“It has been my observation that going into government, especially in a high-visibility job, lowers a person’s IQ by at least 50 points.”
Politics is often the art of lying about the effects of policy, and Hugo Chavez, Venezuela’s Prevaricator-in-Chief, is a master politician. As consumer-price inflation hits a 27 percent per annum rate, he blames capitalism.
One report summarizes his position: “Mr. Chavez said the market had become a perverse mechanism where the big monopolies, the big trans-nationals, and the bourgeoisie, dominate and ransack the people.”
So he’s extended price controls from staples to all sorts of goods, with some prices being immediately subjected to a rate freeze. Big firms will have to report costs to the government, so bureaucrats can determine a “fair price.”
Were it not a ratcheting up of oppression and hardship, I’d say this is all getting rather funny. Price controls notoriously fail to achieve what they aim. In the United States, Nixon-era wage and price controls set stagflation into overdrive. Long lines at the gas pumps, shortages in supermarkets, and rising prices. What a mess.
There’s good theory to explain why price floors and price ceilings cause major problems. But according to the head of the country’s price control board, “The law of supply and demand is a lie.”
Hugo and his cronies deny the relevance of the central bank’s doubling the volume of money in circulation since late 2007. Supply of money increases? No possible effect on skyrocketing prices, supply and demand being a lie, you see.
Meanwhile, people have begun to hoard products. It’s now almost impossible to even find coffee in Venezuelan stores.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Washington warned Brown hanged
On Dec. 2, 1777, according to legend, Philadelphia housewife and nurse Lydia Darragh saves the lives of General George Washington and his Continental Army when she overhears the British planning a surprise attack on Washington’s army.
On this day in 1859, abolitionist John Brown is hanged for his raid on Harper’s Ferry. He wrote, “The crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away but with blood.”
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Frederick Douglass
“Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what a people will submit to, and you have found out the exact amount of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them; and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.”
America’s agricultural policies are notoriously crazy. The federal government subsidizes one crop while discouraging its use at the consumer end. The old New Deal program of paying farmers not to grow crops is still in place. The high tariff on sugar artificially increases prices far above the world price.
To compensate, the federal government helped develop a refined sugar substitute, high fructose corn syrup — an even more “sugary” sugar — and then infected nearly the whole food supply with it.
So, some sympathy for the “locavore” movement, the folks who believe we should eat foods grown in the areas we live. It seems more natural. Less goofy.
But it’s also a lot more costly, considering that buying locally tends to forsake gains from trade.
So a law to prop up locavore production and consumption, like the legislation introduced early in November by Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-OH) and Rep. Chellie Pingree (D-ME), cannot help but shuffle two steps back for every misstep forward. Basically, it’s about more subsidy, including $30 million for “Value-Added Producer Grants,” $15 million for “farmer food safety training,” $90 million for something called a “Specialty Crop Block Program.” The least obviously bad part would direct the “USDA Research, Education, and Extension Office to coordinate classical plant and animal breeding research activities,” though I don’t see why farmers can’t manage this on their own. This is the Age of the Internet, after all, of Information.
Congress: Forget it; repeal current agribusiness subsidy and protectionism, instead.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
“How many roads must a man walk down before you call him a man?”
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Rosa Parks
On Dec. 1, 1955, Rosa Parks refused to obey bus driver James F. Blake’s order that she give up her seat to make room for a white passenger in Montgomery, Alabama, sparking the Montgomery Bus Boycott.
On Nov. 30, 1967, Democratic Senator Eugene J. McCarthy of Minnesota declared he would challenge Lyndon Johnson, the incumbent president of his own party, over the Vietnam War. McCarthy’s strong showing in the 1968 New Hampshire primary drove Johnson from the race.
On this date in 1835, writer Samuel Clemens, known as Mark Twain, was born. On this date in 1874, Winston Churchill was born.
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Mark Twain
“Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself.”
Rob Walton is rich, $21 billion rich.
An email I received yesterday from the folks at Wal-Mart Watch (WMW) implores me to click to a website to vote for Mr. Walton as “the worst of the 1 percent . . . the person who is doing the most with their wealth to exploit the rest of the country.”
Could this be true?
“The Waltons inherited that wealth,” WMW says, “much of it was created by paying many workers at poverty-level wages, offering poor benefits, and lowering conditions in the supply chain by demanding ever-lower prices.”
Count me out.
Even Sam Walton, founder of Wal-Mart, had the right to give his wealth to whomever he wished, especially his children. Besides, as chairman of Wal-Mart for 20 years now, Rob’s earned plenty on his own.
The email forgets to mention that Wal-Mart provides more to the poor through lower prices than the federal government provides through food stamps.
And hey, didn’t workers at Wal-Mart apply for — and freely accept — their jobs? How many “living-wage” jobs has WMW created?
The sentence in bold type signals the real gripe, I bet: Rob Walton has transgressed by supporting causes that “advance a right wing agenda.” The Walton Family Foundation (of which he’s a board member) has donated to the Heritage Foundation, Cato Institute, school choice groups, and others.
Horrors! If Rob Walton is the worst of the 1 percent, the self-appointed vanguard of the 99 percent ought to occupy a mirror.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.