Dollar? I never even &c.

Via Atrios, I knew that it was widely believed that the US would not act to devalue the dollar, but I was also under the impression that the context of that position was that, while a falling dollar would be (potentially) beneficial to our economy, there are some number of reasons against trying to pursue those ends. I didn't realize Geithner's position was actually in the opposite direction, that we need to do all we can to strengthen the dollar.

I mean fair enough, some people are in the "let's try anything" camp while others are more towards the "let's not mess with anything and see how it shakes out" side of things. "Let's take whatever people in the 'try anything' camp suggest and run in the opposite direction" seems so pointlessly sadistic as to be off the reservation entirely.

You camp on a reservation right.

Consistency Check

One not infrequently encounters defenses of so-called "sweatshop" labor that proclaim that factories thus described are only able to find employees because they represent the "best available option" for residents of their localities.

Consequently, goes this line of argument, any bleeding-heart's personal boycott (or public campaign exhorting widespread boycott) of companies using these types of facilities is counterproductive, making the lives of the workers the would-be do-gooder claims to be looking out for worse off by hurting their employers.

It strikes me that for a moral person who truly believes this, it should not be enough to stop at "don't boycott" as a response to sweatshops: indeed, there is a moral obligation to actively seek out and prefer sweatshop products over alternatives, and to agitate for others to do the same.

The purchase of "fair trade," artisanal, or other "humanely manufactured" items takes food from the mouths of those who need it most to line the pockets of well-heeled hobbyists and lazy union "workers."

But don't they realize inflation isn't an issue right now?!?

Moderate liberal Matt Yglesias starting to radicalize?

The Drug War Requires a Police State

Interesting thought experiment by Kevin Carson considering how the War on Drugs would fare in a society in which the Fourth and Fifth Amendments to the US Constitution were respected according to their plain meaning and spirit. "Not well" is the short version.

Carson concludes:

If you want the Drug War, you must sacrifice the Bill of Rights and the due process rights of the accused, and submit to a police state in which you have no rights or protections whatsoever.

I would tend to put this the other way round, that the Drug War (like its antecedents, including Prohibition) exists because of its impact on due process rights: if drugs didn't exist they'd need to be invented, because the same rights that are essential to democracy are obstacles to capitalism.

The Capitalist Solution to Health Care: More Money for Capitalsts

The apologists for capitalism really are beyond parody.

I will quibble with digby's implication that this has anything to do with a misplaced faith in markets per se; there's nothing inherently absurd about insurance insurance (and it sort of exists in, e.g., auto policies that include coverage for collisions with uninsured drivers), and if there were sufficient demand for those kinds of policies then insurance companies would offer them.

That's not good enough for the likes of Cato, however, who aren't happy unless the very maximum amount of wealth is being extracted from the populace and funneled into corporate coffers. The crisis of the medically at-risk being insufficiently covered by rapacious insurance companies becomes the opportunity for those selfsame insurers to squeeze out one more drop of blood. Such is the nature of capitalism: markets are a means to an end, but it is the end—the continued ascendancy of the capitalist class—that is paramount, and when markets aren't getting the job done they are dropped to the side without a second thought.

The Book of Neuteronomy

So we are supposed to get Prancis's balls chopped off soon, and our neighbors told us about the ASPCA's mobile spay/neuter truck. It so happens that it's going to be near us on Saturday, and we can save a couple hundred dollars by getting him neutered there instead of at the vet's.

I am a little hesitant because the program is intended to provide services to low income communities and they perform only a limited number of operations (25 animals a day) on a first come/first served basis. There is a nominal fee for people without proof of public assistance, but even with that we could be preventing someone from getting their pet fixed for whom going to the vet would not be an option. If we want to minimize our impact as gentrifiers in our neighborhood, isn't this exactly the kind of thing we should be avoiding? On the other hand, it would save us $300, which is a significant amount of money...but maybe that makes it that much more unethical?

I don't know, I'm not sure what we'll decide. We've also discussed the possibility that 25 people might not even show up by seven on what is going to be a drizzly Saturday morning on a holiday weekend, but that feels like a rationalization.

Priorities

Atrios links to this LA news story about California "ghost" towns of foreclosed houses. There are all these people still living in half-empty neighborhoods with legitimate complaints about trashed abandoned houses that get used for gang hangouts, drug sales, and so forth.

But then all of a sudden attention turns to a house that's being squatted by...a family! Who can't be evicted because...they pay their utility bills? Uh, so what's the problem again?

Oh, I see, they don't maintain their lawn and neighbors would prefer a "nice family." Maybe leaving the place empty would be a better option? Hilariously, one person even complains about the squatters' impact on property value, as if that's still a thing.

Nice to see a dying community unite around the poor bankers, who just want their justly deserved "fees," and against the evil homesteaders squatters who might actually have a shot at saving the neighborhood.

The Caine Dootiny

Via Sadly, No!, wow, Michael Caine is a jackass. It's not like he pulled himself up by his own bootstraps in the midst of the Thatcherite capitalist paradise...he made his career in the 1960's, under the confiscatory tax structure decried by other working class lads made good.

Clearly, while some people are none too happy about their tax brackets once they've met with great success, the threat of high taxes was not enough to put them off their ambitions in the first place, so it's hard to take Iain Martin's scaremongering in the Telegraph column seriously. He seems to half recognize this, as he is very right to worry about "[a]ccess to the best schools...increasingly limited to the affluent." It's just his proposed remedy—slash taxes for the ultra wealthy—that's nonsense.

She's a Superfund (She's Superfundy)

I'm glad it sounds like the Gowanus Superfund status is going to go through. The arguments against it all basically amounted to "it's going to be really hard to get people to live in housing built on a Superfund site," which, yeah. Is that supposed to persuade anyone?

May Day Cartoon

Who Is This Fellow?

I subscribed to the Center for a Stateless Society feed when they picked up Kevin Carson...I had already wished he'd post more to his personal blog, and didn't want to miss anything. But now they seem to have a new blogger, Thomas Knapp, whose ideology seems much more in line with the vulgar libertarianism Carson has dedicated so much effort railing against.

For example, take this recent litany of standard libertarian canards...Mussolini never made the trains run on time, public schools suck, USPS sucks, &c. It gets my dander up, though I'll refrain from offering a classic point-by-point rebuttal; if I wanted to spend my time rebutting libertarian cant then there are any number of intertubes I could read, but I don't so I don't.

In any case, Kevin Carson seems to be pretty consistent in linking to his C4SS posts from his personal blog, so maybe I'll just stay subscribed to that.

PANZAIIIIIII

I agree with what Atrios says, the real estate bubble and a lot of the stock market in general have always sort of been pyramid schemes. This dude seems to have gotten in trouble for giving the game away as much as anything else.

I mean, there was a period of several years during which people were quite publicly encouraged to buy more real estate than they could pay for, not just despite their prices being very high by historical standards, but because of it: the logic being that the continuation of recent pricing trends would mean they could sell in a couple years at even astronomic-er prices and recoup their investment and then some. And because everyone knows that home ownership is a great way to build wealth, and because brokers make money as long as stuff changes hands, it's win-win-win.

In the basic model of how stock investments are supposed to work, as I understand it, the shareholders buy their stocks from a company to help give the company a bunch of money to work with; the company uses that money to run their business and turn a profit; and the profit is then distributed to the shareholders as dividends. But then some stocks don't work that way at all, and actually the entire value of purchasing a share derives not from any predicted dividend, but from the expectation that at some point in the future someone else will pay you more for it than you did (because of their expectation that at some point further someone else will pay them even more...).

And it seems to me that when you're in a position where actually quite a lot of stocks are traded based on those kinds of predictions, and when a lot of real estate is trading hands due to the widespread possession of a similar set of expectations (rather than because a given area is getting more or less popular as people move around and figure out where they want to live their lives), then it's a situation that is inherently unsustainable in basically exactly the same way a Ponzi scheme is: you need a greater number of people to pay into the system for each successive generation of investors to come out ahead, and at the end of the day there are only so many people and it collapses.

Block of Castles

When I hit up the Key Food's over on Nostrand, I usually end up on the South side of St Marks by the time I get to the block between Rogers and Nostrand. So I usually check out some of these crazy houses across the street:


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The detached home in the middle is unique in the neighborhood, as far as I can tell...there are lots of big mansions, but they're all regular brownstones. That two-family home on the right is half boarded-up and half under renovation. So they're basically the castles of the neighborhood and I check them out when I go to grab groceries.

For some reason, on the way to Key Food's last night, I wasn't able to cross over from the North side of the street by the time I was on that block. And so I noticed this awesome apartment building on the South side of it:


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I love the six stories and then the teensy pitched roof all the way on one side. So crazy.

Anyway, the whole block is cool. There are some neat weird homes with storefronts as you get to Nostrand. Also, this blog post was inspired by just popping out to the grocery store, but I have to say that I'm loving the hi-res Jeeves maps. The future is now, APDTO (all praise due to Obama).

On the topic of people remodeling old castles of Crown Heights, in February This American Life did an episode that touches on gentrification. It's about the Plan to repopulate black neighborhoods across the US with white people, and it starts around 32:00.

Detroit Possessive S

My brothers and I thought we were so hilarious when we talked about shopping at "Target's" and whatnot. It's a thing people say in Detroit, apparently. I wonder if we picked it up from our mom.

Anti-Lemon Law

This weekend I finally took a deep breath and took my car in for an oil change and general check-up, after having taken it to a shop for years that I eventually found out had a reputation for not actually doing what they said they were doing. Amazingly, the new place, which came highly recommended by the internets, found the car to be in great shape.

When I used to play golf in P.E. high school, I used to argue that my friends shouldn't take mulligans (I was sort of a dick in high school), because if they didn't think they should have to play an uncharacteristically bad drive then they should also not be allowed to play an uncharacteristically good drive; and nobody ever said "whoa, that was wayyyyy too long and straight for me (nullus), I should do that over."

By the same token, I seem to have been saddled with an anti-lemon. With 90-something,000 miles on it, and despite years of probable abuse at the hands of the mechanics in my old neighborhood, my car is still doing great (knock on wood (nullus)). By my own standards, I should make the inverse of a "lemon law" claim and pay the manufacturer a sum of money to compensate for its unexpected reliability.

The Business Case Against National Health Care

Atrios thinks private corporations' opposition to government-provided health insurance is purely ideological. But there is actually a logic to it, I think: employer-based health insurance means it is more difficult for people to switch jobs, which drives wages down. It doesn't make CEO's not-assholes, but it does make sense in economic terms.

Why Not Organize When Things Are Good?

Via GameSetWatch, a blog post from someone at a UK game maker on organizing in the games industry.

The author essentially comes down on the "give unions a shot" side of the debate, while noting that both sides are really arguing from a position of ignorance given that nobody in the industry has really tried a unionized workforce. This statement does seem strange, though:

At this point in the discussions, the cry is usually "why don’t you just join [a union] and start the ball rolling", which for me is equally frustrating. Of course, I am in fact management, and not just an employee. So it doesn’t make sense for me to be a union member. And my team, not being generally mistreated, feels no need to join a union either.

You'd think, actually, that that would be a great sort of place to give a game making union a shot: you start out with employees that are content and a basically union-friendly boss, and the union is just there to keep things in that peaceful state. It's unfortunate that there's a perception of unions as a necessary evil that only come into play where workers are horribly abused.

Two Dissonances Don't Make a Cognition

A friend happened to link me to a Megan McArdle post on how the economic crisis might mean trouble for New York City. It's a mess of course, but in sort of an interesting way.

First, there is the cognitive dissonance implicit in the assertion that "the City and State of New York are remarkably business-unfriendly places." I don't know if you could find a more perfect example of the doctrinaire libertarian observing that reality and dogma are in conflict, and deciding that reality has gotten it wrong. I have absolutely no doubt that New York does indeed "usually end up ranked at the very bottom of the league tables in terms of the ease of doing business there": at the top are certainly Antarctica and the Moon.

Combine that with the current financial meltdown, the demonstration of corporate deregulation run amok so perfect that no capitalism skeptic could have invented it in their wildest fantasies. It goes without saying that no sounder rebuke to vulgar libertarianism has occurred in McArdle's lifetime. And yet, it is this very same economic disaster that McArdle muses might finally cause the scales to fall from the eyes of all those misguided New York businesses who were so foolish as to choose the business-hostile isle of Manhattan in which to thrive.

Joe the Neurosurgeon

Matt Yglesias dreams of a world where rogue plumbers slip silently through the night, fixing leaks and then escaping before the government can catch them and bury them in paperwork.

Any honest and humane opposition to licensing bodies must necessarily begin by targeting the traditional professions. The AMA's stranglehold on medical education vastly outweighs the effects of state licensing electricians in terms of economic, let alone public health and safety, terms.

You will always find anti-licensing allies in big business as long as you are trying to undermine trade unions, but they have no interest in any principle beyond that of broad opposition to organized labor. Licensing requirements for all sorts of occupations may be problematic in theory, but it's short-sighted to make common cause with anti-labor forces to do away with specific forms of licensing in isolation of anything else.

No Way To Run A Business

I was over at the National Alliance Review blog trying to get a read on the different partisans' reactions to the bailout failure (consensus: the House GOP chose to demagogue rather than pass a bipartisan bill and now the Democrats are free to pass a progressive dream bill along party lines...works for me). One of the fascists over there posted this hilarious reader email on a different topic:

My husband’s business is a canary in the coalmine...[A]t the mere thought of a President Obama, he has paid off his debt, canceled new spending, and jotted a list of whom to "let go."...

My husband will make sure that we’re okay, money-wise, but he won’t give himself a paycheck that will just be sent to Washington...[H]e will not spend his money, not show a profit, and scale his workforce down to the bare minimum.

Multiply this scenario across the country and you’ll see the Obama effect: unemployment, recession, etc.

Amazing. It is apparently the "mere thought" of President Blackazoid, and not, say, the descent of the actual Republican-helmed economy into the actual economic shitter, that is to blame for a small business's financial hardship. Pray that the mighty captains of industry don't picture Bill Clinton's penis or we'll all be doomed.