Over on Facebook, a lot of people have their knickers in a knot over this picture of Super Bowl parking rates from WTHR:
The irony is that most of the people who are shocked, shocked at expensive pricing for Super Bowl parking are the same people who were caterwauling a few months ago about how it was unfair that the 1% had so much money. Well, guess what folks? The vast majority of people who can afford to attend the Super Bowl in the first place are among the 1%, or within spitting distance of it, So on the one day when local businesses can make a killing rooking Mr. Big Shot 1% because he wants to park his Ferrari or Escalade within walking distance, you get all outraged over “price gouging.” I guess because someone’s actually making a profit off Mr. 1% rather than the government stealing it from him to pay off the debt from your Masters in Women’s Studies.
A parking space has no “intrinsic value.” It’s worth whatever people will pay for it. (And while we’re on the subject Marx’s Labor Theory of Value is bunk. Just in case you hadn’t figured that out yet.) Why should you care that a guy who’s already paid $1,200 for tickets has to cough up another $200 for parking? No one’s forcing Mr. 1% to park there. The market pays what the market will bear.
Over at Shall Not Be Questioned, Sebastian talks about a review of Adam Winkler’s Gunfight: The Battle over the Right to Bear Arms in America, an excerpt of which Clayton E. Cramer was kind enough to examine here. This particular post is notable as both Winkler and Cramer chime in in the comments. I would be most interested in reading a full-length review by Cramer of Gunfight, but I don’t think he’s done one yet.
You know the problem with doing one of these roundups on the European Debt Crises? I can search for “Euro” just about anytime of the day and night on Google News and come up with a dozen things I could potentially include. So just consider this a Whitman’s European Despair Sampler of possible bad news, as there’s a lot more where this came from:
European Finance Minsters on Greece’s latest bond offer: REJECTED.
In exchange for bailing out Greece yet again, Germany wants Greece to cede control over its tax rates and budget to an EU commission (i.e., Germany). It’s almost touching, this German naivety that Greeks can actually be compelled to obey German laws when they can’t even be compelled to obey Greek laws even now. But despite the fact that such government dictates would be ignored just like they are now, Greeks are still furious at the proposal. (Hat tip: Ace.)
And if Berlin doesn’t get to call the tune? “Germany and the Netherlands are likely to quit the eurozone rather than swallow an indefinite number of ‘unrequited transfers’ to the union’s crisis-stricken nations.”
What will European currency look like after a Euro-zone breakup? Like this.
Another month, another EuroZone bailout fund. The rules for the New and Improved Euro Bailout Fund is: 1. “Access [will] be made conditional on signing a new treaty on fiscal discipline.” 2. “Countries representing 85 percent of the fund’s capital [will make] decisions instead of unanimity among the eurozone 17 – will only apply to authorise ESM loans from existing funds.” So 1.) We get an entire new set of fiscal discipline guidelines for the PIIGs governments to ignore, and 2. Germany will call the tune, and the rest of the Eurozone will dance. At least until the next shuffling of the fiscal deck chairs.
Well, here’s a headline sure to fill investors with confidence: “From now on, in Europe, everything gets worse.”
Spanish unemployment hits 23.4%. And what happens when austerity means they can no longer pay people not to work? That’s he problem with cradle-to-grave European welfare state: sooner or later you run out of your grandchildren’s money…
The Soviet Union yesterday: “We pretend to work, and they pretend to pay us.” Greece today: “The old dynamic—with Greece pretending to make structural changes and its lenders pretending to save it from default—has become untenable.”
The whole EU illusion has been predicated on the assumption that Greeks can be made to behave like Germans, and that the EU could manage to forge a new, multi-ethnic, post-national identity in 20 years when Belgium hasn’t been able to do it in almost 200.
Cameron caves. Sadly, this behavior is far more in line with his previous record than his brief stint of standing on principle.
House Republicans are working to rescind the $100 billion IMF bailout fund Nancy Pelosi helped create. They may not succeed, but they might force the Obama Administration to defend backstopping the Euro at a time when the federal budget is still hemorrhaging red ink…
Last week: France’s credit rating makes our latest Euro bailout fund rock solid. This week: oops.
The threat of default is also holding up the merger of two Greek banks, maybe because it’s as yet unclear just how they’ll put European taxpayers on the hook for their losses. Once that’s figured out, I’m sure the merger will fly through…
Those bondholders who can’t stick it to taxpayers are looking at 70% losses for Greek debt.
LinkSwarm, or EuroDoom? LinkSwarm, or EuroDoom? Well, the first link has some of each, but with Davos just starting up, I imagine their will be a nice helping of EuroDoom ready to serve tomorrow, so let’s put up a LinkSwarm today:
Mark Steyn looks at the Costa Concordia sinking and smells a metaphor.
Myth: Newt Gingrich told his first wife he was divorcing her on her hospital deathbed. Fact: They had already agreed to a divorce, Newt was just visiting her, the tumor was benign, and Jackie Battley Gingrich is still alive. But who are you going to believe: Online liberal trolls, or the daughter who was actually in the hospital room at the time?
Jonah Goldberg discusses Newtzilla, but his best barbs are reserved for his opponent: “Romney seems like a creature put on Earth to blend in with the humans and report back what he finds. He clearly likes earthlings, and they in turn find him pleasant enough and surprisingly lifelike.”
Maureen Dowd on on Obama’s cocoon of self-aggrandizing victimization. Like all Dowd’s columns, it focuses on the trivial minutia of the-personal-as-political…and is all the more devastating for it. “The man who came to Washington on a wave of euphoria has had a presidency with all the joy of a root canal…The Obamas, especially Michelle, have radiated the sense that Americans do not appreciate what they sacrifice by living in a gilded cage. They’ve forgotten Rule No. 1 of politics: No one sheds tears for anyone lucky enough to live at the White House. And after four or eight years of public service, you are assured membership in the 1 percent club.”
After 12 months, what has the Arab Spring wrought in Egypt? Cairo Winter: “The reality of the past twelve months, however, has undone whatever high hopes one might have held. Egypt is now headed for radical theocratic, rather than liberal democratic, rule. And a befuddled Obama administration has failed to do anything to stop the coming disaster.” (Hat tip: Michael Totten, who adds: “I know a few Egyptian intellectuals and activists who are authentic liberals, but they’re not remotely a majority. The percentage of Egyptians who genuinely support most or all the tenets of Western-style liberal democracy is in the high single digits at best.”)
Japan suffers its first trade deficit since 1980. Remember all those stories from the 1980s about how Japan was going to take over the world? They were very similar to the ones we were getting about China just a few years ago…
Hat tips: Ace, Insta, The Corner, and the usual suspects.
France’s credit rating, that is. “Standard & Poor’s has downgraded France’s credit rating, French TV reported Friday, while several euro zone countries face the same fate later in the day, according to reports.” Maybe because that “strict” 2012 budget France passed still had a budget deficit of 4.5% of GDP, despite the EU having a “limit” (in much the same way the Professional Wrestling has a “limit” on fouls) of 3.0%.
The race to a Euro-crackup seems to have slowed down to merely a jaunty saunter this week. Maybe once everyone made it to the New Year without a sovereign default, the Eurocrats might have breathed a sigh, confident that there’s still a few miles yet before they went over the falls…
Germany could create a parallel currency—a new D-Mark, pegged at 1.0 to the euro. The German government would guarantee that holders of German government bonds could convert euro securities to new-D-mark instruments on a one-to-one basis up to some designated date, perhaps two years in the future. Private German contracts expressed in euros would switch to new-D-mark claims over the same period. The transition would likely feature a period in which the euro and new D-mark circulate as parallel currencies.
Other countries could follow a path toward reintroduction of their own currencies over a two-year period. For example, Italy could have a new lira at 1.0 to the euro. If all the euro-zone countries followed this course, the vanishing of the euro currency in 2014 would come to resemble the disappearance of the 11 separate European moneys in 2001.
Of course, this would mean that any bonds from the PIIGS with a maturity date more than two years in the future would trade at a heavy discount, but that’s far preferable to the looming Euro crash. But a bigger problem to this proposal actually being implemented is that it reverses the drive to centralize European bureaucracy, and Eurocrats will never stand for that.
This morning former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee endorsed David Dewhurst’s Senate campaign.
That’s a very good pickup for Dewhurst, and along with his previous Pro-Life endorsements, it shows that he’s doing better than expected among social conservatives.
In his endorsement, Huckabee said that “Lt. Gov. Dewhurst is a strong fiscal conservative, with a record to show for it,” However, Huckabee is not exactly known as a small government conservative. As far as I can tell, Dewhurst has yet to pick up any significant small government/budget cutting/Tea Party endorsements, which thus far Ted Cruz has monopolized (as well as picking up some social conservative endorsements of his own).
The MSM loves to play up the economic-conservatives-vs.-social-conservatives angle (primarily because they hate both, and intramural GOP brawls help increased the chances of their favored liberal candidates), but the most successful conservative politicians (Ronald Reagan most conspicuously) have been fusionists that embodied policies that appealed to both. Texas voters are socially conservative, but they also love low taxes and small government. Whoever wins the GOP nomination will have to appeal to both groups.
Like a squirrel hording nuts for winter, I’ve set aside a few tasty links for you to chew on:
George Will offers up a masterful column on why big government actually increases, rather than decreases, inequality.
Liberals have a rendezvous with regret. Their largest achievement is today’s redistributionist government. But such government is inherently regressive: It tends to distribute power and money to the strong, including itself.
Government becomes big by having big ambitions for supplanting markets as society’s primary allocator of wealth and opportunity. Therefore it becomes a magnet for factions muscular enough, in money or numbers or both, to bend government to their advantage.
[snip]
Not only does redistributionist government direct wealth upward; in asserting a right to do so, it siphons power into itself. A puzzling aspect of our politically contentious era is how little contention there is about the ethics of coercive redistribution by progressive taxation and other government “corrections” of social outcomes it considers unethical or unaesthetic.
This reticence, in an age in which political reticence is rare, reflects the difficulty of articulating principled defenses of these practices. They go undefended because they are generally popular with a public that misunderstands their net effects and because the practices are the political class’s vocation today. The big winners from these practices are that class and the interests adept at collaborating with it.
Government uses redistribution to correct social outcomes that offend it. But government rarely explains, or perhaps even recognizes, the reasoning by which it decides why particular outcomes of consensual market activities are incorrect. When taxes are levied not to efficiently fund government but to impose this or that notion of distributive justice, remember: Taxes are always coerced contributions to government, which is always the first, and often the principal, beneficiary of them.
Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindel makes the case for Rick Perry:
Mark Styen on the left’s idea of empathy: “In 2008, the Left gleefully mocked Sarah Palin’s live baby. It was only a matter of time before they moved on to a dead one.”
Speaking of Steyn, here are his wishes for a Happy New Year in his usual gloomy, depressing, acerbic way.
And speaking still further of Steyn, he once noted that China will get old before it gets rich. And just what is it like to be old in China now? It really sucks. It turns out Communism’s claims of taking better care of the helpless was just as big a lie as all communism’s other claims…
“Air time will be filled instead with extended news bulletins and ‘programs that promote traditional virtues and socialist core values.'”
I don’t think you want to do that, sunshine. People like their TV, and they need something to distract them from China’s imploding economy, general unrest, specific unrest among the Muslim population, unequal sex ratios, Communist Party suppression of dissent, and the endemic corruption. You want to give them more circuses, not less. Do they really think that The Happy Socialist Progress Hour is an acceptable substitute for a popular drama or comedy, or can they just not afford circuses anymore?
And if they can no longer afford the circuses, how soon will it be before they can no longer afford the bread?
