Month: June 2008

Nunn of the Above

Open left has the following VP short list of Obama, and I thought that I would put my 2 cents in:

  • Evan Bayh (Sen-IN)
    • DLC Squish.
  • Joe Biden (Sen-DE)
    • Only if McCain chooses Joe Biden.
  • Wes Clark (Gen-AR)
  • Hillary Clinton (Sen-NY)
  • Tom Daschle (Sen-SD)
    • Sorry, but he screams out milquetoast.
  • Chris Dodd (Sen-CT)
    • Recent revalations about his house loans rule him out.
  • James Jones (Gen-MO)
  • Tim Kaine (Gov-VA)
  • John Kerry (Sen-MA)
    • No. He’s already lost once.
  • Patty Murray (Sen-WA)
  • Bill Nelson (Sen-FL)
  • Sam Nunn (Sen-GA)
    • If he gets the nod, we will all know that a bunch of progressives in the party got completely taken in by him. In addition to being homophobic, he’s sat on so many corporate boards lately that he looks like a McCain lobbyist.
  • Jack Reed (Sen-RI)
  • Kathleen Sebelius (Gov-KS)
  • Mark Warner (Gov-VA)
  • Jim Webb (Sen-VA)

We’ll see, but if it’s “Don’t ask, don’t tell” Nunn, it’s not a good move.

Shoot Me, I Agree With Canuck Flying Monkey Right Winger David Frum

David Frum, writing in The New Republic, in yet another example of how that magazine has fallen, actually writes something that I wholeheartedly support, though for very different reasons:

I have my own personal nomination for vice president for McCain. It’s Rudy Giuliani, precisely because he shares the vision of a practical, reforming, war-winning Republican Party that inspires John McCain, plus the stronger-than-usual grounds for hoping that he might be the rare candidate who can make a difference in an essential state–in this case, New Jersey.

Simply put, it’s been way too long since I’ve had the opportunity to use the phrase, “Clown Show”, but making a your vice-presidential running mate the man who:

  • Chose a police commissioner who was mobbed up.
  • Who recommended said mobbed up police commissioner to be head of homeland security.
  • Who broke up with his wife at a press conference on mothers day
  • Whose first wife was his cousin
  • Bailed on the Iraq study group so he could get fat speaker fees.
  • Lobbyied for unsavory clients, including Saudi Arabia, Tobacco, and Coal.

Would give me plenty of opportunity.

Of course, I can’t hope to own him the way that Joe Biden did when he said that when Rudy talks, “there’s only three things he mentions in a sentence: a noun and a verb and 9/11.”

That one is one of the classics of the ages, up there with George Bernard Shaw and Winston Churchill.

Economics Update

The Empire State Manufacturing Index droppeed 5 points, to -8.7 (0 is neutral), indicating further weakness.

Oil is down for the day by a quarter, but it hit a new record of $139.89/bbl before settling, and retail gasoline hit another record, now having hit a record on something like 25 days of going back a month.

It’s not surprising that the dollar was down today, though I’m not sure if this drove oil, or oil drove this.

In banking, we have Barclays looking at selling shares to raise capital to cover losses in the US mortage market, and Lehman had some sort of hush-hush weekend meeting, which might indicate some problems, though it’s reassuring that they reduced their mortgage holdings by 20%, which indicates a bit of common sense.

Econ 101: Free Trade Does Not Necessarily Bring Lower Prices

Dani Rodrik has a good analysis:

Advocates of globalization love to argue that free trade lowers prices, and the argument seems sensible enough. Think of all the cheap goods from China that we can buy at Wal-Mart. But anyone who understands comparative advantage knows that free trade affects relative prices, not the price level (the latter being the province of macro and monetary factors). When a country opens up to trade (or liberalizes its trade), it is the relative price of imports that comes down; by necessity, the relative prices of its exports must go up! Consumers are better off to the extent that their consumption basket is weighted towards importables, but we cannot always rely on this to be the case.

Consider your typical Argentinian for example, who consumes a lot of wheat and beef. Since these are export products for Argentina, free trade implies a rise in the relative price of the Argentine consumption basket. (The gains from trade are still there, of course, but they derive from the usual allocative efficiency improvements, not from lower prices across the board.) And in the U.S., the Wal-Mart effect has to be qualified to take into account the fact that the relative price of the goods that the U.S. exports (including for example agricultural commodities) is higher than it would have been absent trade. Similarly, when the U.S. gets better market access abroad for its agricultural exports (a key demand under the Doha round), you can be sure that this will raise domestic prices for these goods, not lower them.

Highly recommended.

Not Getting it in the EU

Looking at this report on the responses to the failure of the Irish referendum on the new EU treaty, it’s clear that the many of the movers and shakers simply don’t get what their problem is.

I am generally not a big fan of the referendum as a process, but it is a valid process, and the degree that the Eurocrats are claiming that it is somehow illegitimate, they are reinforcing every negative stereotype about them.

The problem is quite simple, and has 3 parts:

  1. The new constitution is too damn complex. At 250 pages, no one understands all of its sections, and so this breeds distrust.
  2. The response to the failure of the last constitution, where France and the Netherlands had referenda that failed was to eliminate referenda, which further breeds distrust in the process.
  3. Among the Eurocrats, there seems to be the idea that the decision making structures of the EU must be insulated from politics, which means that they are insulated from democracy, which further breeds distrust.

Simply put, in order to update the EU governance structures such that they will win the support of the public, or at least the Irish public, since any change in Ireland mandates a referenda, these structures must be seen as less opaque and more democratic.