The Future: Blaze TV Is Awesome

I just purchased a subscription to Blaze TV to watch the Mark Levin show.  Levin has written a book about the media, which promises to be a fun summer read, and I became interested in his broadcasts. Levin is awesome, and I am impressed with Blaze TV.  I recommend it as a substitute for the fake news on cable.

Robots Won't Replace Human Labor Anytime Soon

I just got a rare piece of good news:  Australian IFM is going to buy Buckeye Partners (BPL)  for $41.50 a share, and the MLP rose 28% on the news.  My stake went up to about $10,000, and I'm thinking about what to do with the money.  For the most part, I'm getting old and want yield, so I'm putting a chunk into one of the preferred stock ETFs (PFF or PGX).  To maintain my exposure to the depressed MLP sector, I'm also putting some into Kinder Morgan (KMI) and possibly Kayne Anderson (KYN).  I'm thinking of putting the little left over into a robotics and artificial intelligence ETF, BOTZ.

Just yesterday a young academic suggested that artificial intelligence and robotics are going to replace much human labor so that the chief jobs for people will involve human interaction and interpersonal skills. He's probably right about the need for interpersonal skills, but the more generalized fear that machines will replace people is wrong. It goes back to the days of the Luddites and before.  In 1589 Queen Elizabeth refused to issue a patent to inventor William Lee because of demonstrations against his stocking frame. The reasoning of both crowd and queen was that technology would replace jobs. That was 200 years before the industrial revolution.

Nothing has been better for freedom than technology.  Before technology, the only way to become wealthy was to spare the victims of imperialistic wars and turn them into slaves. The Romans considered slaves to be the living dead because the alternative would have been death due to conquest.  The South lost the Civil War in part because slave-based societies are less productive, hence poorer, than technology-based societies.

Perhaps because technology ended slavery, one often reads superstitions about technology's ending people in general.  It is easy to see the more slave-like jobs that might disappear, but it is difficult to imagine the less slave-like jobs that will replace them.

There was less technology in 1780 than today.  At that time the population of the US was  three to four million.  If you had said to someone that one day there would be motorized tractors that  would enable one farmer to do the work of 50 today, you might have added the conclusion that 98% unemployment would ensue and that the workforce would decline.  It would have been difficult to imagine the advent of helicopter factories, the profession of accounting, state university professors, and so on. 

In early January I bought NCR, which has since had a nice run with the broad average  and is up 30%.  However, BOTZ, the robotics index,  hasn't had fantastic returns since its founding two years ago:

Source: Maks FS,Seeking Alpha

Apparently, fears about an explosion of robotics overtaking human labor are where the mouth but not the money is.

The reason to be concerned about job replacement is not the technology per se, but its subsidization by central banks and the financial system.  When interest rates are artificially depressed, the cost of capital becomes lower, and demand for labor-saving equipment increases.  Hence, in the long run low interest rates, the policy of the United States and especially the Democratic Party and its economists like Paul Krugman, have replaced labor with capital.  Low interest rates are the chief source of income inequality because they boost stock values, enhancing the income of commercial bankers, investment bankers, real estate investors, stockholders, bond holders,  and government employees, and at the same time they reduce wages because of money illusion or inflation and capital substitution.

The Democratic Party further exacerbates the tendency toward income inequality by favoring regulation that squashes human resource development. Minimum wages and mandatory workplace benefits make it more expensive to hire the least skilled, damning them to a lifetime of poverty and dependency.  That Democrats consider themselves altruistic in advocating such policies is in the altruistic traditions of Dr. Mengele and Dr. Benway.

Hence, BOTZ, NCR and similar investments are a play on a continued march toward socialism and crony capitalism, not a play on market-driven innovation. 

Letter to DOJ Re Junk Science in Start by Believing Programs

Dear Mr. Attorney General:

I just received an email from Ed Bartlett of SAVE that says that although the overall movement to restore due process on campus continues to gain support, one aspect appears to be actually getting worse:  Campus and criminal investigations are increasingly based on guilt-presuming “believe the victim” and “trauma-informed” concepts. Each year, literally thousands of law enforcement and campus Title IX personnel have participated in sessions where they are told to repeat, in sing-song manner, “Start By Believing.” This has continued since 2016.

I am deeply concerned about this lack of concern for due process and advocacy of fascistic investigative process, apparently based on junk social science. 

Bartlett says that the U.S. Department of Justice has spent millions of dollars to promote such “victim-centered” approaches, including a national start-by-believing campaign;  a law enforcement training program "Approaching Your Work with a Trauma Informed Lens"; and an Office of Community Oriented Policing Services Report,  “Identifying and Preventing Gender Bias in Law Enforcement Response to Sexual Assault and Domestic Violence: A Roundtable Discussion.”

On May 29, the DOJ will be sponsoring a program on such “victim-centered” approaches titled, “Law Enforcement Response: Approaching Your Work with a Trauma-Informed Lens.”

Bartlett suggests that it's hard to imagine a more direct assault on the presumption of innocence and the impartiality and integrity of the investigative process than these programs.

It is time to bring the three-ring, junk-science circus at DOJ to an end. I am copying the president on this.

Sincerely,

Mitchell B. Langbert, Ph.D.

John Galt on the RINO Response to the Pro Antifa Media

In the course of John Galt's climactic speech in Atlas Shrugged, he spends a paragraph on what today is recognizable as RINO cowardice in response to America's extremist, pro-Antifa, fake-news media, starting with the New York Times. We are witnessing this most recently vis-a-vis the Stephen Moore nomination:

You, who are half-rational, half-coward, have been playing a con game with reality, but the victim you have conned is yourself.  When men reduce their virtues to approximate, then evil acquires the force of an absolute, when loyalty to an unyielding purpose is dropped by the virtuous, it's picked up by scoundrels--and you get the indecent spectacle of a cringing, bargaining, traitorous good and a self-righteously compromising evil.  As you surrendered to the mystics of muscle [leftists] when they told you that ignorance consists of claiming knowledge, so now you surrender to them when they shriek that immorality consists of pronouncing moral judgment. When  they yell that it is selfish to be certain that you are right, you hasten to assure the that you're certain of nothing.  When they shout that it's immoral to stand on your convictions, you assure them that you have no convictions whatever. When the thugs of Europe's People's States snarl that you are guilty of intolerance because you don't treat your desire to live and their desire to kill you as a difference of opinion--you cringe and hasten to assure them that you are not intolerant of any horror.  When some barefoot bum in some pesthole of Asia yells at you:  How dare you be rich--you apologize and beg him to be patient and promise him you'll give it all away.