Tag Archives: economics

Misunderstanding

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…by Howard Kurtz in his recent Fox News piece.

Sony’s unforgivable blunder was in making this misbegotten movie in the first place. I mean, an assassination “comedy” that includes Kim Jong Un’s head being blown up, with an internal debate over how much his hair should be on fire? As Greta Van Susteren tweeted, “Anyone who has been to NK knows how dangerous it is and would not have been so stupid to make that movie.” Sony Pictures and Seth Rogen didn’t even have the wit to make it about a fictional regime with a short leader.

No. Sony and Rogen had plenty of wit—they had the wit to skewer a living, breathing thug who’s starving his own people.

Kurtz misunderstands completely. The quality of the movie, the degree of its comedy, are wholly irrelevant. Folks like Kim “Bébé Doc” Jong-un are exactly the ones who need to be called out, satirized, ridiculed, caviled, and by name.

The point of free speech, the reason it’s at the center of liberty, is to allow men to speak their minds on any subject—especially including calling out, to facilitate their removal, political thugs.

Sony’s unforgivable blunder was not in making a movie but in collapsing into their fetal ball in the face of some threats.

Is Sony Dissembling?

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President Barack Obama said Sony “made a mistake” when they decided not to release their movie in surrender to northern Korea’s hacker threats.

Sony had this in response to Obama’s recognition:

Let us be clear: the only decision that we have made with respect to release of the film was not to release it on Christmas Day in theaters, after the theater owners declined to show it. Without theaters, we could not release it in the theaters on Christmas Day. We had no choice.

Let me be clear: releasing the movie and theaters then showing it (or not) are two different things. Sony “leadership” knows this full well. Sony easily could have released the movie. Some theaters might have shown it, others might not (and several major ones had, in fact, chickened out and said they wouldn’t show it), but absent the release, no theater has the opportunity to show the movie.

Sony had a choice.

Update: Sony has backtracked its backtracking, and it has released its movie this Christmas to some 300 theaters in the US, and it’s streaming the movie online via Google Play, YouTube Movies, Microsoft’s Xbox Video and its own website, http://www.seetheinterview.com.

On Trade with Cuba

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Doug Erwin, an Economics Professor at Dartmouth, writing in The Wall Street Journal, had a thought.

Restoring trade ties and expanding commerce would revolutionize the Cuban economy and transform Cuban society. It would spur the growth of a business class, creating competing pockets of power and new, wealthy groups that would challenge the ruling Communist Party. It would give Cuban citizens access to more information, and information about the outside world destabilizes any repressive regime. What would happen if every Cuban citizen had access to a smartphone, could organize protests via Twitter, and spread the word about government outrages?

That may well be true. It certainly comports with my view that conservatism and free market philosophies have nothing to fear in the market competition of ideas, and there certainly needs to be such a free market in Cuba.

But there need be no normalization of relations with Cuba, which in the end would benefit only and exclusively the Castros and their successors in the regime, to achieve this. All that’s required is to allow—to legalize from our side of the strait—market interactions between Cuban citizens and American businesses. True enough, the Castro tyranny would object to such a move. However, a black market is the free market alternative to centrally planned economies and to the “economy” of despots.

It’s certainly true that black market pricing is higher than legal free market pricing, but they thrive in a despotic environment for two reasons. One is that those higher than legal free market prices still are lower than the government’s prices. The other is that the products being bought and sold are available at all, as they often are not (e.g., smartphones) in a despot’s economy.

Here is the interaction, and here is the ultimate downfall of the Castro régimes of the world. Then can occur normalization of government-government relations.

 

h/t Cafe Hayek

Obama’s Cuba Normalization Move

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It’s certainly true that 50 years of trade embargo and absence of formal—normalized—relations between the US and Cuba have not brought about increased freedom or prosperity for the Cuban people. Neither had 45 or more years of Cold War containment succeeded in giving the Russian people, or the other peoples trapped behind the USSR’s iron curtain, a chance at improving their lot. Until it did.

Normalization isn’t the necessary change in policy here.

Cuba’s economy, always on the verge of collapse, but always propped up by key supporters—Russia and Venezuela—no longer has those props to hold it up. Venezuela, due to government economic policy failure and the sharp fall in oil prices, is itself in dire economic straits. Russia, due to economic sanctions and the sharp fall in oil prices, also is in dire economic straits. Cuba, now, is in its deepest economic crisis since the Castros took power those 50 years ago.

Why normalize now, then, with economic leverage on the rise?

The US got nothing in return for this normalization. There is no easing of Internet access for the Cubans. There is no increase in freedom of speech for the Cubans. There is no easing of restrictions on public assemblies by the Cuban people. There is no move toward free elections from among freely competing political parties or independently running candidates for the Cuban people. There aren’t even any handshakes, nor promises of greater flexibility, nor winks and nods or quiet pats on the back implying such moves in a nebulous future. Indeed, it appears as though the normalization was a sweetener demanded by the Cuban government in return for bringing to fruition the 3 for 2 prisoner swap.

How does this help the Cuban people?

President Barack Obama’s signatures—Obamacare and Dodd-Frank—along with his economic deadweights of EPA regulation, labor interferences, constant demand for ever higher taxes and spending, combined with his unblemished record of foreign policy failures, form a legacy of shambles.

Could this move, then, just be a desperate attempt to retrieve something of a reputation for, and by, this President? Could it be smaller ball, a naked pandering to Americans of Cuban heritage for the 2016 elections?

Technology, Oil, and Government

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Falling oil prices are a good thing. Except when they’re not. Or….

The irony in the falling prices is that the success of US producers using hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling technologies is partly responsible, along with slowing demand by struggling Asian and European markets. Now that success could come back to bite the so-called fracking industry and other drillers in America.

[Wyoming Governor Matt, R] Mead acknowledged that in the short term, lower gas prices will benefit businesses and residents in his sparsely populated state, where distances between towns are often calculated in hours instead of minutes.

But, he pointed out, “If we see low prices continue for some time, we’ll see rigs start to lay down. And it’s not just the direct revenue. It’s the hotels, restaurants and all that goes with that.”

Not to mention jobs.

This is normal in a free market economy, though. New technologies, or old technologies like fracking whose time has come, are always disruptive. Recall the stereotypical, but no less accurate for that, impact on horse-drawn buggy and whip manufacturers with the advent of the horseless carriage and then the assembly line for making those automobiles cheap.

So it is with fracking. Not only does it make hard-to-get oil and natural gas (much) easier and (much) cheaper to get, it drastically increases the supply of these commodities, each of which individually drastically lowers the price of these, and together they synergistically do.

But when supply overshoots demand, and the price obtainable for oil and gas cannot cover even the lowered cost of extraction, many of the suppliers, extractors, stop producing, stop extracting. This has negative effects on both fracking jobs and the ancillary jobs Mead mentioned.

However, in a free market, supply and demand quickly match each other, and prices—and jobs—stabilize. With the technological advances associated with this commodity, too, as with any technological advance, the new pricing equilibrium will be lower than the prior equilibrium. It’s uncertain whether oil and gas pricing in particular will stabilize at their current levels, continue a little lower, or go a little higher. But it’s virtually certain we’re done with $100 oil for the foreseeable future, which is to the good of utilities, manufacturers, consumers, and anyone and anything that uses energy.

And those jobs? They’ll recover with the stability and predictability of the new normal in oil and gas extraction. The widespread use of fracking and related technologies also will lead to a net increase in employment when all is said and done, just like in those early automobile days.

The kicker here is identified by Kathleen Sgamma, Western Energy Alliance Vice President of Government and Public Affairs [emphasis added]:

There is a point at which the lower commodity price combined with the increased regulatory cost will put new wells out of business—they just won’t be drilled[.]

And [emphasis added]

whether a well is on private, state, or federal land, “because the regulatory environment is such that it makes it more expensive to develop on those federal or tribal lands.”

Government’s intrusive regulation wasn’t a factor in Henry Ford’s disruption.