Paul M. Jones

This is late notice, as usual, but I'll be speaking at php|tek next week in Chicago. You can see the schedule here.

In addition to my Organizing Your PHP Project talk (updated from the one I have given in the past to include nods to formal namespaces and framework-based projects), I've got Solar on the Hackathon roster, and I have two proposed unconference talks:

• Your Framework Sucks! (a new talk that I'll probably write the night before, if it gets enough votes), and
• Benchmarking PHP Applications and Frameworks, updated with new numbers, and a Rails and Django comparison that might surprise you.

Vote those up (I guess by commenting) if you want me to present them. Hope to see you there!

I'm sure that most people reading this blog via RSS are here mostly for the PHP content. The recent spate of economics and government-related blogging is probably feeling like a bait-and-switch to many of you. For those of you interested only in the PHP-related content, you can subscribe to the PHP-only feed here: http://paul-m-jones.com/blog/?feed=rss2&cat=2.

Most people underestimate just how economically valuable the rule of law is. A roughly stable investment environment that doesn't maximize social justice is undoubtedly better than an unpredictible one that tries to--just as the billions of poor people who live in states that have tried to exchange the former for the latter. The winners were not the dispossessed.

This can be exaggerated--markets have memories, but they don't last forever, and robust democracies can survive a fair amount of skullduggery at the margins. But on balance, I doubt that deal maximized utility compared to an alternative where the government stayed out of it and Chrysler made whatever deal it could.

via The Better Bankruptcy Bureau - Megan McArdle.

(Emphasis added.)

It’s nothing new for presidents to give us bloated budgets with phony promises of belt-tightening at the end of the day. But never, ever, in the history of the republic has there been so irresponsibly gargantuan a budget defended by rhetoric so duplicitous as we are now seeing from President Barack Obama.

“We cannot settle for a future of rising deficits and debts that our children cannot pay,” he said last month, and he has talked as well about fiscal discipline, eliminating waste, increased efficiency, more focused policies and how dishonest President Bush was in leaving the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan “off the books.”

Well, yes, Bush did that thing and he shouldn’t have, but everyone knew that money was being spent and the dishonesty, such as it was, is nothing – zero, zip, nada – next to Obama dressing up as a miser as he promotes a $3.59 trillion budget with a $1.2 trillion deficit on its back.

via www.washingtonexaminer.com >> Jay Ambrose >> Opinion Articles - Jay Ambrose.

The actual numbers aren’t just worse than the rosy picture Obama painted for a world after his magical stimulus took effect. They’re worse even than the doomsday scenario he outlined if Congress didn’t pass his stimulus plan.

via Unemployment numbers worse than projected | Les Jones.

So let me get this right. We are currently doing worse, having "done something", than the worst predicted outcome if we had "done nothing". Tell me again how "let the markets operate without interference" was a certain path to disaster?

I reject the premise that capitalism is currently failing to "deliver the goods." The whole point of capitalism is to destroy companies like GM and Chrysler. The whole point of capitalism is to destroy unions like the UAW that favor older and retired workers at the expense of younger workers and workers yet to come. The whole point of capitalism is to destroy the "smart guys" who create defective financial products. The whole point of capitalism is to punish us for electing a government that enmeshes itself with the jokers above. The "current unpleasantness" is a feature, not a bug.

via Cafe Hayek: The whole point of capitalism.

As Roberts points out, it's not the *whole* point, but it's a significant one. It's a profit *and loss* system; the failures need to fail, not be propped up artificially. Only then can their destruction create something better.

Spurring new demands to overhaul the nation's healthcare system, Medicare trustees announced Tuesday that the program's biggest fund for serving the elderly would run out of money in just eight years.

But the announcement, the latest in a succession of dire predictions about Medicare's fiscal condition, also pointed up the chasm separating Democrats and Republicans as the Obama administration and its congressional allies prepare for another major attempt to reshape the U.S. healthcare system.

...

"The government-run healthcare programs we already have are unsustainable," said Rep. Tom Price of Georgia, who heads the Republican Study Committee, a conservative House caucus. "It should be obvious that putting more people under the inflexible control of Washington is no way to bring down medical costs, and it's certainly no way to provide healthcare of the highest quality."

via Report: Medicare fund is 8 years from insolvency - Los Angeles Times.

The Federal government can't afford the health-care programs is has *now*, and it wants to create *more* of them? If you want to reduce costs, then reduce regulations and let a free market operate. Hell, I get the idea that even taxpayer-paid vouchers toward high-deductible health savings accounts would be better.

Out in the real world beyond Washington, “structural imbalance” means: Washington politicians are on a spending rampage the likes of which has never before been seen anywhere in human history. The spenders include President Barack Obama, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, plus a supporting cast of bureaucrats like Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and his predecessor, Henry Paulson, and the Democratic majorities in the Senate and House (joined by a few Senate Republicans). These officials are terminally afflicted with what Sen. Tom Coburn, R-OK, calls “federal spending disease” (FSD) an incurable addiction in which the sufferer is utterly unable to stop spending other people’s money. An intervention by voters is the only effective treatment.

via www.washingtonexaminer.com >> Feds are broke but keep right on spending.

For those of you who know a little about federal personal income or corporate tax, or who just want to get a sense for the scope of the tax increase, I commend to you the more extensive write-up produced by Deloitte Tax. I've clipped some inflammatory excerpts for your morning indigestion, but it is worth scrolling through to get a sense for the breadth and nature of the proposal. The short version is that President Obama is pushing absolutely staggering increases through the corporate and business tax systems. Direct taxes on business are, in general, inefficient and economically disruptive, but they are also peerless in their complexity, which means that few voters and essentially no reporters will make the effort to understand what is being done to them.

...

If Barack Obama is bashing somebody in his speeches, he is preparing the media battlespace for a substantive attack to come. It turns out that it matters very much what he says.

via TigerHawk (the audacity of taxes).

Obama's health care plans are very, very expensive, and they mean higher taxes for everyone, not just that elusive klatch of greedy fools who are not in the 95% of working families now allegedly slated for stable or lower taxes. Otherwise, how could Obama hope to pay for it?

...

You may recognize these proposals; they are recycled from the Obama budget. Estimated cost savings listed: $215 billion over ten years. That leaves just $1.785 trillion for the "stakeholders" to find. And with a model of stakeholder cooperation like Chrysler before us, that shouldn't be hard.

via Obama's Magical Mystery Tour of Health Care Savings - Megan McArdle.