Goldberg on the hidden costs of "Cash for Clunkers"

Article here. He starts with Bastiat's "Parable of the Broken Window," of which this is a wonderful example. I was explaining this to our older daughter the other day, and she picked up on the reasoning very quickly.

Lamar Alexander's proposal on GM ownership

Put the stock certificates in individual taxpayers' names. Interesting. Get it out of the hands of the government and back into private hands. It's certainly better than what's going on now, anyway.

Progressive Corporatism

via Instapundit:

Arnold Kling on Progressive Corporatism and the Resistance

Just for reference...

It's the same with me.

James Lileks: "Maybe I’m old-school, but 'President fires CEO' looks as wrong as 'Pope fires Missile.' Does not compute."

I know what you mean.

Was there a gun sitting on the table?

The Obama administration pushes GM's CEO out the door. Why couldn't this have been done with a formal bankruptcy procedure, again?

New gold rush in California

It's estimated that 80% of the gold from the 1849 rush was never found, so with the price 'way up, people are panning for it again. Neat!

Maxine Waters exposes the grand conspiracy of Goldman-Sachs

Got to love the expression on Geithner's face.

Umm...

U.S. Seeks Expanded Power to Seize Firms

This is sounding very early-20th-century to me. I know these guys think they're doing what's necessary, but...

Obama's push for regulation of executive pay

From the IHT.

One thing I haven't had explained clearly to me about these limits on executive pay written into the "stimulus" bill: are they permanent? I mean, it's generally described in the news reports that banks that took stimulus money are limited to such-and-such on executive pay. Well, for how long? Until (if?) they pay the money back? (Do they have to pay this back at all?) Or is it forever and ever? In which case, that's a brilliantly evil scheme to regulate anything and everything a politician wants to do: offer somebody money, and if they take it, they have to submit to all of your plans on how to remake society, forever. You could make them stand on their heads and whistle the Star Spangled Banner every Tuesday at 3:00, if you wanted to. If paying it back doesn't get them out from under your thumb, you've just vastly increased the power of the Federal Government forever, for practically nothing.

Forgive me for asking such a dumb question, but where does it say in the Constitution that you can regulate executive pay? Is that an interstate transaction? Does the executive work in a different state from his company? (Even then, I'm not sure that would be "commerce," in the way the authors of the Constitution used the word.) Sigh.

I'm not one hitting the panic button...

...but this column on the Fed's monetizing the debt has me worried. Maybe Glenn Beck has been right, and I'm going to hide out in a fallout shelter with bags of gold coins, waiting for the apocalypse.

Blow-back against a 90% from both sides of the Atlantic

The Financial Times has a bunch of choice quotations to support the story. I hope Congress starts to get the message and kills this bill entirely.

Mona Charen on the AIG bonuses

Amen, Mona. I have a recurring fantasy that one of these guys who's called to testify before Congress and getting berated by a Congressman will stop the gentlemanly self-abasement and tell those Congressmen exactly what he thinks of their self-important grandstanding. I've got a particular script I'd like AIG's Liddy to read out to Barney Frank. It includes phrases like "corrupt little satrap" and "I'll be d***ed if I give you these names." For Frank to demand a list of names that he can publicize is outrageous, especially in light of the death threats against these officials and their children. And for Frank to say that he wouldn't be bound by any confidentiality agreement if Liddy did turn them over, death threats or not!

Schumer is my least-favorite senator, and I reckon Frank is fast becoming my least favorite congressman.

NYT map of unemployment rates

This is really interesting. Especially when I find out that West Virginia, of all places, has one of the lowest unemployment rates in the country. Defies the stereotypes, doesn't it? The county we live in is comparable in that way to the wealthy D.C. suburbs, except that unemployment here is not on the rise, the way it is there. Great!

Popping the oil bubble?

Wouldn't this be nice?

Economics of foreign adoption

No, not in the monetary sense, but in the more general meaning--something that could have found its way into Freakonomics. My cousin, who is a pediatrician who does a lot of work with foreign adoptions, noted that the strong prejudices against Gypsies in Eastern Europe has had a noticeable effect on the relative health of babies adopted from those countries. Gypsy children being adopted into the United States are more likely to be in good health than babies (who are up for foreign adoption) of the majority ethnic group of that country. Why? Because the babies of the majority group are preferred by locals wanting to adopt, and they'll obviously further prefer one of good health. So the majority-group babies who are left for foreign adoption are mostly those who have some health or developmental problem. Meanwhile, the Gypsy babies are more likely to be passed over by local adopters, and so those being adopted into the US still have the typical distribution of health.

I don't know of any moral to take from this. I just found it interesting.

Diamond and oil cartels

The New York Times' John Tierney has a thought-provoking discussion of cartels, especially in diamonds and oil. I've been intrigued with the diamond market, ever since I proposed to my wife and owned a loose diamond for all of about two weeks, before they set it in the ring. It made me feel like one of the guys on an episode of Simon & Simon who'd have a bunch of loose diamonds in a velvet bag get stolen, and the Simon brothers would have to infiltrate a smuggling ring or something. Actually, I think most of the guys running around with loose diamonds in detective shows in the '80s were the bad guys. But still, it felt really cool! Wait--I'm sure there were some good guys with loose diamonds that got stolen on these shows. They usually had them in a safety deposit box. Yeah.

OK, anyway, after listening to a BBC story about de Beers and how much money in diamonds they have sitting in their building in...London?...and how the trading works in Amsterdam, and how they have the mineral rights to all the diamonds in South Africa--I became fascinated by the economic model of it all. I don't like the principle of a cartel, but it's still fascinating.

Tierney points out the precarious nature of cartels and how so many of them have failed over the years. The diamond market itself is in trouble right now, thanks to artificial diamonds that are (apparently) indistinguishable by a jeweler. I don't know that I really want to have artificial diamonds being considered equivalent to the natural ones. There's a different feel to it, a cheapness, in knowing I had an imitation, even a nearly perfect one that was physically equivalent. But that's a psychological thing.

He makes the comparison to the pearl market, now that nearly all commercial pearls are cultured. But a pearl has to be grown inside of an oyster, whether you put the sand in its gullet or the tide did it. It's still the same natural process from that point on. I can see the additional desirability of a natural pearl, but I'm not as adamant about it as I am with diamonds. But sure, the advent of pearl farms certainly meant the market saw a glut and prices came down. And diamonds are maybe close to seeing that.

Oil? Well, if we could find a cheap, large-scale way of manufacturing artificial oil... Heh, heh, heh. Right. So OPEC doesn't have to worry about that kind of competition. But there are other sources of energy, and technology can bring the prices down. I hope we'll someday see that cartel get broken. But I don't know it'll be soon.