Two interesting bits of news. Most importantly North Korea has deregulated food markets.
"the People's Security Bureau also received the Central Committee's order, and passed on a special instruction to each regional security office ordering agents not to crack down on markets for anything other than illegal goods, and not to regulate food sales, in particular." Local authorities were also ordered not to engage in altercations with market traders and not to intervene or interfere in fights between traders working within the markets.
Additionally, it has been reported that North Korea is running a trade surplus with South Korea. Balance of payments is not understood by most people who believe that a trade deficit or surplus is good or bad like a budget surplus or deficit. It isn't. A constant trade surplus is not sustainable (as China will be discovering) and most countries only run one when their economy is in bad shape. This old article has more information of trade deficits. I wish there was a picture of Oliver Twist (more food, please!)
While Barack Obama was making his latest pitch for a brand-new, even-more-unsustainable entitlement at the health-care summit,' thousands of Greeks took to the streets to riot. An enterprising cable network might have shown the two scenes on a continuous split-screen because they're part of the same story. It's just that Greece is a little further along in the plot: They're at the point where the canoe is about to plunge over the falls. America is farther upstream and can still pull for shore, but has decided instead that what it needs to do is catch up with the Greek canoe. Chapter One (the introduction of unsustainable entitlements) leads eventually to Chapter Twenty (total societal collapse): The Greeks are at Chapter Seventeen or Eighteen.
What's happening in the developed world today isn't so very hard to understand: The 20th-century Bismarckian welfare state has run out of people to stick it to. In America, the feckless, insatiable boobs in Washington, Sacramento, Albany, and elsewhere are screwing over our kids and grandkids. In Europe, they've reached the next stage in social-democratic evolution: There are no kids or grandkids to screw over. The United States has a fertility rate of around 2.1 or just over two kids per couple. Greece has a fertility rate of about 1.3: Ten grandparents have six kids have four grandkids ie, the family tree is upside down. Demographers call 1.3 lowest-low' fertility the point from which no society has ever recovered. And, compared to Spain and Italy, Greece has the least worst fertility rate in Mediterranean Europe.
So you can't borrow against the future because, in the most basic sense, you don't have one. Greeks in the public sector retire at 58, which sounds great. But, when ten grandparents have four grandchildren, who pays for you to spend the last third of your adult life loafing around?
By the way, you don't have to go to Greece to experience Greek-style retirement: The Athenian public service' of California has been metaphorically face down in the ouzo for a generation. Still, America as a whole is not yet Greece. A couple of years ago, when I wrote my book America Alone, I put the thenSocial Security debate in a bit of perspective: On 2005 figures, projected public-pensions liabilities were expected to rise by 2040 to about 6.8 percent of GDP. In Greece, the figure was 25 percent: in other words, head for the hills, Armageddon outta here, The End. Since then, the situation has worsened in both countries. And really the comparison is academic: Whereas America still has a choice, Greece isn't going to have a 2040 not without a massive shot of Reality Juice.
Is that likely to happen? At such moments, I like to modify Gerald Ford. When seeking to ingratiate himself with conservative audiences, President Ford liked to say: A government big enough to give you everything you want is big enough to take away everything you have.' Which is true enough. But there's an intermediate stage: A government big enough to give you everything you want isn't big enough to get you to give any of it back. That's the point Greece is at. Its socialist government has been forced into supporting a package of austerity measures. The Greek people's response is: Nuts to that. Public-sector workers have succeeded in redefining time itself: Every year, they receive 14 monthly payments. You do the math. And for about seven months' work: For many of them, the work day ends at 2:30 p.m. And, when they retire, they get 14 monthly pension payments. In other words: Economic reality is not my problem. I want my benefits. And, if it bankrupts the entire state a generation from now, who cares as long as they keep the checks coming until I croak?
We hard-hearted small-government guys are often damned as selfish types who care nothing for the general welfare. But, as the Greek protests make plain, nothing makes an individual more selfish than the socially equitable communitarianism of big government: Once a chap's enjoying the fruits of government health care, government-paid vacation, government-funded early retirement, and all the rest, he couldn't give a hoot about the general societal interest; he's got his, and to hell with everyone else. People's sense of entitlement endures long after the entitlement has ceased to make sense.
The perfect spokesman for the entitlement mentality is the deputy prime minister of Greece. The European Union has concluded that the Greek government's austerity measures are insufficient and, as a condition of bailout, has demanded something more robust. Greece is no longer a sovereign state: It's General Motors, and the EU is Washington, and the Greek electorate is happy to play the part of the UAW everything's on the table except anything that would actually make a difference. In practice, because Spain, Portugal, Italy, and Ireland are also on the brink of the abyss, a European' bailout will be paid for by Germany. So the aforementioned Greek deputy prime minister, Theodoros Pangalos, has denounced the conditions of the EU deal on the grounds that the Germans stole all the bullion from the Bank of Greece during the Second World War. Welfare always breeds contempt, in nations as much as inner-city housing projects: How dare you tell us how to live! Just give us your money and push off.
Unfortunately, Germany is no longer an economic powerhouse. As Angela Merkel pointed out a year ago, for Germany, an Obama-sized stimulus was out of the question simply because its foreign creditors know there are not enough young Germans around ever to repay it. Over 30 percent of German women are childless; among German university graduates, it's over 40 percent. And for the ever-dwindling band of young Germans who make it out of the maternity ward, there's precious little reason to stick around. Why be the last handsome blond lederhosen-clad Aryan lad working the late shift at the beer garden in order to prop up singlehandedly entire retirement homes? And that's before the EU decides to add the Greeks to your burdens. Germans, who retire at 67, are now expected to sustain the unsustainable 14 monthly payments per year of Greeks who retire at 58.
Think of Greece as California: Every year an irresponsible and corrupt bureaucracy awards itself higher pay and better benefits paid for by an ever-shrinking wealth-generating class. And think of Germany as one of the less profligate, still-just-about-functioning corners of America such as my own state of New Hampshire: Responsibility doesn't pay. You'll wind up bailing out anyway. The problem is there are never enough of the rich' to fund the entitlement state, because in the end it disincentivizes everything from wealth creation to self-reliance to the basic survival instinct, as represented by the fertility rate. In Greece, they've run out Greeks, so they'll stick it to the Germans, like French farmers do. In Germany, the Germans have only been able to afford to subsidize French farming because they stick their defense tab to the Americans. And in America, Obama, Pelosi, and Reid are saying we need to paddle faster to catch up with the Greeks and Germans. What could go wrong?
#2
"Greece has a fertility rate of about 1.3: Ten grandparents have six kids have four grandkids ie, the family tree is upside down. Demographers call 1.3 lowest-low fertility the point from which no society has ever recovered. And, compared to Spain and Italy, Greece has the least worst fertility rate in Mediterranean Europe."
These are the raw, hard, nightmarish facts which every right of centre political party needs to re-state time, and time, and time, again. The welfare state kills societies. The days of accepting socialism as some kind of inevitable end state of civilisation must be ended.
President Obama can't say he wasn't warned. But the advice was ignored. Now it has come to pass. Eighteen months ago, I warned then-presidential candidate Barack Obama that should he get elected, he should not allow his administration to fall into the clutches of Washington insiders.
It has been said that Obama had to go to some lengths to get the well-wired Emanuel to leave the Hill and help the new administration navigate the ways of Washington. But now, as Obama's approval rating has dipped below 50 percent, Emanuel is taking some heat. He is accused of not having what it takes to run the White House or serve as Obama's gatekeeper.
It's hard to recall the last time differences between a White House chief of staff and his boss have been aired so publicly -- and to the president's distinct disadvantage.
The column made it clear that on those key decisions that ended up landing the administration in trouble, it was the president -- not Rahm Emanuel -- who got it wrong.
Items:
- Emanuel "bitterly" opposed former White House counsel Greg Craig's plan to close Guantanamo within a year but was overruled by Obama. "The president would have been better off heeding Emanuel's counsel";
- Emanuel fought against Attorney General Eric Holder's plan to try Khalid Sheik Mohammed in New York and lost. "Another political fiasco";
- Emanuel argued for a smaller, more politically popular health-care bill, but Obama disregarded that strategy. "The result was . . . disastrous";
- Emanuel successfully got 11 substantive bills on Obama's desk in the first half of 2009, but in the second half, Obama let himself get bogged down with big-ticket items and the momentum stopped. "Congress has ground to a halt."
When Obama wasn't screwing up, the column suggested, his close confidants -- Valerie Jarrett, Robert Gibbs and David Axelrod (dubbed "the Cult of Obama") -- were.
There's this jewel of an inside jab: "A good example was Obama's unproductive China trip in November. Jarrett, Gibbs and Axelrod went along as courtiers; Emanuel remained at his desk in Washington, struggling to keep alive the big health-care bill that he didn't want in the first place."
It was, perhaps, cheeky of me to say in the June 2008 column that personal aggrandizement is everything to Washington insiders. But I didn't rule them out of administration jobs. "They know stuff," I acknowledged. "Just don't put them in charge."
Posted by: Bobby ||
02/27/2010 08:50 ||
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Obama has engineered the government takeover of automobile manufacturing, insurance and finance. He is about to take over health care. Socialism will be firmly entrenched. Over half of all Americans will now suckle at the public teat. He will have transformed the American economy in one term. So for Emanuel the only fault is that he gets no credit for this triumph of the will.
#3
The call for open access online publication of raw data concurrent with paper publication is a biggie. There are some cooperative, voluntary moves in that direction already, but if this becomes the norm in research it has many implications.
One of those implications is that scientists in e.g. China will now be able to leapfrog many years of legitimate work involved in collecting and validating data. It's akin in some ways to tech transfer to them.
Not saying we shouldn't do it, just pointing out that there will be second and third order effects, the inevitable reaction to politicized science on the part of some.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
President Obama can't say he wasn't warned. But the advice was ignored. Now it has come to pass. Eighteen months ago, I warned then-presidential candidate Barack Obama that should he get elected, he should not allow his administration to fall into the clutches of Washington insiders.
When Obama wasn't screwing up, the column suggested, his close confidants -- Valerie Jarrett, Robert Gibbs and David Axelrod (dubbed "the Cult of Obama") -- were. 
