Revealed at Last: The Greatest Threat to "Liberaltarianism!"
(posted by Jim Henley)
Certain liberal talk-radio hosts.
Consider.
DC’s Air America outlet is kind of lame. Yesterday it ran a Thom Hartmann broadcast about Heller from before Heller was even decided. (Looks like it was the June 17 show.) Hartmann had on a scholar from the Independent Institute, Stephen P. Halbrook, and proceeded to badger him about standing armies. The whole point of a militia, Hartmann insisted, was to obviate the need for large standing armies. So how come you’re not trying to [SOMETHING that would make standing armies go away, though Hartmann never quite said what] instead of trying to make sure DC drug lords can get ahold of a Mac-10? My question is, how ignorant do you have to be, how little due diligence on your guests do you need to undertake, to be so clueless about how the Independent Institute feels about standing armies?
Consider also.
Yesterday, Ed Schultz had his legal guy, Norman Goldman, hosting, but Goldman was doing the standard Ed Schultz routine on gas prices, so all you had was a guest with a lot less charisma than the host doing the host’s schtick. “Big Eddie” is a genuinely charismatic voice, and I can see why he’s been so successful.
Goldman and Schultz have for weeks been demanding, over and over, to know how the so-called Laws of Supply and Demand can be squared with the observable facts that US gas consumption has begun dropping “but the price is higher than ever.” One caller to Goldman yesterday tried, albeit not very articulately, to explain that
- The US isn’t the sole consumer of gasoline in the world.
- In any case, there are reasons why price wouldn’t exactly track changes in demand.
To which Goldman replied, with a sneer, You given us a model, sure, and I’m not saying it’s wrong, but it fails to account for HUMAN GREED.
Okay then.
I’m familiar with various debates about whether and how much speculation is affecting the price of oil in the near term. I read Marginal Revolution and Crash Landing! The most facially plausible-sounding theory I’ve heard is that some of the money that used to be in US mortgage-backed securities and real-estate has moved to oil futures in an attempted “flight to quality.” That’s something you’d need to prove by showing actual investment patterns, mind you, but it isn’t obviously absurd. But all Schultz’s show does is say, over and over, US demand is down but prices are up! That makes no sense! I will laugh like Beavis now!
July 4th, 2008 at 9:59 am
[...] I complain about liberal talk radio. This of course means I’ve been listening to liberal talk radio. [...]
July 4th, 2008 at 1:37 pm
Oh, that human greed that fails to account for why these prices weren’t this high (or higher yet, as greed is boundless!) for years before the current spike?
But it’s true that given the relative inelasticity of the demand for the commodity called gasoline, combined with the world demand for it, consumption and price patterns wouldn’t exactly track each other as nimbly as do other products.
July 7th, 2008 at 9:10 am
“The most facially plausible-sounding theory I’ve heard is that some of the money that used to be in US mortgage-backed securities and real-estate has moved to oil futures in an attempted “flight to quality.”
You didn’t go far enough back on the chain. When you double (or more) the supply of money over a short period of time, alot of people come to believe that they are wealthy because of all the new paper, because the market has not re-valued the money with respect to real goods. Once the paper starts to re-value due to supply and demand forces, these people who believe they are wealthy will desperately do whatever is necessary to save their “wealth”.
It’s almost like gravity. Once you shoot something up, you know it’s eventually going to come back down. Once you print a lot of new money, you know there will be an excess of speculation until the value of the money re-equilibrates with fundamentals.