Stable Genius Liberal

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What does it say about Romney’s campaign that to run against a sitting president, one with a three and a half year track record, they have to lie about what he said to find a point of attack? They Didn’t Build That – NYTimes.com Once again, reality has a liberal bias.

Libertarians don’t even know when to gloat

I also favor smaller government, but that doesn’t make big government the cause of every economic problem. If the Spanish and Greek governments shrank enough to balance their budgets, they’d still have 24% unemployment, if not more. Their economies are hopelessly uncompetitive at the current exchange rate. Milton Friedman understood that. What in the world has happened to the modern libertarian movement?

Libertarians are no longer about liberty, they are about blaming government for everything. They are about non-policy, not market based policy. Denialism rather than skepticism. Friedman is so far removed from modern Libertarianism that it isn’t even funny.

Revealed – the capitalist network that runs the world – New Scientist

The idea that a few bankers control a large chunk of the global economy might not seem like news to New York’s Occupy Wall Street movement and protesters elsewhere (see photo). But the study, by a trio of complex systems theorists at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, is the first to go beyond ideology to empirically identify such a network of power. It combines the mathematics long used to model natural systems with comprehensive corporate data to map ownership among the world’s transnational corporations

Take this with a grain of salt. Being connected may not be the same as being in control. And I am not sure what assumptions they made and how true they may be. But the study is an interesting one and might give rise to more.

From John Cole: The Next 48 Hours Summarized For You In One Short Post

R- Guns don’t kill people, people kill people. D- Yes, but guns make it very easy to kill people in large quantities. He would not have been able to stab 71 people. R- Stop trying to politicize this tragedy! What we need are not fewer guns, but more guns. If only someone else in that… Continue reading From John Cole: The Next 48 Hours Summarized For You In One Short Post

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I love the way the GOP thinks it is perfectly acceptable to inconvenience people who want to vote by demanding all types of paperwork accessible only in remove government offices when there is little to no voter fraud but doesn’t want to inconvenience a person who wants to buy 6000 rounds of ammunition and a… Continue reading Untitled

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friendlyatheist: Good point…

The World Is Experiencing The Opposite Of A Sovereign Debt Crisis

You might be tempted to say, well, okay but the Fed is manipulating rates, or that the US is just the “cleanest dirty shirt” but both of these explanations fail when you look at the wide sweep of borrowing costs around the world.

This is the exact opposite of what should be happening if the Peter Schiff’s and Ron Paul’s of the world were right about a currency crisis causing spikes in inflation and interest rates as they have been predicting for almost a decade now.

Krugman, Say’s Law and the silliness of Going Galt

Now suppose that President Obama has reduced Mr. Wheelerdealer to despair; not only does the president waste money by doing things like feeding children, he says mean things about some rich people, which is just like the Nazis invading Poland, or something. So Wheelerdealer decides to go Galt. Well, actually just one-third Galt, reducing his working time to just 2000 hours a year so he can spend more time with his wife and mistress.
According to marginal productivity theory, this does in fact shrink the economy: Wheelerdealer adds $10,000 worth of production for every hour he works, so his semi-withdrawal reduces GDP by $10 million. Bad!
But what is the impact on the incomes of Americans other than Wheelerdealer? GDP is down by $10 million — but payments to Wheelerdealer are also down by $10 million. So the impact on the incomes of non-Wheelerdealer America is … zero. Enjoy your leisure, John!

At some point we will be forced to admit that the folks who live on the equity side of the ledger are over paid and under taxed and this is a problem for people on the asset side of the ledger. If they all went Galt, no one would miss them and many people, mostly wage workers, would be better off.

What is the Libor scandal?

growing evidence that Libor numbers have been deliberately manipulated by banks for years means that millions of people have been paying the wrong interest rate on all manner of financial products. Vast sums of money have been wrongly snatched from innocent people and created equally vast undeserved windfalls for others. The basic structure of the world’s financial system has once again been exposed as fundamentally broken.

And once again, the right says nothing about it, or claims it isn’t a problem because there is no way to fix the problem via tax cuts and deregulation. And if there is no way to fix it via tax cuts and deregulation, it can’t possibly be a real problem.