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You must prove your love for Obama, America

The Daily Caller on Obama’s quote from Wednesday: “But if you love me you’ve got to help me pass this bill.”

What’s that? Oh, you think you can make it out there with a new president, is that it? Listen up: you were nothing before you met Obama. Nothing. So how about you just do as you’re told and shut that pretty little mouth, America. Then we won’t have any problems.

brownsville: home of the brave

Someday, it won’t take bravery to live in Brownsville. Someday. ‘Til then, M.O.P.:

anil dash’s strawmen

Blogger/Entrepreneur Anil Dash sets up a conservative strawman to debate with in a seemingly eloquent piece on his site, and takes him down to the applause of many otherwise very intelligent people. None of them will ever read this reply, but I wanted to type it out before I forgot how much Dash’s appallingly poor logic and flippant stereotypes infuriated me.

Dash first explains that Jobs is:

…the anchor baby of an activist Arab muslim who came to the U.S. on a student visa and had a child out of wedlock. He’s a non-Christian, arugula-eating, drug-using follower of unabashedly old-fashioned liberal teachings from the hippies and folk music stars of the 60s. And he believes in science, in things that science can demonstrate like climate change and Pi having a value more specific than “3″, and in extending responsible benefits to his employees while encouraging his company to lead by being environmentally responsible.

And then Dash says that because Jobs has been successful, anyone who disagrees with any aspect of Jobs’s beliefs is inept at business and has no business voicing an opinion:

Every single person who’d attack Steve Jobs on any of these grounds is, demonstrably, worse at business than Jobs. They’re unqualified to assert that liberal values are bad for business, when the demonstrable, factual, obvious evidence contradicts those assertions.

In other words: Successful man A believes B—as do I—ergo, you’re either with us or you’re dead wrong. (Sounds a lot like a particular reviled Texan, but I digress.)

No, That’s Not Me

This strawman—Dash’s “they” who disagree with “liberal” values as espoused by Jobs—is an intellectual minstrel show. I do believe in the scientific viability of the theory of evolution. I believe in significantly more open borders. I believe we get a negative ROI on the Drug War.¹ I believe that America’s strength lies in the Rule of Law, and not in any single faith. I think that Victorian-era social mores have a destructive effect on society. I’m not a white, evangelical (or otherwise) Christian conservative who can be shoehorned into a Knuckle-Dragging Conservative ReThuglican™ stereotype, and to imply that disagreeing with modern liberalism means I am is disgraceful.

The worst part of this all-or-nothing approach is that in focusing on social values, it ignores the economic values that are the cornerstone of innovation and prosperity. Any student of post-colonial India who isn’t waist deep in Marxist fables could see that India tried ruthless egalitarianism, trading away economic growth and individual profit to ensure that the nation remained equal according to Gandhian notions of fairness. They made it hard for small-business owners at every step of their companies’ development: financing projects was a sin, hiring and firing workers were determined by almost anything but the content of one’s character, buying equipment required running to government officials like a twelve-year-old asking for his allowance, and any profits that were made after all of these hurdles were stripped from the entrepreneurs’ hands. Indians had a vibrant democracy with some of the greatest freedoms of any Asiatic people. But it meant nothing because individuals couldn’t thrive without worrying that they were going to be shaken down by a government who thought they were getting too big for their britches.

This system that assumes the worst of the most successful almost destroyed the Indian economy for three generations. It led to thousands fleeing India (like my own parents, and presumably some of Dash’s family), while those who couldn’t make it out were trapped in a vicious cycle of corruption and despair.

tl;dr

The myopic liberal economic values that pave this road to Hell with good intentions are what “they” are protecting us from. A pretty good chunk of conservatives like yours truly don’t give a damn if Jobs eats arugula. We don’t even care that he’s Arab-American. But we do care if the next Steve Jobs is thwarted from his dreams at every turn because Washington (or Albany or Sacramento) has decided that stopping his future greed through taxation and regulation is more important than allowing his current innovation through freedom from either. Social freedom is as important as Dash says it is. But without economic freedom, innovation will never leave the cocktail napkin.

¹ Incidentally, these last two are explicitly supported by those evil, conservative-backing Koch brothers everyone’s getting so many emotional hemorrhoids about.

updated 9/9 Added the link to the original post, because I’m not a jerk. This is why late night posts are terrible. Also, Anil himself commented below, so…that’s pretty awesome.

sometimes, we have to make sacrifices

sometimes, we have to make sacrifices, a photo by Nikhil Bhat on Flickr.

Talking with my mom about the difficulties we’ve faced in NY during Hurricane Irene.

krugman jumps the shark (UPDATED)

So the Krugman post was a hoax, albeit a funny one. So while Krugman didn’t say that Tuesday’s East Coast quake could’ve been an economic stimulant, this Nobel laureate did, in fact, say this about the Japanese earthquake in March:

And yes, this does mean that the nuclear catastrophe could end up being expansionary, if not for Japan then at least for the world as a whole. If this sounds crazy, well, liquidity-trap economics is like that — remember, World War II ended the Great Depression.

And this, about 9/11:

Nonetheless, we must ask about the economic aftershocks from Tuesday’s horror.These aftershocks need not be major. Ghastly as it may seem to say this, the terror attack — like the original day of infamy, which brought an end to the Great Depression — could even do some economic good.

So yeah, it’s not beyond the realm of possibility that he’d say something like that. As a commenter on the hoax-exposing post says:

The dude 0wns [sic] the Broken Window Fallacy. We should rename it in his honor to the Broken Krugman Fallacy.

Original post after the jump.
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pocket ball washer

Every man needs one.

This is how we roll.

The Ruins, Talisay City, Philippines.

send these troopseses only!

Star Wars translated into Chinese, and then translated back to English.

Episode III: The Backstroke of the West.

(c.f. Macho Business Donkey Wrestler)

northeast flight patterns

For those in the Northeast Corridor, the WSJ explains why NYC’s three area airports suck so hard:

In 2008, the FAA imposed restrictions on airline scheduling at Newark, similar to limits placed on New York’s other two major airports, Kennedy and La Guardia. At Newark, airlines can’t schedule more than 81 “operations”—takeoffs and landings combined—per hour. But because airlines schedule to the maximum limit, any delay during the day pushes the next hour over its capacity limit, then the next and the next. There’s little ability for the airport to catch up unless airlines cancel flights, which they have been doing more often, sacrificing regional airlines and their small-jet flights for takeoff and landing slots for larger jets with more passengers.

And earlier in the same article, now it’s not just New York’s airspace that’s the bottleneck:

Much of the bottleneck is in Washington, D.C. Both flights out of Newark have to fly through heavily congested airspace in the Washington area, Delta says, where much of the traffic headed into and out of the Northeast meshes together, creating a choke point for the nation’s air travel.

The reason the limits were imposed is that air traffic controllers are using decades-old equipment that requires more padding between flights in a given airspace to avoid collisions. If this weren’t a government operation, Mother Jones would have done eighteen stories on ATC’s negligence and how it’s killing babies, puppies, and immigrant mothers. And Matt Taibbi would’ve been full of anti-capitalist butthurt to boot.

Again:anti-Chinese protectionism only hurts us

A National Bureau of Economic Research paper confirms that protectionists’ hand-wringing over China has zero national interest in mind:

The authors conclude that the surge in Chinese imports was responsible for about 15 percent of European technological change for the whole period from 2000 to 2007, but the impact now seems to be growing stronger. … This suggests that increased import competition with China has caused a significant technological upgrading in European firms in the affected industries through both faster diffusion and innovation.”

[ellipses mine]

Competition makes us stronger.