Some Concerns With the Amazon Boycott
Woo hoo, I already got 1 hate mail on this one. An excerpt (from the article, not the hate mail):
It’s ironic to think through exactly why Amazon ended up being the target of the boycott, when even the boycotters would all quickly admit that it was Lieberman who was more culpable than the Amazon executives. Consider: If a would-be boycotter wanted to cause economic pain because of the silencing of WikiLeaks, then the obvious move would be to stop sending more money to the very government that is waging wars and harassing Assange.
Yet the boycotters aren’t saying, “Hey everyone, let’s stop sending our money to D.C.” Why? Because they are afraid of what the government would do to them. In other words, they are behaving exactly like the Amazon executives.
Let us not forget that all of us, to the extent we pay taxes, are funding the very organization that is carrying out operations that WikiLeaks is trying to stop. In that light, it’s odd to become indignant over Amazon for merely withdrawing its support from WikiLeaks, when the boycotters themselves continue to send their money to the organization actively trying to shut down WikiLeaks.
Save the Bluefin Tuna With Property Rights
My article yesterday at Mises.org. BTW lately my articles have benefited from the customized artwork of Evan Wondolowski. An excerpt:
Over the past two weeks, National Public Radio (NPR) has carried stories on the plight of the bluefin tuna and on the conservation campaign designed to save the endangered fish. Restaurants and supermarket chains have pledged to boycott the delectable creature until governments lower fishing quotas. Some vocal fishermen naturally oppose reductions in their quotas, because this would hurt their livelihood.
The whole episode is just another demonstration of the conflict that arises whenever government regulation tries to solve a problem caused by a lack of property rights. If people owned portions of the ocean, then the bluefin tuna would become as ubiquitous as cattle.
Quotable Quotes
Wittiest thing I heard today: A client whose check for my traveling expenses hadn’t shown up wrote something like, “Sorry Bob I mailed that on November 24. It’s not impossible that the Post Office just hasn’t delivered it yet, with the holiday. As my husband says, that 44-cent stamp is 14 cents for postage and 30 cents for storage.”
Dumbest thing I heard today: An anchor on CNN, going to a correspondent to discuss the Fed bailouts, said something like, “Wow Candice, $9 trillion is an unbelievable amount of money. I think the question on every American’s mind is, will the Treasury be paid that money back?”
The poor woman had to figure out how to answer that question without using obscenities.
David : Goliath :: Lincoln : Davis?!
I was listening to some “light” commentary on NPR concerning a guy Miller who apparently yet again didn’t make it into the Baseball Hall of Fame. I tuned in during the middle of the monologue, so I didn’t catch the guy’s full name. I gathered he wasn’t a player–or at least, not a player of note–but rather a representative of the players, and was responsible for bringing free agency into baseball.
(For those who have TVs and watch sports, don’t judge me. I catch Krugman errors, not fly balls. There are only 24 hours in the day.)
Anyway, the NPR commentator was trying to describe the injustice of the powerful baseball commissioner (who locked horns with Miller) already being inducted into the Hall of Fame, while Miller had not yet been given the honor. The guy said, “That would be like having Goliath in the biblical hall of fame, but not David. It would be like inducting Jefferson Davis in the league of honored presidents, but leaving out Abraham Lincoln.”
Eh, I don’t think that second analogy really works, unless it just means, “Here are other people I dislike and like.” I can understand how someone raised on standard American lore would even go so far as to compare Lincoln to Jesus. (Not that I endorse the comparison, just saying I understand how someone could think, “Ah yes, a righteous person wielding overwhelming power, freeing slaves and slaying bad guys.”)
But to compare Lincoln to pipsqueak David, and Davis to the monstrous Goliath? I don’t think so.
Potpourri
Once again the browser becomes turgid with tabs:
* Jim Manzi has been having a good discussion/argument with Karl Smith, on the confidence economists should have in their models. If you go to this post, you can get up to speed. It’s an interesting discussion because if you read either of them, you totally “get” what he is saying, but they are fundamentally disagreeing with each other.
* Seeing that the CIA has taken no hostile action against Julian Assange, Robert Wenzel comes out of hiding and does a podcast with Lew Rockwell.
* Speaking of Wenzel, I think he often bites below the belt, but anyone can appreciate this (from his review of Matt Taibbi’s new book): “In thinking about the book, the only people I think could find the book useful would be the miners in Chile who were trapped for 69 days, but only if they would have been trapped for 6.9 years, instead. It would have brought them up-to-date in an almost picture book like way.”
* I don’t share his flippant dismissal of Arrow’s Theorem, but nonetheless Silas Barta makes some good points in this post, especially his response to a famous result by Amartya Sen.
* This is a YouTube of a new mother who is given the runaround because she doesn’t want her breast milk to go through the x-ray machine. She actually printed out the TSA’s own policies, but she couldn’t show the printout to the agents because her luggage was already screened and she was still in the hot zone. I think some of the people go to the airports looking for a fight, but this one (no sound, unfortunately) looks like they were really just screwing with her to teach her a lesson.
* Here’s my podcast from a couple of weeks ago on “Live Free Austin” (John Bush and Jason Rink). I don’t even remember what we talked about. I’m sure it was not favorable to Bernanke.
Could the Fed Become Insolvent?
I discuss this possibility today at Mises.org. I walk through three separate (hypothetical) Fed balance sheets to show how it could occur. An excerpt:
Although our central bank appears to be insolvent, in practice what would hinder its continued operation? Its liabilities consist in the legal-tender fiat money of the land. If someone walks into a branch of the central bank, hands over a $20 bill, and says, “I want to redeem this!” the teller can calmly reply, “Do you want that as two $10 bills, or four $5 bills?”
Things are more complicated for a small central bank that has liabilities denominated in other currencies. But for the case of the Federal Reserve — with dollar-denominated liabilities — it is hard to see what actual constraints it would face, should its accountants suddenly announce its insolvency. Even if there is a “run on the Fed,” where all of the commercial banks want to withdraw their electronic reserves on the same day, the central bankers need not panic: they can order the Treasury to run the printing press in order to swap paper currency for electronic checkbook entries. (This is a neat trick unavailable to the mere commercial bankers.)
However, if the central bank were to actually become insolvent, it would be quite scandalous. The government would probably have to “seize it,” lest the public realize that the whole scheme was a giant, legalized counterfeiting operation.
In my opinion, this is the bankers’ main concern at the moment. They surely don’t like thousands of economists blogging away on the possibility of the Fed going bankrupt, because that gets more and more people thinking through the logic of our crazy banking system.
I also take the opportunity to plug my new upcoming online class:
For those interested in an analysis of the actual Federal Reserve’s balance sheet and its various interventions into asset markets since the financial crisis began, I will be offering a new Mises Academy course, “Anatomy of the Fed,” in early January.
How Does Scott Sumner Really Feel About “Income”?
I was reading Scott Sumner’s blog and was moved to send him this email (with links added):
I was going to do a really smarmy post once I realized this, but I want to give you a chance to defend yourself. Here’s my problem:
(A) You have been arguing that income is a meaningless concept, and that people don’t use it to plan their consumption.
(B) You have been arguing that we are in a recession because national income did not grow quickly enough, and so people’s plans are all screwed up. In fact you want Bernanke to stop talking about inflation and start talking about income.
I’m sure you can see at least the apparent problem.
Bob
With permission, I reprint Scott’s reply:
Same word, completely different concept. When you say “income” you include stuff like capital gains, which is not a part of GDP. I am interested in production, not income, as the term is applied to individuals.
BTW, NGDP isn’t really the optimal monetary policy target, but on the other hand the optimal target (nominal wages) is not a good Fed target for all sorts of pragmatic reasons. So I use NGDP as a good compromise. OK, now fire away!
Scott
I don’t really have much else to say. If I understand him, Scott is saying that firms and households make long-term contracts based on their estimates of what national output will be, but don’t care how much their accountants say their own incomes will be.
If I have indeed correctly understood Scott, I guess all I have to say is, I don’t think that’s a useful foundation for a model on which to advise Bernanke.
Leslie Nielsen, RIP
I spent a few minutes looking for a good “Best Of” compilation on YouTube, but there were flaws in the first 3 I checked. I settled for the preview for Naked Gun, which is pretty good:
Also, I was about to go ballistic on this NPR obit because of the title: “Remembering Leslie Nielsen, A Master Of The Art Of Not Being Funny.” But it’s actually complimentary:
When Nielsen hosted [Saturday Night Live] way back in 1989, he was given a magnificent opening monologue where he explained exactly what he did and his bafflement therein. He didn’t understand why he had been asked to host a comedy show, because he was neither a comedian nor a comic. A comedian, he explained, was someone who says funny things. A comic was someone who says things in a funny way.
Nielsen, on the other hand, was someone who said unfunny things in an unfunny way, and for some reason, people laughed. To demonstrate this, he delivered an innocuous line – something along the lines of “Mr. Jones, sit down, I’d like to talk to you about your son” – twice. The first time, he said it as though he were in a drama, and the response was muted.
Then he told us that he was going to say the exact same unfunny line as Lt. Frank Drebin, in an unfunny way, and he did exactly that, and the audience exploded. It wasn’t just indulging him as prompted, either. Without actually tilting his delivery in that direction, Nielsen made it genuinely funny. To underscore his point, he then broke character with a look of happy exasperation and basically said, “See?”
It was one of my favorite SNL monologues ever, because it explicitly dissected the host’s entire schtick in a way that invited appreciation, rather than making it instantly tired and formulaic. Instead of mocking his persona in one way or the other, in the manner of most monologues, it was a tiny little master class in how it’s done.
…
And when I watch Airplane! or the Naked Gun movies or – seriously, you won’t believe how dumb and brilliant it is – Police Squad!, I understand just a little bit more how he’s doing what he’s doing, and it makes me sit in awed appreciation a little bit. Look, “And don’t call me Shirley” is, perhaps indisputably, the dumbest joke in the history of anything. Leslie Nielsen was able to turn it into comic gold. Saying unfunny things in an unfunny manner and magically having the result be funny is an incredibly hard trick. And nobody ever did it better.
I think my favorite line–in the sense that I quote it often, to the chagrin of whoever is standing next to me–is when Drebin is walking around town, trying to sort things out. He ends with a bunch of questions (regarding the case), then he looks at his surroundings and says, “And where the hell was I?”
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