Shannon Love

What’s Up, Doc?

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Sorry I haven’t been posting much recently but the truth is that the Cartoon Network has been showing reruns of old classic Warner Brother’s cartoons, so I’ve been preoccupied with…uhmmm… cultural research.

Okay, I haven’t. Truth is that I’m trying to boot strap a little software company and that means coding 12 hours a day. So, no blogging or much of anything else save a little family time. I haven’t even been listening to the news or reading Instapundit. When I really have to concentrate, I shutout the news and blog reading because if I hear something that piques my interest I have a terrible urge to write about it and I don’t want the internal distraction of the urge.

However, the Cartoon Network has been showing old Loony Toon cartoons and I have been watching those during my regrettable “brain off” periods.

I really enjoy those old cartoons far more I think than a person of my theoretical maturity should. They evoke for me not childhood but an almost tangible cultural history. They are redolent with the rich undertones of the era’s popular culture. By their very nature as mere schematics, their creators perforce had to anchor the stories, gags and iconography on concepts widely understood by the audiences of the time. As such, they capture the feel of their times in way that other art forms just can’t quite convey.

Ah, who am I kidding? I’m just a sucker for pre-political correctness cartoons. Give me the old stuff with firearms, explosives, falling anvils, cross-dressing and moonshine!

Pitting Redistributionist Against Environmentalist

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David Foster’s post on the cost to industry of EPA overreach gave me an idea of how to pit one group of Leftists against another group of Leftists.

The upper-class, white, environmentalist Leftists might not care if Shell lost 4 billion (with a b) dollars when forced to shelve their exploration plans in Alaska but I wonder if, say, an African-American redistributionist Leftist struggling to find funding for urban social-welfare programs might care about all the Federal tax revenues lost when Shell is forced by the environmentalist to forego the profits they would have made pumping the oil.

If Shell was going to spend $4 billion in development, then they planned to make at least twice that in profits. With the 35% US corporate tax rate, the means that the Federal government alone just lost $1.5 billion in tax revenues. That’s a bit simplistic of a calculation but nevertheless once you take into account the loss of income and social security taxes from the jobs that won’t be created, the EPA’s actions just cost the government a lot of tax revenues.

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The Left and the Near Enemy

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An anonymous reader of Instapundit, in writing about the Left and Libya says:

I’ve really been enjoying your take on things since the bombing in Libya started this weekend, even more than I normally do. For eight long years, well-meaning people on the right have been accused of all manner of hate, dishonesty, stupidity, and wickedness, from a bunch of people who believe their own neighbors are the primary cause of suffering in the world.[emp added]

That is Leftism in a nutshell. Leftism is nothing but a continuously shifting series of excuses for why Leftist should have the right to use the violence-based coercive power of the state to dominate and control their own neighbors. For the Leftists there are no true external enemies, every problem in the world is ultimately caused or controlled by someone within our own society. For Leftists, there is only the near enemy, the people they see everyday.

No where is that more clear than in foreign policy.

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Could We Just Buy Off Gaddafi’s Mercenaries?

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Gaddafi is relying on foreign mercenaries to serve as his security troops just like Romania’s Nicolae CeauÈ™escu relied on hired Palestinians. This is a sure sign that his regime has little to no internal support.

My spouse and I were explaining this to our son who asked, “So, since they’re mercenaries, couldn’t we just outbid Gaddafi?”

We laughed at the idea at first but then stopped to think. Back in the day when mercenaries were far more common, they could sometimes be bought off especially if it looked like their current employer would never be able to pay up. The basic economics of a mercenary life has not changed so maybe Gaddafi’s mercenaries would be just as susceptible to financial inducements as their historical predecessors.

Gaddafi supposedly has a lot of money to pay his mercs with but I think it safe to say we have more and a much better track record of paying off.

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The iPad2 is So Much Better If You Have Any Money Left to Buy One

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The Wallstreet Journal on the Fed’s new media campaign to spin its inflationary policies:

The former Goldman Sachs chief economist gave a speech explaining the economy’s progress and the Fed’s successes, but come question time the main thing the crowd wanted to know was why they’re paying so much more for food and gas. Keep in mind the Fed doesn’t think food and gas prices matter to its policy calculations because they aren’t part of “core” inflation.
 
So Mr. Dudley tried to explain that other prices are falling. “Today you can buy an iPad 2 that costs the same as an iPad 1 that is twice as powerful,” he said. “You have to look at the prices of all things.”

Here’s the thing: The iPad was always going to provide more bang for the buck regardless of what the Fed did or didn’t do. The cost drop for the iPad is due to the rapid technological change in the computer field. Moreover, without the Fed destroying the value of the money in people’s pockets, the cost to performance ratio change for the iPad would have been even more dramatic.

How can the Fed claim they aren’t causing problems by pointing to a factor over which they have no influence. Shouldn’t we hold the Fed accountable for the factors they do influence?

Improving technology automatically improves the standard of living but that has nothing to do with inflation. Yes, it’s great that you can buy a much more powerful iPad2 for the same price as an iPad1 but it’s not so great if you can’t afford even the price of an iPad1 now because your food and gas prices have increased to absorb all the excess income you had budgeted to get a new iPad!

Inflation is the most dangerous of all financial strategies. It destroys real wealth and utterly disrupts the price mechanisms that drives the entire economy. To the extent it works, it does so by transferring vast amounts of wealth from ordinary people to those who get the inflated currency first. In this case, it is the large banks that the Fed are trying to re-inflate after the housing bust sucked all the capital out of them.

Even if is necessary, and I’m not saying it is, the Fed should have at least have the good grace to explain things straight to us instead of trying to convince us that our rapidly decreasing purchasing power is nothing to worry about. Inflation is just a form of taxation. They are taking money from us to prop up our financial institution. That taking will leave us all with a lower standard of living than we would have had otherwise. They should be honest about that.

Just because Steve Jobs is very good at his job doesn’t mean the Fed doesn’t suck at theirs.