Tag Archives: economics

The PRC and Bitcoin

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The behavior of the People’s Republic of China regarding bitcoin has purpose far beyond controlling bitcoin.  As background, The Wall Street Journal had this assessment of the PRC’s financial industry:

China has digitized its financial sector faster than any other nation.

The reason for their rapid pace is this according to Li Lihui, a spokesman for the National Internet Finance Association of China, and it has nothing at all to do with a sovereign nation’s legitimate desire to control its own currency and money supply:

A goal of China’s monetary regulation is to ensure that “the source and destination of every piece of money can be tracked[.]”

That end-to-end tracking, to the extent it can be done, guarantees that the PRC will know who is spending and for what.

And that means that the PRC, a nation that rules by “law” (rather than operates under rule of law) and that brooks no dissent from the pronouncements of the Communist Party of China, can control whether any given individual or organization will be permitted to spend for any particular purpose—or even whether that person or individual will be allowed access to his money at all.

Huzzah

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Regular order—it lives, sort of, at least on spending measures, in the House.

The House on Thursday voted to send 12 appropriations bills to the Senate. The chamber approved four of these 2018 spending measures prior to its August recess, and the remaining eight were debated and passed as part of the broader Thursday vote. They had previously passed out of committee. This is the first time since 2004 that a House Republican majority has passed all of its individual spending bills….

Now all we need is for the Senate to figure out how to do its job and pass these bills.  However, with unreliable Republicans in the Senate like John McCain (R, AZ), Rand Paul (R, KY), and Lisa Murkowski (R, AK), The Wall Street Journal is almost as skeptical about that as I am.

Eat the Easter Bunny

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Peter Rabbit, too.  Because that’s better than having actual food in the stores, in the pantry, and on the table, like a free market would produce in abundance.  At least according to Venezuelan strong man Nicolas Maduro, who caused the food shortage.

Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro has introduced a “Rabbit Plan” that encourages people to start eating rabbits rather than keep them as pets in a bid to tackle the country’s food shortages.

Heads up, Bambi.

Nonsense

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The National Park Service is handing $100,000 to UC Berkeley in a “research” grant to “to ‘honor the legacy’ of the Marxist revolutionary group the Black Panther Party.”  Worse, it did so without following its usual competitive bidding process for research grant money.

This cooperative research project between the National Park Service (NPS) and the University of California, Berkeley (UCB) on the Black Panther Party (BPP) is anchored in historical methods, visual culture, and the preservation of sites and voices.  The project will discover new links between the historical events concerning race that occurred in Richmond during World War II and the subsequent emergence of the BPP in the San Francisco Bay Area two decades later through research, oral history, and interpretation.

Committed to truthfully honoring the legacy of BPP activists and the San Francisco Bay Area communities they served, the project seeks to document the lives of activists and elders and the landscapes that shaped the movement[.]

This is…nonsense.  To truthfully handle the legacy of the Black Panther Party domestic terrorists, the Department of Justice should be the ones conducting this “research.”  If the NPS is serious about finding out things concerning the relationship between the Black Panthers and American society, it should claw back those $100,000 and transfer them to DoJ.

NPS’ funding announcement can be seen here.

Medicare for All

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Senator Bernie Sanders (I, VT) is beating that drum, again, and has support from some Progressive-Democratic Party Senators.

The health proposal, dubbed Medicare for all, would offer the same suite of medical benefits required for some insurance plans under the Affordable Care Act and eliminate most out-of-pocket costs. Mr Sanders argues that although taxes would likely rise to support the new system, families would save money by no longer needing to purchase health coverage. The government, he says, could also secure lower prices for medical services.

Of course it has the same stuff as Obamacare—it’s the planned evolution of Obamacare into a Federally mandated single-payer system.  Because Government Knows Better, especially one run by Progressive-Democrats and their Social Democrat crony.

“Taxes would likely rise”—yewbetcha, to the tune of an additional $24,000 per family.  Whether we want that “benefit” or not.  Families can save money by not having actually to purchase coverage?  That’s rich: what do these guys think those 24 stacks are, if not coverage purchase costs inflicted on us whether we want or need coverage or not?  Aside from that, lots of folks, my family included, don’t use health care services very much; we don’t need coverage against costs we don’t incur.  That’s for one geezer family.  Those 24 stacks represent no net savings for us at all.  The young families also are healthy, don’t use health care services very much, and so have no need of health coverage.  And as they’re just starting their lives, they don’t have those 24 stacks to begin with.

Government can get lower prices?  That’s, um, rich.  Just like it (doesn’t) get lower prices on so many other “services” it provides, what with requiring contractors to pay prevailing union labor wages, whether the contractors employ union workers or not.

[P]rivate insurers wouldn’t be permitted to compete with the government plan for basic coverage….

This, I suppose, is one way in which Sanders’ government would get lower prices—competition raises prices, after all, in his and his Progressive-Democrat cronies’ fetid imaginations.

The 96-page bill offers no mechanisms to pay for the plan….

Of course not.  Money grows on trees.  Or, as I speculate Sanders will tout in his promised for “tomorrow” white paper on funding, money is in the bottomless wallets of the rich.