Group items tagged

Legalisation promises three benefits.

TPM spoke with activists working on both issues and they identified several reasons marijuana legalization may have a less bumpy road along the way to earning nationwide support.

“The argument for legalization has really been sort of couched in medical usage. You still have to sell marriage. Not everyone knows a gay person or a gay person who wants to marry their same-sex partner. Everyone knows someone who smokes weed,” the consultant said.

In theory, support for pot legalization could stall at the current 50/50 split. But one key trend, the same driving the seemingly inexorable rise of support for gay marriage, makes that outcome highly unlikely. Young people overwhelmingly support legalization. And diehard opposition is heavily concentrated among older voters.

“What I would really pinpoint as the source of this last four year nudge up where we jumped up 10 points is the economy,” Altieri said. “People always knew we shouldn’t be giving such harsh punishments to those arrested for marijuana offenses and spending hundreds of millions of dollars to put them in jail. It became much more imperative when we had the financial crisis and then we’re seeing the debt ceiling.”

Washington and Colorado’s legalization law also set the stage for a pivotal moment where Attorney General Eric Holder will decide whether to intervene in those states and arrest those involved in the (still federally illegal) marijuana trade.

Modern states have borders; weak and failed states have frontiers.

It would seem from this accounting that the Obama administration's decision to militarily intervene in Libya (along with its NATO allies) was a blunder of the first magnitude.

More to the point, because we still do not know all the intelligence the administration had available at the time regarding Gadhafi's intentions in Benghazi, to condemn administration officials outright is too easy a judgment at this date.

But there is a conundrum here that those who favored intervention -- in Libya as well as elsewhere -- do not own up to. That is, short of deploying large numbers of ground troops, the ability of the U.S. government to rebuild weakened or collapsed states is severely limited.

Toppling an evil regime or stopping a war is a profoundly moral act.

So, is this one of Hayek’s technical problems or is this an economic one?

This is different on the internet.

These methods only work if you think that the best site about ducks is either (a) the site that has the most money to pay Altavista for prime “duck” listing, (b) the site that has the most “ducks” in its text, or (c) the site that was most appealing to your employees tasked with finding duck sites.

All of the questions of organizing activity on the internet are solved (when they are, in fact, solved successfully) using Hayekian decentralized knowledge.

We all know where the best economic knowledge lies, in the many and never the few.

Rather, voters fall back on political philosophy as a shortcut to reach their summary choice -- the only one they have.

He followed in the footsteps of the popular Bill Clinton, who made his mark by declaring that the age of big government was over and ending welfare as we knew it. Both cases reflect the pressure on liberals to kiss the we-don't-favor-big-government ring before they can hope that the majority of Americans will give their message a chance.

On it goes. Moreover, one must assume that for every government capture by special interests the press reveals, there are quite a few others not aired.

But it is a serious mistake to hold that this is the main attraction, or ignore the Tea Party's key message: namely, that the government is not working for us, is not responsive to our needs, is not hearing our voices.

Readers may wonder why, if it is true that large segments of the public are open to populist appeals, did Occupy Wall Street fare so poorly?

A populist narrative must clearly focus on special interests, even admitting that they may include some with liberal feathers. And it must call for liberating the government from special interests so that it might once again serve the people. This is a thesis that could unite liberals with many others who have many very sound reasons to be furious.

The next step, a major first step to return the government to one for the people, by the people, is actually a relative easy one to outline: rolling back the negative impact of the Supreme Court's Citizens United decision.

The Argument for Airstrikes

The counterargument is that the United States is engaged in a unique sort of war.

The primary unit is the individual, and the individuals -- particularly the commanders -- isolate themselves and make themselves as difficult to find as possible. Given their political intentions and resources, sparse forces dispersed without regard to national boundaries use their isolation as the equivalent of technological stealth to make them survivable and able to carefully mount military operations against the enemy at unpredictable times and in unpredictable ways.

The argument for using strikes from unmanned aerial vehicles is that it is not an attack on an individual any more than an artillery barrage that kills a hundred is an attack on each individual. Rather, the jihadist movement presents a unique case in which the individual jihadist is the military unit.

Ignoring the question of whether jihadist operations are in accordance with the rules and customs of war, their failure to carry a "fixed distinctive sign recognizable at a distance" is a violation of both the Hague and Geneva conventions. This means that considerations given to soldiers under the rules of war do not apply to those waging war without insignia.

There is of course a greater complexity to this: attacking targets in countries that are not in a state of war with the United States and that have not consented to these attacks. For better or worse, the declaration of war has not been in fashion since World War II. But the jihadist movement has complicated this problem substantially.

There are two points I have been driving toward.

The enemy strategy is to draw the United States into an extended conflict that validates its narrative that the United States is permanently at war with Islam. It wants to force the United States to engage in as many countries as possible. From the U.S. point of view, unmanned aerial vehicles are the perfect weapon because they can attack the jihadist command structure without risk to ground forces. From the jihadist point of view as well, unmanned aerial vehicles are the perfect weapon because their efficiency allows the jihadists to lure the United States into other countries and, with sufficient manipulation, can increase the number of innocents who are killed.

In warfare, enemies will try to get you to strike at what they least mind losing. The case against strikes by unmanned aerial vehicles is not that they are ineffective against specific targets but that the targets are not as vital as the United States thinks. The United States believes that the destruction of the leadership is the most efficient way to destroy the threat of the jihadist movement. In fact it only mitigates the threat while new leadership emerges. The strength of the jihadist movement is that it is global, sparse and dispersed. It does not provide a target whose destruction weakens the movement. However, the jihadist movement's weakness derives from its strength: It is limited in what it can do and where.     

All that said, income inequality does matter—for both politics and the economy.

At the same time, wage growth for the median earner has slowed since 1973.

It’s worth noting that over this same period of time, inequality of work hours increased too. The top earners worked a lot more and most other Americans worked somewhat less. That’s another reason why high earners don’t occasion more resentment: Many people understand how hard they have to work to get there.

For a variety of reasons, single-occupancy households in the United States are at an all-time high.

Many studies suggest that above a certain level more money brings only marginal increments of happiness.

Why is the top 1 percent doing so well?

Many of the other high earners are also connected to finance.

After Wall Street, Kaplan and Rauh identify the legal sector as a contributor to the growing spread in earnings at the top.

If we are looking for objectionable problems in the top 1 percent of income earners, much of it boils down to finance and activities related to financial markets. And to be sure, the high incomes in finance should give us all pause.

some investors opt for a strategy of betting against big, unexpected moves in market prices.

if you bet against unlikely events, most of the time you will look smart and have the money to validate the appearance. Periodically, however, you will look very bad

If you plan to stay with an investment bank for ten years or less, most of the people playing this investing strategy will make out very well most of the time. Everyone’s time horizon is a bit limited and you will bring in some nice years of extra returns and reap nice bonuses.

For the people actually investing the money, there’s barely any downside risk other than having to quit the party early.

Perhaps more important, government bailouts minimize the damage to creditors on the downside.

Neither the Treasury nor the Fed allowed creditors to take any losses from the collapse of the major banks during the financial crisis. The U.S. government guaranteed these loans, either explicitly or implicitly.

For better or worse, we’re handing out free options on recovery, and that encourages banks to take more risk in the first place.

And it’s not just the taxpayer cost of the bailout that stings. The financial disruption ends up throwing a lot of people out of work down the economic food chain, often for long periods.

The upshot of all this for our purposes is that the “going short on volatility” strategy increases income inequality.

There’s a second reason why the financial sector abets income inequality: the “moving first” issue.

These two features of the problem—“going short on volatility” and “getting there first”—are related.

It’s as if the major banks have tapped a hole in the social till and they are drinking from it with a straw.

We have to find a way to prevent or limit major banks from repeatedly going short on volatility at social expense. No one has figured out how to do that yet.

We’ll see if these reforms constrain excess risk-taking in the long run. There are reasons for skepticism.

Virtually any asset position can be used to bet long odds, one way or another. It is naive to think that underpaid, undertrained regulators can keep up with financial traders, especially when the latter stand to earn billions by circumventing the intent of regulations while remaining within the letter of the law.

Another root cause of growing inequality is that the modern world, by so limiting our downside risk, makes extreme risk-taking all too comfortable and easy.

Yet bankers who take bad risks (provided those risks are legal) simply do not end up with bad outcomes in any absolute sense.

That’s an underappreciated way to think about our modern, wealthy economy: Smart people have greater reach than ever before, and nothing really can go so wrong for them.

How about a world with no bailouts? Why don’t we simply eliminate the safety net for clueless or unlucky risk-takers so that losses equal gains overall? That’s a good idea in principle, but it is hard to put into practice.

Bank bailouts may sound quite interventionist, and indeed they are, but in relative terms they probably were the most libertarian policy we had on tap. It meant big one-time expenses, but, for the most part, it kept government out of the real economy (the General Motors bailout aside).

So what will happen next?

Yet neither is another crisis immediately upon us. The underlying dynamic favors excess risk-taking, but banks at the current moment fear the scrutiny of regulators and the public and so are playing it fairly safe.

We Millennials have all the same ludicrous delusions of grandeur as our parents, but now, we’re ready to shuck capitalist gospel out the window. The Boomers call us spoiled, and ask us to do more with less, telling us to tamper our dreams. But the best thing we Americans have going for us is our entitlement, sans the free-market faith.

The Boomers are right that it all smacks of entitlement. We are entitled. The world, and this country in particular, is awash in capital. With the billions floating in and out of this city every day, it’s amazing that you can walk around Manhattan and not end up with at least a grand worth of cash sifting around in your shoes like beach sand. The big lie is that the coffers are empty and budgets must be balanced. What a fucking joke. American workers have spent hundreds of years building this country and amassing this wealth, and it’s about time we claimed the vast majority of it.

Having a friend or a relative working in the IRS is not going to save you from paying taxes, but such a situation is a rarity elsewhere.

Conservatives want to help the poor, but only if they can demonstrate that they deserve it by jumping through a series of hoops meant to demonstrate their willingness to work, to stay off drugs, and preferably to settle down into a nice, stable, bourgeois family life.

2) A Basic Income Guarantee might be required on libertarian grounds as reparation for past injustice.

3. A Basic Income Guarantee might be required to meet the basic needs of the poor.

But the passage above suggests that he may have had an even stronger idea in mind - that a basic income is not merely a permissible option but a mandatory requirement of democratic legitimacy - a policy that must be instituted in order to justify the coercive power that even a Hayekian state would exercise over its citizens.

2) The GOP's Obamacare boomerang.

3) The Republican Party is horribly unpopular.

4) The Republican Party devalued hostage taking.

5) They split their party.

But there's one silver lining for Republicans:

But it’s extremely implausible that GMOs in general, all expressing different genes, are uniformly dangerous for consumers. The scientific consensus has landed squarely on the conclusion that consumption of approved GMOs is safe.

Her claims were based almost entirely on rough correlation with rising consumption of GMOs since their debut in the 1990s. By such a flimsy standard of evidence, one might cheekily suggest that the real culprit is organic food, sales of which have also boomed over the same period—but good luck persuading Whole Foods to sponsor a panel about that.

The contradiction of defending this paper at an event dedicated to the virtues of transparency was seemingly lost on the panel.