Amazon at $15
Amazon is raising the minimum hourly wage for its workers to $15…this includes Whole Foods, it’s not totally clear whether or not it includes contract employees, though I’d assume it does. Jeff Bezos...
View ArticleTariffs, Trade, and the British Corn Laws
Stuart Schneiderman linked an article by Robert Samuelson on the 1846 British repeal of the tariffs on food imports, which further linked an Economist article arguing that: With the repeal of the...
View ArticleCoupling
(No, this post is not about sex…sorry. Nor is it about electrical engineering, though it might at first give that impression.) The often-interesting General Electric blog has an article about drones,...
View ArticleWorthwhile Reading
Why do journalists love twitter and hate blogging? The legacy of China’s Confucian bureaucracy. Related: my previous post on the costs of formalism and credentialism. Stroking egos does nothing for...
View ArticleFinancial Markets Commentary
John Hussman on valuations The saga of Broker Joe, from 2007
View ArticleEven Smart People Get It Wrong Sometimes
Economist Art Laffer: “China is a huge plus to the U.S. because without China there is no Walmart, and without Walmart there is no middle class or lower class prosperity in America.” Actually, the US...
View ArticleConspiracy Theories.
I’ve been having some fun poking around old posts on my own blog to see how some have held up ten years later. Conspiracy theories seem to have held up well, and new ones keep popping up. Like Jeff...
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President Trump’s ‘Xanatos Gambit’ Trade Policy
I’ve written previously in my column “President Trump’s ‘Xanatos Gambit’ Government Shutdown” of President Trump’s tendency for building political strategy trees were every possible outcome is to his...
View ArticleAmerica, the Land of the Free Lunch and the Home of the Brave Easily Traumatized
As a Boston area baby boomer, I belted out the National Anthem in my youth with conviction at sporting events. Massachusetts educators emphasized its role as the birthplace of the American Revolution...
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Our ‘Xanatos Gambit’ President’s Energy Export Strategy Tree
In my last post — President Trump’s ‘Xanatos Gambit’ Trade Policy — I spoke to how President Trump has set up his political strategy on trade policy to make any outcome on the USMCA Trade agreement...
View ArticleThe Trade War and Agriculture.
We are entering a period when the tariff controversy with China is getting serious. The Wall Street Journal is worried. A failure to break an impasse in talks in Washington on Friday opened a new phase...
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Iran’s RQ-4N Shoot Down, Pres. Trump and the Expiration of the Carter Doctrine
It’s become something of a regular occurrence for the American mainstream media to blow a foreign policy story because of their Trump Derangement Syndrome. Yet they seem to have greatly sunk to new...
View ArticleRe-Privatizing Fannie and Freddie: It’s Déjà Vu All Over Again
Privatization reform of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, a hot topic on and off since their founding eight and five decades ago respectively, is heating up once again after more than a decade of temporary...
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Summer Rerun — Book Review: Life in a Soviet Factory
Bitter Waters: Life And Work In Stalin’s Russia by Gennady Andreev-Khomiakov A fascinating look at the Soviet economic system in the 1930s, as viewed from the front lines of that system. Gennady...
View Article“After Minimum Wage Hike, Labor Day Will Be Replaced by Cheaper, More...
… Foremost on the front burner is an attempt by the Democrats to raise the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour. A fiscal review by the Senate Budget Committee, however, showed that doing so would make...
View ArticleLabor Day Rerun: Technology, Work, and Society
Here is an intriguing book concerned with the exponential advances in technology and the impact thereof on human society. The author believes that the displacement of human labor by technology is in...
View ArticleLabor Day Rerun: Attack of the Job-Killing Robots
(This is a 3-part series, link to next post is at the end) Here’s a new factory for making automobile frames, specifically designed to minimize the need for human labor. The CEO of the company that...
View ArticleHow the Conservative Party has sold out Britain.
King George III and Lord North have been blamed for botching negotiations with the American colonies. Now, the same Conservative Party seems determined to botch another negotiation; with the EU. In...
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Summer Rerun–Book Review: Little Man, What Now?, by Hans Fallada
Little Man, What Now? (edited, with updates) I’ve often seen this 1932 book footnoted in histories touching on Weimar Germany; not having previously read it I had been under the vague impression that...
View ArticleSummer Rerun—Hoffer on Scribes and Bureaucrats
Nothing is so unsettling to a social order as the presence of a mass of scribes without suitable employment and an acknowledged status…The explosive component in the contemporary scene is not the...
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