Free kibbles

ECONOMY:

Explaining the broken window fallacy to Keynesians.

Now the White House expects 9 percent unemployment through 2012. Obama's frustrated because this means he's unlikely to succeed at completely collapsing our economy before then and he's unlikely to get re-elected to do it afterwards.

FEDERAL RESERVE:

Currency competition ends Zimbabwe's economic nightmare.

"The country’s new finance minister, Tendai Biti, declared that the Zimbabwean dollar had ceased to exist: “Our currency,” he said, “is moribund.” On April 12, Zimbabwe suspended the use of its currency as legal tender.“At first covertly, then in openness, and finally with the consent of the government,” Mr. Noko writes, “foreign currencies – the rand, the euro, the pound, the U.S. dollar, the [Zambian] kwacha – replaced Zimbabwe’s dollar.” Precisely as Mr. Hayek had imagined, Zimbabwe’s inflationary spiral ended. Within weeks, the country’s economy showed dramatic improvement. Businesses began to open. Banks began to function. Unemployment began to fall. GDP began to rise. Private credit began to increase. Foreign investment began to return. The human exodus ended.
Out of sheer necessity, Zimbabwe adopted the fiscal discipline known as “cash budgeting,” which meant that the government could spend and lend only the money it had in cash. Mr. Biti, the finance minister, said simply: “We will eat what we have gathered.”"

If only we were that free.

Excess reserves at the Fed are starting to leak into the economy, causing higher inflation.

Historically, currency reform has produce seemingly miraculous economic recoveries.

GLOBAL WARMING AND ENERGY:

More analysis shows Irene was only a tropical storm, not a hurricane. The diminishing death rates from hurricanes makes perfect sense because we had been getting wealthier. Interesting note that death jumped up after 2000. Most if not all of that is from Katrina, but a case could be made that we've been getting poorer since 2000 too. It'll be interested to see if that point is an outlier or the beginning of an increasing trend.

A shiny example of the green economy, a solar company subsidized with half a billion tax dollars, goes bankrupt. So much for green jobs.

POLICE STATE:

Documents released under FOIA reveal that mobile backscatter machines emit dangerous levels of radiation.

MEDIA:

Ask and vote for or against questions for Republican candidates in upcoming Foxnews-Google debate.

You have to love this spin: Republicans have blocked frustrated Obama from cutting deficits. He has such a great record cutting deficits, I can see where this comes from.

MISC:

Federal family? I don't think so, unless they mean like a mafia family.

Buried in this satirical article about government causing the extinction of the dinosaurs, we get an idea I've never heard from the scientific community: dinosaurs were out-competed by mammals. This site mentions it:

"Small mammals appeared that fed on dinosaur eggs"

But nobody ever talks about that theory, though, given the meteor strike at pretty much the same time as the mass extinction suggests the impact played a significant role.

"Not all scientists are satisfied with the asteroid theory, however. They point out the fossil record shows the dinosaurs were already in decline before the K-T boundary and the asteroid might just have been the final blow that finished off a population already weakened by some other factor.In Montana, at a dig supervised by celebrated paleontologist Jack Horner, Nan Crystal Arens from Hobart and Smith Colleges carefully examined the fossil leaves and pollen from a slice of the Hell Creek formation at many different levels. The Hell Creek formation is set just above the K-T boundary and represents the millions of years just before the extinction of the dinosaurs. Dr. Arens found that the number of different species of plants, especially flowering plants, declined significantly as one got closer to the boundary. Perhaps 90% of all the flowering plants had already died before the asteroid struck. Since these represented a large portion of the herbivore dinosaur's food supply, and herbivore dinosaurs were in turn food for the carnivores, this might have caused a sharp decline in dinosaur populations even before the disaster."

Interesting.

Government's war on the refrigerator. Did canned food spark the industrial revolution? It freed men from having to work farms.

"There are some canned goods, and thank goodness for them. In the modern form, canned goods were invented in the 1880s. The whole process of canning in bottles dates back to the great work of French confectioner and chef Nicolas Appert, who perfected the process in 1810. This is what dramatically expanded the range of the human diet in the 19th century, long before the refrigerator came along."

1810 sounds about right.