Thursday, April 11, 2019

Dalio and Legislating Good Behavior

 ...where can a crowd of individuals get rights from, unless it be from the individuals themselves, who make up the crowd? and yet, if the individuals possess these rights over themselves, as individuals, what place is left for rights belonging to the crowd, as a crowd?--Herbert





Minnesota Democrat Ilhan Omar in a speech at a Muslim rights group’s event  described the September 11, 2001 terror attacks as 'some people did something.'
Really goofy ideas suffer when people try to explain them, so they try not to. Spokesmen for goofy ideas can be very revealing. And fun.

The company that owns the National Enquirer said it is exploring a sale of the tabloid. (wsj)

A Texas medical school will no longer consider race in its admissions decisions under an agreement with the U.S. Department of Education, the first of its kind as the Trump administration seeks to roll back affirmative-action practices.

Automobili Pininfarina’s Battista is a model the Italian company wants to use to position itself as a pioneer in the luxury electric-vehicle (EV) space. A 120 kilowatt hour (kWh) battery feeds four electric motors, one for each wheel, resulting in  1,900 horsepower and 1,696 pound-feet of torque. That’s about four times as powerful as the 2019 Chevrolet Corvette Stingray.
Battista rockets to 60 miles per hour (mph) in less than 2 seconds, faster than a Formula 1 racing car, and reaches almost 300 miles on a single charge. Top speed is about 217 mph.

Attorney General William Barr said he would form a team to examine the origins of a 2016 inquiry that conducted ‘spying’ on people tied to the Trump campaign. I saw his testimony before congress and this is a truly disturbing idea if it has any merit at all--the workings of the government trying to influence an election and the government's future. He said he thought the government did spy on Trump's campaign; his question is why. The response by the Democrats looked to be fear.


It was staunch free-market economist Walter E. Williams who wrote in 1987 that “short of aerial saturation bombing, rent control might be one of the most effective means of destroying a city.” It was the communist foreign minister of Vietnam who made nearly the identical point in 1989: “The Americans couldn’t destroy Hanoi,” Nguyen Co Thach remarked, “but we have destroyed our city by very low rents.”--Jacoby

In  “The Road to Serfdom” Hayek sought to demonstrate the incompatibility of socialist economic policy with the rule of law and democracy. Key to his argument is that in a democratic liberal society, there’s no overarching single scale of values. Society cannot achieve a single hierarchy of ends we all agree on. In fact, the great strength of democratic liberal societies is a multiplicity of values that are respected among diverse and often divergent, even distant, individuals. Liberal democratic society is a pluralistic society. (Boettke) So socialism is incompatible with diversity. And diversity is essential to competition and development. So....

 The largest single mass lynching in U.S. history took place on March 14, 1891, in New Orleans when a mob slaughtered 11 Italian-Americans. 

Slavery itself was not unique to Africans. The very word “slave” derives from the name of a European people — the Slavs, who were enslaved for centuries before the first African was brought to the Western Hemisphere. The tragic fact is that slavery existed all over the world, for thousands of years. Unfortunately, irresponsible demagogues have also existed for thousands of years.--Sowell

[I]f protection against free trade is good for the country, why not for the region, or the city, or the neighborhood, or your house?--McCloskey

On this day in 1814, Napoleon Bonaparte, emperor of France and one of the greatest military leaders in history, abdicated the throne, and, in the Treaty of Fontaineblea, was banished to the Mediterranean island of Elba.

                                            Dalio and Legislating Good Behavior


"Capitalists don’t know how to divide the economic pie, while socialists don’t know how to grow it," hedge fund billionaire Ray Dalio writes, apparently accepting the Piketty assessment and not the counter argument.
“Disparity in wealth, especially when accompanied by disparity in values, leads to increasing conflict, and, in the government, that manifests itself in the form of populism of the left and populism of the right and often in revolutions of one sort or another,” he says.

“Capitalism is now working in a way in which people and companies find it profitable to have policies and make technologies that lessen their people costs, which lessens a large percentage of the population’s share of society’s resources,” Dalio writes. “Those companies and people who are richer have greater buying power, which motivates those who seek profit to shift their resources to produce what the haves want relative to what the have-nots want, which includes fundamentally required things like good care and education for the have-not children.”

A narrative.


His suggestions? Create private-public partnerships to invest in socially and economically productive projects that offer a solid, measurable return on investment; tax pollution and other causes of poor health, for which society pays a price; raise more money from top-earners and distribute the proceeds to the middle- and bottom-earners, making sure to still encourage productivity and innovation; establish minimum standards of healthcare and education for all, and put “money and credit into the hands of those who have a higher propensity to spend from those who have a higher propensity to save and from those who need it less to those who need it more.”

We should follow this advice. Our leaders have done so much for us over the past generations. They have been so insightful, their analysis has been so accurate. And they have a lot of experience in top-down social and political re-reconstructions in places like Iraq and Libya. We absolutely should throw all of our energy and change all of our principles to create an imaginative solution to a guy's imaginative explanation of life.

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