Tag Archives: political economy

The Cost of Food

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Saturday’s Wall Street Journal had an article centered on the difficulty of passing a farm bill that, among other things, continues subsidies for farmers. The article included some words on the bill’s food stamp program and funding, including this remark:

...SNAP, the food-stamps program is generally aimed at helping low-income households afford to buy food.

There are at least two ways to help low-income households afford to buy food. One is to restore work/train for work/school requirements to the program, which in the end, increases those families’ income.

The other way is to get rid of the ethanol subsidies and requirements. Converting food to fuel additives drives up the costs of a whole range of foods, creating a closed loop of increasingly expensive food driving increasing need for food stamps. Cut that out.

Getting rid of the subsidies will help the farmers, too, by encouraging them to grow more food more cheaply and with their lower cost (already significantly lower than the cost of farming in other nations), gain global market share. And more income for farmers.

Some Corporate Values

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Recall Major League Baseball’s, Coca Cola’s, and Delta Airlines’ reactions to Georgia’s voter integrity protection law, SB202, passed last year. That law, after all, created such nasty things as

  • signature matching
  • voter ID
  • restrictions on drop boxes
  • ban on the mass mailing of absentee ballot request forms to those who did not ask for them,
  • mandatory citizenship checks

MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred said baseball’s decision to pull the All Star Game out of Atlanta that year, causing the loss of upwards of $70 million of revenue to Atlanta’s small and medium businesses, was the best way to demonstrate our values as a sport.

Coca-Cola CEO James Quincey said Georgia’s law is unacceptable and a step backwards.

Delta CEO Ed Bastian said that Georgia’s law is unacceptable and does not match Delta’s values.

Here’s what that law, wholly unacceptable to these corporations’ values, did.

  • total turnout of early voters—both in-person and absentee—was 2,504,956, an all-time record
  • 2,288,889 total early in-person voters this year, compared to 1,890,364 early in-person voters in the 2018 midterm elections, a 17% increase
  • average wait time in [voting] lines was about two minutes in the afternoon, when a day’s voting really starts getting going
  • tracking at three minutes
  • longest on the leader board 14 minutes
  • check-in time, when you got to the front line, 47 seconds

Now we know clearly what those corporate values are: low voter turnout, great difficulty getting to a voting booth for those who are allowed to vote, voting by illegal aliens and other non-citizens.

In fine, those corporations have shown their values to be suppression of citizens’ ability to vote and diminution of the value of citizens’ votes through promotion of non-citizens’ votes.

Why would any American citizen want to do business with this kind of corporation, a corporation that so blatantly disparages what it means to be an American citizen?

Ubiquitous Battery-Powered Vehicles

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These need things; here’s a partial list of Critical Items and some problems associated with their acquisition.

With respect to batteries, the raw materials—lithium, nickel, manganese, cobalt, among others—are expensive to mine and destructive of the environment to mine. Both the metals themselves and the mining tailings are highly toxic and expensive to handle and to dispose of.

Refining those materials comes with its own problems:

[The People’s Republic of China] processes some 70% of the world’s lithium and cobalt, and 99% of the manganese, according to PricewaterhouseCoopers. [The PRC] also dominates the market for the parts that go into batteries, such as cathodes and anodes, as well as the production of batteries themselves.

And this:

[The] majority of motors used in today’s EVs rely on permanent magnets, which produce a constant magnetic field that helps spin a motor’s rotor and, in turn, power the wheels.
But these magnets require costly rare-earth metals such as neodymium and dysprosium. As with battery ingredients, the dominant supplier is [the PRC], and producing the metals can cause pollution

That makes us dependent on an enemy nation for our economic welfare.

On the other hand, there are such things as AC induction motors. These are a 19th century invention and are ubiquitous in today’s household appliances. However.

[They are] less efficient. That can reduce a vehicle’s driving range unless battery storage is boosted.

That increased battery dependence would make us even more dependent on that enemy nation for the materials. Aside from that, induction motors also take a double potful of copper, and copper mining is destructive of the environment.

And this: the electricity distribution infrastructure needed to for recharging the batteries doesn’t yet exist, and the current grid already is nearly fully occupied just handling today’s household and business loads.

And this: the production of electricity depends on inconstant solar and wind facilities, on fossil fuel (reliable and cheap, but currently under attack by the Left), and on nuclear power (currently hugely expensive to produce, with the building of additional nuclear power facilities even more expensive due to enormously expensive over-regulation).

The root problem (to use a phrase), then, is to get government out of the way of fossil fuel use and out of the way of adding nuclear power reactors to the electricity distribution grid. And expanding the grid to handle the increased load.

Why Do the Workaround?

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NVIDIA Corp is busily looking for ways to circumvent newly enacted rules barring export of computer chips and chip technology to the People’s Republic of China.

Nvidia Corp has begun offering an alternative to a high-end chip hit with US export restrictions to customers in China, after the new rules threatened to cost the American company hundreds of millions of dollars in lost revenue.
Nvidia said the new graphics-processing chip, branded the A800, meets US restrictions on chips that can be exported to China under new rules rolled out last month. The chip went into production in the third quarter, the company said.

On the other hand,

According to a memo Nvidia sent to its channel distributors last Thursday, the A800 has the same computational performance but a narrower interconnect bandwidth, the capacity of a chip to send and receive data from other chips, crucial for training large-scale AI models or building supercomputers.

It’s not the data rates, though, that matter; it’s the computational techniques and the technology used to implement those techniques that are important.

NVIDIA claims,

The A800 meets the US government’s clear test for reduced export control and cannot be programmed to exceed it.

This is disingenuous. The chip can be reverse-engineered to learn how the computational techniques are achieved. Indeed, simply programming the chip—accepting, arguendo, NVIDIA’s claim about programmability—would be a useless enterprise when the goal is to gain the technology itself.

It’s true enough that it takes some little time to relocate manufacturing/assembly sites and to move supply chains. However, why should NVIDIA or any American company, especially our technology-based companies, do business with any PRC company beyond a—adjusted apace—period of transition away from that nation?

Why would an American company be so willing to transfer, or risk transferring, American technology to an enemy nation by doing business with that nation or any business domiciled in it?

Anti-Democratic

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Progressive-Democratic President Joe Biden claims he’s worried about anti-democratic forces in play in today’s American politics.

We must vote knowing who we have been and what we’re at risk of becoming. We must vote knowing what’s at stake and not just the policy of the moment—but institutions that have held us together, as we’ve sought a more perfect union, are also at stake.

Here’s one of those democratic institutions that’s at risk even after the just-completed elections—from Biden and his National Labor Relations Board:

[The] National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) announced it would start the process rescind a 2020 rule implemented to protect workers’ right to vote on removing union representation.

The institution of company employees isn’t to be allowed to exercise—by voting in particular—their right to not join a union or their right to vote to decertify an existing union.

Never mind two central facts.

According to NLRB data, among petitions filed to hold elections to install or remove a union, a unionized private-sector worker was more than twice as likely to attempt to decertify union representation than a nonunion worker was to unionize….

And

[A] pro-union group, The Worker Power Coalition, argues the “surge in worker organizing is the largest in more than 50 years,” and the data shows a 53% increase in union representation petitions….

That’s democracy in the workplace in action. That’s democracy that the Hero of Democracy in the White House wants to destroy.