Mickey Kaus argues against liberals... as usual.

Kaus sets up Brazil as the situation liberals don't want -- incredible wealth at the top, desperate scrabbling poverty (poverty-poverty, as Whoopi Goldberg might say) at the bottom -- and goes from there.

But, hey, whatever. Let's assume the problem is income inequality. And none of us wants Brazil.

The question is then what makes Brazil Brazil. Is it wild riches at the top, or extreme poverty at the bottom? It seems pretty obvious, from what little I know of Brazil, that the problem is the bottom, not the top. We worry about Brazil because of the favelas, the huge impoverished shantytowns, and the crime coming out of them. We worry because it's hard to believe that if you're a poor Brazilian squatting in a shanty you can think of yourself as the social equal of a tycoon across town. And across town, thanks to all that crime, it seems impossible to lead a normal, American-style socially-egalitarian middle class life, at least without a full-time bodyguard. You're not about to go sit in the cheap seats at a soccer match or wander near your local favela while shopping. I had an affluent Brazilian friend who moved to New York City and would only consider living in Trump buildings, on the grounds that only they would have adequate security for someone of her class. I finally convinced her that no, this was America. You could really live almost anywhere you wanted. You didn't need a guard with a gun on every floor. And you could walk around.

If you're worried about incomes at the bottom, though, one solution leaps out at you. It's a solution that worked, at least in the late 1990s under Bill Clinton, when wages at the low end of the income ladder rose fairly dramatically. The solution is tight labor markets. Get employers bidding for scarce workers and you'll see incomes rise across the board without the need for government aid programs or tax redistribution. A major enemy of tight labor markets at the bottom is also fairly clear: unchecked immigration by undocumented low-skilled workers. It's hard for a day laborer to command $18 an hour in the market if there are illegals hanging out on the corner willing to work for $7. Even experts who claim illlegal immigration is good for Americans overall admit that it's not good for Americans at the bottom. In other words, it's not good for income equality.

If you want to help Americans at the bottom, you can improve their wages by making unskilled labor more valuable, by reducing competition -- or in this case, simply preventing new competition from forever entering the market.

Liberals never understand that the "problem" of income inequality, to the extent its a problem, is not a two-sided problem. The problem is not the very poor and the very rich. The very rich are not the problem, and just taking from them is not the solution. The problem is just the poor, and whether they are advancing or not. And that can't be done just be increasing tax rates and giving handouts. Handouts only create a dependent, cynical underclass, with far greater ills than the working poor would ever experience.

Since Brazil has been brought up, check out this 60 Minutes piece on Brazil from a few weeks ago. The joke was that "Brazil is the country of the future-- and always will be." That is, it would never actually make it to first tier status, just threaten to, before Latin economics and Latin politics would sabotage it yet again.

But this time... maybe so.

Two points: One, Brazil is getting rich partly over its newish oil discoveries. Gee, wouldn't it be nice if somewhere in America there were potential oil fields that maybe rivaled Brazil's that we could tap.

Two, Krofft talks here with a lot of wealthy people. Ultra-tycoons. And he takes them -- as anyone who's not a twit would -- as evidence that Brazil is doing well, not that Brazil is doing poorly.

This just reinforces the point that these people are not the problem. Other people did not become poor so that they could become rich. The poor have largely stayed poor; the rich and ultra-rich get that way because of new wealth, not wealth hijacked from the poor.

Who the hell robs a poor person? There's no percentage in it.

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Posted by: Ace at 12:40 PM | Comments (62)
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The one good thing is that both parties have a narrative/answer for this -- the Republicans, expanding domestic drilling, including in ANWR, and the Democrats, filling out tanks with starshine and rainbows -- but prices at this level will compel moving on both. The public may still want their starshine and rainbows, but they're not going to be content with only that option.

"I'm predicting actually the worst outcome over the next two years which takes us to 2012 with higher gasoline prices," he said.

Tom Kloza, chief oil analyst with Oil Price Information Service says Americans will see gasoline prices hit the $5 a gallon mark in the next decade, but not by 2012.

"That wolf is out there and it's going to be at the door...I agree with him that we'll see those numbers at some point this decade but not yet." Kloza said.

"The demand is still sluggish enough in some of the mature economies."

Instapundit quotes John Tierny on oil, and Malthusian pessimism against Cornucopian optimism.

I called Mr. Simmons to discuss a bet. To his credit — and unlike some other Malthusians — he was eager to back his predictions with cash. He expected the price of oil, then about $65 a barrel, to more than triple in the next five years, even after adjusting for inflation. He offered to bet $5,000 that the average price of oil over the course of 2010 would be at least $200 a barrel in 2005 dollars.

I took him up on it, not because I knew much about Saudi oil production or the other “peak oil” arguments that global production was headed downward. I was just following a rule learned from a mentor and a friend, the economist Julian L. Simon.

As the leader of the Cornucopians, the optimists who believed there would always be abundant supplies of energy and other resources, Julian figured that betting was the best way to make his argument. Optimism, he found, didnÂ’t make for cover stories and front-page headlines.

No matter how many cheery long-term statistics he produced, he couldnÂ’t get as much attention as the gloomy Malthusians like Paul Ehrlich, the best-selling ecologist. Their forecasts of energy crises and resource shortages seemed not only newsier but also more intuitively correct. In a finite world with a growing population, wasnÂ’t it logical to expect resources to become scarcer and more expensive?

As an alternative to arguing, Julian offered to bet that the price of any natural resource chosen by a Malthusian wouldnÂ’t rise in the future. Dr. Ehrlich accepted and formed a consortium with two colleagues at Berkeley, John P. Holdren and John Harte, who were supposed to be experts in natural resources. In 1980, they picked five metals and bet that the prices would rise during the next 10 years.

By 1990, the prices were lower, and the Malthusians paid up, although they didn’t seem to suffer any professional consequences. Dr. Ehrlich and Dr. Holdren both won MacArthur “genius awards” (Julian never did). Dr. Holdren went on to lead the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and today he serves as President Obama’s science adviser.

Julian, who died in 1998, never managed to persuade Dr. Ehrlich or Dr. Holdren or other prominent doomsayers to take his bets again.

The Malthusians seem to forget that many limitations on resources are imposed by lack of human will, lack of human energy, and lack of human knowledge, and that rising prices in any particular sector have a habit of increasing those scarce supplies.

Posted by: Ace at 12:26 PM | Comments (73)
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This article is worth a skim if you care about the rape/rape-rape allegations against Julian Assange, but I guess I was most taken by Julian Assange's alleged line:

She says they had consensual sex but she woke up the next morning to find him having intercourse with her to which she had not consented.

When she asked him if he was wearing anything, he had allegedly said: "I am wearing you."

That's pimp. The line I mean, not the rape. Gotta give him that.

He claims:

Mr Assange regards himself as a victim of radicalism. "Sweden is the Saudi Arabia of feminism," he said. "I fell into a hornets' nest of revolutionary feminism."

Not exactly. According to him, this is just the vengeance of jilted women:

He said he believed his accusers became angry when the younger woman, Miss W, contacted Miss A and they realised he had been to bed with both of them in swift succession. They went to the police station together, apparently to seek advice. A policewoman who heard their stories is said to have suggested they could pursue criminal charges.

...but the second woman claims she specifically told him to stop after she awoke to find him on top of her, and he didn't. So, he hadn't had consent -- I guess a sort of implied consent in his mind, but not actual consent -- and even if you give him a pass on that, that non-consent was followed up with an affirmative denial of consent. But he kept going and, um, "finished up," despite that.

Maybe some date-rape charges are a bit grey-area, but this charge doesn't seem gray-area, if true. It sounds like rape.

Posted by: Ace at 10:40 AM | Comments (292)
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"Lettermarking" is just earmarking via another route. It's a scandal that incoming GOP senators like Mark Kirk, who ran on an anti-earmarking platform, are already earmarking, just calling it something else.

In fact, "lettermarking" is worse.

What Kirk is doing -- and your senator is probably doing too, unless you ride herd on him -- is no longer including his spending preferences in actual bills, but writing letters to the administrative agencies asking them to direct monies in this way or that way. It doesn't have the force of law, but does have the force of coercion: An agency that wants to keep its budgets ever, ever growing (as is the goal of all federal agencies) knows damn well it had better do as requested.

At least "hard earmarks," as opposed to these "soft earmarks," are actually part of the constitutional process of proposing and voting and stuff.

The GOP's energy should be devoted exclusively to finding new ways to cut government spending, not new ways to spend it.

The GOP has been granted a two-year probation. It seems they are hellbent on violating the terms of probation and going back to political prison.

I don't know if the GOP is going to survive much longer. At some point, they just prove they don't care, and it's time for the party to die.

Posted by: Ace at 10:03 AM | Comments (137)
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Interesting argument.

First of all, I couldn't remember if the bit about "the general welfare" appeared only in the preamble (in which case it would be guidance, programmer's notes rather executable code, if you will) or both in the preamble and the actual Constitution; it's both. The taxing and spending clause of Article 1 mentions that monies will be spent "for the general welfare."

Barnett's and Oedel's argument here is persuasive, but it sort of requires text plus logic to get to his interpretation; liberal judges will of course resist adding in that logic, and claim that anyone who says otherwise is guilty of "judicial activism" (!!!), adding stuff to the Constitution. But this is certainly reasonable inference -- if words appear in the Constitution, they're supposed to mean something, and not mean nothing at all, as a resistant liberal will claim. The words didn't just appear there as filler. They had a point, we can assume.

The basic argument is that ObamaCare's Medicaid mandates for states plus the opt-out is coercive and violates the General Welfare clause, because if a state did exercise its right to opt out, its money would flow to Washington (and other states) without anything in return. The money would therefore decidedly not be spent for "the general welfare," as any state opting out would not have its welfare improved at all (and would in fact be reduced, as billions flow out of it to benefit the citizens of other states).

He also makes this argument with regard to the Cornhusker Kickback -- a special Nebraska-only benefit to secure the vote of one Ben Nelson of Nebraska, a situation in which dollars flow to Nebraska (to make up for their non-contribution to the costs of the program) from other states.

This is actually a rather important idea. The Cornhusker Kickback violated many people's sense of fair play, but I think many of us couldn't quite explain which rule of fair play it violated. The danger of the maneuver was clear -- if you can bribe individual states' citizens to go along with federal programs, you can create different tiers of states, with some citizens having more rights than the citizens of others, which seems, certainly, to violate the basic idea of equality in the eyes of the law.

Barnett and Oedel sharpen this up a bit, I think, by offering a more specific command of the Constitution such schemes can be said to violate. Money spent in this way is not for the General Welfare, but for the particular welfare of the citizens of one state (and not others), and thus is impermissible.

Like I said, interesting. And certainly, I think, the Constitution should stand for such an idea. Without such a command, it is quite possible that a blue state president with a blue state Congress could simply reduce taxes and other burdens on the blue states alone and hike them punitively on the red states. Some would say that will never happen, as that would spark a new civil war, but I'd like to think the Constitution itself has something within it to restrain violations of such blazing injustice such that civil war isn't necessary to retain basic fairness.

It's Old: Gabe ably covered this yesterday.

I thought this argument, while attractive, was a bit of longshot, but as Gabe mentions it just might fly:

From a litigators' perspective, this argument of Barnett's is strategically attractive because the Dole restriction, discussed in the WSJ piece, is relatively unfleshed by the courts. This case is absolutely headed for the Supreme Court and justices hesitate to overturn precedent. Dole's very vagueness gives them (ahem, Kennedy) room to maneuver because ObamaCare says 100% of Medicare dollars will be withheld from states that opt out. The justices won't have to decide a sticky question about just how much is too much coercion; it's relatively easy to say that 100% is too much.

Yes, judges don't like laying down categorical forbiddances (i.e., you can never spend more on one state than another) and try to avoid fine-tuning line-drawing about where the threshold of forbiddance is reached, as that just leads to lots and lots of litigation and more and more decisions.

That said, as Gabe notes, it's a relatively easy thing to say, in one decision, that seizing 100% of the money a state spends for one purpose to distribute it to other states is unconstitutional. Later cases may be more difficult -- how about a 25% penalty? How about a 10% penalty? -- but the 100% fuck-you confiscation is itself rather easier to call bullshit on.

Posted by: Ace at 09:31 AM | Comments (44)
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There really isn't any news to speak of today, so . . . how about more 2012 speculation. CNN/Opinion Research has a new poll out gauging support for several probable candidates. On the Democrat side -- surprise, surprise -- 78% want to see the President run for election.

The Republican results are just heartbreaking, though. Somehow 67% say they would support Certain Fuckin' Doomabee if he sought the nomination. That compares to 59% for Mitt Romney and 54% for Newt Gingrich. The only other possible candidate polled was Sarah Palin, who only got 49%.

I guess Huckabee's TV show is paying off, huh?

The poll results are here (PDF). The margin of error for the Republican sample is +/- 4.5% points.

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 08:47 AM | Comments (259)
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I'm stepping away, a little bit, from politics in today's yearly review to recall the places that dominated news cycles. Some of these places are just plain amazing, some are just plain scary, and some are just plain. For sure, what happened in these places last year will color national and international events in the future. more...

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 04:30 AM | Comments (218)
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Up Up Down Down Left Right Left Right B A B A Select Start

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 03:07 AM | Comments (71)
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Another night, another ONT.

So What Generation Do You Belong To?

Take the USA Today quiz and find out which one you really belong to.

Hawaii Governor To Combat Birthers
He's most definitely not a Birther:

Neil Abercrombie, who was a friend of ObamaÂ’s parents when the president was a baby, has only been governor of Hawaii for less than three weeks, but heÂ’s said in interviews this week that heÂ’s already initiated a process to make policy changes that would allow Hawaii to release additional evidence that Obama was born in Honolulu on Aug. 4, 1961.

Posted by: Maetenloch at 05:53 PM | Comments (416)
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Great rebuttal to that nonsense "study." more...

Posted by: Ace at 04:33 PM | Comments (83)
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