It’s official: The Chevrolet Volt, the new plug-in electric hybrid car from General Motors, will cost $41,000—that’s a four-seat hatchback for about the base price of a BMW 335i. To be sure, a $7,500 federal tax credit cuts that to $33,500, and electricity is cheaper per mile than gas. But barring some huge oil price spike or stiff new gas tax, it would take more than a decade to offset the higher purchase price.
. . . .
And that’s my problem with the Obama administration’s energy policy, or at least with his lavish subsidies for the Volt, Nissan’s all-electric Leaf (likely sticker price $33,000), and Tesla’s $100,000 all-electric Roadster: Where does the federal government get off spending the average person’s tax dollars to help better-off-than-average Americans buy expensive new cars? (Read more from slate.com)
Surprising that this was publish by the leftist, pro-state, pro-green Slate.com.
It always troubles me to see professionally produced, economically illiterate videos condemning capitalism. Here’s one:
David Harvey asks if it is time to look beyond capitalism towards a new social order that would allow us to live within a system that really could be responsible, just, and humane?
@ 3:20 — The fifth of his list of “popular explanations of the crisis” is pretty much correct, though Glenn Beck and the World Bank are hardly apostles of deregulation. Why doesn’t he cite Ron Paul, Peter Schiff, Mises, etc? This guy would do well to study the Austrian School.
@ about 3:40, the narrator asks, “What kind of plausible story can I write [explaining our economic crash] which is none of the above?” I think, WTF? Uniqueness is not how we should judge economic theories. How about a meticulous logical examination? “Renowned academic,” my ass.
@ 4:20, the narrator relates a story about the Queen of England asking economists why they didn’t see it coming. “Story” is a good description for what David Harvey is telling. He ignores the many Austrian Economists who did see it coming, and now see things getting much, much worse before they get better. Maybe we should listen to them before we try David Harvey’s workers’ paradise.
@ 6:00, he speaks from Marx’s flawed class analysis. In a free market, the interested of capital are not opposed to those of labor. They are complimentary. In fact, capital competes with other capital for the best of labor, and labor competes with labor for the best jobs. If you consider each a monolithic class opposed to the other, you will be blind to much of the world. Significantly, Marx, in his writing, never defined his most crucial term: class.
@ 7:15 — Capitalism DOES solve its own crises, if you let people fail, and let people accept whatever they damn well please as money. Bailouts and forcing people to use fiat money have nothing to do with free markets or capitalism.
@ 8:50 — Financial innovation does not empower financiers. Government bailouts and government subsidies empower financiers. If firms were allowed to go bankrupt they would regulated themselves / be regulated by their investors.
@ 10:15 — “I don’t have the solutions.” Here, I completely agree with you, Mr. Harvey.
From their website: For over 250 years the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (RSA) has been a cradle of enlightenment thinking and a force for social progress. Our approach is multi-disciplinary, politically independent and combines cutting edge research and policy development with practical action.
That’s not enlightenment suckling in their cradle. I think the previous century has seen enough of their sort of “progress.”
* Dollar continues to decline.
* US continues to follow misguided Keynesian stimulus philosophy.
* GM (government motors) spends bailout money to buy sub-prime-like auto loan business.
* GM bailout was actually bailout of auto workers union.
* The most interesting part of this video begins at 6:00. He talks about how Goldline, a gold selling company, has abused customers by selling overprices antique coins. Peter predicts that this will be leveraged to attack all gold dealers. Remember, tyrants have always hated gold.
* 7th week in a row of declining value of the dollar.
* Propagandists say that the U.S. will not be like Japan. Peter argees only in a perverse way: the U.S. will suffer much, much more than Japan did in the 80’s.
* GDP is bullshit. It’s recent increase is completely attributable to debt and deficit spending.
* Politicians claiming credit for the abomination that was the auto bailout. They will need another bailout soon.
* The 2008 crisis was a UNITED STATES crisis. The world was exposed to it because they had loaned us so much money, but don’t believe the propaganda of the U.S. getting caught up in a world crisis.
* Expect people to begin fleeing the dollar, and U.S. assets. Expect gold to make another run, despite some talking heads claiming that it’s about to crash.
* No sign of a stricter Federal Reserve. As November elections approach, all incumbent politicians will fight for more easy money — which will be like drinking more booze to avoid a hangover.
Hundreds of residents of one of the poorest municipalities in Los Angeles County shouted in protest last night as tensions rose over a report that the city’s manager earns an annual salary of almost $800,000.
An overflow crowd packed a City Council meeting in Bell, a mostly Hispanic city of 38,000 about 10 miles (16 kilometers) southeast of Los Angeles, to call for the resignation of Mayor Oscar Hernandez and other city officials. Residents left standing outside the chamber banged on the doors and shouted “fuera,” or “get out” in Spanish.
It was the first council meeting since the Los Angeles Times reported July 15 that Chief Administrative Officer Robert Rizzo earns $787,637 — with annual 12 percent raises — and that Bell pays its police chief $457,000, more than Los Angeles Police Chief Charlie Beck makes in a city of 3.8 million people. Bell council members earn almost $100,000 for part-time work. (Read more from bloomberg.com)
The Washington Post’s Dana Priest demonstrates once again why she’s easily one of the best investigative journalists in the nation — if not the best — with the publication of Part I of her series, co-written with William Arkin, detailing the sprawling, unaccountable, inexorably growing secret U.S. Government: what the article calls “Top Secret America.” To the extent the series receives much substantive attention (and I doubt it will), the focus will likely be on the bureaucratic problems it documents: the massive redundancies, overlap, waste, and inefficiencies which plague this “hidden world, growing beyond control” — as though everything would better if Top Secret America just functioned a bit more effectively. But the far more significant fact so compellingly illustrated by this first installment is the one I described last week when writing about the Obama administration’s escalating war on whistle blowers:
Most of what the U.S. Government does of any significance — literally — occurs behind a vast wall of secrecy, completely unknown to the citizenry. . . . Secrecy is the religion of the political class, and the prime enabler of its corruption. That’s why whistle blowers are among the most hated heretics. They’re one of the very few classes of people able to shed a small amount of light on what actually takes place.
This is a wonderful essay I recently discovered by Hans Hermann Hoppe. It demonstrates the anarcho-capitalist point of view.
If the government excludes a person while even one domestic resident wants to admit this very person onto his property, the result is forced exclusion (a phenomenon that does not exist under private property anarchism). Furthermore, if the government admits a person while there is not even one domestic resident who wants to have this person on his property, the result is forced integration (also non-existent under private property anarchism).
Billy Raye, a 51-year-old unemployed bike courier, is looking for work.
Fortunately for him, the Mid-Atlantic Regional Council of Carpenters is seeking paid demonstrators to march and chant in its current picket line outside the McPherson Building, an office complex here where the council says work is being done with nonunion labor.
. . . . the union hires unemployed people at the minimum wage—$8.25 an hour—to walk picket lines. Mr. Raye says he’s grateful for the work, even though he’s not sure why he’s doing it. “I could care less,” he says. “I am being paid to march around and sound off.”
. . . . In California, one group is offering to pay $10 and up per hour to activists to hold signs in demonstrations against foam cups and plastic bags. (Read more from online.wsj.com)
Here’s a head scratcher: as everyone knows from elementary chemistry courses, gold is the most inert metal in the world – it does not rust, nor corrode. Yet this is precisely what Russian commercial precious metal trading company, International Reserve Payment System, discovered on thousands of (allegedly) 999 gold coins “St George” issued by the Central Russian Bank. The serendipitous discovery occurred after various clients of the company had requested that their gold be stored not in a safe, but in a far more secure place: “buried under an oak tree.” As the website of IRPS president German Sterligoff notes: once buried, “the coins began to oxidize under the influence of moisture.” And hence the headscratcher: nowhere in history (that we know of) does 999, and even 925 gold, oxidize, rust, stain, spot or form patinas, under any conditions. (Read more from zerohedge.com)
Obviously, global warming is much more severe than we thought.
Dear Sirs:
In his letter published in the August 2nd, 2010 edition Mr. Ken Jansen states that there is a “public accommodations principle” that requires Somali taxi drivers to pick up passengers who they find to be objectionable and that “we rightfully forbid many forms of discrimination”. In a rhetorical slight of hand Mr. Jansen states that these taxi drivers should “get out of the public accommodation business.” But the taxi drivers are not in the public accommodation business; they are in the taxi business. They have invested significant time and money in their businesses and have every right to defend their lives and property from those whom they deem objectionable. As a more powerful example, Mr. Jansen cites laws against discrimination in hotel accommodations. What Mr. Jansen overlooks in both cases is the sanctity of property rights and that failing to offer a service or buy a service does not cause anyone harm. The fact that I buy my groceries from A instead of B does not mean that I have harmed B. Likewise, by refusing to sell a product that I own to A and not B, no matter how objectionable the reason, causes no harm to B. Real harm is physical harm; but there is no physical harm in refusing to act in a manner that “society” dictates. In a truly free society, a business owner who discriminates for reasons that society finds objectionable would find his business in decline. My wife still refuses to eat at Denny’s due to media reports years ago, whether true or not, that some restaurants discriminated on the basis of race. Our modern theory of justice has been so perverted that property rights are deemed to disappear as soon as one offers a product or service for sale. This is not justice but tyranny. (from patrickbarron.blogspot.com)
It’s official: The Chevrolet Volt, the new plug-in electric hybrid car from General Motors, will cost $41,000—that’s a four-seat hatchback for about the base price of a BMW 335i. To be sure, a $7,500 federal tax credit cuts that to $33,500, and electricity is cheaper per mile than gas. But barring some huge oil price spike or stiff new gas tax, it would take more than a decade to offset the higher purchase price.
(Read more from slate.com)
Subscribe RSS