JayB

Hahaha. I could score Bingo 12X within 5 minutes of leaving my house on any given day.

What do you need a car for? You don't need a car to do whatever it is that you do with your time any more than I *need* a truck to carry my kayaks to rivers, or sleep in, or travel over snowy logging roads in Maine or whatever else I choose to do with it. I can pretty much guarantee that you're burning a hell of a lot more fossil fuel than I am per-week, so you're hardly in a position to question anyone elses choices or conduct - much less mine - are you? I don't ride because I think it makes me an eco-saint, I ride because I like being fit, hate sitting in traffic, and it saves me a bit of money. I only mention it when bloviating eco-wanks think that making the staggering personal sacrifice involved in....owning a subcompact with a couple of bumper stickers that advertise their empty and profoundly ineffectual moral narcissim "Free Tibet!" "Hey, Look at me, I want to Free Tibet! Aren't I something!"...makes them some kind of enviro-hero. Whatever. Until you adopt the life of a Yemeni goatherd and decide to spend the rest of your days squatting under a lean-to and subsisting on grubs and roots that you pry-from the earth with a digging stick, the fact of the matter is that you've got exactly jack shit on anyone else when it comes to the enviro-thing, and the only thing that makes you different from the guy in the F350 is the magnitude of your narcissm, not the magnitude of your ecological footprint, which is hardly any different.

Well, your reference failed to offer any statistics one way or the other about the US union labor content of Japanese vehicles, so my earlier, very specific refutation still stands. And you may 'think' its the unions who are to blame, but auto industry analysists, including those who have posted on the JAMA website, apparently don't agree. They claim that US protectionism, poor dealership relationships, and a lack of vehicles that the public might actually want to buy as the root of the problem, none of which have anything to do with unions whatsoever. I think your desire to blame unions dates back to Lee Ioccoca, when unions were much more powerful than they are today. Yeah - I'm sure this was management's idea: http://www.detnews.com/2005/autosinsider/0510/17/A01-351179.htm

Thanks for that link. Good to know which vehicles to avoid buying. May have to go for the FJ Cruiser instead of the Tacoma when the time comes to replace the current Toyota Pickup in a few years. Heaven forbid that you buy something more fuel efficient. I guess that would require a little too much personal responsibility than your supposedly traditional conservative nature is willing to cough up. I know, I know, you need a big pickup for all those heavy bulk loads you haul around every day. Hahaha. Yeah, the mid-90's Pickup is quite the behemoth. I've commuted to work by bike, day-in, day-out, in Seattle and Boston for the past seven years, and with the exception of a single three-year period, I have done all of my day-to-day commuting either on foot or by bike for the entirety of my adult life, so spare me the sanctimony unless you've got something more substantial than your fluoride-free lifestyle to bring to the eco-righteousness table there, amigo. Too funny.

Thanks for that link. Good to know which vehicles to avoid buying. May have to go for the FJ Cruiser instead of the Tacoma when the time comes to replace the current Toyota Pickup in a few years.

http://vids.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=vids.individual&videoid=1690924675

BZZZZZZZT - Gary wins because he's wearing shorts over polypro! Look at all of those wands, though. No wands on Gary.

Looks like someone has thrown down the gauntlet in the cc.com gape-off. That's a reasonably strong effort by Gary, but I think that I can take him.

I have also found that doubling up sleeping bags was significantly colder than sleeping in single bags.

You sure about that?

Whoah. Pardon me while I snap a photo of the pig flying past my window.....

Hey - Jimbo's back. Not the kind of liberalism I was referring to, but that was a nice summary of your worldview, complete with custom neologisms. Thanks for the testimonial.

Yes, there is a difference between liberal economics and anarchism.

Looks like a good article. Thanks for sharing. Who should get credit for the neg-income tax idea? I must have mistaken popularization for invention.

No, and protectionism by another name. Partial yes.

You can thank the late Milton Friedman and his acolytes for the idea. I think the conceptual hurdles are more formidable than the administrative ones. There's already something like this in place for students working their way through college via the work-study program at most universities. I'm not terribly familiar with the parameters that govern who gets the EIC, but this is more or less a negative income tax that's extended to people who meet certain conditions. In any event, I suspect that most of the administrative machinery necessary to implement this kind of program is already in place.

I can't think of a situation where price controls wouldn't ultimately do much more harm than good, so I can't think of a situation where I'd support them. With respect to the US, the only strict price controls that we have that I'm aware of come in the form of the minimum wage, and I've been clear in saying that it would be a much better idea to use targeted subsidies like the EIC or some other sort of negative income tax to achieve the ends that minimum-wage supporters are hoping to achieve. The single-mom working the till at McDonald's would qualify for a subsidy, the kid working the same job, living at home, and saving up for an iPOD and a new amp for his tricked-out Accord wouldn't. The public, rather than the employer, would shoulder the financial burderns of the policy. With respect to all of the other subsidies that riddle our economy, there's a critical difference between price controls and subsidies, in that the government acknowledges there's a difference between the market price and the price that the government has concluded a particular good/service/commodity should be sold for, and it pays the difference between the two. I'm not a fan of either, but subsidies at least have the minor merit of indicating that whoever is implementing them has not yet completely succumbed to the notion that reality - ergo prices - can be determined by administrative fiat. If you liked Zimbabwe in 2006, you'll love Venezuela in 2015.

is he instituting price controls? Yes. how and where? Exchange rates and selected staples. I'm amazed that you missed the opportunity to sink some assets into the "Bond of the South" that they issued last year to mop-up dollars in an attempt to shrink the glaring disparity between official Bolivar/Dollar exchange-rate and the real exhange rate. As far as I know, the price-controls on staples are only in force in government-owned stores, but as the government assumes more control over the economy as per the aforementioned confiscations, or through involuntary "partnerships," look for them to increase in size and scope. More on "The Bond of the South": http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601086&refer=latin_america&sid=auKaVIzbn2jM

is he instituting price controls? Yes.

Burned hand teaches best. Spare the rod and you'll have another 50 years worth of implosions inspired by Allendesque fables about how it could have all worked so beautifully if only Uncle Sam had left Hugo alone. Let those who support Chavez stay live with the consequences of their rhetoric, and hope that those who don't have the the sense to emmigrate.

What he lacks in discipline he'll more than make up for with ineptitude. The path wander a bit, but of the final destination there is absolutely no doubt. Prices communicate real information about the relationship between supply and demand, which are a function of realities that cannot be eliminated. When food is scarce, the price goes up. Artificially suppress the price and you suppress effective demand, which effectively prevents the generation of additional supplies. Regimes such as Chavez's can attempt to control prices, but since they cannot control the realities and contingencies that generate them, this experiment is doomed. Moreover, once they no longer have the information provided by prices to engage in economic calculations, they won't even be able to tell if a particular enterprise is generating outputs that are worth more than their inputs. Is state-run company X generating a profit or loss? Who knows. Expand this example infinitely and you begin to see the process by which the missallocation of resources that characterizes socialism generates the cumulative depletion of productive resources and structural distortions that guarantee its failure. Look for significant outmigration to commence in 5-10 years once the confiscation party is over and the mismanagement of the oil-bounty has worked its magic.

There's always a holliday during the confiscation phase. Once there's nothing left to confiscate and the price mechanism has been fully supplanted by central planning, economic calculation becomes impossible, as is efficiently coordinating supply and demand, and outright economic decline and mass impoverishment are guaranteed outcomes. There is no escape from this. The only variables that will meaningfully affect the chronology are the price of oil and Venezuela's ability to maintain its production of this commodity. I personally thought that Hugo'd be smart enough to dupe foreign oil companies into sinking enough capital into the fields to prop up production for a while longer before confiscating their assest, but it appears he's feeling flush these days, so he may take a cleaver to the golden goose a bit earlier than I'd expected.

I really was, shocked. Seriously. The state seizing the most valuable and productive private assets? In a socialist country? In South America? I mean, come-ON? Unhead of. I do agree with you that as time goes on there will be quite a bit more economic equality in Venezuela. I am not convinced that this will be the result of increases in the average person's standard of living, but a certain kind of equality will be the inexorable conclusion that Chavez brings to Venezuela.

No specific theory, just a general observation/query. It just seems to me that if you've got a group of people who are cunning and devious and powerful enough to orchestrate some of the plots that you've mentioned, these same people would probably be clever enough to leak some morsels of "secret" information out to folks who are a couple of standard-deviations above the norm on the IQ/education/analytical-capability scale and let them put the pieces together in such a way that the "unintended" disclosure of this ostensibly "secret" information actually enabled them to pursue other, more consequential objectives in secrecy. Tactical ruses, strategic head-fakes on the way to the real goal.

The good old Seattle nice-off. Count your blessings, folks.