I've known politics is corrupt all too often, since at least when I was a teenager in Illinois, as I watched a local ballot in a small town (2500 or so) 'steal' votes on paper ballots and no one seemed to care. She kept a pencil lead under one of her long fingernails and either spoiled ballots by marking a vote that voided the actual vote for that office or by making a vote for her favored candidate (party) when an office had been skipped.
But decades later the corruption somehow seems to be even worse than Boss Tweed and Tammany Hall over 100 years ago. And not only do few seem to care, too many not even in the 'system' seem to embrace it.
Well, 250 years is a pretty long run for a republic, I guess.
Actually, I have. I found it interesting, if unconvincing. I mean, I understand why it happened, and I understand human nature a little, but everyone but a true psychopath always has a good reason they did this or that thing.
It's been a while, but if I remember correctly, his argument was that he didn't actually steal money from the budget or physically steal, he merely 'knew' things others didn't (for some odd reason) and made money on the knowledge.
He distinguishes honest graft from dishonest graft on the basis that the latter involves doing illegal things, not that one is stealing and the other isn't. I don't think the book is so much a defense as a description, much of it somewhat tongue in cheek.
That's more n line with what I remember. Maybe I'll go back and read it again. I now remember the honest graft and dishonest graft thing. So Hunter is in the clear for two reasons. 1) He was not part of the government, so his graft was honest. 2) He apparently rarely or never delivered what the payees thought they were buying.
In a less humorous note, I'm waiting to see if his aunt throws him under the bus. She doesn't seem to be the kind to take her chances.
Here's a googlebooks link to Frank R Kent's imperishable 1920's 'The Great Game of Politics', patronage politics with two competing parties who each had some mass media. It was in each party's interest to appoint competent people in high-visibility office, for the good name of the party. Though most jobs were party-loyalty plus seniority, no damned nonsense about merit. It's how America used to work.
Until D-FDR got a lock on both federal patronage and mass media, and went hog-wild, and D-LBJ made Democratic party federal patronage the law of the land. D-FDR extended the Great Depression six years. The D patronage expansion of the 1960's stopped US economic growth by 1970. Now DEI is finishing us off.
I think Hunter Biden has done some horrible things and likely deserves to--and will--be in prison. I'm a conservative who would be glad to weaken the democrats for several years. That being said, if Joe Biden pardoned Hunter on his way out of office, my reaction would be just a shrug. I don't think people will hold it against him.
As I hope the story made clear, I have considerable sympathy for Biden's situation. I don't approve of him as a politician — but I love my children too.
I don't think Hunter is the main problem here. I mean, sure, he's a criminal degenerate who deserves to be in prison, but there are thousands upon thousands of criminals, and I want them to be prosecuted on general principle of rule of law, but if some single one of them slips through it wouldn't be that huge of a deal for me. Even the corruption aspect by itself is not the worst part - if Joe was willing to be corrupt, there would be - and were - a lot of people besides Hunter that would take part in facilitating that corruption, so the most of the guilt here lies on the corrupt politician himself.
The worst part, however, is the consequences of this. To hide the extent of Hunter's degeneration and corruption, and the extent of Joe Biden's involvement in it, almost every institution in the US has been corrupted and prostituted - the fireign diplomacy was engaged in covering up Hunter's affairs, the security services protected him from exposure and suppressed the speech of those who wanted to make it known, major media outlets and big tech deployed widespread coordinated censorship campaign to facilitate this task (not that they didn't use it for other tasks, but for this one too), the courts and the legal system had to be subverted to prevent the prosecution, and publicly lie about it - the sheer extent of corruption is just breathtaking, virtually no institution remained untouched. Truly, if Hunter would admit all those crimes and Joe would just issue him a blanket pardon, that would be much less damage to the society. It has happened before that Presidents pardoned bad people for various reasons, and one the grand scale of things it didn't change much. The wholesale corruption of everything that we are observing now is much, much worse than that.
I agree that the main damage is the cover up. It wasn't done to protect Hunter — his father cares about him but the NYT doesn't. It was done to protect Joe.
As I say in the story, we don't know if Joe was actually corrupt in the sense of doing things because people gave him money via Hunter. But we do know that he accepted bribes via Hunter, whether or not he delivered on what people thought they were buying or only on being willing to listen to people and make it look as though they had influence over him. And openly admitting that would be politically expensive, hence the cover up.
As I said below, we are not only 'pardoning' criminal behavior (like mass shoplifting and looting) but many who don't commit any of the acts seem to embrace the pardoning.
That's a problem but not the same problem. Hunter's defenders are not saying "yes, he accepted bribes on behalf of his father, but we should forgive him for it." They are trying, however implausibly, to conceal the fact that he did so.
I was referring more to the public acceptance, overall, of such behavior, I guess. If the voters don't care, why should anyone else. They don't even need a plausible defense. Just, "He's on our team, so he must not have done it."
Yes. As I suggested but did not say, part of the issue is his prominence. He has done things for which there are, in law, serious criminal penalties, which makes it hard to defend not imposing them when everyone is paying attention and letting him off easy will be interpreted as an application of political influence.
Trump is currently being prosecuted for business offenses on which the statute of limitations has run, on the claim that they were done for political purposes. That wouldn't be happening if he were an ordinary rich man either, did not happen during all the years when he was an ordinary rich man.
That's odd, since I am not an evangelical or even a Christian.
Assuming the "other half" means the tragedy, are you suggesting that only evangelical Christians sympathize with someone caught between his love for his child and the rest of his goals and obligations? Or that only an evangelical Christian believes that Hunter sold access to his father?
I had been taught that beating the market was impossible, like finding $100 bills on the street. so I asked the teller at the bank to check if it was fake. It was real!
I always found this take odd. Even believing in perfectly efficient markets, people make mistakes (like drop cash on the ground). They also fail to recognize the benefits, or potential benefits, of a money-making idea/plan. Not everyone is a genius or can see long term goals or is willing to take the risks, etc.
Efficient market theories don't say that people never make individual mistakes, but that a market will eventually correct for any slack. "Eventually" doing a lot of work there, with some implying near-instant effects but most looking at a medium-term approach.
What would discredit efficient market theories is if the people who found the money left it on the ground (and not as a gotcha to prove the point of this discussion), not that there's ever money on the ground at all. To take it out of the metaphor, if there was never "money on the ground" (meaning, an opportunity for gain) then there would never be a business started or endeavor tried.
A more precise statement of the economic logic is that twenty dollar bills will be found on the pavement just often enough to incentivize people to pick them up as often as they are dropped.
In the stock market case, prices will diverge from true values just enough to incentivize market participants to engage in the amount of research needed to keep the divergence down to that level.
The implication for investing is that you should assume that all easily known and evaluated information about a stock is already included in its market price, either do no research and expect to get the market return or, if you believe you have some special information that the market does not have, more precisely does not agree with, bet on that.
When the Macintosh came out I had read about the Xerox Star and was familiar with the concept of a graphic interface. It was obviously a large step forward that my business school colleagues, and presumably most other well informed people in the market, didn't understand, so I bought Apple stock.
The money isn’t that improbable. Years ago, I found money blowing down the street near where I lived, while walking my dogs.
It turned out that an older man who had a habit of carrying loose cash in his pockets was visiting family in the neighborhood. The money had fallen out of the pockets of his shorts.
Actually I once found money, I think more than twenty dollars, concealed under the edge of the carpet in an apartment I was renting. My memory is that the previous occupants were Saudi.
On a tangent, Larry Sharpe (who is very sharp, hehe) proposes this sequence of events: Biden/Harris wins against Trump (because they beat him last time; stole it; whatever). Biden resigns after 2 years, making Harris (who could never get elected as Prez) Prez. She then takes the incumbent advantage to serve two more terms (10 years max) giving the Democrats control over the Supreme Court for 16 straight years. With the Supreme Court in their pocket, they get to rewrite any precedent they want.
I've known politics is corrupt all too often, since at least when I was a teenager in Illinois, as I watched a local ballot in a small town (2500 or so) 'steal' votes on paper ballots and no one seemed to care. She kept a pencil lead under one of her long fingernails and either spoiled ballots by marking a vote that voided the actual vote for that office or by making a vote for her favored candidate (party) when an office had been skipped.
But decades later the corruption somehow seems to be even worse than Boss Tweed and Tammany Hall over 100 years ago. And not only do few seem to care, too many not even in the 'system' seem to embrace it.
Well, 250 years is a pretty long run for a republic, I guess.
Have you read _Plunkett of Tamany Hall_? It's an entertaining defense of the system by someone who was high up in it.
Actually, I have. I found it interesting, if unconvincing. I mean, I understand why it happened, and I understand human nature a little, but everyone but a true psychopath always has a good reason they did this or that thing.
It's been a while, but if I remember correctly, his argument was that he didn't actually steal money from the budget or physically steal, he merely 'knew' things others didn't (for some odd reason) and made money on the knowledge.
He distinguishes honest graft from dishonest graft on the basis that the latter involves doing illegal things, not that one is stealing and the other isn't. I don't think the book is so much a defense as a description, much of it somewhat tongue in cheek.
That's more n line with what I remember. Maybe I'll go back and read it again. I now remember the honest graft and dishonest graft thing. So Hunter is in the clear for two reasons. 1) He was not part of the government, so his graft was honest. 2) He apparently rarely or never delivered what the payees thought they were buying.
In a less humorous note, I'm waiting to see if his aunt throws him under the bus. She doesn't seem to be the kind to take her chances.
https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Great_Game_of_Politics/WbZWAAAAYAAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=the+great+game+of+politics&printsec=frontcover
Here's a googlebooks link to Frank R Kent's imperishable 1920's 'The Great Game of Politics', patronage politics with two competing parties who each had some mass media. It was in each party's interest to appoint competent people in high-visibility office, for the good name of the party. Though most jobs were party-loyalty plus seniority, no damned nonsense about merit. It's how America used to work.
Until D-FDR got a lock on both federal patronage and mass media, and went hog-wild, and D-LBJ made Democratic party federal patronage the law of the land. D-FDR extended the Great Depression six years. The D patronage expansion of the 1960's stopped US economic growth by 1970. Now DEI is finishing us off.
It looks very interesting.
I think Hunter Biden has done some horrible things and likely deserves to--and will--be in prison. I'm a conservative who would be glad to weaken the democrats for several years. That being said, if Joe Biden pardoned Hunter on his way out of office, my reaction would be just a shrug. I don't think people will hold it against him.
As I hope the story made clear, I have considerable sympathy for Biden's situation. I don't approve of him as a politician — but I love my children too.
Sure-- and I think all but the most partisan of voters will have sympathy too.
I don't think Hunter is the main problem here. I mean, sure, he's a criminal degenerate who deserves to be in prison, but there are thousands upon thousands of criminals, and I want them to be prosecuted on general principle of rule of law, but if some single one of them slips through it wouldn't be that huge of a deal for me. Even the corruption aspect by itself is not the worst part - if Joe was willing to be corrupt, there would be - and were - a lot of people besides Hunter that would take part in facilitating that corruption, so the most of the guilt here lies on the corrupt politician himself.
The worst part, however, is the consequences of this. To hide the extent of Hunter's degeneration and corruption, and the extent of Joe Biden's involvement in it, almost every institution in the US has been corrupted and prostituted - the fireign diplomacy was engaged in covering up Hunter's affairs, the security services protected him from exposure and suppressed the speech of those who wanted to make it known, major media outlets and big tech deployed widespread coordinated censorship campaign to facilitate this task (not that they didn't use it for other tasks, but for this one too), the courts and the legal system had to be subverted to prevent the prosecution, and publicly lie about it - the sheer extent of corruption is just breathtaking, virtually no institution remained untouched. Truly, if Hunter would admit all those crimes and Joe would just issue him a blanket pardon, that would be much less damage to the society. It has happened before that Presidents pardoned bad people for various reasons, and one the grand scale of things it didn't change much. The wholesale corruption of everything that we are observing now is much, much worse than that.
I agree that the main damage is the cover up. It wasn't done to protect Hunter — his father cares about him but the NYT doesn't. It was done to protect Joe.
As I say in the story, we don't know if Joe was actually corrupt in the sense of doing things because people gave him money via Hunter. But we do know that he accepted bribes via Hunter, whether or not he delivered on what people thought they were buying or only on being willing to listen to people and make it look as though they had influence over him. And openly admitting that would be politically expensive, hence the cover up.
As I said below, we are not only 'pardoning' criminal behavior (like mass shoplifting and looting) but many who don't commit any of the acts seem to embrace the pardoning.
We can't go on forever in such a situation.
That's a problem but not the same problem. Hunter's defenders are not saying "yes, he accepted bribes on behalf of his father, but we should forgive him for it." They are trying, however implausibly, to conceal the fact that he did so.
I was referring more to the public acceptance, overall, of such behavior, I guess. If the voters don't care, why should anyone else. They don't even need a plausible defense. Just, "He's on our team, so he must not have done it."
The rich hardly ever actually go to jail for tax crimes. and drawing out even an open-and-shut case for four years is not that hard either.
Yes. As I suggested but did not say, part of the issue is his prominence. He has done things for which there are, in law, serious criminal penalties, which makes it hard to defend not imposing them when everyone is paying attention and letting him off easy will be interpreted as an application of political influence.
Trump is currently being prosecuted for business offenses on which the statute of limitations has run, on the claim that they were done for political purposes. That wouldn't be happening if he were an ordinary rich man either, did not happen during all the years when he was an ordinary rich man.
Clearly a fake $20 bill. If it had been real, it would have been picked up already. (Funny thing that an economist sees an econ joke in real life.)
iirc, the other half is an evangelical Christian message
That's odd, since I am not an evangelical or even a Christian.
Assuming the "other half" means the tragedy, are you suggesting that only evangelical Christians sympathize with someone caught between his love for his child and the rest of his goals and obligations? Or that only an evangelical Christian believes that Hunter sold access to his father?
https://images.app.goo.gl/pMNuQjkSXJsWeY9i6 think he was talking about one of these:
Got it. Thanks.
Exactly. The apparently perfect fold of the bill looked exactly like one of those.
Ironic you write this the week of the Torah portion where Joseph says, "I am Joseph, is my father still alive?"
https://www.chabad.org/parshah/article_cdo/aid/3224/jewish/Vayigash-in-a-Nutshell.htm
I found a $100 bill walking on the street.
I had been taught that beating the market was impossible, like finding $100 bills on the street. so I asked the teller at the bank to check if it was fake. It was real!
I always found this take odd. Even believing in perfectly efficient markets, people make mistakes (like drop cash on the ground). They also fail to recognize the benefits, or potential benefits, of a money-making idea/plan. Not everyone is a genius or can see long term goals or is willing to take the risks, etc.
Efficient market theories don't say that people never make individual mistakes, but that a market will eventually correct for any slack. "Eventually" doing a lot of work there, with some implying near-instant effects but most looking at a medium-term approach.
What would discredit efficient market theories is if the people who found the money left it on the ground (and not as a gotcha to prove the point of this discussion), not that there's ever money on the ground at all. To take it out of the metaphor, if there was never "money on the ground" (meaning, an opportunity for gain) then there would never be a business started or endeavor tried.
A more precise statement of the economic logic is that twenty dollar bills will be found on the pavement just often enough to incentivize people to pick them up as often as they are dropped.
In the stock market case, prices will diverge from true values just enough to incentivize market participants to engage in the amount of research needed to keep the divergence down to that level.
The implication for investing is that you should assume that all easily known and evaluated information about a stock is already included in its market price, either do no research and expect to get the market return or, if you believe you have some special information that the market does not have, more precisely does not agree with, bet on that.
When the Macintosh came out I had read about the Xerox Star and was familiar with the concept of a graphic interface. It was obviously a large step forward that my business school colleagues, and presumably most other well informed people in the market, didn't understand, so I bought Apple stock.
The money isn’t that improbable. Years ago, I found money blowing down the street near where I lived, while walking my dogs.
It turned out that an older man who had a habit of carrying loose cash in his pockets was visiting family in the neighborhood. The money had fallen out of the pockets of his shorts.
Actually I once found money, I think more than twenty dollars, concealed under the edge of the carpet in an apartment I was renting. My memory is that the previous occupants were Saudi.
That's less surprising, since it wasn't visible.
It's possible, yes, that Biden will pardon him on the way out. If he wins and pardons Hunter, he will resign and give the office to Harris.
That's a prediction that had not occurred to me.
On a tangent, Larry Sharpe (who is very sharp, hehe) proposes this sequence of events: Biden/Harris wins against Trump (because they beat him last time; stole it; whatever). Biden resigns after 2 years, making Harris (who could never get elected as Prez) Prez. She then takes the incumbent advantage to serve two more terms (10 years max) giving the Democrats control over the Supreme Court for 16 straight years. With the Supreme Court in their pocket, they get to rewrite any precedent they want.