Paradocracy

If anyone's wondering how the socialist paradise of California addresses the perceived problem of homelessness, please read on. So today, the Department of Housing determined from the following passage that every unit requires a designated living room: "The dwelling unit must have a least [sic] one bedroom or living/sleeping room for every two persons."  Of course, any individual remotely educated in the art of logical deduction, or computer programming, will attest to the importance of comprehending language and syntax before engaging in argumentation over meaning. So in this case, it seems as though the bureaucrats at the Department of Housing are failures in the language department, failing altogether to grasp the denotative meaning of "or" in distinguishing between the basic requirements for any unit. In this case, the operative word "or" affords that brilliant condition of one case precluding the other. Therefore, if said unit possesses...

The Nation , in a video entitled People in Denmark Are a Lot Happier Than People in the United States , nearly perfectly illuminates the non-economist angle on a matter that can only be formatted to tell a convenient story on why democratic socialism beats the free market . First, the United States of America today hardly encapsulates the spirit of the unbridled free market, more closely resembling only a vestige of it while moving increasingly toward the more fashionable socialism embraced in this cunning and graphically-appeasing caricature of life under both systems. Of course, the United States fails to even break the top-10 in the free-market rankings , where it has fallen less than gracefully to number seventeen. As always, feel free to watch the video here to draw your own conclusions. The following evaluation is merely my own. Thanks for reading. Under the Economic Eye The recently-released video entitled People in Denmark Are a Lot Happier Than People in the United ...

What's powering the Dow? With the DJIA closing at an all-time closing-bell high of 21,637.74, much fanfare surrounds the markets and the potential for Dow 30,000 ! Is all the hype justified? And what does all of this mean to the average investor seeking returns for retirement? This article points out the perils of U.S. equities and the real character and quality of the perceived boom. The Dow tracks the price-weighted average of 30 large publicly-owned companies traded on the NASDAQ or NYSE. The index includes the likes of McDonald's, Boeing, American Express, IBM, Apple, Visa, Walmart, Microsoft and Nike, among others. Along with the NASDAQ Composite and S&P 500, the DJIA functions as one of the major stock indices in the United States, representing the major moves of the trading day. When first published in 1885, the Dow posted 62.76, peaking at 78.38 during the summer of 1890. Even as early as 1987, the Dow peaked just above 2,700 before falling 508 points ...

The price of gas, similar to the price of any hybrid industrial-consumer good, will fluctuate commensurate with the amount of market activity and confidence in the prevailing money. In the case of the United States, global demand for the USD is artificially high while aggregate demand from its consumers lags along with their shrinking pocketbooks, plateauing personal incomes and virtually nonexistent savings. The Federal Reserve has commissioned studies concluding a nearly direct (0.99) correlation between monetary expansion and general price increases. "Under fiat standards, we find the same extremely high correlation between money growth and inflation that has been found by other researchers who have studied this relationship. In addition, we find that the strength of the relationship does not vary with the measure of money used: The correlation between money growth—measured by primary money, secondary money, or M2—and inflation is always 0.99." Moreover, the ef...

The universal acceptance of money as either a need or an entitlement has wholly mutated the very foundation of survival, whereby inhabitants of this world consistently arrive at the radical conclusion that they may sustain their lives through the abstract reworking or refinement of the mechanisms which assess, tax and extort the enjoyed benefits of others. This transformation of the general inhabitant’s psychology has ubiquitously erased the organic obligations for survival which are commensurate with the innate state of being on this planet and its minimum requirement for survival. Instead of laboring for its attainment, the centralized and highly-manipulable world of fiat currency has completely and systematically minimized or outright eliminated exposure to that level of existential obligation, that exposure to the inherently risky and uncertain circumstances of fighting each day for survival, harvesting and hunting for one's food, building one's shelter and seeking f...

Over the past 21 years, United States nominal GDP has averaged 8.69% annual growth while MZM money stock has averaged yearly growth of 18.05%, a net difference of 9.36%. While the headline GDP figures may look impressive upon first glance, perpetuating frothy confidence in the markets, a look behind the curtain reveals a sobering difference. Now, the math cited above surely illustrates a problematic incongruity between the perceived productive capacity of a nation and what could either be captured through the PCE or else described as sleight of hand by the manipulative money-printers at the central bank. PCE data show an annual increase of 7.19%, leaving an unaccounted 2.17%. So, the PCE data either fail to capture the total increase of general prices or some of this money has been shipped elsewhere, thereby temporarily postponing the eventual rise of prices. As it turns out, the latter scenario is indeed supported by the widening trade deficit , unaccounted price incr...

Housing is traditionally an asset that retains its market value across time, unlike a car which proves to preserve hardly any of its original value over its lifetime of use.  The reason that property is so valuable in the San Francisco Bay Area, for instance, where property values ubiquitously outstrip the values of the homes built on them, is not because the houses are so elegant, but principally because of downzoning and vertical restrictions on development, the sky-high levels of government-backed credit made available at ultra low rates of interest to buyers who foresee untenable rates of real returns or unmanageably expensive total costs of ownership.  Throughout the 1960s, before the end of Bretton Woods and the fiat frenzy that resulted in the dollar losing two-thirds of its real value over the 1970s and even further bouts of massive inflation during the following decades, the median sales price of homes in the United States climbed by a tepid 5% per annum. Since 19...

More economic-illiterate political commentary was released today from the Detroit Free Press, a publication notorious for shortsighted commentary on current events. Their recent article, entitled  Keep job creation top state priority , refreshes the economic air with a splash of more politically-convenient potpourri, covering the lamentable stench of economic decay in the city which once stood as the Arsenal of Democracy , the bastion of productivity , and the economic envy of the world. The article begins by claiming, "The state still needs more good-paying jobs, and it should also diversify its portfolio of industries." Now, jobs are the means to the desired ends of productive and useful goods. Theoretically, jobs and their creation are nothing more than an organic byproduct of necessity, that is until they are rendered superfluous by still further advancements in automation which may relatively inexpensively, reliably and indefatigably produce the same or better output...

The activities of government are made reprehensible not merely by the systematic thievery which sustains their administrations, but by the exhaustion of resources following their execution. In spending some time at the nearby Department of Motor Vehicles, the United States Postal Service or the local police precinct, one is sure to encounter notoriously long lines , dispirited efforts and attitudes of indifference, the total of which would surely translate to opportunity for any competitor in private enterprise. However, in the public sector this is all too familiar and oddly acceptable. This phenomenon is principally due to the complete absence of competition, as government is and has always been the chief proprietor and issuer of monopolization. As it turns out, government is in the business of producing theatrical mirages of value at the expensive exhaustion of human capital, physical resources and the consumer goods that the regular working class competes to earn in the ...