While everybody is quivering in righteous populist anger over the impending restrictions on corporate pay and bonuses for the most bailed-out corporations, Goldman Sachs is salting away a bonus pool of, well: As Wall Street firms typically do, Goldman set almost half that sum aside to compensate its workers. Through the first nine months of 2009, the firm socked away $16.7 billion, enough to pay the average Goldmanite $526,814. The bonus pool is on pace to hit $21 billion for 2009, which would match the record bonus payout of 2007. Goldman said it won't decide the size of the bonus pool till year-end. In any case, the payments will be substantial -- and will come just one year after huge sums of taxpayer dollars were funneled to financial institutions. Of course, GS leadership (at least that much of as has not been recruited to run the Fed and the Treasury Departmet) asserts that it should be exempt from government regulation because it has paid back all $10 billion in government b...

I hope that senator Obama can deliver on these promises. In my fantasy land, Obama would adopt the foreign policy strategies of Ron Paul and it would make the dream ticket. These proposed economic polices are not bad, in fact many of them are what needs to be done to move the nation and our economy forward into a global world. This is one of the areas that the good Senator and I agree on, that keynsenian economics are much better that military keynesianism , now if he would do that instead of a guns and butter platform we would be in much better shape as a nation. Love him or hate him, the one thing that Ron Paul pointed out eloquently is that it is virtually impossible to avoid national bankruptcy if you try to have have a huge military budget and social programs. So too often the left says we support social programs and the right says we support the military programs and then they wind up supporting both to the detriment of the republic and its form of government and to benefit a ...

The cafeterias serving the House of Representatives are run under contract by Restaurant Associates (since the 1980s) and turn a profit while serving good food that draws legions of staffers each day from all over Capitol Hill. The Senate dining room is a public eatery, where even the wait staff averages $37,000/year, the food is terrible, and taxpayers have had to fork out subsidies of $18 million since 2003 just so Senator Bob Menendez (D-NJ) could continue to eat sushi that costs you and me more than an Amtrak ticket. Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), of all the unexpected advocates of free enterprise, led the finally successful attempt to have the Senate dining room privatized. From the Washington Post : In a letter to colleagues, Feinstein said that the Government Accountability Office found that "financially breaking even has not been the objective of the current management due to an expectation that the restaurants will operate at a deficit annually." But Sen. Robert ...

On Money, Inflation and Government Dr. Ron Paul These past few weeks have provided an unfortunate opportunity to discuss inflation. The dollar index has reached new all-time lows. The total money supply, M3, as calculated by private sources, is growing at a disturbing 17% rate. The Fed is pumping dollars into the economy at an alarming rate. Just recently the Fed announced new loan auctions totaling $100 billion. That is new money created from thin air. If these money auctions, combined with the bailout of Bear Stearns, continue to be the trend, we are in for some economic stormy weather. The explanation lies in understanding the basics of money, and why it is dangerous to give government and big banks control over it. First, money is not wealth, in and of itself. You cannot create more wealth simply by creating more money. Wall Street bankers cry out for more liquidity, but what is really needed is more value behind the dollar. But the value, unfortunately, isn't there. You see, t...

Rep. Jeff Flake (R-Arizona) discusses why we should have free and open trade with Cuba against the objections of Lincoln Diaz-Balart (R-Florida) and the Cuba Caucus who want to continue an embargo that clearly has not worked and has caused innumerable sufferings to the normal people of an island 90 miles from Florida. Diaz-Balart has gone so far as to suggest, that the US should use its force to assassinate the former leader of that nation... http://www.cubaupdate.org/cu0404_09.htm Take time to watch Rep. Flake's response to the issue... http://reason.tv/video/show/336.html And Senator Max Baucus' Free Trade Agreement.... http://finance.senate.gov/press/Bpress/2003press/prb021303.pdf Cuba free trade is a good idea to show the Cuban people that during their political transition we can work with them to build a more peaceful hemisphere. Cooperation with other countries as a free trading partner is going to go a long way to ease tensions in the hemisphere.

Folks, I am sorry, I am still new at this so if the spacing or scope of the document is not correct, I apologize. I am not opposed inter-Americanism or pan-Americanism and I never really have been. I like the idea of an "empire of liberty" that Jefferson said his principles would bring about. I think it is the best and most socially responsible model out there for the development of trade agreements. That being said, that model is opposed to our managed free trade agreements in NAFTA and CAFTA which both 1.) create net job loss in the intended countries are fueling immigration, 2.) create jobs on one end, for one class, in the social scale, but are non-reciprocal agreements that do not promise jobs in this country and 3.) create political tensions in each region they are enacted in. Much like Roman trade agreements that assure stability by protecting the propertied classes, NAFTA and CAFTA fuel the problems of immigration normal North Americans are forced to deal with. I am s...

It was a real pleasure Steve invited me to be part of the blogger mafia. It is a pleasure to get information about some of the things I know about out there to the blogoshpere . It may seem a little depressing to start my first blog on the site with a posting about warfare and geopolitics, but if you take the time to read it you will see that in fact it is not depressing at all, it the technical and social equivalent of 1776. There is a technological revolution going on in both culture and warfare that are highly and I fear will only become more significant in each of our lives as the years go on and I want you to read about them here where freedom of speech and moral conscience are an absolute right. With that let me begin and say welcome to all of you used to reading Steve’s magnificent work! I hope that you enjoy my posts and Tyler's excellent work. Now that the introduction is over, I would like to ask a question. Do you ever wonder about the future of culture and warfare? Well...

Becky, that Girl in Short Shorts , has a thoughtful post on the emerging retail health care industry, those limited-service clinics inside Wal-Mart or your local shopping mall: ,i> An estimated 18,000 Amerians die every year because they can't afford or can't qualify for health insurance. That's five times the number killed in 9-11. Not to mention all the people who are stuck in sucky jobs because they don't dare lose their current insurance. But you know what we can start doing ? Pay doctors with cash. There will be some people that can not afford it, and the government will have to help. But a lot less than nowadays, because it will be a heck of a lot cheaper. This is how people got health care thirty years ago, before America became infatuated with monthly premiums and co-pays. And there are some doctors who are already starting to reject insurance and accept only cash. They are able to charge less and spend more time with each patient because they do not have to...

I rarely find myself in agreement with Pennsylvania's Arlen Specter on much of anything, and even today he's right for the wrong reasons. Specter wants to repeal the 1961 anti-trust exemption granted to the NFL (which set a precedent for other sports leagues) allowing the franchises to group themselves as one entity to sell TV broadcast rights, primarily because he objects to the fact that some games are not freely available over commercial airwaves. That's the right action for the wrong reasons. Even the New York Sun , while opposing Specter's legislation (which also has no realistic chance of ever making it out of committee), admits that the current practice amounts to "football economic socialism," by allowing Green Bay or Nashville to reap the same financial rewards as New York or Los Angeles and thus achieve parity in terms of ability to recruit the best players. The Sun argues that such a move would be costly for NFL fans, because the teams would move i...

Free markets today are in somewhat ill repute, having been tarnished, I think, by eight years of mishandling by a Republican administration that essentially shit on the Libertarian wing of the party at every opportunity. This has allowed proponents of managed capitalism or welfare state capitalism to stage an intellectual comeback of sorts, arguing that all we've see from the market is a massive transfer of wealth upward: the rich get richer, the middle class gets worried, and the poor get poorer. I want to point out a different perspective on free markets, but I will warn you ahead of time that I'm not going to provide a bunch of easy URLs to check out the facts behind my reasoning, mostly because it comes from studies in those most antiquated of sources: books. There will be a bibliography at the end; do your own homework. Here's my thesis: it is sometimes the case that unfettered free markets lead rather than follow with respect to positive social change. Case in ...

This one is from our friends at The Eco-libertarian , a story about how many farmers in California now allow fields to lie fallow in order to sell the water they purchase as below-market agricultural rates to drought-struck cities. Wow. I got that all into one sentence, even if it does run on a bit. The longer post makes more sense, grammatically speaking, but the logic still defies me. Evolutionary biologists have saying, used whenever anyone starts to believe they've outwitted nature: "Remember, evolution is smarter than you are." The same thing, apparently, applies to market economics.

No, India's Tata Motors is NOT exporting the new $2,500-3,000 Nano to America, but you'll be seeing Tata products on US highways by year's end. Chrysler has signed an agreement to have Tata Motors to produce electric min-trucks for the American market : The deal, with the US carmaker's Global Electric Motorcars unit, is for an electric version of Tata's mini truck Ace that would be sold in the United States, the report said. "The battery-operated vehicle has passed required safety and reliability tests, and the prototype is ready for production," it said, adding they will be exported as completely built units. Tata Motors will begin exporting around 10,000 units by year-end, and ramp up to 50,000 units, it said. "We are indeed exploring the feasibility of a vehicle on the Ace platform with an electric engine suitable for the U.S., in collaboration with a U.S. company," a spokesman for Tata Motors told Reuters. "But it is premature at this st...

America is generally short of news outlets that take a genuine world perspective, which is why--as I noted in my post on the budding relationship between France and China --we miss so much of what's really going on in the world. For that--even though the graphics are pathetic and the stand is conservative enough to embarrass Thurston Howell III--I read The Economist . Among other advantages, the magazine is actually written by people who know something about economics rather than the glib but essentially puppet-like market analysts we constantly see on TV. Recently The Economist took on the issue of soaring food prices worldwide , attributing them to: ...long-running changes in diet that accompany the growing wealth of emerging economies—the Chinese consumer who ate 20kg (44lb) of meat in 1985 will scoff over 50kg of the stuff this year. That in turn pushes up demand for grain: it takes 8kg of grain to produce one of beef. But the rise in prices is also the self-inflicted result...

Friend Waldo Lydecker has a Monday Night Rant posted that covers a lot of ground (rants are good for that, if you can just get somebody to read them). He takes on media--satellite radio and cable TV--for assuming that "the gay experience ends at about age 28 and after that you put on weight and wear sweaters that button up." But more importantly for my current purpose, he tackles the conjoined issues of identity politics and cultural diversity, explaining that Paradoxically ... we left Seattle- one of the gayest cities in America, [because] it was- is- too gay. People won't let you be your own kind of gay. You have to be on this team or that. If you aren't, punishments must be exacted. In our previous life as a lawyer, we lost a ton of work over a decade because we were- before the Bush regime made the position untenable- a Republican gay. We dealt with judges keen to seek the gay vote and then shiv them in court; newspapers who profess progressive views but who nev...

The release of, and controversy over, the new Indian Tata Nano (new car around $3,000, what's not to love?) got me started thinking about global automotive production, global warming, and all that. First I tried to find out about global automobile production, which has changed radically over the past few years, as China, India, and Brazil have surged forward in production. Here's the Top 22 for 2006 (every country that produces more than half a million cars per year): This is a list of countries by automobile production in 2006 mostly based on OICA accessed in September 2007. World/69.257.914 EU/18.887.996 1 Japan 11.484.223 2 US 11.263.986 3 China 7.188.708 4 Germ. 5.819.614 5 S. Korea 3.840.102 6 France 3.169.219 7 Spain 2.777.435 8 Brazil 2.611.034 9 Canada 2.572.292 10 Mexico 2.045.518 11 India 2.019.808 12 UK 1.648.388 13 Russia 1.508.358 14 Italy 1.211.594 15 Thail. 1.194.426 16 Turkey 987.780 17 Belgium 918.056 18 Iran 904.500 19 Cz...

The best science weekly (both online and in print) in the world is Great Britain's New Scientist , which--given that the Brits also produce the best news weekly in the world in The Economist , hardly seems fair. Trust New Scientist to have researched the details on India's new ultra-cheap car that's causing all the fuss amongst environmentalists, the Tata Nano. The Tata Nano will meet European emissions standards on exhaust. If you want to see details, check out the Euro IV line in this table. Bear in mind that exhaust emissions standards regulate the particles that make up smog, not emissions of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide (which the EU does not currently regulate, although it's trying). The numbers come out in favour of the Tata Nano. Euro IV standards are more stringent than those in place for the motorcycles and scooters, which make up a big chunk of India's motorised traffic. For instance, according to the Indian Federation of Automobile Dealers Associa...

From Thoughts on Freedom, the Australian Libertarian Society Blog comes this Quote of the Da y: Saw this quite wonderful quote on A Western Heart, “Our business model is one of very high risk: We dig a very big hole in the ground, spend three billion dollars to build a factory in it, which takes three years, to produce technology we haven’t invented yet, to run products we haven’t designed yet, for markets which don’t exist. We do that two or three times a year.” Paul Otellini, CEO of Intel It encapsulates everything that is great about the free market - hope, optimism, faith in science, a willingess to take risk, the knowledge that you will be rewarded for this risk, and a total belief in your people to succeed. God bless free enterprise.