Category Archives: politics

Economies, Culture, Regulation

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Greg Ip had a piece in Thursday’s Wall Street Journal touting the strength of our economy, especially in comparison with the European Union’s continental economy. Among other points, he had this regarding the difference between our economy and the EU’s, and this is what I want to focus on in this post.

More important is the role of technology. No EU company worth more than 100 billion euros, equivalent to $108 billion, “has been set up from scratch in the last 50 years,” while all six US companies worth more than $1.08 trillion were created in this period, Draghi said. America’s companies are also faster to adopt technology such as artificial intelligence, which explains much higher productivity in professional services, finance, insurance, and information technology services.

Ip missed, though, that that difference is from a combination of things that are not economic, but things that make an economy more or less capable, that make rapid technological advances possible. Those things are culture and the regulatory environment that puts bounds on what economic players are allowed or required to do.

Our economy has, until relatively recently, players much more willing to run risks and accept mistakes and failures on the way to grand success. That risk-taking runs the gamut from guys like Elon Musk (an outlier, to be sure, but he’s not that far extreme, except in the venues in which he’s chosen to operate) to heads of families striking out, many even before they have families to head, to start their own businesses, risking everything they have just to get started.

The EU has no one willing to run the risks an Elon Musk does. Even the Fiat acquisition of Chrysler was achieved less by a risk-taking entrepreneur leading Fiat than it was an acquisition supported, indirectly, by the US government and EU regulations, since the combined company would be governed by EU rules. Neither do EU individual families start new businesses at anything close to the rate American families do: they’re much more used to government presence in their lives and to reliance on government for their business success.

The EU’s regulatory environment is much more restrictive than ours, as well, for all the recent explosion of regulations governing our business behavior.  EU’s more socialist-in-effect governance that tends to cap performance so the laggards—for whatever reason they lag, good or ill—can keep up. EU regulations are especially restrictive regarding areas that our nation would consider competition and the outcomes of competition.

Gains from a willingness, or government limits on willingness, to run risks aren’t as available to EU economic actors the way they are here.

Teachers Union Against Minority Child Education

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That’s the outcome of Nebraska teachers union opposition to Nebraska’s scholarship program to support families with children wanting to attend private schools, a program administered by Opportunity Scholarships of Nebraska.

The union, through the Save Our Schools organization that the union backs got onto next week’s general election ballot a referendum aimed at repealing that scholarship program.

Currently, some 1,500 children benefit academically and their parents benefit financially from those scholarships. Of those families,

half…have household income below 213% of the federal poverty level, the measure used to determine eligibility for the Children’s Health Insurance Program. Some 40% are nonwhite and 11.5% have special needs.

(For 2023, the Federal Poverty Guideline for a family of four was $30,000. 213% of that works out to a skosh under $64,000.)

But the teachers union says to Hell with those minority children and those special needs children. Their union-controlled public schools are the only schools acceptable. It doesn’t matter that those public schools are broad failures.

A Tough Move to Make

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The headline poses the question:

Harris Doesn’t Campaign on Her Gender. Is That a Sign of Progress?

Hillary Clinton did, overtly and zealously, when she ran for President on the Progressive-Democratic Party ticket in 2016. That didn’t run out well for her, but her failure was far more a result of her being a lousy and openly arrogant candidate than it was a function of her running on her sex.

Harris’ decision to eschew running on her sex could have been a sign of progress as the headline alludes. She also isn’t campaigning on her race, for all that there was a brief back and forth with former-President and Republican Presidential campaign over her variously self-identifying as black [via Jamaica] or Indian, and that could have been a sign of progress, also.

However.

Against the backdrop of Progressive-Democrat Joe Biden’s having selected her as his running mate explicitly because she was black and a woman—what many termed, for good or ill, a diversity hire—either of those would have been a tough sell to make independently of her origin as Vice President.

The touting would have been too likely to have been taken as sexist and racist—just as Biden was accused for his selection criteria.

Minerals and Net Zero

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McKinsey & Company, the high pockets consulting company, has expressed concern regarding the Climate Funding Industry’s net zero by 2050 goal and the minerals available to achieve it. This particular concern is buried well down in the report.

Raw materials. Demand for critical minerals, like lithium, cobalt, and rare earths, is expected to surge, but current supply is only about 10 to 35 percent of what would be needed by 2050. This is a Level 2 challenge, where supply would need to be scaled, alongside managing demand for such minerals.

McKinsey defines a Level 2 challenge as one that

require[s] the deployment of known technologies to accelerate, and for associated infrastructure and inputs to be scaled.

One of the problem here, though, is that mining minerals like lithium, cobalt, and rare earths is an immensely toxic operation, both in producing and handling these raw minerals and in the collateral production and handling of the hugely toxic mining tailings that are inextricably associated with the mining process. Those tailings, too, while not precisely forever chemicals, do last a very long time and are subject to leaching out of whatever supposedly sealed off storage area they might be in, whether from long-term deterioration of the isolation materials or from human error (vis., EPA’s failure with the Gold King Mine near Silverton, CO).

Then there’s the end-of-life disposal of the materials and devices containing these minerals when those materials and devices have worn out or failed. The minerals are still in those devices, they’re still toxic, and we still don’t have the technologies needed adequately to handle that waste.

Then there are the intermediate steps of…assembling…those minerals into the finished net zero-supporting products. They’re toxic to handle there, too, for all that they’re much more easily handled safely than while digging them out of the ground and processing them into usable form.

And that bit about managing demand—that sounds akin to managing third world demand for fossil fuels, too—they shouldn’t have any; they should be consigned to poverty, or the rest of us consigned to poverty forking over the trillions of dollars it would take to prop them up.

Much of that mining, too, is done with child and other slave labor, but that’s really a side issue in this context. It would be straightforward enough to force an end to that, if only by mining elsewhere with legitimate labor forces and technologies. The switch needs only political will and actual sincerity, vice virtue signaling, on the part of the Climate Funding Industry members.

It seems we can’t get there from here (never minding that we really don’t need to).

Oops.

 

H/t Watt’s Up With That

Harris’ Closing Argument

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Progressive-Democrat Vice President and Party Presidential candidate Kamala Harris made her closing argument Tuesday on the Ellipse, hoping the location would emphasize the irony and contrast in comparison with former-President and Republican Presidential candidate Donald Trump’s speech there on 6 January 2021. The irony is lost, though, when you recall that Trump, in that speech, called on his supporters to protest peacefully at the Capitol and that the rioters there were a tiny few compared to the thousands on the Ellipse who listened to his speech—and that those rioters had begun gathering at the Capitol before Trump gave his speech.

That’s a minor point regarding Harris’ closing “argument.” The high points of her speech are these:

Trump is a bad man, Evil incarnate. She spent several minutes on this.

Harris has a to-do list. That list was largely devoid of how she would enact any particularly item, it even lacked specificity of what many of those items actually might be. She did promise price controls, though, in the form of punishing businesses for what she calls price gauging, but which have been price increases caused by the several inflation-spiking policies and regulations she and her boss, Progressive-Democrat President Joe Biden, enacted in the first few months of their administration and expanded on over the last three-and-a-half years. She did, though, make explicit her price control plan to cap drug prices.

Her to-do list also included these inflation-driving items: $25,000 to each first-time home buyer and increasing even further her tax credits for families with children.

She tried to contrast Trump’s security policies with her own, non-specific plans, terming Trump in another of her “bad man” claims a threat to global security. She tried to slide past the security our nation, and our friends and allies, enjoyed during his last term—no wars at all, and the Abraham Peace Accords in the Middle East.

This is in contrast with the Biden-Harris/Harris-Biden administration’s panic-ridden abandonment of Afghanistan, followed by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the People’s Republic of China’s increasingly naked threats to conquer the Republic of China, Iran’s nearby nuclear weapon breakout, and open warfare by Hamas and Hezbollah terrorists on Israel, a war aided and abetted, and entered into, by Iran. And there’s the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden situation, a situation in which her administration’s policy has functionally surrendered those waters to Houthi terrorists via this administration’s determinedly ineffective tit-for-tat responses to Houthi missile and drone attacks all along what used to be a busy route for commercial shipping.

Most of her to-do list, most of her policies, were left unspecified, unclarified, vague. This gloss-over was deliberate: her policies are ill-defined in her own mind.

There are a couple of exceptions to that last, though. She fully intends to support eliminating altogether the Senate filibuster so she can convert our nation to one-party rule. She fully intends to support revamping (I can’t call it reforming) our Supreme Court so she can convert it from its Constitutional role of coequal branch and check on the other two branches into a rubber stamp court supporting whatever her one-party government wants to do.

This is not someone whom we can afford running our nation. Nor is the Party she heads.