Reverie

"It was the experience of the Republic here which decisively shaped her political thinking, tempered as it was in the fires of European tyranny and catastrophe, and forever supported by her grounding in classical thought. America taught her a way beyond the hardened alternatives of left and right from which she had escaped; and the idea of the Republic, as the realistic chance for freedom, remained dear to her even in its darkening days." This was said at the funeral of Hannah Arendt by her friend, the philosopher Hans Jonas. 

 

Department of Life-Imitating-Art: Since the 1970s, The Godfather (1972) has been a perennial source of inspiration for real-life mobsters. Louie Milito, a member of New York’s Gambino crime Family, killed in 1988, “watched the movie six thousand times” according to his wife’s autobiography. Ms Milito reports that, after seeing the film, her husband and his crew were “acting like Godfather actors kissing and hugging . . . and coming out with lines from the movie. A couple of them started learning Italian”.

Drivers are already charged 11.50 pounds ($15) to enter the financial district and parts of west London under a congestion charge. But those driving petrol and diesel vehicles typically registered before 2006 will need to pay an additional 10 pounds.

Bezos is a global warming guy; I wonder if Pittsburgh's location and water gives it an advantage with Amazon.

“Branded generics” have given Abbott and a handful of other players a relatively cheap font of growth, allowing them to repackage off-patent drugs and extend their commercial lifespan. (wsj)

Who is....Rosatom?

One of the truly amusing elements of the tax debate is the emergence of Democrats as deficit hawks. Maybe the country has Alzheimer's and has lost its memory.


Of all the residential floor space sold in China last year, 18% was purchased by the government. The share could reach 24% this year - an unprecedented government bailout scheme - which is taking place even as Chinese property sales posted their first decline since March 2015.


The Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), approved the Uranium One transaction in October 2010.  According to new emails revealed by The Hill, just months before that approval, Bill Clinton sought permission from the State Department, run by his wife at the time, to meet Arkady Dvorkovich, a top aide to then-Russian President Dmitri Medvedev and one of the highest-ranking government officials to serve on Rosatom’s board of supervisors, the company which was ultimately approved to purchase Uranium One.
We are a very tolerant nation, or a poorly informed one.


Fidelity Investments is moving to address long-simmering problems with workplace conduct following allegations of sexual harassment and bullying that led to the ouster of some high-profile employees at the mutual-fund giant. (wsj)

The "MeToo" hashtag and related posts on Facebook are intended as a feminist rallying cry. The Feministing website explains, "Gender violence doesn't exist without white supremacy (such as racism, colonialism, zionism (sic), militarism."

 

"[Adam] Smith envisioned a system that would give people the incentive to better themselves through economic activities where they would create wealth by serving others through market exchange rather than through political activities, where they might seek to redistribute existing wealth through brute force or legal restraints on competition.  Under such a system, the political motivation of self-interest could be channeled toward socially beneficial activities that would serve the general interest rather than toward socially unproductive activities that might advance the interests of a select few but would come at the expense of society as a whole.

Free trade is an important component of this system of economic liberty."--Irwin

In China, according to a UN study, 23% admit to rape. In Papua New Guinea, 61% of men say the same. Huh?

There is an argument over controlled immigration that the citizen of a country is its owner. So control is justified. But that makes any control justified. The problem seems to be the circumstance of the nation: Is the nation nothing more than geography? For example, can an entity that believes meat-eating to be evil allow meat-eaters to swell the population until meat-eating is encouraged? In this view, the nation would be a voluntary association with a geography, not just a geographic entity. So admittance would be more than a simple libertarian free movement, it would entail an acceptance of some rules, some limits. A geography constituted as an Islamic State would be within its rights to discourage Christians or Jews from entering. So an entity could not logically encourage the immigration of people opposed to its existence.

Another very worrisome notion was raised by Freidman who said,  "You cannot simultaneously have free immigration and a welfare state." This means that the state entity could not financially survive with an unlimited social welfare demand.

Warren Buffett still lives in his $31,000 starter house in Omaha.

Golden oldie:

http://steeleydock.blogspot.com/2017/07/tsunami.html

Tsunami steeleydock.blogspot.com On this day in the year 365, a powerful earthquake off the coast of Greece caused a tsunami that devastated the city of Alexandria, Egypt. ...

For Mark Cuban, reading sparks inspiration. He tells Vanity Fair: "I'll read hours every day because all it takes is one little thing to propel you to the next level." 

The key to wisdom, according to Buffett's right-hand-man Charlie Munger, boils down to one, simple habit: reading. "In my whole life, I have known no wise people who didn't read all the time — none, zero," says Munger.

On October 25, 1917, the precursor to the Communist Party in Russia launched a 24-hour revolution against the revolutionary government of socialist Alexander Kerensky. This became known as the October Revolution in order to distinguish it from the revolution that had overthrown the Czar the previous February. In the October Revolution, two people were killed while the revolutionaries were capturing the Winter Palace, where the Provisional Government met. ..

On August 21, 1991, eight leaders of the tattered remnants of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union launched a coup against the government of Communist Mikhail Gorbachev. They had placed him under house arrest at his dacha 900 miles away. Boris Yeltsin was visibly in charge of the existing government at what was known as the White House: the parliament building. The Communists sent in troops to remove him and his supporters. Thousands of citizens then lined up to resist the troops. The troops refused to fire on them. That ended the Communist Party's power. Three civilians were killed by armored personnel carriers...

A total of five people were killed at the beginning and the end of the Bolshevik revolution. In between, Lenin and Stalin (mainly Stalin) executed or starved at least 15 million people, according to the 2007 edition of Robert Conquest's 1968 book, The Great Terror. Conquest had initially estimated 20 million. We will never know for sure, he said in 2007. (from North)

At what point will the growth and expansion of Amazon, or Google or Apple start to look like monopoly?

Modern Healthcare (10/23, Livingston, Subscription Publication) reports that “an analysis by the American Medical Association” indicates “a single health insurance company dominates the commercial insurance market in more than 4 in 10 of the nation’s metropolitan areas.”

Yale professor Samuel Moyn and Oxford professor David Priestland recently declared in a New York Times op-ed that “there is no real evidence that Mr. Trump wants to seize power unconstitutionally, and there is no reason to think he could succeed.”

Quantitative easing, the once-unconventional monetary policy in which a central bank creates new money to buy financial assets, will most likely start winding down next year in Europe and has ended in the U.S. These moves are the beginning of the end of an extraordinary period of central-bank innovation. (wsj)

"Former President Obama’s drone assassinations of American citizens were non-issues because observers knew Obama “meant well.” When Obama decided to bomb Libya in 2011, his appointees made it clear that he would ignore the War Powers Act of 1973, enacted to prevent presidents from launching wars on their whim. When a federal judge ruled in May 2016 that the Obama administration’s consumer subsidies under the Affordable Care Act violated the Constitution, the decision was almost completely ignored — perhaps because Obama’s illegalities were progressive. When President Trump ended the subsidies, he was denounced for trampling Congressional prerogatives. 
This is possible only if people are not paying attention or do not care.

It was George W. Bush’s White House, not Trump, which asserted a “commander-in-chief override” that entitled presidents to ignore the law and the Bill of Rights." This is from Bovard who concludes with a funny line: " Many Trump opponents are not opposed to dictators per se — they simply want different dictates."

A Wall Street Journal analysis of Morningstar mutual-fund ratings over 14 years found that top-rated funds drew the vast majority of investor dollars, but most didn’t continue performing at that level. Morningstar said it has never billed its ratings as predictive and they should be a starting point for investors selecting funds.

Charen wrote this: "Feminists set themselves a contradictory task — to insist that men and women were indistinguishable in their sexual tastes and appetites but then to demand that men respect women's particular reserve." And then this: "Male sexual aggressiveness has been a challenge every civilization has had to manage. Among some Orthodox Jews, one answer is to set such strict limits on contacts between the sexes that men do not even touch women they are not related to — not even to shake hands. This can lead to other problems when Orthodox men's reticence is misunderstood by others, but it isn't crazy. How many of us have been hugged a little too long and a little too aggressively by men taking advantage of the fact that they can get away with it?"

So people who pay taxes benefit from tax cuts. Amazed by the obvious.

The AP (10/20, Alonso-Zaldivar) reported on Friday’s release of the Gallup-Sharecare Well-Being Index, based on a 500 person daily sample, finding, “the number of U.S. adults without health insurance is up nearly 3.5 million this year” or 1.4 percentage points to 12.3 percent of US adults in the three months ending September 30. The increase in uninsured is attributed to a number of changes President Trump made to healthcare policy including having “stopped federal payments that reimburse insurers for lower copays and deductibles,” and “slashed the advertising budget for 2018 sign-ups,” while having “cut the length of open enrollment in half, and sharply reduced federal grants to groups that help consumers navigate the process.” Advertising? Navigating groups?

Comparing the 1955 Fortune 500 companies to the 2017 Fortune 500, there are only 59 companies that appear in both lists. 

The protectionist  argument is that free trade works only if the worker displaced by foreign competition moves at least laterally. But most do not. His opponents argue that trade wars damage everyone, individually and collectively. In a way, protectionism turns the protected group into a dependent sub-class, like zoo animals, dependent upon the largess of those less damaged by the protectionism. Until It fails.
 

 AAnnnnndddddddd....a graph (the market goes up and down except when it goes down and stays down):