Mugabe Shrugged - Coercion vs cooperation in Zimbabwe

The LA Times has the details:

Along the highways, brown grass stands high between the thorny acacias in a stunning vista of what Africa must have looked like before mechanized agriculture made farming Zimbabwe's main export business. Now, most farms lie dormant.

Meat disappeared after the government shut down private abattoirs, transferring all slaughtering to a quasi-governmental organization that cannot meet demand. Fuel supplies dried up after the National Oil Co. of Zimbabwe was made the sole authorized distributor.

In towns, straggling queues form at any rumor of sugar, maize or bread. Most supermarket shelves are empty of basic staples: no meat, no sugar, no maize, no bread, no pasta, no rice, no milk.

Authorities have focused on one sector after another, accusing them of collaborating with the opposition, supporting regime change or engaging in economic sabotage.
…

"The laws of economics are very powerful in the end, and they will take over," Robertson said. "It's actually quite a dangerous business trying to force bad policies into a system where there's a great reluctance to accept these policies."

Bloomberg, Capitalisms Fifth Column Gets Worse

Is there any business transaction they do like? Their online rag has been railing for more intervention, more regulation, and less freedom at a fever pitch. With the sometimes exception of Caroline Baum, their op/ed writers are statists to the man.

Matthew Lynn covers the hackneyed rant; bankers’ bonuses are too high and they are obnoxious people. I can’t think of a single banker who would take these ludicrous arguments seriously. His reasoning speaks for itself:

The only people who have a right to share bank profits are the people who put money at risk: the shareholders. The employees don't usually put their money on the line, so they can't expect to receive some of the profits.
…
A bonus isn't a salary. Nor is it a dividend. It is a reward on top of your usual remuneration for exceptional effort or outstanding performance. It should probably be unexpected.

Bankers may claim they have made a lot of money for their employers. So what? That's what they were paid for. The people serving the burgers and fries at McDonald's Corp. restaurants aren't entitled to a bonus just because the business happened to do well one year. They already got paid for doing their jobs. The same principle should apply at a bank.

..and so on.

SEC's Information Socialism Failure - NY Times Op/Ed

The SEC’s recent break up of a so-called insider trading ring made it obvious what their real goal was – to stay relevant. After getting hugely embarrassed by the feedback regarding their hedge fund minimum increase, they had to do something to make it appear they were doing something. And what better way to get headlines than by arresting a bunch of random people and calling it an insider trading ring, it’s like a real conspiracy theory!

The busts included not just a guy who had no insider knowledge but instead followed his customer’s insider traders, but two traders who started following his trades. How can they have any fiduciary responsibility or presumed to have any inside knowledge is beyond me.

A NY Times Op/Ed today points out how idiotic current Information Socialism laws are, but does not go far enough:

Insider trading encompasses the buying or selling of stocks based on non-public information about the securities in question. It is illegal to tip such information to others or to act on tips oneself. Under this definition, insider trading is so common that the only way the Securities and Exchange Commission can enforce laws against it is selectively, much as a patrolman tickets only the red sports car when everyone on the road is speeding. It may make for sexy headlines when a brazen conspiracy is uncovered, or a Martha Stewart is accused. But stopping the sports car slows traffic only for a mile or two. It gives the false impression that the policeman is on the beat, making the financial markets safe for the rest of us.

Weekend Reading - That Which is Seen, and That Which is Not Seen

A Bastiat classic from 1850. Its depressing in that it could have been written yesterday. It means 150 years of the ascent of man and capitalism in lockstep has not advanced economic debate very much at all.


“Your arguments are fashionable enough, but they are too absurd to be justified by anything like reason.”

“They would gladly suppress the capitalist, the banker, the speculator, the projector, the merchant, and the trader, accusing them of interposing between production and consumption, to extort from both, without giving either anything in return. Or rather, they would transfer to the
State the work which they accomplish, for this work cannot be suppressed.”

"Directed by the comparison of prices, it distributes food over the whole surface of the country, beginning always at the highest price, that is, where the demand is the greatest. It is impossible to imagine an organization more completely calculated to meet the interest of those who are in want; and the beauty of this organization, unperceived as it is by the Socialists, results from the very fact that it is free. It is true, the consumer is obliged to reimburse commerce for the expenses of conveyance, freight, store-room, commission, &c.; but can any system be devised, in which he who eats corn is not obliged to defray the expenses, whatever they may be, of bringing it within his reach?”

95% of Britons Have Done This

Why have “95 percent of Britons…urinated, vomited or defecated in public”?






















As expected, Government idiocy is the cause. Their Disabilities act forced the closure of rest rooms. Furthermore, regulations are still in place, “which prevents local authorities for charging for men’s urinals.”

Gunpoint do-gooders have forced toilets to close and kept regulations in place that would permit opening of the new one. The Public Health committee has the gall to get indignant at the obvious results of the gov’t policy and states, “for…those with disabilities or health problems, the lack of public toilet facilities restricts their lives.” And what did they expect? What solution does their report recommend? Of course, more intervention of they type that got rid of the toilets in the first place is deemed the best solution.

95% of Britons have experienced the consequences of statist meddling; the authorities can’t even run a rest room correctly, why gives them control over anything important?

Shaun Donovan Lies About Housing

...referring to the mayor’s plan to create or preserve 165,000 units of lower-priced housing by 2013. “No other single change that we will make, or new policy, will have as broad an impact.”

Except getting rid of rent controls.

Comrade Bloombergs Statism machine rolls on. Him and the rest of them think that affordable housing is the result of legislative fiat. Not that it every worked previously:

The 421-a program, which costs the city hundreds of millions of dollars a year in forgone tax revenue, was begun in the 1970s to spur housing development. Under the program, developers could get a 10- to 15-year exemption from the increase in taxes that resulted from their work...

When the real estate market in Manhattan revived in the 1980s, the program was modified to require developers in central Manhattan to build lower-cost units if they wanted the tax break.

The same initiative failed in the 70's, it failed in the 80's and it will fail again to provide anything but profit opportunities for the politically connected.

Also note the newspeak in the article - "affordable housing advocates" - which seems to be a euphemism for looter