Monday, December 22, 2008

Free Markets!


The Waning Days of the Years-Of-Bush are filled with cries about the "Death Of Free Markets."
Well, Good Ridddance, I say. Mostly because the so-called free markets never were actually free. Entry into the arena of free trade always reauired a fee. Money, Power, Connections, any of the above will do. To the worker who produces the goods and services being freely traded - Nothing.
Sorry; I got a little sidetracked there.
Something that came to me in a nightmare a while ago: Maybe, just maybe, if it's "Too Big To Fail", then it's also Too Big To Be Run For Short-Term-Profit to please the stockholders and generate bonus payments to senior management. If the gov't. (that's you and me, fellow taxpayer) is going to end up on the hook, why doesn't the gov't. have a sayso in the management? If the Interstate Highway System is infrastructure, the why arent the Cars and Trucks travelling on the highways also infrastructure? The vehicles are, like the roadway, merely conveyances for the delivery of people and products.
Now, this is a pretty radical thing to say; I imagine the proud owner of a hugely expensive and very shiny Land Yacht would consider it more as a prized possession than as a transportation device. Often, on the roads of America, the transportation part, implying movement, does not, in fact, apply to the multitudes clogging the asphalt. The prized personal conveyance (My Car!) ends up much more a status symbol than a device that can actually transport one from location A to location B. Without passing (sloowly) through locations A', A", A'"... en route. Not an efficient use of resources, one might say.
This radical notion of Infrastructure and State Participation would seem to apply equally to other areas where we are now seeing some marvelous examples of the ineptitude of management. Of course, we're seeing some pretty clear examples of the ineptitude of governmental management as well as of corporate management. Whether this is because of the incestuous relationship between Business and Government or vice versa, I'm not prepared to speculate now.
Perhaps Next Year.
God Bless Us Each And Every One.

Saturday, December 20, 2008

"Go Shopping"


In an eerie echo of counter-culture hero and loonie retailer Earl (Madman) Muntz; San Francisco retailers are "slashing prices, in some cases selling items below cost"! YES! "We have not yet begun to shop." Not only are the shoppers out of control, as they have been for many years, consuming everything that comes to hand with both hands, so to speak; now it appears that, just as the shoppers "Gotta Shop" just so the sellers "Gotta Sell". It's in the blood. "What will it take to put you into this {product-I'm-trying-to-sell}?, they cry". With a nation of compulsive sellers selling to a nation of compulsive buyers, it's no wonder that Treasury Sec'y Hank Paulson is focused on topping up the lender's money supply. They're gonna need every penny. Once everybody is far enough in debt, the economy will have recovered its robust appearance, as victims of Consumption (the tubercular kind) are also wont to do.
Even President-Elect Obama seems to be intent on returning the nation to its massively unsustainable levels of overconsumption, lacking any clear pathway to a healthy economy that depends on rational levels (of slightly less unsustainable levels) of consupmtion.

Thursday, December 18, 2008

For Every Problem...


There's A Solution that's simple, obvious, and wrong. Here's one that seems clearly obvious (well, to me, at least).
Here's the situation: As the year winds down and the time Congress reconvenes approaches, the Senate is in a bit of disarray. NO; That isn't the problem. The problem is that one state (Illinois) is short a Senator, while a near neighbor state (Minnesota) has one too many. WELL! What could be simpler. In the newfound, though sure to be short-lived spirit of collegiality, Minnesota could lend one of its surplus senators to Illinois! It's probably not a goood idea at this time to let Gov. Blagojevich, he of lets-make-a-deal fame, become involved in the process at this time. In the spirit of Keep-It-Simple-Stupid, I suggest a coin toss.
After all these ponderuous matters of "spoilt ballots" (one Minnesota ballot was disqualified because the voter used a smiley instead of filling in the circle - how much more clearly could a preference be stated?!) are resolved, the finally-victorious Senator-Elect from Minnesota could, if he was lent out, be repatriated, and Illinois left, if still a Senator short, at least no worse off. Perhaps the Senator-on-Lend-Lease would have enjoyed the time so much as to decide to run in the eventually-to-be-decided-upon special election. Actually, I may have overquoted H. L. Mencken above; I don't think this solution is wrong at all. Just unusual; and possibly illegal. That doesn't seem to be much of an impediment when Illinois politics are involved though.

Monday, December 08, 2008

Brain Drugs


In a shocking development - "Scientists Back Brain Drugs for Healthy People." Yes, the selfless scientists who are hard at work developing new drugs to alleviate the ills of mankind now believe that the fruits of their labors should be shared by all - not just the sick and hypochondriacal. However; aware that the human mind is a complicated mechanism (though, unfortunately, often out of tune, so to speak), it really isn't safe to simply pass out the pills to all comers. "More Research", say the Researchers. This kind of self-serving claim is so ubiquitous in scientific reports that one wonders if anybody ever does any research for the purpose of learning anything - except to find a need to fund further research.
Some years back, for instance, at a "State of the (San Francisco - ed.) Bay" conference, the Keynote Speaker noted with some dismay that much of the bay's marine life was in precipitous decline. Her proposed solution: "A Major Funding of Research" to find out why. My proposed solution: "Stop Pumping All the Water Out of the Bay".
A noted minister and charlatan who's much given to rhyming platitudes has one that's certainly appropriate in this kind of situation: Avoid The Paralysis Of Analysis. Sometimes we really do know enough to do the right thing, without waiting for yet-another-study.
Sorry for mixing such disparate examples. But it was kinda fun.

Sunday, December 07, 2008

Scapegoat?


India seems intent on blaming Pakistan for the terrorist attack on Mumbai. At first it seemed as though Indian Government was upset that the Indian terrorists were setting up training camps in Pakistan instead of India, as they usually do. Perhaps they were getting tax breaks or something from the Pakistani Government. But no! Feeling the heat from their pallid response to the attacks on high-profile targets, Indian officials decided to blame the Perpetually-Failing-State of Pakistan. Trying to distract attention from the fact that the Indian Government, no great shakes, itself, hasn't been too successful at preventing terrorist activity, either. In fact, judging by the somewhat amazing Charge/Countercharge going on, both of these parties seem intent on finding a Casus Belli, allowing them to substitute a nice little border war for anything resembling actual responsible governance.
Seems almost Bushian in the way it's being played out:
Step One: Find a Scapegoat.
Step Two: Attack!
Step Three: Blame "Faulty Intelligence" for your continuing failures...

Friday, December 05, 2008

Moronic


Is What This Is. Debating all the little details of a puny few billion (somewhere between 15 and 150 Billion $$$ is what we're talking about here): Terms for Auto Aid; also known as Micromanaging. In a business-as-usual manner, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) proclaimed "As we consider this legislation, our first priority must be to protect the hard-earned money of the American taxpayer..." Subtext: "We Need It For Our Friends On Wall Street." Sen. McConnell isn't the only one piling on, of course. Sen. Christopher Dodd (D-Conn.), the master-micro-manager of the Senate, while grilling the by now well-toasted "Big Three" CEOs wanted to know if they were going to switch their now-useless SUV plants over to the building of Mini-Buses. His plan: spend taxpayer money to build mini-buses to sell to ride-share programs that cities will fund with, you guessed it, taxpayer money! All this will be funded with IOUs, of course. Then again, some congressman wanted to know if any of this bailout money would be given to Auto Parts Suppliers. Helping them, one would suppose, to make more parts to build cars that nobody will make, on account of nobody will buy them. The (by now well-toasted) CEOs, without batting an eye, or lauging hysterically, said something so non-committal that it ended up as an 18 minute blank spot on the Congressional Record. I'm joking. They said something. It got published. It absolutely made no sense in the context of why or why not anybody should give the "hard-earned money of the American taxpayer..." (Thanx Mitch!) to the automobile industry.
Perhaps they should get the hard-earned etc. etc. because, as noted here, At G.M., Innovation Sacrificed to Profits..."Time and again over the last 30 years, G.M. has spent billions of dollars on innovative ideas"... Only to discard them when they threatened to actually become atually viable in the marketplace. Which, as George M. C. Fisher says, was "probably a mistake, in retrospect.”
Do Ya Think?
Oh: there was also something said by G. Richard Wagoner Jr, the CEO of General Motors (GM) to the effect that it would be impossible for the auto industry to be viable if the market in the USA shrank to Only Ten Million Cars A Year. How anybody could make a living selling only 10,000,000 of something is inconievable to this Chief Executive of Mega-Corporation.
I Googled "buggywhip" AND "bailout", and found (not too surprisingly) "about 156" results. Mostly non-responsive. There was, however, this snippet from The Oil Drum: "as the bailout calls for yet another transfer from poor to rich, ... to pass this legislation unless it includes incentives for buggywhip manufactures. ..." YES! I'm not the only one who wonders why the Buggywhip Companies didn't get a bailout in 1908, but their successors should get one in 2008.
Still, looking at this historically (if that's possible), it seems as though this Laissez-Faire Capitalism adventure is pretty much Darwinian in its lifespan. It grows and grows until it founders from its own Gigantism (is that a word?).
Still seems to me that, instead of frantically trying to get debt-ridden consumers to spend more (see Sixteen Tons), it might be better to ride the tide, and look for a way to ease the transition to a less-unsustainable lower-level of over-consumption.