Less than two weeks ago political strategist Dick Morris conducted a poll of likely Wisconsin voters that produced some strange results. By a margin of 74-18, those polled want teachers and other government workers to contribute more toward their health insurance premiums, and by an even larger margin (79-16) they want public employees to pay a larger share of their pension costs. Voters also want to end the automatic deduction of union dues from public employees’ paychecks (54-34) and want to require that pay increases that exceed the rate of inflation be submitted to referendum (66-30).

At the same time poll respondents say (by a 54-41 margin) that they don’t want to limit the collective bargaining rights of the public workers’ unions. But by a 58-38 margin, they want issues such as tenure, merit pay, and the right to fire incompetent teachers taken off the bargaining table.

I suppose this could be taken as proof of the Arrow impossibility theorem — that there is no voting system consistent with both individual rationality and democratic principles that will produce consistently rational results. Or, more likely, it just shows that people don’t really understand what “collective” bargaining is.

Whatever Governor Walker’s intentions, his proposed reforms amount to union-busting, just as his critics charge. Collective bargaining becomes a sham when there is nothing to bargain about. And it becomes impossible when a union loses the ability to coerce dues out of the workers it claims to represent. So for Wisconsin voters to say they support collective bargaining, while at the same time expressing strong support for reforms that will kill it, is to reveal a profound misunderstanding. Read more »

Aha! The lamestream media has caught Sarah Palin committing another Palinism!

In his State of the Union address Tuesday, President Obama invoked the Sputnik, the artificial satellite the Soviet Union launched into orbit October 4, 1957, to justify new government spending programs (which he called “investments”):

Half a century ago, when the Soviets beat us into space with the launch of a satellite called Sputnik, we had no idea how we would beat them to the moon. The science wasn’t even there yet. NASA didn’t exist. But after investing in better research and education, we didn’t just surpass the Soviets; we unleashed a wave of innovation that created new industries and millions of new jobs.

This is our generation’s Sputnik moment. Two years ago, I said that we needed to reach a level of research and development we haven’t seen since the height of the Space Race. And in a few weeks, I will be sending a budget to Congress that helps us meet that goal. We’ll invest in biomedical research, information technology, and especially clean energy technology — (applause) — an investment that will strengthen our security, protect our planet, and create countless new jobs for our people.

Sarah Palin went on Fox News Channel’s “On the Record with Greta Van Susteren” the following night and challenged Obama’s Sputnik analogy:

. . . he needs to remember that what happened back then with the former communist USSR and their victory in that race to space, yes, they won, but they also incurred so much debt at the time that it resulted in the inevitable collapse of the Soviet Union. Read more »

You’ve got to hand it to Warren Buffett: his sense of timing is perfect — no, better than perfect. On Wednesday he writes a thank-you note to Uncle Sam, and the very next day the White House announces that he’s to be awarded a Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Actually, it wasn’t the medal for which he was thankful. He was thanking the government (and Ben Bernanke, Hank Paulson, Tim Geithner and Sheila Bair) for bailing out Wall Street.

And well he should. TARP has been a veritable gold mine for Buffett. And his sense of timing was perfect there, too.

Consider: in September 2008, Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway Inc. invests $5 billion in Goldman Sachs Group, Inc., receiving in exchange 10-percent preferred stock plus warrants to buy up to 43.5 million shares of common stock for $115 per share. Just weeks later Congress passes TARP and Goldman Sachs, having recently transformed itself into a bank holding company, qualifies for the bailout and receives $10 billion in TARP funds.

Buffett’s investment is earning Berkshire about $500 million per year in dividends. Not bad. Not bad at all, considering that the dividend yield on the common shares of bank holding companies is currently hovering somewhere south of one percent. “We love the investment!” Buffett exclaimed to Berkshire investors at the holding company’s annual meeting in May. Read more »

Insanity, according to an aphorism often attributed (probably erroneously) to Albert Einstein, is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.

Last week Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke announced that the Federal Open Market Committee plans to purchase $600 billion in longer-term Treasury securities between now and the middle of next year. This move is not, as he admitted at a conference at Jekyll Island, Georgia, this past weekend, a substantive departure from what the Fed has been doing all along. The question is, what makes him think the results will be different this time?

The news media have dubbed this move QE2 — the QE stands for “quantitative easing” — implying this is the second time the Fed has done anything this dramatic. But it’s really just the same old story: the Fed is buying the government’s IOUs. The only difference this time is in their maturities.

The Fed has furiously been buying up government securities since the subprime mortgage meltdown in the fall of 2008, and presently is holding more than $2 trillion worth. What they are doing is accommodating the Federal Government’s huge deficits, turning government debt into bank reserves.

Theoretically, an increase in bank reserves will support an increase in the money supply that is several times the injection of the new reserves — if the banks lend the money. And here’s the catch: they aren’t. Read more »

Last Thursday Baltimore County police shot and killed one man and arrested two others shortly after midnight as they were leaving their Pikesville, MD, hotel room. The three men had been under police surveillance for some time, and the two who were arrested were charged with — get this — counterfeiting currency, a federal crime.

What does this have to do with SB1070, the Arizona immigration law that was scheduled to take effect today? You know, the law that the Obama administration got a compliant federal judge to emasculate yesterday, if only temporarily?

Just this. Recall that the Obama administration’s argument for asking a federal court to invalidate Arizona’s law is that requiring local law enforcement personnel to ask about the immigration status of people who come to police attention on other matters preempts federal authority. And the judge mostly backed them up on this point, enjoining enforcement of the provision

requiring that an officer make a reasonable attempt to determine the immigration status of a person stopped, detained or arrested if there is a reasonable suspicion that the person is unlawfully present in the United States, and requiring verification of the immigration status of any person arrested prior to releasing that person

on the grounds it most likely will be struck down. Read more »