Oxfam

Liberalism is not about finding all life’s meaning in a shopping list, it just says that we need more meaning than can be found in a ballot paper. And that those who seek the meaning of life in collective projects that they try to enforce on everybody else have less of a sense of the beautiful richness and diversity of human nature than the alleged cold and robotic market liberals.--norberg

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Since 2020, there have been about 500 encounters between orcas and boats, Alfredo López Fernandez, a coauthor of a 2022 study in the journal Marine Mammal Science, told NPR. At least three boats have sunk, though there is no record of an orca killing a human in the wild.

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Oxfam

Oxfam is a British-founded confederation of 21 independent charitable organizations focusing on the alleviation of global poverty, founded in 1942 and led by Oxfam International.

You wouldn’t learn it from Oxfam, but the global Gini coefficient measuring inequality has fallen from 92 to 88 since 2000. The top 1% saw their share of global income cut from 49% to 44.5%.

More important, the world’s poorest five billion have become significantly richer. The Oxfam report makes it seem as if things have gotten much worse for the poor since the pandemic. Oxfam makes this claim five times in its report, but never says by how much. It turns out that the poor’s share of global wealth—as measured by assets minus debts—declined by 0.2%, a figure so small that it is within the margin of error.

Something else you won’t find in the Oxfam report: Global poverty is now at its lowest level ever recorded—8.6%, down from 29% in 2000.

Not sure what these numbers truly mean but it is interesting that the numbers the organization takes seriously are better and the organization itself tries to minimize that.

The Pros and Cons of Homelessness

WSJ poll finds more than four in ten Americans now support abortion bans at six weeks — half of the previous threshold.

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A male weightlifter once dubbed "New Zealand's Strongest Man" applied last week to compete in a women's powerlifting competition. His intention was not to defeat women in the sport, but rather to discredit the notion that biological men don't have a physiological advantage over their female peers — an advantage which male transsexuals appear keen to simultaneously exploit and deny.

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Romeo and Juliet: The average age for women to marry in Elizabethan England was in their early 20s; the average age for men was their late 20s. Shakespeare’s audience would have seen Juliet as a mere child. They would have been shocked that she was neglected by her parents in the face of the dangers she faced.

The Pros and Cons of Homelessness

Interesting story out of Arizona where a strangely even-handed debate has developed over the problem of homelessness. Some people oppose intervention.

An Arizona judge ruled this week that the city of Phoenix must remove the tents belonging to over 1,000 homeless people from downtown.

The ruling comes after a group of property owners and businesses sued the city for its failure to enforce bans on public camping, which they claim has led to a rapid increase in the number of homeless living in an encampment downtown that locals call “the zone.” It’s estimated that more than 1,000 homeless people now live there.

The business owners claim the encampment prevents them from operating, while other locals claim the city has essentially made the homeless encampment and surrounding area “off-limits to law enforcement,” which presents safety concerns.

Residents claim that public defecation and urination, drug use, and violence are common in the area and that it spills over onto their private property.

“You know, the shelter started letting people camp on our property, then it just happened and it exploded because the city has no control,” sandwich shop owner Joe Faillace told News Nation.

During the lawsuit, Phoenix officials claimed that their hands were tied by a Ninth Circuit precedent from 2019 that ruled it is “cruel and unusual punishment” to arrest people for “involuntarily” sleeping on the streets.

The city was also facing a suit from the ACLU of Arizona in November, which sought to prevent the cleanup, saying that the cleanups “criminalize, punish and scatter” people living outdoors. Ultimately, the judge presiding over the business owners’ suit did not buy this defense since many of the homeless people in the zone are there by choice and have refused to go to a homeless shelter in the past.

After the judge’s ruling, a city spokeswoman said that Phoenix is “committed to addressing the needs of all residents and property owners,” and that they continued to work to “address the complex issues surrounding those experiencing homelessness,” including connecting people with indoor shelter. The city has until July 10th to clean the area. (from morning wire)

A Capital Idea

In Capital, Piketty complains that the "r" (return) of inherited money is greater than growth, "g". That’s how we will end up with a rentier society.

 

Piketty insists that, since r exceeds g, the return to capital exceeds economic growth,  wealth of any kind will outperform work. Thus, according to the French economist, the rich will just keep on getting richer, and we’ll be left with an economy in which plutocrats are surrounded by us unsuccessful boobs, wandering around between Mad Max and a Star Wars bar scene.  Further, he goes on to say that the rich who inherit have access to much greater returns than the rest of us, making it a self-supporting spiral of economic misery.

This is great because there is justification in being angry at the rich.

 

It is interesting--but so is Lamarck.

The Sunday Times’s annual rich list, which was recently published, shows something different. Some 94 percent of the 1,000 people made the cut not by getting rich the old-fashioned way—by marrying or inheriting—but instead by making it. This correlates with the large sociological study in The Millionaire Next Door. It's a small sample and may not be indicative. But is does not agree with the Piketty theory, which has little hard support. It is doubtful that haziness of a theory will defeat it, though. Leaders and aspiring leaders always look for something, anything, to justify their power-concentrating, self-serving acts.

Leaders will always volunteer to set things right.

 

But--even if Piketty were correct-- the basic question goes unanswered: Can an order be imposed from above that will produce predictable results, however desirable? For example, how well has Iraq implemented the Madisonian blueprint that, in the American experience, is without doubt superior and worthwhile?

The Pope, Sentiment and Action

The Pope offers concerns about the world that are a distillation of the moral problems of the West. The care of the poor is the touchstone. Poverty is essentially a low tide of economic achievement. Many such situations are inherent to peoples and/or places and will not improve: The Eskimo is probably making the most of his options. Efforts by New York to improve the conditions of the Eskimo might make him physically more comfortable but also might make him less an Eskimo, like a displaced New Yorker. So what should be done?
It is kind of those with excess to share it with those with less but is it kind for others to take from those with excess and share it with those below subsistence? And how would that be done? Christ always placed such decisions upon the individual. Christ's gospel is filled with personal responsibility; He had disregard for institutions.
How is poverty to be defined? Many would say the intrusion of Europeans--despite the excess they brought--was a disaster for the impoverished hunter-gather North American Indian--not just in combat but in culture. Should the West duplicate such intrusions elsewhere? What about the relativity of poverty? A poor man in America would be middle class most other places; should that be considered? How should such decisions be made and who should make them? Worst, the history of centralized powerful entities making decisions such as these has historically been a nightmare. The agent of redistribution always, always become a monster. The practicalities of these problems overlook the underlying moral question as well: By what authority does one group demand the production of another?
Until someone starts talking about the problem of moving sentiment to action, the poverty cat will never get a bell.

Tax the Rich, Feed the Poor

What is interesting about the "Tax the rich" cry is that there is so much resistance to it. Why would anyone object? They are different, isolated, often obnoxious and the high profile rich themselves want their taxes raised. Why is there a public debate?

My bet is that it is the other side of the equality coin. People want equal opportunity; they do not want to legislate results. This is the obverse of the objection to subsidies for people and groups.