God. Real. Right.

This odd UPI story provides a nice metaphor for the financial and economic plight Americans find themselves facing this week. Here’s the story:

COVE, England, Sept. 30 (UPI) — Firefighters in Cove, England, said they were called to rescue an iguana trapped 45 feet up in a tree only to find the alleged lizard was a green branch.
An animal rescue officer and an aerial ladder platform team from the fire department were called to the scene by Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals officers, who received calls from residents about a stranded lizard, The Sun reported.
Colin Horwood, the animal rescue officer, said the rescuers made it about 25 feet up on the ladder before they realized the reported distressed lizard was nothing more than a green branch.
“The branch bore a striking resemblance to an iguana from the ground,” Horwood said.

So Americans look up into the economy and see an imperiled creature. (Don’t go the wrong direction for the analogy. The iguana-like branch is not (more…)

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The same issue about economics and the free market arose about oil prices, and is discussed in this previous post.
The ideas are simple. But apparently, not very many people have thought of them lately. So here’s a very brief reminder of a very basic concept for as very many people as will read it.
Money is not real. It simply stands for something else. It is not edible, for instance; and even if it were, it would not be edible as money, but instead as whatever composes or materially represents the money. It does not buy or warm houses, invent new products, cure diseases, or entertain anyone. (Neither is it a spirit, for dualists otherwise unsatisfied by my sample list.)
But even when people acknowledge that obvious fact, they tend to think that it stands for the wrong thing. That is, they think the amount (more…)

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Addressing the current financial sector crisis in America, President Bush made this remark:

I’m a strong believer in free enterprise, so my natural instinct is to oppose government intervention. I believe companies that make bad decisions should be allowed to go out of business.
Under normal circumstances, I would have followed this course. But these are not normal circumstances. The market is not functioning properly. There has been a widespread loss of confidence, and major sectors of America’s financial system are at risk of shutting down. [emphasis added]

The Market is not the problem.
The problem is that we don’t like some of the things the market does. We don’t like that the market makes the stuff we love very expensive and the stuff we don’t care about as cheap as dirt. We don’t like the fact that the market makes us put as much (more…)

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JoAnn Fitzpatrick has an insightful Op-Ed on Massachusetts’ failing “universal” health care plan in the Boston Herald this week. (click here for the editorial.) The problem with Massachusetts’ “ideal” solution is the same problem any nationalized health care plan will face, and it is as simple as economics. But explaining to most people that no effort to pretend otherwise can overcome the laws of supply and demand which govern human behavior is futile. People are certainly intelligent enough to realize, for instance, that government cost caps only reduce the amount or level of care or slow the economy overall so that everyone suffers; but they are not interested enough to learn about all the channels through which economic pressures will inevitably seek level.
So here is one very simple, inevitable, fundamental way to explain why universal health care will have exactly the same problem faced by the current health care system in America. Right now, almost no one can pay for major medical care outright. So they depend either on government guarantees of basic care (like emergency rooms and county hospitals) or on insurance. Either way, the amount of care provided is limited by the paying or covering agency. A person with (more…)

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There is no real law of unintended consequences. But there might as well be. Whenever people choose acts based on some desired result, they will not only get the desired result (maybe, that is) but also much more. They may or may not foresee it. They may or may not want it. But there will be a consequence, actually many, which they did not intend.
Some unintended consequences are happy, like telling a joke and stumbling into an extra pun in the process. Some seem malevolent, like running tests to avoid potential meltdowns at Chernobyl only to bring about the meltdown through the test. (Yes, that’s how it happened.) Some are simply ironic, often resulting in the opposite of what was intended, or an intensification of the problem which was supposed to be solved.
Such is the case with animal protection. In May U.S. Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne announced that polar bears were being added to the list of endangered species. Never mind that Russian, Alaskan, and Canadian populations (more…)

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“They shoot people in Texas.” Texans are going to start dealing with a reputation for being trigger-happy. A few weeks back a man was no-billed for shooting and killing two men who were burglarizing his neighbor’s home. Now, a 25 year old Garland man has shot and killed a man suspected of climbing onto the roof of his father’s business in order to strip and steal copper from air conditioning units. Reports so far, including one in the Dallas Morning News, indicate the 25 year old will not even face a grand jury for the shooting. DFW’s CBS 11 has a video report on it as well.
Undoubtedly some people will be offended (more…)

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Chris Wallace of Fox News Sunday interviewed senators Byron Dorgan (D, ND) and Kay Bailey Hutchison (R, TX) Sunday about high gas prices and domestic oil production–the transcript is available here. Everyone in touch with reality (a handful of people, by last count) knows that the price of any product in an even minimally free market is directly related to the ratio of demand to supply. The higher the demand and lower the supply, the higher the price.
So the two most direct routes to lower gas prices are (a) imposing despotic restrictions on consumption and (b) increasing supply. Since (a) is still a degree or two too admittedly Marxist even for most people in congress, the focus turns instead to (b); that is, the attention turns to increasing the amount of oil available to be refined into gasoline. All of those things are good and fine, and they are the reason both Dorgan and Hutchison express the need for increased production–albeit with possibly different (more…)

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A Jerry Johnson Live broadcast from June 10, 2008: Some on issues at the SBC, some on the death of desabled human value advocate Harriet Johnson, and some on McCain, Obama, and congress trying to steal oil company profits.

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The Dallas Morning News reports that The Bridge, Dallas’ new multi-million dollar homeless shelter/social services center, is regularly seeing overflow crowds. Some interpret that (over-) use as a good thing–evidence that The Bridge was needed, and that it was worth the $21 million spent to build it.
Let’s be clear. (more…)

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The Exxon shareholders meeting held in Dallas today is the latest opportunity for economic gufus (or gufusses, if you prefer) to demonstrate their practically omnipotent ability to ignore reality. The Dallas Morning News describes the context of the meeting and mentions some of the conflict here.
Protesters believe gas prices are too high. Here’s the reality. When gas prices are too high, people will stop buying gas–or at least buy significantly less of it. And as the demand goes down, so will the profits of the companies selling it. If people are willing to pay $4/gallon to drive to their Memorial Day weekend getaway, then gas prices are not too high for them. If a man takes his car to work every day instead of the bus, (more…)

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