Mostly for My Own Benefit

I've long heard of the Medieval Warm Period. The best evidence is the existence of Viking colonies on Greenland, which was, in fact, green when Eric the Red started the settlements. I've been there myself (a long, long time ago) and have seen some ruins of Viking homes.

If you're a believer in man made global warming, then this chart might cause you to pause. You can find many example of it by googling "medieval warm period" and look for images.

The Medieval Warm Period was much warmer than today; although, admittedly, we are warmer now than in recent years. Check out the blue area below the x-axis: that's the Little Ice Age. Remember the pictures of Washington crossing the Delaware through ice flows? The planet warms and cools all by itself, with and without our help.

Thomas Jefferson on Public Debt

“To preserve our independence, we must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt. We must make our selection between economy and liberty or profusion and servitude.

If we run into such debts as that, we must be taxed in our meat and in our drink, in our necessaries and our comforts, in our labors and our amusements, for our callings and our creeds, as the people of England are.

Our people, like them, must come to labor sixteen hours in the twenty-four, give the earnings of fifteen of these to the government for their debts and daily expenses; and the sixteenth being insufficient to afford us bread, we must live, as they now do, on oatmeal and potatoes, have no time to think, no means of calling the mismanagers to account; but be glad to obtain subsistence by hiring ourselves to rivet their chains on the necks of our fellow-sufferers.

Our land-holders, too, like theirs, retaining, indeed, the title and stewardship of estates called theirs, but held really in trust for the treasury, must wander, like theirs, in foreign countries, and be contented with penury, obscurity, exile, and the glory of the nation.

This example reads to us the salutary lesson that private fortunes are destroyed by public, as well as by private extravagance. And this is the tendency of all human governments.

A departure from principle in one instance, becomes a precedent for a second, that second for a third, and so on, till the bulk of society is reduced to be mere automatons of misery, to have no sensibilities left but for sinning and suffering.

Then begins, indeed, the bellum omnium in omnia, which some philosophers, observing to be so general in the world, have mistaken it for the natural, instead of the abusive state of man.

And the forehorse of this frightful team is public debt. Taxation follows that, and in its train wretchedness and oppression.”

– Thomas Jefferson

Counter-factuals

I love a good counter-factual: and in this case I mean data that pricks a hole in the balloon of modern liberalism. I just ran across an excerpt from a book called "Why Capitalism is Good for the Soul" by Peter Saunders.

"The way this [capitalism] has enhanced people’s capacity to lead a good life can be seen in the spectacular reduction in levels of global poverty, brought about by the spread of capitalism on a world scale. In 1820, 85% of the world’s population lived on today’s equivalent of less than a dollar per day. By 1950, this proportion had fallen to 50%. Today it is down to 20%.... In 1900, the average life expectancy in the “less developed countries” was just thirty years. By 1960, this had risen to forty-six years. By 1998, it was 65 years. To put this extraordinary achievement into perspective, the average life expectancy in the poorest countries at the end of the twentieth century was fifteen years longer than the average life expectancy in the richest country in the world—Britain—at the start of the century."

Name for me the political or economic system that can compete with Capitalism for simple human betterment. (And I do not mean the Crony Capitalism - or Corporatism as we exercise it today.) Even hobbled by politics, free markets have enough residual energy to raise up an entire planet's prosperity. Oh, what we could do with truly free markets. (Dream on, boy.)

What We'll Do for Food

Not a Big Fan of Bill - Until Now

Bill Gross, the head of a super-player in the bond markets PIMCO, has written an excellent piece he calls "The Devil's Bargain" that defenestrates almost the entire world for complicity, duplicity, and mendacity in the financial meltdown of 2008 and the world since then. It's well worth the read.

The Moral Question

The distribution of taxes paid by US income groups is not a secret and is available to anyone curious enough to look for it.

For my reader (singular intended) who thinks that the mythical rich don't pay enough taxes, it's important to understand that you're making a moral argument, not an economic one. You're saying that by the simple fact of having more money than you do, a rich woman owes a higher percent of her income to the general weal.

I try to stay away from statements of morality when talking economics but let me turn the moral question around. What moral right gives a poor or, more importantly, middle class person the right to take the property of the wealthy woman? By definition, money is a store of value and nothing more. Her couch is a store of value, her car is a store of value, her house is a store of value. Can you take the couch from her living room? Can you take the car from her driveway? By what moral right do we insist that she pay a larger percent of her income that we do?

Maybe the question answers itself but then again, maybe not.