I'll give you my satellite dish when you take it from my cold, dead hands

SARFT Outlaws Shanzhai Satellite Dishes

Shanzhai satellite dishes are unapproved satellite receivers often seen in rural areas where cable television is not available; it is also prevalent in lower-tier cities as the cost of cable television is often too expensive for the average consumer. The recent decree from China’s State Administration of Radio, Film, and Television (SARFT) outlawing shanzhai satellite dishes was met with general disapproval, with some netizens posting pictures of their dishes hidden or disguised to avoid being discovered.

Comments include:

中国人民完全可以继承老一辈的革命传统和战斗精神______中国人民万岁。。。。打倒一切压迫力量 ("Chinese people can really inherit the previous generation’s revolutionary tradition and fighting spirit…long live the Chinese people…defeat all oppressive powers.")

and

哪里有压迫哪里就有反抗————("Where there is oppression, there will be retaliation——– [quote from Mao].")

Implementing the REAL ID act

Even though [Arizona's controversial new immigration law] in effect requires everybody to carry an approved form of ID and present it to police on demand, the authors want us to know that "nothing in this act shall implement or shall be construed or interpreted to implement or establish the REAL ID act," a 2005 federal law that Arizona legislators rebelled against in large part because they feared the scenario that are now trying to achieve.

Mattel 's malfeasance gets them a waiver

Mattel buys millions of items from China that violate American product-safety laws and standards. Congress reacts by punishing the entire industry, especially those small businesses that can’t afford independent testing, especially on products that don’t really need it. Thrift stores can’t resell merchandise without testing, making their business model impossible and threatening the charities that rely on those sales. Meanwhile, the economy of scale means that this law gives Mattel a competitive advantage from their own malfeasance — and they get the waiver on independent testing?

It's still our Government Motors

GM is using government money to pay back government money to get more government money.

Emphasis mine

Here's one Democrat's excellent idea

Jack D. Franks writes:

Instead of pushing for a tax increase, Quinn should stop the unnecessary spending.

Quinn could cut $1.2 billion worth of "member initiative" pork projects by executive order. He could push to collect more than $1 billion in taxes and fees owed to Illinois. He could push to scrap the lieutenant governor's office, which would save us $16 million over four years.

Rather than play politics with education, Quinn needs to scour Illinois' budget, assess every dollar spent and cut all but the most necessary expenditures.

We can do our part in the House and Senate. We can eliminate the Department of Commerce and Economic Opportunity to save another $1 billion. We can combine the Illinois State Toll Highway Authority with the Illinois Department of Transportation and save millions. We can eliminate governor-appointed boards and commissions.

And we need to fundamentally change how we set the state budget each year.

We need forensic audits of all spending. Justify every dime and know where every dime is going.

We need a zero-based approach that requires all spending be justified. It is simply common sense. I have co-sponsored legislation that would require the General Assembly to adopt a full accrual-based accounting statement. Legislators would know exactly what our economic position is before they approved any budget. We can prevent this type of fiscal nightmare from recurring.

Illinois can pull itself out of this mess. We have to shrink the size of government through better accounting and restrained spending.

How GM is "repaying" its loan

GM is taking money from the Wall Street Bailout – the TARP money – and using that....

Via The Everyday Economist

Crony capitalism

In the U.S today, we are moving away from reliance on honest pricing. The federal government controls 90% of housing finance. Policies to encourage home ownership remain on the books, and more have been added. Fed policies of low interest rates result in capital being misallocated across time. Low interest rates particularly impact housing because a home is a pre-eminent long-lived asset whose value is enhanced by low interest rates.

Distorted prices and interest rates no longer serve as accurate indicators of the relative importance of goods. Crony capitalism ensures the special access of protected firms and industries to capital. Businesses that stumble in the process of doing what is politically favored are bailed out. That leads to moral hazard and more bailouts in the future. And those losing money may be enabled to hide it by accounting chicanery.

If we want to restore our economic freedom and recover the wonderfully productive free market, we must restore truth-telling on markets. That means the end to price-distorting subsidies, which include artificially low interest rates. No one admits to preferring crony capitalism, but an expansive regulatory state undergirds it in practice.

I gotta move to New York

Best Weight Loss Plan Ever.

Guy #1: How's that new apartment?
Guy #2: Every night the rats eat a little bit more of my foot...

--N Train

via Overheard in New York, Apr 22, 2010

Idiotic Charles Schumer

Charles Schumer declares that passengers have the right to bring a carry-on aboard “without having to worry about getting nickeled and dimed.’’ ...[I]f Schumer grieves so deeply about travelers being “nickeled and dimed’’ when they fly, why has he never gone after the US ticket tax, which adds 7.5 percent to the price of every domestic flight? Or the $16.50 the federal government charges for each international departure and arrival? Or the $17 in customs and inspection fees paid by passengers flying into US airports from abroad? Or the “passenger facilities charges’’ (up to $18 per round-trip)? Or the “US Security Service Fee’’ ($2.50 per departure)? Or the “domestic segment fee’’ ($3.70 per flight segment)? The government’s unremitting “nickeling and diming’’ of airline passengers doesn’t trouble the sleep of New York’s senior senator. Only when a private firm acts does he toss and turn in anguish.

Contempt for the bourgeoisie in general and the United States in particular

[C]ontempt for the bourgeoisie was part of an intellectual tradition dating back to the 19th century, when English aesthetes..., German sociologists..., and French litterateurs... made careers out of flaying the middle class. They defined it as comprising, in the words of the great French historian Francois Furet, “petty, ugly, miserly, laborious, stick-in-the-muds, while artists were great, beautiful, brilliant and bohemian.” Flaubert, for one, argued against democracy on the grounds that “the whole dream of democracy is to raise the proletarian to the level of stupidity attained by the bourgeois.”

It was only in the 1920s...that such contempt for the bourgeoisie—and with it a deep hostility toward the United States’s position as the quintessentially middle-class, democratic, and capitalist nation—found a wide audience in this country through a new generation of writers....

And still today in the academy, there's lots of hostility to the hand that feeds us.

Tea Party supporters are stupid

Most Tea Party supporters think that Social Security and Medicare are worth the cost to taxpayers.

Obama's unpaid interns

Mr. Obama should not only apologize to the thousands of young, unpaid volunteers whom he exploited in 2008 for his own profit – namely, to win his election to the highest pulpit in the land – he should also give to each and every one of them back pay (with interest) for their efforts on his behalf.

Feeling good about ourselves

[I]n truth, differences between parties are often small. Democrats want to spend more and don't want to raise taxes, except on higher earners. Republicans want to reduce taxes but don't want to spend less. Vast budget deficits reflect both parties' unwillingness to make unpopular choices of whose benefits to cut or whose taxes to boost.

Given this evasion, the public agenda gravitates toward issues framed as moral matters. Global warming is about "saving the planet." Abortion and gay marriage evoke deep values, each side believing it commands the high ground. Certainly, President Obama pitched his health care plan as a moral issue. It embodies "the core principle that everybody should have some basic security when it comes to their health care," as he said when signing the legislation. Health care is a "right"; opponents are, by extension, less moral.

Obama's approach was politically necessary. On a simple calculus of benefits, his proposal would have failed. Perhaps 32 million Americans will receive insurance coverage -- about 10 percent of the population. Other provisions add somewhat to total beneficiaries. Still, for most Americans, the bill won't do much. It may impose costs: higher taxes, longer waits for appointments.

People backed it because they thought it "the right thing"; it made them feel good about themselves. What they got from the political process are what I call "psychic benefits." Economic benefits aim to make people richer. Psychic benefits strive to make them feel morally upright and superior. But this emphasis often obscures practical realities and qualifications. For example: The uninsured already receive substantial medical care, and it's unclear how much insurance will improve their health.

Nobody would want to live in a world where rich people and poor people got the same kind of health care

The government should withdraw its support for the NCAA cartel

Ilya Somin proposes "a conceptually simple, though politically difficult, solution" to the problem of underpaid college athletes:

The government should withdraw its support for the NCAA cartel. Universities will gradually stop pretending that Division I football and basketball players are primarily students, and start treating them as the employees they actually are. The players will get paid for their work, and they and the universities won’t have to waste time and money forcing players to attend bogus classes in order to keep up appearances. Those who have the desire and academic credentials to do real coursework should of course be allowed to do so.

Deborah Solomon trivializes personal freedom

Shit happens

I do not approve of the masses killing people, but the masses’ bitter hatred toward bad people cannot be discouraged, and it is unavoidable.

--Xie Fuzhi, Mao's minister of public security

群眾打死人，我不贊成，但群眾對壞人恨之入骨，我們勸阻不住，就不要勉強。

--谢富治

Highly educated but lacking in useful skills--me?

I see little evidence of a conscious political effort to lump those who are highly educated but lacking in useful skills together with those who are highly educated and actually useful skills, even if that's the way of society in general and the academy in particular.

However, it's true that teachers are rarely trained to teach effectively. Moreover, I know from personal experience that when teaching at the college level at least, we're not pushed to find ways of improving learning outcomes. Instead, we're rewarded on the basis of student evaluations (which basically comes down to how much the students like us), and research, which may or may not have much classroom relevance.

(I posted this as a response to Arnold Kling's post but it's not showing up yet, and I wanted to save the links to the two articles mentioned.)

Obama's Rain Dance

Arnold Kling writes:

Don Boudreaux reminds us that when the stimulus was sold it was with a promise that 90 percent of the jobs created or saved would be in the private sector. Before anyone can focus on the outlandish claims made for the stimulus, we now have the outlandish claims made for the health bill. No doubt we are about to hear outlandish claims for the financial regulation bill and whatever new initiatives the ruling class wishes to impose on the country.

Boudreaux links to They Don't Call It Stimulus No More

Like a rain dance that produces no clouds, we are now into our fourth round of federal deficit creation - the automatic "stabilizers," followed by the Bush (2008), Obama I (2009), and Obama II (2010) versions. With each dry day, the deficit dancing intensifies. When the rain finally falls, we will be told that the recovery is a tribute to the Keynesian Gods. But it's already clear that something has gone wrong: the "stimulus" chant has fallen silent. Our dance on a fiscal cliff has lost its theme music.

Happiness

From Elizabeth Kolbert's review of Derek Bok's “The Politics of Happiness: What Government Can Learn from the New Research on Well-Being”:

...the incomes of the country’s top earners have, in recent decades, grown several times as fast as those of the earners at the bottom. But the statistics show that, over the past few decades, the subjective well-being of those at the bottom has remained unchanged. If the poor aren’t bothered by the growing disparity, Bok asks, why should anyone else be?

“The most obvious reason for deploring income inequality is our instinctive sympathy for those who must make do with many fewer goods and services,” he observes. “It is not immediately clear, however, why growing inequality should elicit such compassion if lower-income Americans themselves have not become less happy.”

So much for policy to alleviate economic equality. Because job loss leads to unhappiness, Bok, trained as a lawyer, wants more generous unemployment benefits, apparently assuming they'd make people happier. But would they?

Kolbert also discusses Carol Graham's “Happiness Around the World: The Paradox of Happy Peasants and Miserable Millionaires”:

[Nigeria]’s per-capita G.D.P. last year was about fourteen hundred dollars. (In real terms, this is significantly lower than it was when the nation declared its independence, in 1960.) Yet the proportion of Nigerians who rate themselves happy is as high as the proportion of Japanese, whose per-capita G.D.P. is almost twenty-five times as great. The percentage of Bangladeshis who report themselves satisfied is twice as high as the percentage of Russians, though Russians are more than four times as rich, and the proportion of happy Panamanians is twice as high as that of happy Argentines, though the Argentines have double the income. Research that Graham has done in Afghanistan shows that, despite three decades of war and widespread destitution, Afghans are, on average, a pretty cheerful lot. (The most cheerful areas of the country tend to be those in which the Taliban’s influence is stronger.) Graham’s research in Latin America shows that the very poor are often remarkably upbeat. “Higher per capita income levels do not translate directly into higher average happiness levels,” she writes.

So much for our war in Afghanistan.

Also, Jean Kazez notes,

[A] study of 90,000 people across 26 European countries...found that "to belong to a religion is positively correlated with life satisfaction." You can see how that might be. Belonging increases the chances of believing. And believing increases optimism ("God will provide, protect, prevent, etc."), which is strongly correlated with greater happiness.

Now here's the surprising part. Everyone is more satisfied with life in areas that are more religious, including the atheists. And everyone is less satisfied in places with more atheists. "Having a higher proportion of atheists has a negative spillover effect for the religious and for atheists alike." Apparently, to some considerable extent, our attitudes about life are held collectively. We don't individualistically base our outlook simply on the beliefs lodged within our own skulls.