VIDEO: Hitler on ClimateGate

Warning: the subtitles include profanity at least 3 times.

Other than that, I found it hilarious. Hat tip to Neptunus Lex.

C4P on Bastiat's Broken Window Fallacy

Doug Brady and Conservatives4Palin.com has a nice post from last year that I ran across that includes a more contemporary paraphrase of Bastiat's Broken Window Fallacy, as well as a John Stossel video on it.

Henry Hazlitt, an economist who was influenced by Bastiat, explained the broken window fallacy in his book, Economics in One Lesson. Here’s the relevant excerpt:

A young hoodlum, say, heaves a brick through the window of a baker’s shop. The shopkeeper runs out furious, but the boy is gone. A crowd gathers, and begins to stare with quiet satisfaction at the gaping hole in the window and the shattered glass over the bread and pies. After a while the crowd feels the need for philosophic reflection. And several of its members are almost certain to remind each other or the baker that, after all, the misfortune has its bright side. It will make business for some glazier.

As they begin to think of this they elaborate upon it. How much does a new plate glass window cost? Two hundred and fifty dollars? That will be quite a sun. After all, if windows were never broken, what would happen to the glass business? Then, of course, the thing is endless. The glazier will have $250 more to spend with other merchants, and these in turn will have $250 more to spend with still other merchants, and so ad infinitum.

The smashed window will go on providing money and employment in ever-widening circles. The logical conclusion from all this would be, if the crowd drew it, that the little hoodlum who threw the brick, far from being a public menace, was a public benefactor.

Now let us take another look. The crowd is at least right in its first conclusion. This little act of vandalism will in the first instance mean more business for some glazier. The glazier will be no more unhappy to learn of the incident than an undertaker to learn of a death. But the shopkeeper will be out $250 that he was planning to spend for a new suit. Because he has had to replace the window, he will have to go without the suit (or some equivalent need or luxury). Instead of having a window and $250 he now has merely a window. Or, as he was planning to buy the suit that very afternoon, instead of having both a window and a suit he must be content with the window and no suit. If we think of him as part of the community, the community has lost a new suit that might otherwise have come into being, and is just that much poorer.

The glazier’s gain of business, in short, is merely the tailor’s loss of business. No new “employment” has been added. The people in the crowd were thinking only of two parties to the transaction, the baker and the glazier. They had forgotten the potential third party involved, the tailor. They forgot him precisely because he will not now enter the scene. They will see the new window in the next day or two. They will never see the extra suit, precisely because it will never be made. They see only what is immediately visible to the eye.*

VIDEO: Paul Ryan at Health Care Summit

Paul Ryan does an excellent job of summarizing the budget gimmickry and issues with the current health care bills. It amazes me that the conversation could just go on without addressing these numbers. Obama just said that he had some problems with Ryan's numbers and moved on to another Democrat to speak about something else.

I hate the format where each speaker gets to talk for a set period of time, and there's very little back and forth actually hashing out any issues. And the whole summit, Obama gets to constantly frame the discussion after every Republican speaks.

In this case, there should have been considerable discussion addressing the points that Paul Ryan made.

By the way, I wish the Republicans had tried a lot harder to pin down Reid and Obama by asking them both to commit to not passing a bill using reconciliation or signing a bill that was passed using reconciliation. It would have made headlines if while being pressed hard Obama and Reid refused to make that commitment during the bi-partisan summit. It would have exposed how much of a sham the summit was. I'm willing to bet that if the Democrats think they have the votes to pass the Senate bill in the House, and a 2nd bill in both houses that would pass the Senate via reconciliation, that they will jam in through in the next few weeks.

2 Graphs: Jobs and Housing prices

Powerline blog has a great post with two informative graphs.

1. A graph of job gains or losses per month. It shows the natural cycle already starting trending upwards before Obama's policies could have had any effect. It's always important to keep in mind the business cycle's trends when evaluating whether policies have helped or not.

2. A graph of the housing market, asjusted for inflation, since 1900. It makes it clear how government policies and lower lending standards and easy money policies and the market irrationality caused by opaque mortgage-backed securities and their derivatives had thrown housing prices completely out of whack. They are only now back down near, but still higher, than the historical average. Based on this graph, you could expect anything from a stabilization in prices in the near future to a further pendulum swing down another 20-30%.

Obama's Jobs Proposals

In the State of the Union address on Wednesday, and again at the Republican annual conference meeting on Friday, President Obama outlined several proposals for a "jobs bill". I'm trying to think through the pros and cons of each.

1) An up to $5000 tax credit for businesses for each employee hired in 2010.

2) A payroll tax refund (dollar for dollar) for employers who give raises to employees earning under $100,000 for the amount of the raise that is greater than the rate of inflation.

3) Eliminate the capital gains tax for small business investment.

4) Take $30 Billion returned from the Wall Street banks, and give it to community banks to start lending to small businesses again.

(well, I've typed out the proposals, but gotta run for now -- will analyze later)


Here's some more proposals from the meeting with Republicans on Friday:

5) A "modest fee on the nation's largest banks and financial institutions to fully recover for taxpayers' money that they provided to the financial sector when it was teetering on the brink of collapse, and it's designed to discourage them from taking reckless risks in the future."

6) "I propose that we close tax loopholes that reward companies for shipping American jobs overseas, and instead give companies greater incentive to create jobs right here at home."

7) "I've proposed a 3-year freeze in discretionary spending, other than what we need for national security... that's consistent with a lot of the talk... we can't blink when it's time to actually do the job."

8) PAYGO rules -- just passed in Senate.

9) Bipartisan fiscal commission -- I'm going to establish one by executive order, after one died in the Senate the other day. "I hope you participate fully..."

Obama goes on to health insurance, but I don't have time to fisk it all.

International Welfare Creates Dependency Too

Bret Stephens takes the occasion of Haiti's plight to remind people that long-term Foreign Aid (as opposed to short-term emergency humanitarian assistance which almost everyone supports) is part of the problem.

Take something as seemingly straightforward as food aid. "At some point," Mr. Shikwati [, a Kenyan economist,] explains, "this corn ends up in the harbor of Mombasa. A portion of the corn often goes directly into the hands of unscrupulous politicians who then pass it on to their own tribe to boost their next election campaign. Another portion of the shipment ends up on the black market where the corn is dumped at extremely low prices. Local farmers may as well put down their hoes right away; no one can compete with the U.N.'s World Food Program."

Foreign Aid more often than not destroys the local production capacity of the items being provided as aid, and thus creates dependency instead. And to make matters worse, it always props up corrupt local politicians who use their power in the aided country to direct aid for political reasons, or make money off the aid using various schemes, such as buying and running the trucking companies that actually deliver the aid.

American foreign aid, apart from emergency aid like in Haiti right now, in my opinion, should be carefully limited to forms that promote local good governance and increased production capacity in the aided country. Otherwise, it does more harm than good.

The reasons that poor countries are poor is directly due to their economic and government systems. There are numerous examples of countries quickly rising out from the third to first world in a matter of a decade or two with free markets and protecting property rights. The ones that stay mired in poverty are almost all characterized by corrupt governments and dysfunctional economic systems. Foreign investment is almost non-existent in these countries.

Those core reasons for why a country remains poor are by-in-large harmed by long-term foreign aid.

BigJourn: Fisking AP ClimateGate Article

On Andrew Breitbart's new BigJournalism.com website, there is a great fisking of the big AP writeup immediately after the ClimateGate scandal broke back in December 2009.

The AP's article probably had the largest reach of any writeup on the scandal, as it was no doubt featured prominently in most newspapers around the country as well as on countless news aggregator websites.

The AP assigned 5 reporters to the article, who reviewed the emails and got comment from only 4 scientists, taking pains to point out that the one AGW (anthropogenic global warming) skeptic was not a true scientist, even though the other quoted scientists were not in the field of climatology either. Further they distort what the scientists said, or at least what their positions were when contacted by the Big Journalism article's authors, to downplay the significance of the ClimateGate emails and computer code.

The AP article is also conspicuous in who it did not quote, including any of the Global Warming crowd who wrote the emails and computer code, or any of the skeptics who are frequently mentioned in the emails. I'll give them the benefit of the doubt that with the computer code, the AP just hadn't had enough time to have computer programmer pore through all the code yet.

Here's the link to the Big Journalism article.

Be sure to read it. Articles like these are crucial to understanding the bias inherent in supposedly "objective" news reporting.

The biggest error by the AP is in coming to such sweeping and pre-judged conclusions as the headline "Science Not Faked..." when that remains to be seen. There have been many articles since ClimateGate broke which question some of the data itself, and not much can be determined for sure until these Global Warming scientists open up their data and climate models for independent review. The AP headline could have just as easily and validly have been "Scientists' Methods & Motives Now In Question".