JayB

The salient point in every one of your posts is that your leftist intellectual nemesis is a fiction. What do you know about Mexico or Mexican culture, for example? Do you speak Spanish? Have you been there? Do you have Mexican relatives? The leftist intellectuals you commonly speak do exist...in your own mind, as a mirror image of your own academically cloistered persona...with the volume turned up or down as you see fit. Your policy recommendations, what few you actually put forth, as you are mostly an armchair critic, historically have produced disaster. Your GMO cartoon is a classic example. Please...stay in academia where you can publish little papers that no one will read so you can at least do no harm. So the argument here is that...there are not Leftist intellectuals in Mexico, so the author of the said article had to invent them to add a bit of drama to spice up his article about the retail trade in Mexico, and that even if there are leftist intellectuals in Mexico, they would certainly never dream opposing the elimination of tariffs or subsidies, much less doing so under the guise of fighting Yankee imperialism, economic colonialism, etc. Yes - clearly I am operating in a dreamworld here. The ironic thing about this post - other than the transparent weakness of the argument "Have you touched the surface of the Sun? Then how do you know it's hot?" - is that I made no claims to have any special expertise in all things Mexican. Even if I did, that wouldn't be the least bit relevant here. The whole point is that it's not about what anyone other than the poor Mexicans actually value that matters here. If they decide that they want to use their meager incomes to pay artificially high prices in order to prop up the incomes of the folks that control the local market, they should certainly be free to do so, but they shouldn't be forced to against their will by means of regulations that restrict price competition. If Walmart or any other competitor comes along and they decide that paying inflated prices constitutes an essential part of their culture that they want to preserve, then they can choose to do so no matter who operates a store in their town or village. Judging by the reception that Walmart stores have been getting whenever and wherever they open in Mexico, is seems clear that that they don't consider enduring various kinds of material deprivation, or forgoing some of the choices and conveniences that people in the developed take for granted to be essential elements of the Mexican cultural experience. If you think that they are off base here, rather than sanctioning policies which force them to pay artificially high prices at local retailers thanks to regulations that restrict competition, the more ethical thing to do would be to prop up these retailers with your own cash, instead of insisting that poor people do the same with theirs. Form a Union of Concerned Leftists and notify all of the retailers who are about to be subjected to price competition and inform them that you understand their plight, and you are prepared to help preserve the uniquely valuable contribution that their artificially high prices represent with something other than rhetoric. Tell them to send along their sales records before their competitors come to town. If Juan's Tortilla emporium loses $10,000 in sales during the first year in which he faces competition from the MexiMart down the road, no problem - the Union of Concerned Leftists will subsidize his operation and pay the difference, rather than insisting that the poor folks in the local village do the same. With regards to the recommendations that you mentioned in the previous post, indulge me with some specifics. I'd be curious to know where eliminating regulations that prevent competition and eliminate artificially high prices has brought about the disasters that you alluded to. I'd be especially interested to learn about economic disasters that are analogous to the disasters produced by the likes of...drought resistant crops.

For me it would completely depend on the nature of my relationship with the said dude. If it was a close friend or family member, I'd shrug it off and buy some new skis, since the value of the relationship is way higher than a pair of skis. Random dude, I'd see how he felt about paying for half of the cost of the skis. If he declined, given the lack of a realistic means of getting him to pay, I'd write both the dude and the skis off and move on. Having said that, any close friend of mine would probably offer to pitch in some money to cover the damage without me even having to ask. The fact that you are even having to consult with insurance folks or ponder this one in depth indicates that this guy is a loser that you had the misfortune to hook up with for a lift to the slopes, or that you need to elevate your standards for friends.

The salient feature of both opposition groups is that they have motives quite apart from the well-being of the poor, despite their claim that it is concern for the poor that animates their opposition to Walmart. Mexico has traditionally been one of the most closed and corrupt (no coincidence between the closure and the corruption) retail marketplaces in the world, where retailers have colluded with local politicians in order to lock out competition and leave the local people with no choice but to pay excessive prices or go without. It's easy to see how this benefits those who control local commerce, but how anyone can claim that this state of affairs benefits the poorest Mexicans is beyond me. The claim that opening up the local retail sector to price competition will ultimately hurt the poor by putting local shops out of business is also false. If the only way a local retailer can survive is by charging higher prices, then they deserve to go out of business. The claim that this will hurt the local economy is also false - and in this case quite ironic, given the state of the local economy in most small Mexican towns. If you compare total wages before and after the arrival of such a store (how do low-end retail jobs pay in Mexico?) you won't see much of a change initially, and if anything I'd wager that they go up. But the initial change in total wages is not the primary impact that the store will have - it's increasing the purchasing power and the total disposable income of the local people. If your grocery bill, for example, is cut by one third - you have that money to either save or spend. That money is then available to spend on the full spectrum of goods and services that's available in the vicinity. This is a hard concept for people to grasp, but imagine a situation where the price of gas was elevated to $10 a gallon, and price competition was forbidden. What impact would this have on anyone engaged in a business other than selling gas? Would it help those businesses or harm them? That addresses the local businesses and their opposition to Walmart. As far as the "leftist intellectuals are concerned," their opposition is offensive on a number of fronts. First and foremost, they are not poor, and by restricting price competition they are imposing hardships on the least fortunate members of their society that they will not share. The second reason why their opposition is illegitimate is it presupposes not only that they - rather than the poor people - know what truly counts as authentically Mexican and must be preserved, but that they should be granted the power to make that determination and force others to accept their judgement. The third is that Leftist intellectuals in Mexico - to an even greater extent than Leftist intellecutals in the US, if that's possible - are economically illiterate, and are still arguing on behalf of policies that have been completely discredited, and are responsible for the endemic poverty that has continues to plague that country. Leftist intellectuals arguing against economic freedom is like witch doctors arguing against vaccination or anti-retrovirals. The reassuring thing is that the folks who all of this impacts the most have had the sense to ignore the exhortations of the activist-class on behalf of the micro-protectionist retailers. I can only hope that the same will happen with the disease and drought resistant crops that the well-fed activist-class is out to deny to all of the hungry people in the developing world.

Salient Quotes "When Wal-Mart was building a store in Juchitán in 2005, local shopkeepers and leftist groups tried to rouse popular sentiment against the American invader." "Over the past few years, local shopkeepers have teamed up with leftist intellectuals to try to block the construction of new Wal-Marts in several places." For now, however, such efforts have been largely unsuccessful. Global Exchange, a San Francisco-based antiglobalization group, is advising Mr. Alvarez and others in Los Cabos who want to prevent Wal-Mart from entering Baja California Sur, the only Mexican state without a Wal-Mart store. The group figured it might sway the town's new left-wing mayor, Luis Diaz, a member of a political party that opposes free trade. But Mr. Diaz is welcoming the American retailer. "I can understand that some businesses might be hurt by Wal-Mart, but the fact is that the people here want it. It increases the purchasing power of people with very little money," Mr. Diaz says in an interview. "...town officials say Wal-Mart is staying. "The ones who have benefited the most [from Wal-Mart] are the poorest," says Feliciano Santiago, the deputy mayor. "I hope another one comes." "Yes - we want to help poor people by restricting competition and forcing them to use their meager incomes to pay above-market prices." Glad to hear that the poor people in Mexico are using their collective buying power to tell the coalition of Leftist intellectuals and price-fixing retailers to STFU. http://palousitics.blogspot.com/2007/03/in-mexico-wal-mart-is-defying-its.html]WSJ Article

Looks like a decent forecast for kayaking. Dry hot/cold forecast = climbing. Precipitation + cold temps = skiing. Precipitation + warm temps = kayaking. Must suck to be a one-sport Johnny in the PNW.

My take is that some people feel like the contrast between Gore's rhetoric and his lifestyle make him the greenhouse-gas equivalent to Ted Haggard. If you preach against something in public, your own conduct should be beyond reproach, and if it isn't, the odds are high that you'll have to answer for this contradiction in public in some fashion or another. I don't have the expertise to properly evaluate most of the scientific work associated with climate change, so I - like most of you - simply have to take the expert's word for it. I expect the same of those who participate in the debate on evolution, so I can hardly do otherwise here. However, the scientific data is one thing, the policy prescriptions that follow from it are another, and there is plenty of room for debate with respect to what represents the most rational, feasible, and ethical response to the problems associated with mankind's C02 emissions. I personally think that even if the risks associated with climate change can't be defined with absolute certainty, it makes sense to invest in technologies and make some changes that may mitigate the worst of the effects - in the same way that it makes sense to invest in homeowners insurance even if you can't ever know the probability that your home will be destroyed with absolute certainty. I am also biased towards taking actions that will benefit mankind even if the worst case scenario fails to materialize. This includes things like investing in improved energy/resource efficiency. I also think that we should engage in a clear-headed analysis of the costs and benefits associated with these actions. There's lots of low hanging fruit out there in the realm of technologies and behaviors that can be changed to reduce power consumption without sacrificing much in the way of economic growth, comfort, or convenience - but at some point we will arrive at a juncture where we have to take a hard look at the cost/sacrifice-to-temperature change ratio and make some hard choices. If one of the primary reasons for fighting climate change is to reduce human death and misery, there may come a point at which we have to choose between dedicating resources to reducing global C02 emissions and, say, combating infectious disease, providing clean drinking water, or some other measures which would do far more to reduce human misery/death on a per-dollar basis.

Ooops - I thought that I was using the "reply" button, but it must have been the "edit" button. Argh. Unfortunately, it looks as though there's just no way for me to recover the original post. I am very sorry for inadvertently deleting your post Faust, that was definitely not what I was intending to do!

It makes me think about the whole idea girls have that they have to change for a man. This happens sometimes a girl acts differently around a man until she entraps him, then she "reverts" back to how she "is" and gets all huffy when the man is wondering wtf just happened. Read - "I just met this guy...he's so dreamy...and he's a climber! I'll try climbing now, it will be a fun thing we can do together!" N years later she's not climbing, chunked out because she's secure that he can no longer run off so lay on the wine and chocolats baby, and hell the sweaters just cover up everything anyway, and, well hell just not doing much of ANYTHING anymore. Word. I'm constantly amazed by the number of married women who not only seem to have no interests or passions of their own, but who seem actively avoid cultivating any of their own interests so they can stay at home and pout whenever the hubby actually does something outside of the relationship and use the whole abandonment-guilt angle for emotional blackmail later on. These were all women with no children. If there were kids involved and the guy was constantly cruising off to play while she was left to look after the kids I'd understand, but - nope. These are also the type that seem to double-up on the Ben and Jerry's shortly after the honeymoon is over. Scary stuff.

Bronco had a great story about adding a random guy to his team at Camp Muir and the ensuing psycho-epic. Someone should dig this one out of the archives for sure.

Even if you are in a LTR with or married to someone who shares your particular hobbies, the odds are pretty good that one of you is going to have more talent, passion, drive, experience - etc - so it's going to take some trial and error before you figure out what kind of outing will be enjoyable for both of you. Even after you do that, there will be times when you want to climb with someone besides your s/o or spouse, and that may not go over so well, etc. On the whole, it's nice to share some hobbies and a general outdoor orientation, but it's also nice to have interests that you pursue separately IMO. On a related topic, anyone ever read Gerry Roach's "Top 10 Things I Learned While Climbing" list that he put at the front of his guide to the 14er's in Colorado? If I remember correctly "Surfer girl isn't in the mountains" was somewhere in the Top-5. If he added an asterisk he could have made a globally-valid axiom out of this one. "Surfer girl isn't in the mountains*" *Or in the Bass Boat, the woodshop, the duck-blind, the bow-hunting club, on the river next to you in a kayak, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc.

I was talking about Jim's book, but your recommendation is also a worthy one. If you liked "The Road to Serfdom," you should check out "The Constitution of Liberty," also by Von Hayek. His essay "Socialism and the Intellectuals is also worth a read, and is available in PDF form on the web.

OK one more reply. This is a bunch of crap. You have to be kidding. Capitalism has been a positive feedback loop for the corporations and the elite. The social welfare net in the US is in tatters while the corporate tax rate is at a historical low. Forces hostile to capitalism? You're kidding right? You and your perspective are the ultimate vindication of this argument. The operation of the market economy in the United States is the reason that you - unlike the folks that your friends work with and you take justified pity on - are prosperous enough to be a donor, rather than a recipient, of international charity, yet you seem to have this inveterate hostility towards the very system that created the wealth that you wish to distribute. There are scores of millions of people like you in the US, and if you don't constitute a majority opinion, it's mighty close. Head overseas and I'd say you are clearly in the majority. Not sure how this renders Schumpeter's predictions "crap."

I will add that one to the hit list on Amazon.

This was an excellent program and really puts the subject in persepective. But, no. On second though. It's better to do nothing. It's also worth asking why Africa - unlike Asia - is so collossally fucked that they can't even begin to implement rudimentary public health measures, much less make enough money to afford mosquito nets, much less medications, despite massive and sustained infusions of aid for the past 40-plus years. This relates directly to the question of whether it was aid, or something else, that has enabled China, Singapore, Korea, Indonesia, etc to lift hundreds of millions of people out of poverty over the same period of time. This also relates directly to the question of whether societies that organize their economies in such a way as to optimize wealth creation - as opposed to wealth distribution - lead to higher absolute incomes and lower levels of absolute poverty over time, which takes us back to the credibility of the original study that asserted the poorest citizens in the US were just marginally better off than the poorest citizens in Russia and Mexico. Was there actually a point to this study other than to inject a bit more socioligical embalming fluid into Socialism's carcass so that the faithful will be inspired to continue the ongoing experiment against reality? I'm reading Schumpeter's "Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy," now, and one of the central arguments in the book is that: "...the success of capitalism will lead to a form of corporatism and a fostering of values that are hostile to capitalism, especially among intellectuals. The intellectual and social climate needed to allow entrepreneurship to thrive will not exist in advanced capitalism; it will be replaced by socialism in some form. There will not be a revolution, but merely a trend in parliaments to elect social democratic parties of one stripe or another. He argued that capitalism will collapse from within as democratic majorities vote for the creation of a welfare state and place restrictions upon entrepreneurship that will burden and destroy the capitalist structure." He may yet be vindicated.

You should read "The Road to Hell" by Michael Maren, which discusses the significant role that aid - especially food aid - played in the dynamics that lead to civil-war/famine Somalia. One of the more eye-opening books that you'll ever read. If you get a chance to talk to aid workers that lived in Africa - not those that went on a two week charity junket, that can also be very illuminating. My wife spent two years as a Peace Corps volunteer over there and the experience significantly changed her thinking with regards to the nature and extent of the aid that the rest of the world should provide if the aim is actually to foster development, rather dependence and corruption.

The best concentration of high-quality trad routes in the 9/10 range in Washington? My vote goes to be "The Bend" at Tieton, but don't tell anyone.

In my opinion, we should be concerned about absolute rather than relative poverty, and studies that fail to take absolute income with all of the proper adjustments for purchasing power parity, pre-and-post tax income are not only inaccurate and misleading, they are also extremely harmful in that they make it more difficult to pinpoint the real problems that society needs to address. If you can't identify the problems accurately, then it's impossible to solve them, and quite likely that significant resources will be diverted towards solving problems that are less acute. Once you have reliable data, then you've got to have a moral/philosophical discussion about what constitutes a problem or a moral failing on society's part. Are societies that provide more generous welfare benefits irrespective of the ability to work necessarily more ethical? I would argue that they aren't, especially if they have structural factors in their labor market which effectively price the least educated and skilled out of the job market forever. Are they more desirable places to live? Not necessarily. I also think that the long-term viability of various social/economic arrangements fostered by the welfare policies enacted by various societies is worth bringing into consideration. Is a scenario in which people expect to spend the majority of their adult life sustained by the work of others, irrespective of the cost, necessarily more just? As far as I'm concerned, the only people that an ethical society are obliged to take care of are are those where those who are incapable of helping themselves, and are suffering on account of factors for which they are not responsible. This generally includes children, those too old to work, or the disabled. If poor children aren't getting the medical care they need, then I would agree that this is a situation that society has a moral obligation to address. Whether we'd agree on what constitutes the best solution to this and other social problems is another matter. With regards to Africa and Asia, how do account for the vastly different levels of income, development, literacy, etc of those two regions today, despite the fact that they were roughly equivalent to one another in terms of GDP per capita, etc as late as the early 1960's? Is this because the US and Europe have given more aid to Asia than Africa since then, or are there perhaps other reasons? Was it US aid to China that's lifted hundreds of millions of Chinese out of Poverty since the late 1970s?

I think the most accurate way to compare incomes is absolute terms, once it's been corrected for purchasing power parity, taxes, government transfers, etc - and that's what the chart compares. As in the case of the infant mortality data, it's important to analyze the data and make sure that you are comparing apples to apples before drawing broad conclusions from the data under consideration. I have some other comments that I'll have to save until I have a bit more time.

So if people in a country where the median income is $15K have a smaller percentage of people making less than that amount than a country where the median income is $35K, are the people on the low end of the scale in the low-income country better off than those on the low end of the scale in the high-income country when you account for purchasing power parity, etc - just because their income is closer to a lower median income? This reminds me of the claim that the US has the worst infant mortality rates in the developed world. I've seen this claim trotted out a gazillion times, followed by a series of lamentations concerning the wretched state of American healthcare, etc, etc, etc - without anyone ever asking if the definition of "Infant Mortality" in one country is the same as the next. Search the literature for five seconds and you find out that it's not. "Registration artifacts in international comparisons of infant mortality. * Kramer MS, * Platt RW, * Yang H, * Haglund B, * Cnattingius S, * Bergsjo P. Department of Pediatrics, McGill University Faculty of Medicine, Montreal, Canada. michael.kramer@mcgill.ca Large differences in infant mortality are reported among and within industrialised countries. We hypothesised that these differences are at least partly the result of intercountry differences in registration of infants near the borderline of viability (<750 g birthweight) and/or their classification as stillbirths vs. live births. We used the database of the International Collaborative Effort (ICE) on Perinatal and Infant Mortality to compare infant mortality rates and registration practices in Norway (n = 112484), Sweden (n = 215 908), Israeli Jews (n = 148123), Israeli non-Jews (n = 52 606), US Whites (n = 6 074 222) and US Blacks (n = 1328332). To avoid confounding by strong secular trends in these outcomes, we restricted our analysis to 1987-88, the most recent years for which data are available in the ICE database for all six groups. Compared with Norway (with an infant mortality rate of 8.5 per 1000), the crude relative risks [95% confidence intervals] were 0.75 [0.69,0.81] in Sweden, 0.97 [0.90,1.06] in Israeli Jews, 1.98 [1.81,2.17] in Israeli non-Jews, 0.95 [0.89,1.01] in US Whites and 2.05 [1.95,2.19] in US Blacks. For borderline-viable infants, fetal deaths varied twofold as a proportion of perinatal deaths, with Norway reporting the highest (83.9% for births <500 g and 61.8% for births 500-749 g) and US Blacks the lowest (40.3% and 37.6% respectively) proportions. Reported proportions of live births <500 g varied 50-fold from 0.6 and 0.7 per 10000 in Sweden and Israeli Jews and non-Jews to 9.1 and 33.8 per 10000 in US Whites and Blacks respectively. Reported proportions 500-749 g varied sevenfold from 7.5 per 10000 in Sweden to 16.2 and 55.4 in US Whites and Blacks respectively. After eliminating births <750 g, the relative risks (again with Norway as the reference) of infant mortality changed drastically for US Whites and Blacks: 0.82 [0.76,0.87] and 1.42 [1.33,1.53] respectively. The huge disparities in the ratio of fetal to infant deaths <750 g and in the proportion of live births <750 g among these developed countries probably result from differences in birth and death registration practices. International comparisons and rankings of infant mortality should be interpreted with caution. PMID: 11862950 [PubMed - indexed for MEDLINE] What happens when you look at the actual amount of disposable income available to the poor in the US versus Europe when you look at purchasing-power-parity adjusted dollars that wind up in people's hands instead of defining poverty in terms relative to median incomes that differ dramatically from one another? If I moved to Vietnam, I would probably go from a "average" to "tall" relative to the median male height, but I would not be any taller in absolute terms. If absolute height was a proxy for well-being, would I actually be any better off? The poor make less money relative to the median income in the US, but are they actually worse off in absolute terms? Neither the data nor migration trends, etc bear this claim out.

Is there any belief or behavior or practice out there which will not inspire a reflexive urge to find an analogue in one's own culture in order to render all belief, behaviors, or practices morally equivalent to one another? If I were to post an article on say, slavery in contemporary Africa, such as this: "Chattel slavery in Sudan The enslavement of the Dinkas in southern Sudan may be the most horrific and well-known example of contemporary slavery. According to 1993 U.S. State Department estimates, up to 90,000 blacks are owned by North African Arabs, and often sold as property in a thriving slave trade for as little as $15 per human being. "There he found several Dinka men hobbling, their Achilles tendons cut because they refused to become Muslims." —from an ASI report on Sudanese slavery Animist tribes in southern Sudan are frequently invaded by Arab militias from the North, who kill the men and enslave the women and children. The Arabs consider it a traditional right to enslave southerners, and to own chattel slaves (slaves owned as personal property). Physical mutilation is practiced upon these slaves not only to prevent escape, but to enforce the owners' ideologies. According to an ASI report: "Kon, a thirteen-year-old Dinka boy, was abducted by Arab nomads and taken to a merchant's house. There he found several Dinka men hobbling, their Achilles tendons cut because they refused to become Muslims. Threatened with the same treatment the boy converted." In a detailed article by Charles Jacobs for the American Anti-Slavery Group (ASI), Jacobs recounts how a 10-year-old child was taken in a raid on her village in southern Sudan, and branded by her master with a hot iron pot." I would expect the folks in this forum and their ideological contemporaries outside of it to argue that given A) the history of slavery in America and B) The fact that we have failed to pass a national "Living Wage Law," we are in no position to criticize this practice - since our own forms of nominal wage/debt slavery are really not that much different than the actual slavery depicted in this article, and that until we address our own shortcomings in this regard we should refrain from rendering moral judgments on those who engage in this practice.

There are literally hundreds of industries in the US that have to contend with overseas competition, quite a number of which are just as old as GM, yet somehow they've managed to stay in business and avoid amassing the tottering heap of health-care and retirement obligations that GM and the UAW claim are the primary reason for the company's current woes. Yup - nothing whatsoever to do with churning out unappealing defect-laden and recall-prone crap that's resulted in a steady erosion in market share ever since their products became subject to competition. Sorry, this line of reasoning just doesn't fly, and certainly doesn't constitute a logical argument for nationalizing health care.

Good TR here: http://oregonkayaking.net/rivers/grand_canyon/grand_canyon.html

Still seems like the additional payroll taxes required to fund such a system would be greater than any costs associated with limitations on labor mobility due to pension issues, and would effectively saddle all businesses with the same costs that have crippled the domestic auto companies, and turn the entire country into a giant GM. There's also the question of how all of this would work with respect to existing 401(k) plans, IRA assets, etc. If you raise labor costs in this manner, the odds are quite high that this would render the entire country less competitive, and the reduction in total employment/wages would result in spiraling tax rates to fund the national pension liability with fewer workers or cuts in the said benefits. There's also a strong likelihood that since costs associated with having employees - whether that's wages, health benefits, etc - get tossed into a single bucket - any increase in these costs would put additional downward pressure on money-wages. Rising health-insurance costs are responsible for quite a bit of the oft-noted stagnation in real money wages, even as total compensation has been increasing. I'd personally rather take all of my compensation as cash, have a personal tax-deduction for health insurance expenses, and increased tax incentives/deductions for retirement savings. I'm sure the folks in the health biz appreciate the tax-incentive-fueled bonanza they reap every month for whatever it costs for my employer to pay for full coverage, but I'd much rather pay a fraction of these costs for high-deductible coverage and put the difference into an interest-bearing, tax-free HSA account that I control and either invest or spend the rest as I see fit.