"it's all about oil!"

Like a stereophonic cacophony of whining, I keep hearing things like "Bush just wants to start a war for oil!" Initially, I dismissed this proposition prima facea as propaganda that is sophomoric, emotionally charged, and completely disconnected from reality, which it obviously is. But I began to ponder the argument. And here is what is crystal clear.

Since the 9/11 attacks on the United States, the price of crude oil has doubled. During this time, the government of Iraq has been the antagonist in a slow motion game of hide-and-seek-the-weapons-of-mass-destruction. Each UN resolution subjecting Iraq to inspections and disarming, and each manuever to evade each resolution, has ratcheted up the tension between the free world and Iraq. The US is the only nation morally and militarily capable of enforcing any such resolutions in the Middle East -- should force be required. We have been put in the position of leadership in the protection of the free world from rogue nations with weapons of mass destruction. Rightly so.

Now, the question is: who benefits from higher oil prices -- the buyer or the seller? Clearly Iraq, which has been exporting oil in violation of yet other UN resolutions against doing so, is selling to a captive market at better than twice the price it was getting a little more than a year ago. And the free, industrialized world is paying a little more than double for a strategic commodity, suffering economically as a result. Wealth is being redistributed from free nations, from the economic engines and breadbaskets of the civilized world, to the little kingdom of Babylon. So, who's really pulling shenanigans 'for oil?'

Who's motives are dispicable here? Is it the leader of the strongest nation in the free world; one who has not shrunk from the moral responsibility to do everything in his power to judiciously and forthrightly hold the slick bully accountable, or is it the malevolent antagonist rattling his saber, cooperating with vicious terrorists who have no value for life, who are consumed with hatred; an antagonist who is waxing richer and richer each day he keeps the game going as a result of bullying and terrorizing peace-loving and well-intentioned nations?

Removing this self-centered megalomaniac will not only liberate a nation from his dictatorship, it will remove a major disturbance in the balance of the business of life across the world. When the oil market is no longer held hostage by Saddam Hussein, consumers of oil will be freed from the need to scramble to purchase future supply all at once, and the price of oil will decline to something more closely related to what the demand for it and supply of it ought to be under peaceful conditions. The cost of doing business will decrease, as this 'terror tax' is removed. Productive people will prosper. Hungry people will be fed. Weak nations will have a chance once again to become economically viable as terrorism, the oppressor of liberty and joy, is vanquished.

So, in a way, war might be about oil. But just not the way the cliche suggests. The leader of Iraq, in cooperation with terrorists and perhaps even unions in South America, has played a cruel and deadly game of market manipulation. Shame on him. It's time for him to be held accountable. The rest of the world deserves a shot at life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

ho hum

So, Yahoo! is profitable, according to its accountants. They have singlehandedly breathed life enough for another lap into the hope (or rather, the dream) of the 'new economy.' As a trader, I find that to be interesting news.

As a consumer and a citizen, the story is even less exciting. Yahoo! has apparently pulled some black ink out of its hat, in part by selling popup ads. Ads that popup anytime I check my email, which I do frequently. Ads that are so annoying, and so interfere with the function of my computer, that I'm considering abandoning my Yahoo! email accounts altogether.

So put off am I, that, no, I wouldn't pay $9.95 a year to stop the ads. Paying that anecdotal extortion fee won't stop all the unsolicited garbage that Yahoo! allows into my email boxes. And who knows what other clever ways they'll find to stick ads in our faces, since it seems to pay them to do so? Not to mention what sort of data they are gathering and selling.

Those with vested interest, like corporate insiders, and the poor souls who bought the stock for more than a hundred dollars per share, might think a popup ad deluge is a small price to pay for the sight of some daylight on the monthly statement. But, my cable ISP email account is marvelously efficient, works with Microsoft Windows seamlessy, allowing me to send just about any file to anyone I'd like to in the simplest way possible. This is paid for anyway by the cable service charge. I have never received an obscene or mass marketing piece in that account. Competition is a marvelous thing for the consumer.

I doubt that I am the only one who had hoped that there was much more to the new economy than obnoxious ads aimed at base motives. Truly, there is nothing new under the sun.

"da doo doo doo"*

There are many different ways that the government can take your money. It can take it all at once, or a little at a time. It can let you keep a little bit and live like a pauper or it can let you keep most of it and sit back and allow you do productive things that improve everyone's existence, including your own, thereby giving you and others more money to take a little less from.

So what does this have to do with doo doo? That can be summed up in the headline that appears on Yahoo! news which reads, "Bush's Economic Plan Could Cost $600B Over 10 Years." This dire warning was suspended over an AP story with like theme. Dear, that sounds horrible when put like that, doesn't it? But whom will it cost? And what will happen to all that money? (We can assume, for the sake of discussion, that the size of the number is in the ballpark. But let's say up front that the assumption is certainly questionable).

It will cost the government, in the short run, in terms of reduced income. And all that money will remain under the control of the people who earned it in the first place. Is that bad news?

It might be, if one happens to be the beneficiary of a government largesse that is, under the scrutiny of what is best kept a tight budget, done away with. We could do with fewer government subsidized vats of urine with certain religious symbols submerged in them, for example.

Imagine, leaving all that wealth in the hands of those who's blood, sweat and tears produced it. Why, they might get out of debt. Or invest in their businesses. Or support their favorite charities. You know, charities are best policed by their donors, not by Central Command and Control zombies.

Whatever the wealth producers do with their wealth, it will find its way back into the economy. The money will circulate. It will become income for others, which will be taxed. It will support state and local income and sales taxes. It will do so more frequently, if those who earn it are allowed to keep it. They will spread it around, creating more earners, who will spread it around, creating still more earners, and so on, and so on. You see, free people are a phenomenon to behold -- they reverse entropy. Free markets allow human productivity to prosper. And then there's more, more, more income available to generate tax receipts. Frankly, the economy could use an extra $600 billion the way a faithful workhorse could use some good hot mash on a cold day.

So, is a tax cut really going to 'cost' anyone anything? No, no more than your best investments 'cost' you anything. When you have a good, productive investment, you want to put more of your available funds into it. You do better that way. Wouldn't it sound ridiculous if your sour-pussed Auntie started screeching about how much that investment was going to cost you, how much it was going to deprive your children of their goodies, how much less say she might have in what you do with it? Of course it would. You might want to invest double just to teach her a lesson.

Let's put it this way. Suppose you grow corn. A single kernel will yield a stalk, from which one or two ears will yield an average of 800 more kernels per ear. Corn makes more than 1,000 products that can be bought at the grocery store. Praytell, with that kind of math, wouldn't it make sense to put as many kernels in the ground as possible, as often as possible? Or should you put most of the kernels in Auntie's silo? Plant more, and Auntie comes out with more, in spite of herself. But then, she depends on you, and not the other way round. The way she whines about it, one might think that giving up control of your kernels is something that Auntie dreads.

Corn is good. But people are even more productive than corn. How else can it be explained that so few support such a large beaurocracy, and so many other deprived people the world over? There is no greater investment than in the prosperity and morality of free people. Cutting their taxes costs nothing. It's an investment that pays incalculable returns to everyone in the vicinity and many who aren't.

Wealth is not a finite quantity -- it's created all the time, by free people; more so when their right to manage the fruit of their own labors is not out-legislated. As for Yahoo!, AP, and all the other rhetoric-generators and thought-shapers, one can't help but wonder what cause of theirs is really at stake, buried under all that slung mud. Why do they use their influential pulpits to shout with Auntie about harvesting more and more of your corn?

"Their eloquence escapes me*."

*Da Doo Doo Doo -- The Police

Note: Ironically, minutes after this was published, the headline quoted was replaced. It would be presumptuous to attribute causation to this piece. I am remiss for not linking to it immediately.

when evil is good

They kill the innocent in church services on Christmas Day. They kill the innocent in synagogues, in pizza parlors, at weddings, on public transportation, in office towers. They kill the innocent when war has not been declared.

They kill the innocent in his mother's womb.

Barbarism has come of age. And noone seems to be outraged.

alien baby boom

Are these the kind of people we want mass produced? People who think the human race was engineered by aliens? People who disregard the law; people who unwisely push the envelope on new technologies? People, who, perhaps, stretch the truth?

Of course these comments are about the recent claim by members of what is best described as a cult that they have cloned a human being. Even if this claim proves to be a stretch of the definitions, as it probably will, it begs so many questions that it can't be dismissed.

The begged question today is, do we really want to mass produce people like that? And, anyway, who decides? Would Tutsis want to see Hutus turned out en masse? Would Palestinians want to see Israelis mass produced? Would Muslims want to see Christians spawned by the gross? How many people really want to see Hillary Clinton mimeographed in 3-D? What if Osama bin Laden had made 10,000 clones of himself? What would the world be like 15 or 20 years after some self-styled god initiates life in his own image?

The real question is, who gets to decide who is fit to be cloned? And who confers what rights on a cloned life?

The correct answer is, of course, that no individual or committee is fit to make this decision. The problem now is, that someone must. And, really, when someone is deemed fit to decide who is qualified to have life initiated, it is not very far at all to having someone decide who is qualified to have life terminated. All for the good and enlightenment of the race at large, of course.

Unfortunately, Eugenics has come of age. We were warned that it would come to this, if we got comfortable with abortion, but who listened? Not enough people, apparently. And eugenics is the sort of thing that people who want to eliminate entire races think about and practice.

Lunatic fringe, we know you're out there.