28 Friday Mar 2014
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Worthwhile ungated links in the WSJ today:
Matt Ridley on “muted alarm” in the UN Climate Panel’s latest report
The Individual Mandate Goes Poof, and the ACA “can no longer hide what it truly is: another unfunded liability for taxpayers.”
Why Can’t the Left Govern? Rube Goldberg might have had some insights.
27 Thursday Mar 2014
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Great article in The Atlantic on Norman Borlaug, a Nobel Prize winner for his work in bringing high-yield agriculture to the developing world. His work has likely saved hundreds of millions of people from starvation and has slowed or even reversed deforestation in some countries. Yet Borlaug became persona non-grata with some international funding organizations with the rise of the popular environmental movement, which found dubious reasons to oppose high-yield agriculture even as it saved lives. Today, Africa remains one part of the world with extremely low agricultural yields. Borlaug at 82, is spent the last part of his life working with African nations to establish more productive practices. He would have been 100 on Tuesday of this week.
26 Wednesday Mar 2014
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Many US weather stations show cooling with flat maximum temperatures, according to a new study in the Journal of Climate. According to Anthony Watts, the study confirms that warming temperatures in the U.S. over the past 100 years are “all about nighttime influence on minimum temperatures, mostly due to the heat sink effect of urbanization and nearby structures and paving.” One fascinating chart at the link shows the extent to which the artificial “adjustments” to temperature history made by NOAA have distorted the reported temperature trend.
26 Wednesday Mar 2014
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The IRS just ruled that Bitcoin will be treated as property. That means any transaction conducted with Bitcoin as currency could generate a capital gain on the Bitcoins traded, which must be reported. To obtain a value, the ruling says you have to check the current rate on an exchange at the time of a transaction.
So that could pretty much put Bitcoin out of business as a medium of exchange in the U.S. There is already an exception in the tax code for foreign currencies, which can fluctuate in value relative to the dollar between transactions. Why not Bitcoin? But there may be a reprieve: “…the IRS’ guidance may not stand forever. The Treasury Department should now begin developing formal regulations tailored to digital currencies.”
26 Wednesday Mar 2014
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Read the words of an intellectual founder of so-called “market socialism.” They are brutal, the words of a tyrant masquerading as a man of “courage” and conscience. In Socialism Was Born Bad: The Case of Oskar Lange, Bryan Caplan offers these illuminating quotes along with this parting observation:
“At least Lenin was honest enough to call his policy revolutionary ‘terror.’ But it’s just two perspectives on the same policies. For Lange – like the other founding fathers of socialism – courage is the courage to practice terror.”
25 Tuesday Mar 2014
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Peter Schiff warns that the growth of debt will catch up with us. If it’s impossible to cut federal spending or tax more heavily, then the only remaining avenue is more debt issuance and ultimately an inflation tax. This scenario is all too realistic, and it may put the Federal Reserve into a bind of having no credible QE exit strategy. Will the Fed really allow rates to rise? Will it really stop printing?
25 Tuesday Mar 2014
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There are several good opinion pieces on the subject of the War On Poverty at the Washington Post site. Marc Thiessen has some thoughts on Why the Left Is Attacking Paul Ryan, and a nice piece by George Will made roughly the same point a few days ago. Will notes that 50 years ago, Daniel Patrick Moynihan made the same points as Ryan and received roughly the same treatment. Apparently, you can’t discuss facts about poverty and have a serious discussion about policy without inviting accusations of racism. Sacred cow chips indeed!
25 Tuesday Mar 2014
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There is good reason to question validity of IRS investigation. Make that plural: reasons! Right at the top of the list is Obama’s assertion, on national television, that there was “‘not even a smidgen of corruption’ in the IRS political targeting scandal,” just as the so-called investigation was getting underway. According to the author of the piece at the link, Obama’s statement could even be construed as obstruction of justice. Special prosecutor, please.
24 Monday Mar 2014
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Attempts by the administration and its cheerleaders to sell Obamacare in the last weeks of the open enrollment period (ending March 31) look increasingly desperate. John C. Goodman in the WSJ describes the law’s spectacular failure to achieve its stated objectives as well as the inherent unworkability caused by the mandates, subsidies, and incentives created by the ACA. No, it is not “just insurance,” unless you think community rating can be sustained in an actuarial black hole of adverse selection. The ACA is a mess.
23 Sunday Mar 2014
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Historically, regulation has served as a tool of entrenched interests to strangle new competition, and that is more true today than ever. In This piece in Time, Nick Gillespie likens government regulators to Mafia hit men. Yet every new piece of regulation is promoted under the guise of “protecting”consumers or workers in one way or another. HT: John Crawford.
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