DISQUS

The simplest rebuttal is that any innovation people are unwilling to begin during an Obama administration, will be taken up by others; perhaps less effectively, but still taken up.

When more favorable market conditions come back, those willing to innovate earlier will have the advantage of a head start. If _anyone_ uses _any_ excuse to sit on their hands instead of innovate, given the finite number of years youthful entrepreneurial blood flows through the veins, they will be punished greatly for their lack of gumption.

"Working hard when market conditions suggest no chance of real success" - What innovators ever violated this rule?

[ An easier argument can be made that over-rewarding innovation in financial leverage instruments bled young & smart workers from other industries, to the detriment of innovation in those industries. ]

Wilkinson:

> ...promote the deep structural changes needed in primary education to actually improve the quantity and quality of American human capital...

But the fact remains that when businesses hire, a person having gone to a private primary school or a charter primary school (as opposed to a public primary school) commands no higher wages. I hire; the issues affects me personally. If the private school or charter school had a document certifying modern workforce training to the student (with the ability to test to confirm, and retrain at no cost to the business if the skills are actually below what is certified), I would be pretty damn impressed. If such a thing exists for private or charter schools, it is well hidden and very scarce. Until then, why would a business pay a premium for a person who received primary school education at a private or charter school? And if public school is good enough, how can change be expected to happen?

Dan:

> ...I think far too many people are getting pushed into college...

Business do pay a premium for college educated students. Again, if there was a form of technical schooling (associate degree) that had some certifying/testing/retraining guarantees for work skills, businesses would be pretty damn impressed, and would hire those people above people with some college education. I would like to see such resumes.

I read the whole piece. I didn't listen to the audio. If there was some undulation of inflection in your voice that was supposed to telegraph your disapproval of the pseudo-populism of Santelli, I missed it. I apologize.

I read your stuff daily, and I was genuinely disappointed that you would take Santelli's rant as _indicative_ of _anything_. I swear, I cannot see the difference between Santelli and Joe the Plumber. Maybe it was the forum, audio for Marketplace Morning instead of your blog, that pressed that choice of topic upon you, but I was truly disappointed. It is not your duty to care about my disappointment, but I read you everyday, so I have a basis to say commenting on Santelli is beneath you.

[The "volcano" bit was unfair. I plead, I did it for the lolz.]

I am a Leftist, but I am rooting for the libertarians in this fight. Arnold Kling's analysis is the only one that rings true (cautiously approaching sound post-Keynesianism from side of the libertarian right: jobs paid for with business profits). So I am disappointed when Kling gets recorded making a hysterical and inopportune sound-bite about "thugs ransacking my house" [why not just lay out the facts before the people who pay the bills, and let _us_ worry about how it makes us feel], and I am disappointed when you hitch a wagon, rhetorically, to the phenomena that is Republican pseudo-populism [Rick Santelli and Joe the Plumber, I guess Sarah Palin too].

> ... Rick Santelli ... a small flame of populist resentment shouldn't be ignored.

How am I supposed to distinguish Rick Santelli from Joe the Plumber? Personally, I am going to ignore this "small flame of populist resentment" because it seems to be fully contained among floor traders and Republican establishment dead-enders.

There are substantive criticisms of the Obama stimulus, namely, that it has zero connection with fostering businesses using profits to hire from an educated work force. Exiting this recession is impossible without businesses using profits to hire from an educated work force. The crudest of Keynesianism will not do it -- breaking windows for great success.

So the libertarian response is to embrace the intellectual successor of Joe the Plumber. (Don't plead ignorance of this, I read the same libertarian blogs you do.) Disappointing, considering the stakes. I can point out at least one omission: you didn't follow Bobby Jindal's lead and rail against volcanoes and the volcanistic arts. Perhaps in a follow-up...

> And someone please tell me how speeding up the process of picking winners doesn’t simply make well-prepared regulatory capture specialists like T. Boone Pickens (whose PR blitz seems to have worked to get him into the DoE inner circle) richer simply because they’ve got the resources to hoover up contracts.

It won't make them richer. They crowd out any competitors at all times, always. They would get the lion's share no matter how slow the process is.

A quicker process will just get the same money to them, quicker. They spend less time holding open their wallets, reducing the risk of hand cramps.

> But our government’s behavior increasingly looks a bit like a zealous small-town narcotics squad, excited by its slick new SWAT gear, that’s just kicked down the door to a meth house and has started shooting at anything that moves.

You were not given permission to describe the Obama stimulus so succinctly and perfectly.

Consider this a first warning. Keep this up for a few thousand more times, and there will be consequences, mister.

> The rest is just details.

So the third world junta and the Jeffersonian representative democracy inhabit a semi-differentiated lumpy mass?

The ability to make morally vacuous statements does not obligate anyone to withhold disgust.

> The real friends of the libertarians are in the pews and out in the sticks.

Wow. Just like "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously". A sentence whose grammar is correct, but whose meaning is nonsensical.

I am imagining every high school nerd that ever fed a revenge fantasy off of _Atlas Shrugged_, standing up and running into the beckoning arms of rural Southern Baptists. Feel the love...

> tens of millions of Americans who think conservatives are vile, that conventional liberals are too deep in the pocket of the Democratic Party to actually promote prosperity and opportunity, and that libertarians are dogmatic, weird, and irrelevant

Settle down there, Sparky. More Americans vote for the next American Idol than vote. I doubt you could find tens of millions of Americans who could _parse_ those words, much less endorse them.

I am not impressed with the math skills of those criticizing Wilkinson

Wilkinson: "They argue that, _as often as not_, claims about group differences in innate cognitive ability can be proven to be untrue." [My emphasis]

How can this be read as being consistent with:

"...Will would prefer that it shows natural differences to be insignificant"
or
"What's annoying here is the poorly hidden [if hidden at all] prior that a "good" result is that there is no difference at all in cognitive abilities between groups"
?

I am not a card-carrying Bayesian, but I read "as often as not" as 50/50, a perfectly reasonable "prior" for such a broad statement. It would be peculiar if all early IQ research had to be thrown out as hopelessly biased, but it would also be peculiar if absolutely none of it was later found to be needing revision.

Glennzilla has a good take-down of the Obama apologists.

http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2009/02/...

BTW, "Corporatism" is not the politically correct term. It is now properly called "only but a single gambit in 11 dimensional chess". See, doesn't that make you feel better about the smart people in charge?

Whoa! I like those odds. Gotta get to work, building that button...

Arnold Kling's "Macro out of the mouths of children of the Austrian School" makes the most sense, in my uneducated opinion:

http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2009/02/my_...

summarized as:

#1) The way out of the recession will be powered by business profits (as usual). A targeted macro solution: tax cut on the payroll tax (profits go up, and only after the profits have been locked in, employment will go up)

#2) Nobody wants leverage. Let the modern finance system built on leverage die, quickly and painfully, because drawing it out will only be more painful (like removing an adhesive bandage). Nobody wants leverage, people will only pay attention to profits (see #1)

> I think the problem with the American media is that it’s full of Americans who overestimate the importance of American micro-politics...

That's not a bug, that's a feature. It attracts a demographic that can be packaged for advertisers: Tribal-warfare junkies with the attention spans of lemurs. Naturally, the different tribes are attracted by different colors of shiny objects...

> http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily...

Bed-wetting. The only risk from bringing Gitmo detainees into the US justice system is exposing the Gitmo kangaroo court.

I don't find the justice system of 3rd world juntas attractive. In this I am in a 60% majority (per current polling on US citizens' appetite for sanctioned torture). I weep for the US, because 40% of the population is more than enough to fully staff a totalitarian prison system, all in the name of our "safety".

Allow me to preemptively apologize. At this point, I am usually chastised for not supporting the open discussion of opinions. I apologize for crushing the tender flowers of free expression.

Are people serious about wanting a new Lincoln? The "word cloud" comparison of Lincoln's two inaugural speeches demonstrate clearly how he intended to run roughshod over the Constitution. (I admire Lincoln, but I definitely don't admire what he did to the Constitution.)

Also, who is this transformative presidential candidate that people keep talking about? I voted for the canny Chicago politician, and I thought that is who won.

Enough of this foolishness. The endangered species we should be caring about is the paleoconservative. If only we could a mating pair...

Tangential to your main point, and doesn't contract you main point at all, but...

I endorse talking about "Prioritization Skills" instead of "Time Management". Time manages itself, regardless of our actions. It is unique among all our finite resources in that it is impossible to modify the rate it is spent.

You can take actions to lengthen your life, and thus give yourself more time, but, even then, you don't get to choose where and when you get to spend those extra days. They get tacked only the end of your life, exactly at the place where you have the fewest other resources and the least potential.

You can only modify the prioritization and the particulars of task-switching inside the time given.

Tyler's quote is a little more defensible if you replace "Prioritization Skills" instead of "Time Management", because you might defend actually-demonstrated prioritization as the authoritative sign of first-order desires.

I agree with you, first-order desires are subject to deliberative or therapeutic revision. My beef with self-help books is that they represent the time scale of the revision to be on the order of days, where, in my experience, everything _worth_ changing only can be changed on the time scale of a decade. And the title "Ten Years to a New You" would sell very poorly.

Aerospace manufacturing is greatly facilitated in Southern California by the large number of vendors that remained here long after the big airplane OEMs left. California in general, and Southern California in particular, has a government that is tax and entitlement addicted. But parts and platings in 20 minutes beats parts and platings in days.

Amplifying your point, America has manufacturing infrastructure of very high quality, on top of the quality of the labor force.

> If China becomes a huge Singapore, do liberal democracies develop a brain drain problem?

China is functionally (but non-maliciously) xenophobic. Foreigners would be incessantly aware that they are The Other. (Like how Japan treats resident aliens, but less maliciously, with less cruelness.) This is a huge psychic toll, over time.

Also - in a Latin American junta, if you fall on the wrong side of a political dispute, your dismembered trunk could be found on the side of a rural road. In China, you would maintain your corporal integrity, but your life would still become very unpleasant. I will keep my brain-pan and contents in a western liberal democracy, thank you very much, and not drain it on Chinese soil. My grasping for wealth has some limits.

> Whereas in reality you have two corporate imperialist factions who differ on how best to keep hoi polloi in line...

If the Republicans were offering "competency at governance at the Presidential level" on the menu in 2008, they kept it well hidden from corporate donors. That is why Obama could turn down public financing.

Christ, re-animate Nixon's corpse! "Tickle-down", deficits, and Neo-Conservatism are all hardly Conservative policies. Give businesspeople a Republican governor they can vote for, without the guilt of handing down to their own children a more abused United States. The loudness and frequency of Bible-Thumping hardly enters into it.

> He thinks that a genuinely free market will involve a larger number of smaller firms.

If the effective economy is larger, and it might be because of less wealth having to pass through the hands of rent-seekers (lobbyists, corporate lawyers, politicians), you would expect a larger number of smaller firms.

Also, a Wal-Mart could exist, in a slightly smaller form, still provide all the same benefits due to increased productivity, with plenty left over to pay for a thousand small firms (pretending the economy buys small firms with a fixed percentage of its size).

I wouldn't imagine that there would be any fewer of the very largest firms, and there wouldn't need to be, for many more smaller firms to flourish.

Yeah, they did, Will. I am taking a hit on my taxes because I didn't see Republicanism as a reasonable substitute for basic competency in governance.

And the tone of libertarian bloggers confirms that practically all libertarians are Functional Republicans. The mere *promise* (just lip service!) - the mere promise of lower taxes completely buys off almost all libertarians.

All the libertarians bloggers that I read, I can expect nothing but parsing and qualifying for eight years?

[The alternative: reasoned analysis for less government intervention. The words "The Second New Deal" does not make everyone wet the bed, so just repeating those words over and over is not sufficient, BTW.]

Herb Gintis

> Some have asked me what Krugman should be stressing, if not redistribution of wealth and income.

I have found it a trait of libertarians that they have angry views about what other people _should_ be working on. Which is a very human fault, but odd for a professed libertarian (to my thinking).

If there is a libertarian who is genuinely tickled by the full diversity of opinion, I would appreciate having him pointed out to me.

If I never see Jonah Goldberg again on Google Reader for your feed...

I enjoy Free Will very much, and you are training me, like Pavlov's dog, to salivate at the sight of Jonah Goldberg.

(Yes, I am asserting Ivan Petrovich Pavlov trained Russian dogs to salivate at the sight of Jonah Goldberg.)