Tag Archives: Elite

News

What happened in Europe when they embraced Democrat policies?

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Here’s a story from the radically-leftist New York Times.

Excerpt:

Francesca Esposito, 29 and exquisitely educated, helped win millions of euros in false disability and other lawsuits for her employer, a major Italian state agency. But one day last fall she quit, fed up with how surreal and ultimately sad it is to be young in Italy today.

It galled her that even with her competence and fluency in five languages, it was nearly impossible to land a paying job. Working as an unpaid trainee lawyer was bad enough, she thought, but doing it at Italy’s social security administration seemed too much. She not only worked for free on behalf of the nation’s elderly, who have generally crowded out the young for jobs, but her efforts there did not even apply to her own pension.

[…]The outrage of the young has erupted, sometimes violently, on the streets of Greece and Italy in recent weeks, as students and more radical anarchists protest not only specific austerity measures in flattened economies but a rising reality in Southern Europe: People like Ms. Esposito feel increasingly shut out of their own futures. Experts warn of volatility in state finances and the broader society as the most highly educated generation in the history of the Mediterranean hits one of its worst job markets.

[…]The daughter of a fireman and a high school teacher, Ms. Esposito was the first in her family to graduate from college and the first to study foreign languages. She has an Italian law degree and a master’s from Germany and was an intern at the European Court of Justice in Luxembourg. It has not helped.[…]Even before the economic crisis hit, Southern Europe was not an easy place to forge a career. Low growth and a corrosive lack of meritocracy have long posed challenges to finding a job in Italy, Greece, Spain and Portugal. Today, with the added sting of austerity, more people are left fighting over fewer opportunities. It is a zero-sum game that inevitably pits younger workers struggling to enter the labor market against older ones already occupying precious slots.

As a result, a deep malaise has set in among young people. Some take to the streets in protest; others emigrate to Northern Europe or beyond in an epic brain drain of college graduates. But many more suffer in silence, living in their childhood bedrooms well into adulthood because they cannot afford to move out.

“They call us the lost generation,” said Coral Herrera Gómez, 33, who has a Ph.D. in humanities but still lives with her parents in Madrid because she cannot find steady work. “I’m not young,” she added over coffee recently, “but I’m not an adult with a job, either.”

[…]Indeed, experts warn of a looming demographic disaster in Southern Europe, which has among the lowest birth rates in the Western world. With pensioners living longer and young people entering the work force later — and paying less in taxes because their salaries are so low — it is only a matter of time before state coffers run dry.

“What we have is a Ponzi scheme,” said Laurence J. Kotlikoff, an economist at Boston University and an expert in fiscal policy.

He said that pay-as-you-go social security and health care were a looming fiscal disaster in Southern Europe and beyond. “If these fertility rates continue through time, you won’t have Italians, Spanish, Greeks, Portuguese or Russians,” he said. “I imagine the Chinese will just move into Southern Europe.”

The problem goes far beyond youth unemployment, which is at 40 percent in Spain and 28 percent in Italy.

[…]“This is the best-educated generation in Spanish history, and they are entering a job market in which they are underutilized,” said Ignacio Fernández Toxo, the leader of the Comisiones Obreras, one of Spain’s two largest labor unions. “It is a tragedy for the country.”

Yet many young people in Southern Europe see labor union leaders like Mr. Fernández, and the left-wing parties with which they have been historically close, as part of the problem. They are seen as exacerbating a two-tier labor market by protecting a caste of tenured older workers rather than helping younger workers enter the market.

For Dr. Kotlikoff, the solution is simple: “We have to change the labor laws. Not gradually, but quickly.”

Yet in Greece, Italy, Portugal and Spain, any change in national contracts involves complex negotiations among governments, labor unions and businesses — a delicate dance in which each faction fights furiously for its interests.

The left think that education creates jobs. But education by leftists creates ignorance and resentment. Capitalism, corporations, property rights, the rule of law, and tax cuts create jobs. The unions that control left-wing parties like the Democrats are the ones to blame for blocking labor law reform that would create economic growth.

It’s sad, but not too sad, because you have to remember that the young generation is mentally challenged, and they overwhelmingly turn out to vote for more and more socialism – higher taxes, global warming alarmism, and bigger social programs. They just don’t know what the effects will be of their voting until they reach their 30s.

Young people are economically ignorant, but at the same time incredibly arrogant in their ignorance. They want to be cool and trendy, and to vote the way they were taught to vote by the media and Hollywood celebrities. They want to vote for the Peter Pan economics that their teachers and professors taught them – using the red marking pen as a whip to scourge them into submission.

Consider this editorial in Investors Business Daily.

Excerpt:

Heading into the new year, there’s plenty of optimism about the stock market rising, corporate profits recovering and companies hiring. There’s just one problem on that last jobs item: Many will be overseas.

On those rare occasions when it’s not demonizing businesses as bastions of corporate greed, the White House and all its supporting players spend their time pondering why U.S. businesses, with mountains of cash, won’t use at least some of it to hire workers. A mere 900,000 jobs were created in 2010, while U.S. companies sat on $1.1 trillion in cash.

Last week, President Obama went so far as to meet with 20 CEOs for several hours over this, “asking the attendees to dialogue with him on a shared agenda focused on moving our economy forward,” according to a White House statement.

We don’t have any inside lines as to what was said, but news is trickling out the Obama administration is starting to think about doing something big to end the jobs drought in the U.S.

The something big would be to lower the U.S. corporate tax, which at 35%, stands as the second-highest in the developed world. President Obama only told NPR that he discussed “simplifying the system, hopefully lowering rates, broadening the base.”

If so, and if there are no accompanying sleights of hand to extract cash from businesses some other way, as some reports have it, it’s good news. Nothing inhibits the creation of U.S. jobs quite like high corporate taxes and their accompanying regulatory regime.

The fact is, companies sitting on cash aren’t doing nothing. They’re hiring overseas, creating 1.4 million jobs in 2010 alone, according to the Competitive Enterprise Institute.

That’s not because they prefer foreigners to Americans, but because the bad business climate here pushes them to do so.

The rest of the world is a vastly different place from Obama’s U.S., which is characterized by high taxes and protectionist set-asides for politically connected unions that shut out free trade.

In places like Indonesia, Singapore, Taiwan, India and Thailand, nobody demonizes business or blasts trade. Instead great efforts are made by the state and the private sector to draw in foreign investment by becoming more competitive than their rivals.

U.S. multinationals go to these places not because labor is cheap but because these policies also create boomtowns with lots of customers. Incredibly enough, sometimes overseas profits and jobs provide a lifeline for troubled U.S. companies back home. Take GM — today, its Brazil and Korea operations help keep it afloat.

Growth in the 8% to 9% range is typical in Asia.

The young are so busy swallowing slogans and persisting in a taxpayer-funded extended childhood in the schools that they cannot come up for air for a second to understand how the economy really works. All they do is get their worldview from Comedy Central and Michael Moore movies. And when reality asserts itself, they throw rocks through windows to protest as their entitlements are taken away. A generation of barbarians, raised by unionized taxpayer-funded socialist educators who know nothing about life outside of their sheltered ivory tower.

eading into the new year, there’s plenty of optimism about the stock market rising, corporate profits recovering and companies hiring. There’s just one problem on that last jobs item: Many will be overseas.On those rare occasions when it’s not demonizing businesses as bastions of corporate greed, the White House and all its supporting players spend their time pondering why U.S. businesses, with mountains of cash, won’t use at least some of it to hire workers. A mere 900,000 jobs were created in 2010, while U.S. companies sat on $1.1 trillion in cash. 

News

Everybody go vote in this Scientific American survey on global warming

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The survey is here on the Scientific American web site. (H/T ECM)

Questions:

  • Should climate scientists discuss scientific uncertainty in mainstream forums?
  • Judith Curry is:
  • What is causing climate change?
  • The IPCC, or Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is:
  • What should we do about climate change?
  • What should we do about climate change?
  • What is “climate sensitivity”?
  • Which policy options do you support?
  • How much would you be willing to pay to forestall the risk of catastrophic climate change?

My answers were:

  • Yes, it would help engage the citizenry.
  • a peacemaker.
  • natural processes
  • a corrupt organization, prone to groupthink, with a political agenda.
  • Nothing, we are powerless to stop it.
  • an unknown variable that climate scientists still do not understand
  • keeping science out of the political process
  • nothing

Take the survey! It’s important to send them a message.

Related posts

You can find my previous posts on climate change by clicking here.

Commentary

Thomas Sowell explains the economics of cutting health care costs

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The Democrats are talking a lot of about their plan to reduce the costs of health care. And they think that the way to do that is by having government take a bigger role in health care provision. Well, Thomas Sowell doesn’t like the idea that the government can reduce health care costs by using govenrment, and he’s written a four part series on it.

Here’s a quote from the first part about how Democrats attack the suppliers of health care products and services:

Despite all the demonizing of insurance companies, pharmaceutical companies or doctors for what they charge, the fundamental costs of goods and services are the costs of producing them.

If highly paid chief executives of insurance companies or pharmaceutical companies agreed to work free of charge, it would make very little difference in the cost of insurance or medications. If doctors’ incomes were cut in half, that would not lower the cost of producing doctors through years of expensive training in medical schools and hospitals, nor the overhead costs of running doctors’ offices.

What it would do is reduce the number of very able people who are willing to take on the high costs of a medical education when the return on that investment is greatly reduced and the aggravations of dealing with government bureaucrats are added to the burdens of the work.

Britain has had a government-run medical system for more than half a century and it has to import doctors, including some from Third World countries where the medical training may not be the best.

And a quote from the second part about how reducing costs means rationing:

There is no question that you can reduce the payments for medical care by having either a lower quantity or a lower quality of medical care. That has already been done in countries with government-run medical systems.

In the United States, the government has already reduced payments for patients on Medicare and Medicaid, with the result that some doctors no longer accept new patients with Medicare or Medicaid. That has not reduced the cost of medical care. It has reduced the availability of medical care, just as buying a pint of milk reduces the payment below what a quart of milk would cost.

Letting old people die instead of saving their lives will undoubtedly reduce medical payments considerably. But old people have that option already— and seldom choose to exercise it, despite clever people who talk about a “duty to die.”

A government-run system will take that decision out of the hands of the elderly or their families, and thereby “bring down the cost of medical care.” A stranger’s death is much easier to take, especially if you are a bureaucrat making that decision in Washington.

[…]You can even save money by cutting down on medications to relieve pain, as is already being done in Britain’s government-run medical system.

You can save money by not having as many high-tech medical devices like CAT scans or MRIs, and not using the latest medications. Countries with government-run medical systems have less of all these things than the United States has.But reducing these things is not “bringing down the cost of medical care.” It is simply refusing to pay those costs— and taking the consequences.

And a quote from the third part talks about free markets versus government price controls:

If you think the government can lower medical costs by eliminating “waste, fraud and abuse,” as some Washington politicians claim, the logical question is: Why haven’t they done that already?

Over the years, scandal after scandal has shown waste, fraud and abuse to be rampant in Medicare and Medicaid. Why would anyone imagine that a new government medical program will do what existing government medical programs have clearly failed to do?

If we cannot afford to pay for doctors, hospitals and pharmaceutical drugs now, how can we afford to pay for doctors, hospitals and pharmaceutical drugs, in addition to a new federal bureaucracy to administer a government-run medical system?

And a quote from the fourth part talks about equality versus liberty in health care:

What about insurance companies denying reimbursements for treatments? Does anyone imagine that a government bureaucracy will not do that?

Moreover, the worst that an insurance company can do is refuse to pay for medication or treatment. In some countries with government-run medical systems, the government can prevent you from spending your own money to get the medication or treatment that their bureaucracy has denied you. Your choice is to leave the country or smuggle in what you need.

However appalling such a situation may be, it is perfectly consistent with elites wanting to control your life. As far as those elites are concerned, it would not be “social justice” to allow some people to get medical care that others are denied, just because some people “happen to have money.”

But very few people just “happen to have money.” Most people have earned money by producing something that other people wanted. But getting what you want by what you have earned, rather than by what elites will deign to allow you to have, is completely incompatible with the vision of an elite-controlled world, which they call “social justice” or other politically attractive phrases.

What’s frustrating to me is how quickly people think of growing government as the solution to their problems. They don’t want to deal with paying for health care themselves. But what the government does to solve the high prices is fix prices and regulate the producers of health care, like doctors and medical device manufacturers. They make the supply smaller. But when the cost apparently goes down, people are signaled to use more health care. That makes the demand larger. And this is why there is a shortage of health care in countries that have health care provisioning highly regulated by the government.

You can even save money by cutting down on medications to relieve pain, as is already being done in Britain’s government-run medical system.

You can save money by not having as many high-tech medical devices like CAT scans or MRIs, and not using the latest medications. Countries with government-run medical systems have less of all these things than the United States has.But reducing these things is not “bringing down the cost of medical care.” It is simply refusing to pay those costs— and taking the consequences.