Obama Administration Changes Policy on Assad

It comforts me to know that Obama by changing policy with regards to Assad is admitting that I was right all along, and he and Bush were very wrong all along. 

Sometimes I say to myself, you might be wrong the Federal Government administrators mostly got into Yale and Harvard (Yale and Harvard would have laughed at my application had I applied), and they have access to more info than me so maybe I am wrong and they are right, but this change in policy clearly admits that they were wrong and I was right! 

So how can such intelligent people be so obviously wrong and I be right? One theory is that the supper intelligent/great students like that tend to live in a bubble are not realty to common people and so loose touch with reality. 

Perhaps it and Bush's policy in the Middle-eat are the result of cultural and genetic blank slatism run amok. One reason nice people cling to blank slatism is because admission of cultural and genetic group differences could be very bad in the wrong populist hands.

Also Politicians are experts in getting elected not in Governing. 

At least  the Obama administration is showing humility by changing policy. I like Obama personally he seems to be a better person than most politicians and he has shown more military restraint than most presidents which I think is good. I disagree with him on most policy though.

The Good Samaritan Again

In the time of Jesus the Samaritans where people who had taken the scriptures that existed at the time and had added four Gods on top of them. Do you know who else took the scriptures and added something on top of it? Mohamed did.

It is as if he said in 2015 USA, a Christian man was traveling to a town and on the road he was robbed and Muslim man came along and bought him clothes and put him up at a hotel. 

At the end of the story Jesus says go and do likewise. I think that he means even those who hate you are your neighbors and should be treated like the good Samaritan treated that man!

We should have sympathy for our Muslim neighbors and try to win them over with our good deeds.

NCAA Schools Collude to Keep Player Compensation Down, They Should Also Limit Coach Compensation

NCAA schools collude to keep player compensation down, they should at least agree to limit coach compensation to something like $300,000/year. 

Where would the coaches go? The NFL and NBA can only use so many coaches and even if the top coaches did go, would it real make college sports less appealing? I think not. 

Also NCAA sports are used by university administrations as marketing to raise the academic standards of the students they accept which increases the prestige of the university which is in the administrators' interest. But what is in it for the taxpayers? Nothing really.

I live in Gainesville FL home of University of Florida but because UF has been successful in this strategy, they were able to reject my son.  He had to go to University of Central Florida which meant that he could not live with us at home. That cost us an extra $50,000 and it weakens family and has other bad effects! 

The school administration would argue that there is a benefit to concentrating the better students together but there is evidence that such claims are false. In fact studies show that students who applied to more prestigious schools and are rejected do just as well as students who go to the prestigious schools. This is evidence that the schools do not matter but rather the ambition, diligence and intelligence if the entering students is what matters.

Everyone in biased we all are including the top administration of our state universities and we are letting them grab money and prestige at the expense of taxpayers.

Why This Teetotaler is For legalization of All Drugs

I am all for reducing drug use, especially among the the young, but the government does not have the tools. Government is force, but persuasion is what is needed. The use of force against the drug suppliers has wreaked havoc on some Latin American countries. Due mostly to the war on drugs, the level of violence in Mexico and Honduras is almost as high as in Syria. See here.

Pharmaceuticals are more costly than they need to be as a result of the war on drugs. Many patients suffer needlessly because MD's are reluctant to prescribe pain killers. See here. 

A past coworker of mine shot and killed a man after a bad drug deal. He was a fine young man, but he was addicted to crack. When drugs are illegal, dealers can't report theft, and customers can't report scams. This causes people to take the law into their own hands. When people take the law into their own hands, the law takes them to jail. 

On the Necessity of the Welfare State

Scott Sumner has an interesting post on Libertarianism.

Most USAers assume that the welfare state  is more needed and more effective than it really is, and that a huge amount of charity (in fact more than we could ever come close to getting) would be needed to replace it. They may be right that charity would never be enough but I think charity would be much closer to being sufficient than people think.

When progressives assume that the those lowest income cannot affords something they often forget to factor in reduced demand lowering the price.

One example is that in a market for housing with restrictions on building (adding housing units) which we have in most counties, and where housing is subsidized, if you remove the subsidy the landlords will take some of the hit probably most of the hit.

Another example is that as far as I can tell, even adjusted for inflation, our USA schools spent 3x as much as in the 1960's and output is not much improved. Now I am sure that the experience for the student is better now but I would bet that you could cut spending hugely and get pretty much the same output. And if parents payed directly you could possibly get better output due to motivation and for some other plausible reasons. See the link in Scott's post on this.

Welfare also seems to not make as  much difference compared to what most people would expect. Take Social Security, our biggest welfare program, we only need it for low savers who are to weak to work who have not family or friends to care for them. That is a small percent of the population but to reach that small percent of the population without creating very bad incentives we have to give SS to everyone. A huge cost relative to the problem. BTW I think we should give every USA citizen over 67 $200/week from SS, reducing the program cost by about 1/3rd. BTW I think absent SS most people would start to save as much as possible at about 60 years old and work as long as they could and do OK.

Also I once saw a show on PBS about a guy who built a road to Miami Beach.

Narrator: One of his greatest ambitions was to persuade the government to start building better roads. He convinced the leaders of the automotive industry to jump-start the process by financing the first paved road across the country -- the Lincoln Highway, from New York to San Francisco. It was such a success that he went on to build another road -- the Dixie Highway... leading, very conveniently, from Indianapolis to the foot of the bridge he was paying for back in Florida.

Forgetting the History of Central banks

Forgetting that the great depression occurred after the creation of the federal reserve.
Forgetting that Canada avoided the great depression because it had no central bank.

From Wikipedia: In 1934, with only ten chartered banks still issuing notes, the Bank of Canada was founded and began issuing notes in denominations of $1, $2, $5, $10, $20, $25, $50, $100, $500 and $1000. In 1944, the chartered banks were prohibited from issuing their own currency, with the Royal Bank of Canada and the Bank of Montreal among the last to issue notes. From that point forward, the Bank of Canada has been the sole issuer of bank notes denominated in Canadian dollars. A liability of more than $12 million remains on the Bank of Canada's books up to the present day, representing the face value of Dominion of Canada, provincial, and chartered bank notes still outstanding.^[3]

Forgetting that wealth would have been greater had the western world not experienced a great depression..

The EU looked at the world and saw the dominance of the US dollar. They saw research that I have seen shows that the USA is 3% richer than it would be if the dollar was not the dominate currency in the word. They wanted a piece of that. They also thought that a common currency guided by an enlightened central bank.would be better for the Southern countries which had been prone to periods of inflation. Further that a single currency would facilitate trade within the EU. And so the Euro was created.

But big currencies mean big problems and we have Greece, Portugal, Spain and Italy with very high unemployment for 5 years! They are all struggling and falling deeper in debt. 

And lest you get the wrong idea even Germany's real growth has been poor. And no one sees an easy way out.

Time to start thinking of smooth way out of the Euro mess.

Great Depression and the Origins of the Welfare state in the USA

Mike Konczal on the origins of the modern welfare state in America:

Informal networks of local support, from churches to ethnic affiliations, were all overrun in the Great Depression. Ethnic benefit societies, building and loan associations, fraternal insurance policies, bank accounts, and credit arrangements all had major failure rates. All of the fraternal insurance societies that had served as anchors of their communities in the 1920s either collapsed or had to pull back on their services due to high demand and dwindling resources. Beyond the fact that insurance wasn’t available, this had major implications for spending, as moneylending as well as benefits for sickness and injuries were reduced.
The Hoover Administration’s initial response to the Great Depression was to supplement private aid without creating the type of permanent public social insurance programs that would arise in the New Deal. Hoover’s goal was to maintain, in the words of the historian Ellis Hawley, a “nonstatist alternative to atomistic individualism, the romantic images of voluntarism as more truly democratic than any government action, and the optimistic assessments of the private sector’s capacity for beneficial governmental action.” As President Hoover said in 1931, much like conservatives do today, any response to the economic crisis must “maintain the spirit of charity and mutual self-help through voluntary giving” in order for him to support it.
Noble as that goal may be, it failed. The more Hoover leaned on private agencies, the more resistance he found. Private firms and industry did not want to play the role that the government assigned them, and even those that did found it difficult, if not impossible, to carry out those responsibilities. The Red Cross, for instance, did not want to move beyond providing disaster relief. Other groups, like the Association of Community Chests and Councils, had no interest in trying to coordinate funds at a national, rather than local, level. Hoover understood that private charity wasn’t getting to rural areas, yet private charities couldn’t be convinced to meet these needs.
[...]
What’s most worth noting is that, in the end, both beneficiaries of fraternal societies and private charities themselves welcomed this transition. During the Great Depression, citizens, especially the range of white ethnic communities in the largest cities, watched as mass unemployment tore down institution after institution. From fraternal societies to banks to charities, the web of private institutions was no match for the Great Depression.
As documented in Lizabeth Cohen’s Making a New Deal, these white ethnic communities turned to the New Deal to provide the baseline of security that their voluntary societies were unable to offer during a deep recession. As a result of the implosion of the voluntary societies they depended upon, working-class families looked to the government and unions for protections against unstable banks and the risks of the Four Horsemen.

So if he is correct, it looks to me like the Great Depression was the result of a failure of the Federal Reserve so great that it proved to be too great a burden non-Government charity and so Government stepped in. Of course the the Federal Reserve was created to because of earlier failures of the federal government money system.  That system was created to fund the civil war. So government money was both the cause of the failure and reason that government could afford to step in an help.

Never the less, I think that the big flaw in Government charity is not that it helps the poor creating disincentive to work, but that most of the spending goes to rich and middle class (through SS, medicare, farm and other subsidies and Government schooling) and so Federal Government spending on charity is much higher than it should/could be. My reason to believe that is because I do not think it is possible at this time for Government to subsidize the median life time earner. So you are taxing the same people you spend the money on. 

So absent if the Great Depression was avoided how much of Government do you think would be devoted to charity? I think it would be much smaller and just about everyone would be better off. 

Take Social Security for one example. 

• a person who earns $15,000/year will pay $82,000 in payroll taxes (employer and employee combined) over 44 years of work. When he retires, his annual benefit will be $10,476 or 13% of his lifetime payroll taxes.
• a person who earns $50,000/year will pay $273,000 in payroll taxes over 44 years of work. When she retires, her annual benefit will be $21,672 or 8% of her lifetime payroll taxes.
• a person who earns $115,000/year will pay $627,000 in payroll taxes over 44 years of work. When he retires, his annual benefit will be $32,952/year or 5% of his lifetime payroll taxes.[56]

From Social Security Just the facts 

$1,294 is the average benefit/worker/month. If everyone got what those who earns $15,000/year that would enable cut the program by about 1/3. We could then lower the tax by about 25% allowing workers to spend that money when they want. Most people are poorer when they are young than old and so would get a higher marginal benefit from keeping that 25% than getting 25% more in retirement. The lower earners would not be hurt because many of them would get more than they get now.  Almost all USA citizens would be better off.

BTW In Australia the government part of the retiree pension pays out the same amount to all recipients. 

Bottom line we should not work to end Government charity but we should work to educate people about why Gov. charity should be for bottom percentiles of life time earners.