The Other McCain : Page 2134 : "One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up."

Consumer Confidence Sags; Fed Wants More Stimulus; Gold Gains $38 an Ounce

Posted on August 30, 2011Comments

The relationship between these factors is not entirely coincidental:

Gold prices soared Tuesday as Chicago Federal Reserve Bank President Charles Evans called for further monetary easing. The rally continued in after-hours trading after the Fed’s latest minutes from the Federal Open Market Committee meeting in August showed a growing number of presidents calling for more stimulus.
Gold for December delivery surged $38.20 to settle at $1,829.80 an ounce at the Comex division of the New York Mercantile Exchange.

The FOMC report is online here. It’s worth noting that gold is still below the record price near $1,900 it set Aug. 22, but the talk of more “easing” (Fed-speak for deliberate inflation) suggests that predictions of gold prices reaching $2,500 within the next few months are not unrealistic. My point is that rising gold prices cannot be dismissed as a mere speculative “bubble” so long as inflation undermines the dollar, bad fiscal policy undermines treasuries, and gloomy economic prospects undermine stocks.

The stock market nowadays is kind of a perverse measurement, as the talk of more stimulus from the Fed was cited as the cause for Tuesday’s $20 gain in the Dow Jones Industrial Average. In other word (a) the economy sucks, so (b) the Fed will do more stimulus, which means (c) cheap money for major financial institutions, so (d) buy, buy, buy!

If such dubious Wall Street logic worries you, you’re not alone:

Confidence among U.S. consumers plunged to the lowest level in more than two years as Americans’ outlooks for employment and incomes soured.
The Conference Board’s index slumped to 44.5, the weakest since April 2009, from a revised 59.2 reading in July, figures from the New York-based research group showed today. It was the biggest point drop since October 2008. A separate report showed home prices declined for a ninth month.

Let me point out something curious: Even though unemployment is around 9%, it’s been more or less stable at that rate for the past year. If the unemployment rate is not getting worse, then why is consumer confidence trending downward?

Simple answer: Inflation.

People get a lingering sense of unease when inflation silently erodes their earnings, even if they don’t have any reason to fear losing their jobs. And the biggest single asset that most people own is their homes, the value of which has actually been declining all year long. So they’re paying higher prices for consumer goods and services, even while the value of their homes decline, and it is thus hardly surprising that consumer confidence is down.

Think about what all this means: The housing market in the tank, consumer confidence down, Fed officials calling for “QE3.” As I’ve said before, “None Dare Call It Stagflation” — i.e., a return to the economic swamp into which Keynesian policy led us in the 1970s. And if this analysis is correct, gold is actually a bargain at $1,830.

However, because I don’t want to accused of hyping a “bubble,” here’s a video in which Alix Jones of TheStreet.com interviews market strategist Phil Streible, who is bearish on gold:

Streible may be right and I may be wrong. What do you think?

Against Radical Egalitarianism

Posted on August 30, 2011Comments

A friend responded to my earlier post about the so-called “gender gap” with an e-mail pointing out several other statistical problems in that feminist argument. Replying to my friend’s e-mail, I found myself elaborating an argument that eventually reached nearly 1,200 words. Because it explains a lot of the fundamental principles involved in my political orientation, I thought I’d share the e-mail with readers:

Good points all, Adrienne. The real key here is understanding that the “gap” is about average differences between groups of people. This involves a sort of social-science artifact that, when reported sloppily (as is too often the case), creates illusions of widespread unfair discrimination.
It’s like aggregated test scores as a measure of school performance. We are often led to think that if School A reports that its 5th-graders average 93 on the standardized test while School B’s 5th-graders score 83 on average, then School A is “better” than School B. Yet you can come back and check test scores five years later and find that, while neither the personnel nor the curricula have undergone any significant change at either school, School B’s average will have increased to 89 while School A has declined to 87.
What happened? Well, a low-income apartment complex was built in the School A district, while a new upscale development of McMansions was built in School B’s district. So what was previously the clearly “better” school now has a larger number of 5th-graders from a lower socioeconomic background (and standardized test scores tend to reflect such factors), while the previously inferior school now has a few more 5th-graders from privileged backgrounds.
This kind of statistical perception problem occurs whenever we aggregate people into categorical groups — sex, race, whatever — and then make the differences between group averages the basis for a policy aimed at bringing about equality between these groups. But such policies almost never achieve their stated goals, and in the process usually have harmful unintended consequences, not the least of which is the fostering of unnecessary resentments between members of the groups which become playthings in these social enginering experiments. Continue reading Against Radical Egalitarianism →

What Accounts for the ‘Gender Gap’ in Pay? Statistics Prove: It’s Lazy Women

Posted on August 30, 2011August 30, 2011Comments

OK, the statistics don’t actually prove the assertion in the headline — although it sure got your attention, didn’t it, ladies? — and neither do statistics “prove” the common feminist claim that discrimination explains the so-called “gender gap.” But if we examine the number of hours worked per week, two highly relevant statistics emerge:

Men are more likely to hold full-time jobs — According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), about 60 million men were employed full-time in 2007, compared to about 42 million women. Men were thus 42% more likely than women to be working full-time.
Men work more hours — “Full-time” is defined as working 35 hours per week or more. The BLS reports that among the 21.8 million people working more than 40 hours per week, 15.3 million are men (70%) and 6.5 million are women (30%).

So the feminist assertion that women are paid 75 cents on the dollar (or 87 cents or whatever other number is used) compared to men is an absurdity, based on invalid apples-to-oranges comparisons that don’t take account of average differences in the actual working experiences of men and women.

Kay Hymowitz explains this in an article at City Journal called, “Why the Gender Gap Won’t Go Away. Ever.” Hymowitz makes the point that many women choose what has been called “the Mommy Track” in occupational specialties, so that feminist ax-grinders who constantly grumble about the “gender gap” are, in fact, arguing against women’s own choices.

One final point: Being a mother is hard work in its own right. For several years, my wife stayed home with our six children. She would sometimes encounter people — usually other women — who, when they learned of her “just a mom” status would say, “Oh, you don’t work? That must be nice.” As if being the mother of six children wasn’t harder work than is done by most full-time employed people (including her husband).

To understand feminism as a war against stay-at-home motherhood, read Carolyn Graglia’s excellent book, Domestic Tranquility. Being “just a mom” is a choice that feminists don’t want women to have.

P.S.: When I include Amazon Associates book links at the end of an item like this, it is not merely because I get a 4% commission on sales, although I make no apologies for being a shameless capitalist blogger. But I include the links because as Ronald Reagan said, it’s not that our liberal friends are ignorant, rather that they know so many things that aren’t true. I want to provide liberals an opportunity to discover how many “facts” they have been indoctrinated to believe are actually lies, and I also want conservatives to acquaint themselves with facts and logic that debunk common liberal misconceptions.

Vice President Marco Rubio?

Posted on August 30, 2011August 30, 2011Comments

by Smitty

That’s Krauthammer’s take:

He checks all the boxes. We saw his charm. He’s got the right ideology. He’s well spoken. And he’s got a great story, second generation immigrant. I mean, he gives a story of hope and restoration, which would be I think his theme. I think he’s prohibitively the favorite for number two. And at the very least he’ll be the keynote speaker if he’s not going to be number two.

I don’t know. The GOP ?/Rubio ticket is going to have tough sledding against the Democrat’s Wasserman-Schultz/Schumer ticket. Just sayin’.

Lowlife Who Pirated My Video Apologizes for Smearing Michele Bachmann

Posted on August 30, 2011August 30, 2011Comments

Nothing like an attorney’s letter to produce contrition:

I want to apologize for misusing Stacey Robert McCain’s original video . . . I was angry so I decided to take Mrs. Bachmann’s line out of context to make her seem more overtly racist in light of her recent signing of that Iowa marriage pledge that said black children were better off under slavery than in Obama’s America. Whether or not I dislike Michele Bachmann, it wasn’t right to deliver a dishonest blow like that. I wanted to apologize to Mr. McCain and all of you directly. . . .
I have removed the video from my Youtube channel.

My attorney is considering what further action will be necessary, and I have contacted the Bachmann campaign. There are two injured parties, you see. This “On Knees” blogger’s claim that his misleading distortion of Bachmann’s speech was retaliation for her having signed the Iowa marriage pledge is rather interesting in terms of demonstrating malice. But Bachmann’s potential claim for libelous defamation is irrelevant to my potential claim of copyright infringement in having my video pirated for such a purpose.

UPDATE: Welcome, Instapundit readers!

Libertarians In Space

Posted on August 30, 2011August 30, 2011Comments

by Smitty

Yesterday I wrote a post generally lamenting the fact that the U.S. space program is languishing. That we’ve traded the gosh-wow inspiration of boldly going where no human has gone before in for standing in socialist lines, where everyone has gone before, consuming a significant chunk of their lives.

And I mentioned that I was glad not to be libertarian on this topic, which was deemed a careless friendly-fire incident on Twitter by @GaltsGirl. I asked that she use this as a teachable moment, and she did: Continue reading Libertarians In Space →

‘Books Have No Real Future’?

Posted on August 30, 2011August 29, 2011Comments

Excuse me for disagreeing with Bill Quick about that, as I sit in my home office surrounded by a vast personal library of hundreds of books. The idea that we are transitioning permanently and irrevocably to an electronic future, where words printed on paper are of no value, would seem contradicted by various facts.

Is your computer hooked up to a printer? How often do you buy ink cartridges and paper for that printer? Is there a a book, magazine or newspaper within arm’s reach of where you’re sitting this very minute? Do you have a business card — ink on paper — in your pocket or purse? Do you have printed memos or presentations on your office desk?

Digital enthusiasts are to be forgiven for loving what they do and doing what they love, but you can love your Kindle without succumbing to active hostility toward the dead-tree medium, per se. And it struck me years ago, after reading Sven Birkert’s brilliant book The Gutenberg Elegies, that there are certain intrinsic values of the printed book which may be lost by a hasty abandonment of dead-tree publishing.

Having learned to read with books, and having learned to write with pencil and paper — an experience I share with all literate adults, including Bill Quick — I am skeptical that current or future youth would obtain the same educational value, qualitatively, by learning their lessons from electronic media.

We see evidence of this problem already: Some educators have increasingly abandoned old-fashioned drill-work and recitation, based on the assumption that students don’t need to know facts, but rather need only the “research skills” to look up whatever they wish to know. Unfortunately, that pedagogical stance doesn’t encourage kids to develop the knowledge base necessary to evaluate critically whatever turns up on Google.

We have witnessed a plague of plagiarism and cheating among college students, and have also seen astonishing incidences of young journalists publishing plagiarized or fictionalized “news.” Many kids nowadays aren’t taught the value of knowing — committing facts to memory — and this deficit, an unforeseen consequence of the skills-based approach to education, impedes their intellectual abilities in many ways. Excuse me for thinking that this problem is closely related to the digital enthusiasms encouraged during the 1990s (after Al Gore invented the Internet), and fostered by the thoughtless cut-and-paste habits that too many students employ routinely when doing online research.

Pronouncing the doom of the book may be emotionally satisfying to those of us who nowadays write mainly for an online readership (and read mainly online writers), but excuse my old-fashioned mind for the concern that something valuable might be lost in a too-hasty race from print to pixels.

(Hat-tip: Instapundit, whose frustrations with an automated phone-tree ought to be an object lesson in the perils of technological “progress.”)