Curt Doolittle

Theme: Subsidy

  • Rents.

    Economic Rents create lost opportunities for exchange. A cost.  They grant a privilege whose results are incalculable (unavailable because profit and loss are externalized) and therefore unmeasurable (comparable with other investments) and invisible (they are forgotten and never rise again), instead of creating a calculable, measurable, investment and return for the polity.

    Unfortunately, democracy – majority rule – forces us to create these lost opportunities to exchange rents and privileges which are incalculable.

    Furthermore, the pooling of taxes into general funds,  rather than charging fees for services, for the payments of debts, and collecting returns on investments, create opportunities for rents. It is this system of rents that we systemically MUST construct under democracy. Democracy does not let us do otherwise.

    Worse, it is this system of rents, that allows the predatory and parasitic rent-seeking bureaucracy to exist, and expand like a cancer uncontrollably.

    Conversely, if we enforced (a) a universal requirement for operational calculability, (b)universal standing for the prosecution of rent seeking, (c) and the negotiation of contracts, rather than the competition for rents in order to obtain power necessary to issue laws (commands), then it is impossible to seek rents. And even if rents are somehow obtained, impossible to hold them.

    Yet enforcing (a)(b)(c) does not require that we abandon the construction of commons. Only that we abandon the rentiers. So while it was necessary to centralize rents in order to extinguish family, guild and tribal rents, it is now equally necessary to ban rents permanently.

    All that is required is contracts instead of laws, universal standing, and operational calculability.

  • PERSPECTIVE –“Federal anti-climate change spending is now running at $11 billio

    PERSPECTIVE

    –“Federal anti-climate change spending is now running at $11 billion a year, plus tax breaks of $20 billion a year. That adds up to more than double the $14.4 billion worth of wheat produced in the United States in 2013.”–

    Source date (UTC): 2014-09-15 15:03:00 UTC

  • Why Is It Many Times Cheaper To Send Physical Mail Across The Ocean Than An Electronic Money Transfer?

    Because the government subsidizes and insures physical mail that is hard to steal, and less desirable to steal, using low skilled labor when handling mail, while private industry absorbs risks and the cost of semi-skilled manual labor to manually process wire transfers that are unprofitable, and easily fraudulent, and highly desirable to steal, but without which they cannot continue business operations. 

    In other words, wire transfers are both more desirable and easier to steal than physical goods, and once stolen are unrecoverable. And they don’t want to process them so they keep the cost as high as possible.

    The cost of wire transfers is due to the insurance cost of theft by retailers.  Imagine instead that the post office shipped and delivered envelopes of money, and how the behavior of the post office would change. 

    That is why it is cheaper to send hard-to-exchange goods, than exchange goods.  And why it is more cost effective to steal money than stuff you have to sell or pawn.

    This is why Bitcoin (BTC) are better and cheaper means of wire transfers.  The intermediaries in the chain of handling are not exposed to risk – just you.

    Everyone argues that BTC is helpful for the high end of the market, and I totally disagree. The primary virtue of BTC is in its application to solutions for the poor – who pay high costs because the marginal value of each unit of currency is more expensive for them than for everyone else.

    https://www.quora.com/Why-is-it-many-times-cheaper-to-send-physical-mail-across-the-ocean-than-an-electronic-money-transfer

  • Why Is It Many Times Cheaper To Send Physical Mail Across The Ocean Than An Electronic Money Transfer?

    Because the government subsidizes and insures physical mail that is hard to steal, and less desirable to steal, using low skilled labor when handling mail, while private industry absorbs risks and the cost of semi-skilled manual labor to manually process wire transfers that are unprofitable, and easily fraudulent, and highly desirable to steal, but without which they cannot continue business operations. 

    In other words, wire transfers are both more desirable and easier to steal than physical goods, and once stolen are unrecoverable. And they don’t want to process them so they keep the cost as high as possible.

    The cost of wire transfers is due to the insurance cost of theft by retailers.  Imagine instead that the post office shipped and delivered envelopes of money, and how the behavior of the post office would change. 

    That is why it is cheaper to send hard-to-exchange goods, than exchange goods.  And why it is more cost effective to steal money than stuff you have to sell or pawn.

    This is why Bitcoin (BTC) are better and cheaper means of wire transfers.  The intermediaries in the chain of handling are not exposed to risk – just you.

    Everyone argues that BTC is helpful for the high end of the market, and I totally disagree. The primary virtue of BTC is in its application to solutions for the poor – who pay high costs because the marginal value of each unit of currency is more expensive for them than for everyone else.

    https://www.quora.com/Why-is-it-many-times-cheaper-to-send-physical-mail-across-the-ocean-than-an-electronic-money-transfer

  • YA DEPARTMENT: CASH FOR CLUNKERS PRODUCED THE OPPOSITE EFFECT

    http://www.aei-ideas.org/2014/08/oops-obamas-cash-for-clunkers-program-actually-lowered-total-new-vehicle-spending/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+aei-ideas%2Feconomics+%28AEIdeas+%C2%BB+Economics%29TOLD YA DEPARTMENT: CASH FOR CLUNKERS PRODUCED THE OPPOSITE EFFECT

    http://www.aei-ideas.org/2014/08/oops-obamas-cash-for-clunkers-program-actually-lowered-total-new-vehicle-spending/

    Source date (UTC): 2014-08-05 02:02:00 UTC

  • “Something needs to be done about these Academic Welfare Queens.”— John Connol

    —“Something needs to be done about these Academic Welfare Queens.”— John Connolly

    Gave me the laugh of the day.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-07-29 10:57:00 UTC

  • Bindner says: July 16, 2014 at 2:03 pm The further takeaway is that electing a R

    http://taxvox.taxpolicycenter.org/2014/07/16/six-takeaways-cbos-new-long-term-budget-outlook/#comment-241060—“Michael Bindner says:

    July 16, 2014 at 2:03 pm

    The further takeaway is that electing a Republican President and Senate is the only thing that can create near term fiscal disaster. Health and the retirement of the boomers is still a concern – but both of those are, in my opinion, due to inadequate replacement levels – a birth dirth.

    The debt percentage is going up, for now, but won’t hit the record anytime soon. That is not a problem as long as Europe and China stay out of the business of selling their debt as a package or buying ours. The continued uncertainty is likely as much about policy. A strong bipartisan budget agreement will likely change that – but is unlikely to occur just yet. This also kills the prospect of long term reform being easy (but that is a fantasy anyway). The baseline itself is also fantasy – as always. Of course, the alternative scenario is just as unlikely. There may not even be a United States in 2039 – we may unite with Europe, and maybe Latin America and Africa by then (indeed, not uniting by then is probably a bad thing).”—-

    Reply to this comment

    Curt Doolittle says:

    July 16, 2014 at 2:38 pm

    Conservatives value norms, nuclear family, and liberty because they have a Durkheimian view of man: that our culture’s economic advantage is the product of high trust created only under self sufficiency, and such self trust must be constructed normatively first and institutionally second, only as a consequence of those norms. And all evidence around the world un all cultures at all points in time confirms this belief. We cannot run private corporations or corporeal states independent of family structure and norms. This is the fendamental fallacy if universalism whether capitalist or socialist.

    The conservatives speak in myth and allegory, but the empirical content if those myths is correct, while the empirical content of macro economic theory converted from Marx byKkeynes in economics and the universalism of the classicals in mathematics both fail correspondence with drminstrated human behavior. We are tribal beings and only pseudoscientific westerners divorce morality ; the necessary rules required of any cooperative species – from the science that purports to mrasure such things. American divisiveness and europesn divisiveness, and add the divisiveness in the world is caused first znd foremost by attempts of states to violate those necessary laws of cooperation: the prevention of free riding is the cause if moral intuitions.

    Reply to this comment

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    Source date (UTC): 2014-07-16 15:00:00 UTC

  • Next is negative interest rates. After that we’ll hear mainstream modern monetar

    Next is negative interest rates.

    After that we’ll hear mainstream modern monetary.

    I’m all for MMT if we bypass the banks.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-06-07 12:01:00 UTC

  • PRIVILEGE: TAX THE HELL OUT OF WORKING CHILDLESS WOMEN They are experiencing the

    PRIVILEGE: TAX THE HELL OUT OF WORKING CHILDLESS WOMEN

    They are experiencing the greatest luxury, greatest conspicuous consumption, at the greatest social expense.

    —“Japan has one of the lowest fertility rates in the world, with each woman bearing an average of 1.4 children. At that rate, demographers project a plunge from 127 million people today to 87 million by 2060, sapping the workforce of its vital young workers and putting an enormous strain on state finances. The shrinkage has already begun. In 2013, Japan’s population declined by a record-breaking 244,000 people. All of which has led to some rather creative policy proposals from the Chamber of Commerce, such as retaining 70-year-old’s in the workforce, doubling government expenditures on childcare and encouraging men to ask working women out on a date.”—

    Furthermore, keeping 70 year olds in the work force is an excellent idea. Adding 14 year olds to the work force is a better idea. Growth from demographic expansion is a bad idea. Collapse from demographic contraction is a very, very bad idea.

    No one gets a free ride.

    Tax the hell out of working single women.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-05-18 04:52:00 UTC

  • “How can you have evolution if those who do the right thing have to finance thos

    “How can you have evolution if those who do the right thing have to finance those who did the wrong thing?” — Nassim Taleb

    You cant. But you also cant morally or practically hang those who did the wrong thing out to dry. And you have limit the damage that they can do.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-05-07 04:31:00 UTC