Tuesday, April 1, 2014
Donald Trump Says "Yes" to the Second Amendment
New York is too far gone for it to matter much, but it's nice to hear Mr. Donald Trump tell New York's politicians that they're bad guys and to tell Andy Cuomo, "You're fired!" H/t Mert Melfa.
Monday, March 31, 2014
The Science Is Settled: What's Interesting about the American Media Is What It Doesn't Talk About
I was privileged this past Saturday to join Lincoln Eagle publisher Mike Marnell on Scott Harrington's Speak Out show on WKNY, Kingston, NY. We discussed education and politics; I posted the interview here. WKNY is a great local music station that plays close-to-nonstop soft rock. Since they had me on the air, I've been listening to their programming. The soft-classic rock format is great, but the station is an affiliate of ABC News. As a result, I've inadvertently heard a few of the ABC newscasts, which breaks one of my personal moral rules: Do not listen to the media. Most of what ABC discusses is irrelevant. What caught my attention was their blaring claim: "The debate is settled: There is global warming." Well, that's all well and good because there has been a global warming for the past 10,000 years, since the last Ice Age, as the chart below shows.
As I mentioned on the radio show, the useful information to be gained from listening to the media is to learn what it doesn't talk about.
As I mentioned on the radio show, the useful information to be gained from listening to the media is to learn what it doesn't talk about.
Tuesday, March 18, 2014
Technology Heals All Wounds
Dr. Bruce Cordell writes an excellent overview of space exploration and technological trends in 2014. Dr. Cordell makes a number of wonderful observations and predictions about space exploration in terms of what he calls the Maslow window, the appearance out of every five or six decades of an optimistic, technologically expansive one that appears because of exuberant public opinion.
From a policy standpoint, the gist of Dr. Cordell's essay is that the force of technology is so substantial that it can even overcome government's restriction, suppression, and misallocation of economic resources. I don't tend to be so optimistic, but Dr. Cordell may have a point.
As an investor in natural gas pipelines and infrastructure (in firms and Master Limited Partnerships like Chicago Bridge and Iron, Kinder Morgan, Vanguard Natural Resources, Oneok, and Dominion Resources) I am betting on a natural gas boom. The implications of America as an energy exporter are that the costs of misallocation of resources through regulation, monetary expansion, a subsidized banking system, and government mismanagement can be overcome by significant energy revenues that open up because of shale oil, fracking, and other new energy technologies.
Back in 2009, when I last taught an evening course at NYU's Stern School of Business, I got into a friendly argument with a student who was obtaining his MBA to further his career as an energy trader. The student insisted that, based on Matthew Simmons's thesis in his Twilight in the Desert, oil production had peaked. I countered that rising prices will stimulate new technologies.
At the time, I knew of a firm that had invented technology to extract the remaining oil in existing oil wells. The current technology depends on water, but that fails to get at the large amount of oil still in depleted wells. Since then, fracking and shale oil technologies have exploded the potential for energy production in the US. Investors in energy stocks are speculating that America will become the Saudi Arabia of natural gas. If so, the American economy may turn out to be resilient despite Washington's insane economic policies.
From a policy standpoint, the gist of Dr. Cordell's essay is that the force of technology is so substantial that it can even overcome government's restriction, suppression, and misallocation of economic resources. I don't tend to be so optimistic, but Dr. Cordell may have a point.
As an investor in natural gas pipelines and infrastructure (in firms and Master Limited Partnerships like Chicago Bridge and Iron, Kinder Morgan, Vanguard Natural Resources, Oneok, and Dominion Resources) I am betting on a natural gas boom. The implications of America as an energy exporter are that the costs of misallocation of resources through regulation, monetary expansion, a subsidized banking system, and government mismanagement can be overcome by significant energy revenues that open up because of shale oil, fracking, and other new energy technologies.
Back in 2009, when I last taught an evening course at NYU's Stern School of Business, I got into a friendly argument with a student who was obtaining his MBA to further his career as an energy trader. The student insisted that, based on Matthew Simmons's thesis in his Twilight in the Desert, oil production had peaked. I countered that rising prices will stimulate new technologies.
At the time, I knew of a firm that had invented technology to extract the remaining oil in existing oil wells. The current technology depends on water, but that fails to get at the large amount of oil still in depleted wells. Since then, fracking and shale oil technologies have exploded the potential for energy production in the US. Investors in energy stocks are speculating that America will become the Saudi Arabia of natural gas. If so, the American economy may turn out to be resilient despite Washington's insane economic policies.
Monday, February 24, 2014
When the Ignorant Opine: the Case of EJ Dionne
Writing in Forbes, George Leef has analyzed EJ Dionne's Washington Post article about Austrian economics. I logged on to Dionne's article out of morbid curiosity. I was surprised that many people still read the Washington Post. Given how wrong the pro-bailout media has been on so many subjects, from Viet Nam to the tech bubble of '99 to Obama's healthcare reform (no, it didn't reduce costs), the readers must be true believers who, like Dionne, voice opinions about authors they've never read and maintain religious faith in government. No matter how badly or how often the government fails, Dionne and The Washington Post will stand ready to generate lies to defend it.
Anyone who questions the "state activist liberal" religion is subject to angered attack. Hence, Dionne concocts a series of lies: Ron Paul's ideas have been adopted throughout the Republican Party, those ideas are associated with the Republican Congress, and Austrian economics is influential within the Republican Party. Dionne seems to be unaware that Paul lost the primary election to a Progressive, Mitt Romney. I very much doubt that more than five or six Republican congressmen can explain or have even read about Austrian ideas. Since Dionne can't explain them and hasn't read about them either, his explanations fit the crime. An idiot Democrat attacking idiot Republicans about a subject he doesn't understand. How characteristic of Obama's dumbed-down America.
Dionne accuses the Austrians of not understanding history, but in doing so he reveals a lack of understanding of, for example, the reconstruction of Europe after World War II, which was led by Chancellor Konrad Adenauer, who repeatedly said that he was influenced by von Mises and the Austrians and so adopted a market-based economy for Germany rather than the socialistic one that Hitler and his National Socialist (Nazi) Party had created. (See Guenter Reimann's firsthand account of the socialistic Nazi economy, much like the American economy of the Obama years, in his book The Vampire Economy.)
The reason for Dionne's and his fellow "state activist liberals'" religious fanaticism about big government goes back to Richard T. Ely, the economist who brought the ideas of the German historical school, which contested the Austrian viewpoint of von Mises's predecessor, Carl Menger, to America. Followers of "state activist liberalism" like Dionne are, from an historical perspective, heirs to Ely and Ely's predecessors in Germany. American liberals are mouthpieces of the German historical school economists, whose ideas were transmitted here via Ely, John R. Commons, and the Hegelian John Dewey.
The last proponent of the German historical school, Werner Sombart, became increasingly nationalistic in his socialism; his last important work was about "German socialism." He collaborated with the Nazis and signed the letter than evicted Ludwig von Mises, a Jew, from the German Sociological Association. Thus, there is a direct link between American state-activist liberalism and Nazism; the link affected von Mises personally. It is not surprising that von Mises, a victim of Nazism who was forced to flee Europe, might see in his opponents' followers in America similar tendencies.
Moreover, von Mises was right. I see little difference between the totalitarianism that evolved in Germany between 1880 and 1930 and the evolution of Progressivism toward totalitarianism here. The willingness of propagandists like EJ Dionne to concoct lies about Austrian economists whom he has not read is very much like the propaganda that appeared in Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union.
The great public choice theorist Mancur Olson outlines in his Rise and Decline of Nations how the destruction of economic special interest groups, the destruction of the infrastructure of big government, led to the economic growth in postwar Germany and Japan. The public choice debate does not trouble Dionne, who is unread on many subjects, so he blithely and ignorantly attributes the recovery in Europe to government spending. Such explanations fly when a totalitarian state is supported by a collaborative media that serves as a mouthpiece to gangsters like Obama.
Anyone who questions the "state activist liberal" religion is subject to angered attack. Hence, Dionne concocts a series of lies: Ron Paul's ideas have been adopted throughout the Republican Party, those ideas are associated with the Republican Congress, and Austrian economics is influential within the Republican Party. Dionne seems to be unaware that Paul lost the primary election to a Progressive, Mitt Romney. I very much doubt that more than five or six Republican congressmen can explain or have even read about Austrian ideas. Since Dionne can't explain them and hasn't read about them either, his explanations fit the crime. An idiot Democrat attacking idiot Republicans about a subject he doesn't understand. How characteristic of Obama's dumbed-down America.
Dionne accuses the Austrians of not understanding history, but in doing so he reveals a lack of understanding of, for example, the reconstruction of Europe after World War II, which was led by Chancellor Konrad Adenauer, who repeatedly said that he was influenced by von Mises and the Austrians and so adopted a market-based economy for Germany rather than the socialistic one that Hitler and his National Socialist (Nazi) Party had created. (See Guenter Reimann's firsthand account of the socialistic Nazi economy, much like the American economy of the Obama years, in his book The Vampire Economy.)
The reason for Dionne's and his fellow "state activist liberals'" religious fanaticism about big government goes back to Richard T. Ely, the economist who brought the ideas of the German historical school, which contested the Austrian viewpoint of von Mises's predecessor, Carl Menger, to America. Followers of "state activist liberalism" like Dionne are, from an historical perspective, heirs to Ely and Ely's predecessors in Germany. American liberals are mouthpieces of the German historical school economists, whose ideas were transmitted here via Ely, John R. Commons, and the Hegelian John Dewey.
The last proponent of the German historical school, Werner Sombart, became increasingly nationalistic in his socialism; his last important work was about "German socialism." He collaborated with the Nazis and signed the letter than evicted Ludwig von Mises, a Jew, from the German Sociological Association. Thus, there is a direct link between American state-activist liberalism and Nazism; the link affected von Mises personally. It is not surprising that von Mises, a victim of Nazism who was forced to flee Europe, might see in his opponents' followers in America similar tendencies.
Moreover, von Mises was right. I see little difference between the totalitarianism that evolved in Germany between 1880 and 1930 and the evolution of Progressivism toward totalitarianism here. The willingness of propagandists like EJ Dionne to concoct lies about Austrian economists whom he has not read is very much like the propaganda that appeared in Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union.
The great public choice theorist Mancur Olson outlines in his Rise and Decline of Nations how the destruction of economic special interest groups, the destruction of the infrastructure of big government, led to the economic growth in postwar Germany and Japan. The public choice debate does not trouble Dionne, who is unread on many subjects, so he blithely and ignorantly attributes the recovery in Europe to government spending. Such explanations fly when a totalitarian state is supported by a collaborative media that serves as a mouthpiece to gangsters like Obama.
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