and the question of his arguments.

Posted by: TomGrey at 09/26/03 00:30 | link | comments

On comments, how I'd like to see them:

1) Most important, some indication of which comments I've already seen (this is maybe really tough?); a colored blank line; a full/empty box per comment, something. 

1b) I can also imagine 2 comment counts: total and "new": eg. comments 5 - 2 new

1c) Comments should be numbered.

2) Next, when I open the comment, I want to see the oldest unseen comment, if any.

3) When I write my own comment, I want to be able to see the last comment. 

3b) I'd prefer to be able to scroll comments independently of my own comment writing; this implies a two column comment field, or two frames (?)

... 9) micro-perma-links to comments.  Somebody's talking about these tech details (quite low priority)

I vote oldest on bottom as better; but a sort option in the setting as best. 

Posted by: TomGrey at 09/25/03 17:26 | link | comments

THE CASE FOR BUSH HATRED.
Mad About You by Jonathan Chait

A reasonably good case of why a liberal, and specifically this liberal, hates Bush: " I hate President George W. Bush. There, I said it. I think his policies rank him among the worst presidents in U.S. history. And, while I'm tempted to leave it at that, the truth is that I hate him for less substantive reasons, too. I hate the inequitable way he has come to his economic and political achievements and his utter lack of humility (disguised behind transparently false modesty) at having done so. His favorite answer to the question of nepotism--"I inherited half my father's friends and all his enemies"--conveys the laughable implication that his birth bestowed more disadvantage than advantage. He reminds me of a certain type I knew in high school--the kid who was given a fancy sports car for his sixteenth birthday and believed that he had somehow earned it."

Envy is huge in here; along with superiority contempt. There's a huge amount on style, much less on content: "Like Ronald Reagan, Bush crusaded for an enormous supply-side tax cut that was anathema to liberals. But, where Reagan followed his cuts with subsequent measures to reduce revenue loss and restore some progressivity to the tax code, Bush proceeded to execute two additional regressive tax cuts. Combined with his stated desire to eliminate virtually all taxes on capital income and to privatize Medicare and Social Security, it's not much of an exaggeration to say that Bush would like to roll back the federal government to something resembling its pre-New Deal state."

Well, this is unfortunately silly. What about the Farm (pork) Bill? What about steel tarrifs? Jonathan is just wrong here, Bush is not honestly radical like Reagan. He's good on Iraq; he's good-conservative on abortion; he's OK on tax reduction; he's terrible on spending.

"Liberals hate Bush not because he has succeeded but because his success is deeply unfair and could even be described as cheating. " *** Bingo *** But only barely more true than false. Leftists increasingly seem to hate almost all success.

A successful Dem must have a positive vision of a successful America, and successful Americans.

The Iraqi campaign, as a democratic, successful, market oriented country is created, will provide Bush with a visionary promise for the ME. Unless the Dems convince folk that the cost is too high, so the US has to run-away (with honor???). As long as Iraq (or WMDs) is the focus, the Dems lose.
If Dems were focussing on an alternative success plan for Iraq: local Iraqi councils & Iraqi police, backed by US forces who "normally" take their orders from locals; huge increase in NGOs working with local Iraqis; much more language training in Arabic (& offers to teach English); public/ internet bids for reconstruction projects, with a preference for Iraqi majority owned companies ... and claim support for this, whether Bush is doing it or not, to stop Iraq from being the vote decider.

But Bush hatred is too strong for this.  update: TNR has a whole debate going!

Posted by: TomGrey at 09/24/03 21:44 | link | comments

Alan at Petrified Truth has some words about Banned Books. He nicely says how important is free speech/ free press.

:: Relevant to Banned Books, I consider article 19 of the UN Dec'l of Human Rights to be MOST important. Any country with a free press is pretty free; and any country w/o a free press is violating the spirit and letter of Human Rights.

Posted by: TomGrey at 09/24/03 20:32 | link | comments

On the New Republic, "90% OF THE UNIVERSE ISN'T REALLY MISSING, JUST MISPLACED: Today is the first day of a University of Chicago conference at which cosmologists are mapping out plans to attempt to locate "dark matter" and "dark energy." I don't wish to alarm you, but at least 90 percent of the universe is missing. Astronomers hope to find it. "

This is really strange; we don't know ANYTHING about 90% of the cosmos.

Repulse Cosmically; Attract Locally. 

Posted by: TomGrey at 09/24/03 19:04 | link | comments (1)

On Freespeech.

And it's obvious to me why the liberal press is quiet -- it is too similar to Saddam controlled murders, so implies that it's good that Bush booted him out.  Most press wouldn't want any to think maybe Bush did good -- but the WSJ should.

Thanks for an important story.

Posted by: TomGrey at 09/24/03 01:14 | link | comments

Why Paul Krugman matters?  Because, at one time (like 1997), he was great.  Here's a fantastic review of a lousy econ book.

Posted by: TomGrey at 09/23/03 18:34 | link | comments

Hi (Howard?), I quite like your mo'time.

Been with bloggedup (MT); xanga; and blogger; and test drove typepad (your clear competition). Your Google ad Blog Heaven is good.  My bandwidth was exceeded on bloggedup. I don't want that to happen again.  The business model seems to be a free service, for some small X amount of bandwidth,  with more bw based on more cash. I'm OK with this, but I think you should have an explicit policy, and a meter somewhere when I manage my blog that let's me know how I'm doing.

Really good service would give me a warning (or a grace period after over limit), so I have some time to pay before my readers get the bw exceeded message. I'll be checking out your tools -- was a geek, now I'm a blogger (addict) and don't want to mess with much tools.

Posted by: TomGrey at 09/23/03 16:54 | link | comments (5)

More on the NYSE (at Brad)::

The NYSE, like Microsoft, is pretty much a monopoly.  At least in MS case, the gov't has the option of buying something else (don't really know why they don't standarize on Linux; and fund an open-source Office Suite performance competition ... but that's different.)

I would guess most folk, a priori, would accept that Grasso might reasonably ask for a performance fee of some 10% of the increase in value of a NYSE seat.

So, if there are some 1000 NYSE seats (I don't know these numbers, they're hypos), and their value has increased from $300 000 to $2 300 000, the 10% of $2 bil. is $200 mill.  Seems fair-ish; but also likely that there was some market mis-pricing.

Posted by: TomGrey at 09/23/03 16:52 | link | comments

On Brad's note about the deficits:

:: Remember: when one owes the bank a few million, one has a problem; when it's a few billion, the BANK has the problem.

Since most US debt is denominated in USD, if there's a currency crash, a la Argentina/ Mexico/ etc., the investors/suckers still get their (let's say 40% devalued) USD back. No big deal.
For the US ... all imports go up 40%, inflation goes up, what? 8%? huge substituition, US goods much cheaper here and there, more jobs.

And just where are the investors gonna invest? Russia, China, India? Almost certainly not at those levels now pouring into America.

It's just not gonna be a disaster, unless/until oil gets denominated in Euro and more US investment is denominated in Euro/Yen or something else. We'll prolly have a good sized crash before then, and the crash will cause the shift, but the shift away from USD AFTER the crash is much less of a problem.

:: comment to colonialism::

GOOD job Abiola, ethnic problems are key in Africa -- and are related to DeSoto's private property. One tribe, when it gains political power, does NOT respect the property of others.

My suggestion? Cantonization. Of Africa into tribal-based cantons, like the early states of the US or like the Swiss cantons. With weak foreign policy/ defense "central" gov't, but most (all but 1%?) tax collection and spending by tribes. Supported by the World Bank and IMF at a tribal level.

What is YOUR idea?

: PK discussion, endgame for current account ::

Bottom line -- no one-day crash really possible in USD (more than 20%).  Prolly no one-week devaluation (to Euro/Yen/ Yuan?) of more than 30%, though this is a higher risk.  Prolly no one-month devaluation of more than 40%.  Almost certainly not within the next year.

PK is letting his Bush Hatred blind himself to the lack of alternative investments; the demographics of Euro mean no big growth in W. Europe (much more in CEE, much lower base).

:: PK great essay :(Brad's favorite):

Jean, maybe the elites (not to say snobbish?) think there is a different reality than the working poor think?
When PK's thesis is more about the top 1% or 0.1%, whom I agree are getting (obscene?) overcompensation, it seems too close to destructive envy, and not really about making the lives of the lower 20% better.  As PK says in this Truly Fantastic essy (thanks Brad, !!), the research more supports the free market ideology (more libertarian than conservative).

When will big-gov't dems realize that big-gov't programs will, like all regulatory agencies, ALWAYS be captured by the already powerful?  Give up big gov't redistribution programs, to the poor and especially to the rich.

Joe W & A. Zarkov are making great points, though the answer to Bruce's q. (what do the rich DO with their cash?) involves an important something.  The poor consume income, the rich invest it.  Into business.  Which creates profits (making them richer), and jobs.
Remember that word, jobs?  Jobs are what the working poor need.  Jobs are what the rich who want to get richer should be creating in the process of getting what they want (richer - status, not usually consumption).
Jean, one of the main problems with PK and Brad is their implied reliance on gov't and "macro" econ bs (mostly) to create jobs.  What really happens is all micro (almost).

BTW, I think the vast majority of loss of the dot.com bubble was by the top 20%, but don't know where to find this stat.

On the deficits, if the gov't ever needs an increase, fast, in revenue, there's that old Gary Hart $0.50/gal gas "emergency" surcharge, and even means-testing Social Security.  Why don't dems talk about these solutions now?  They're political losers...

Posted by: TomGrey at 09/23/03 01:21 | link | comments

On Brad's note about the deficits:

:: Remember: when one owes the bank a few million, one has a problem; when it's a few billion, the BANK has the problem.

Since most US debt is denominated in USD, if there's a currency crash, a la Argentina/ Mexico/ etc., the investors/suckers still get their (let's say 40% devalued) USD back.  No big deal.
For the US ... all imports go up 40%, inflation goes up, what? 8%? huge substituition, US goods much cheaper here and there, more jobs.

And just where are the investors gonna invest?  Russia, China, India?  Almost certainly not at those levels now pouring into America.

It's just not gonna be a disaster, unless/until oil gets denominated in Euro and more US investment is denominated in Euro/Yen or something else.  We'll prolly have a good sized crash before then, and the crash will cash the shift, but the shift away from USD AFTER the crash is much less of a problem.

Posted by: TomGrey at 09/23/03 01:17 | link | comments

absolutely has a post complaining about Bush not supporting the ICC.  But I think the US democratically elected Senate, on Bush's rec., voted against the US surrendering sovereignty to some semi-accountable euro-bureau crats who seem pretty hypocritical, so far.

My comments there::

Do you think the ICC is democratic?

Would you agree if some survivors of Saddam's torture chambers were to claim the BBC is guilty of war crimes since they aided and abetted Saddam (in order to get access) to the news?

The world's not ready for an ICC yet.  Unfortunately.  (great post earlier about the computer spying on you, er, me)

Posted by: TomGrey at 09/23/03 00:43 | link | comments (3)

My first post on this new motime blog

Posted by: TomGrey at 09/23/03 00:28 | link | comments (1)