It Is Called "Fascism"

Blogging as The Grumpy Economist, John Cochrane makes the following point:

We’re headed for an economic system in which many industries have a handful of large, cartelized businesses— think 6 big banks, 5 big health insurance companies, 4 big energy companies, and so on. Sure, they are protected from competition. But the price of protection is that the businesses support the regulator and administration politically, and does (sic) their bidding. If the government wants them to hire, or build factory in unprofitable place (sic), they do it. The benefit of cooperation is a good living and a quiet life. The cost of stepping out of line is personal and business ruin, meted out frequently. That’s neither capture nor cronyism.

True, the technical name for this system is fascism. It's the same relation to government I.G. Farben and Krupp had with the Third Reich. When the system falls, Nuremberg rules may apply to survivors.

Hat tip to Instapundit for the link. N.B. Cochrane isn't a careful proofreader.

Bad News from Mexico

The Washington Post reports the economy of Mexico is hurting. See a summary quote:

The value of the peso has plummeted to record lows against the dollar, growth rates have shrunk to dwarfish size, and the only things that seem to be getting bigger are the poverty rate and the gap between rich and poor.

A bad Mexican economy means more illegals headed north. Plus a chance the next president could be a leftist who falsely blames their troubles on us.

Brazil Is Angry

MercoPress reports the popularity ratings of Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff are the lowest of any president since the military stepped away from governing in 1985.

Rousseff was revealed to have an approval rating of 8%, according to a survey conducted by polling firm Datafolha, while 71% of respondents said they disapprove of how Rousseff is doing her job. And two-thirds of the interviews said they would like to see Rousseff impeached.

A nation-wide rally on August 16 will demand her resignation.

Choice Snark

Kurt Schlichter blogs for the International Journal Review about the debate:

Everyone had plenty to say about that lying, incompetent hack currently occupying 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, but there was far too little about Public Enemy Number One and how she is totally full of Number Two.

"She" refers to Clinton, in case you were having difficulty identifying the manure sack in question.

A Lucky Gambler, Not a Strategist

Jim Hoagland writes on foreign affairs for The Washington Post. Today he writes Putin isn't as clever as we've believed. He is a risk-taker who has been lucky in his foreign gambles and lucky to face an American president who is without courage, honor or love of country.

A mistaking of luck for skill is reminiscent of another venturesome autocrat whose successes early in World War II were seen as generalship, until he started losing in Russia and North Africa. Compare Putin's South Ossetia and Abkhazia successes (in Georgia) to Hitler's in the Sudetenland (of Czechoslovakia) and Putin's Crimea to Hitler's Anschluss in Austria.

If history has any predictive value, Putin may have one or two more wins before he begins to lose like Hitler. In this card game he is playing a weak hand with some skill, bluffing and finessing.

An Rx for Greece

A 2006 Nobel Prize winner in economics, Edmund S. Phelps writes for Project Syndicate about what Greece needs to regain prosperity.

Greece must dismantle corporatist arrangements and practices that obstruct whatever innovation and entrepreneurship might emerge. Nurturing an abundance of imaginative innovators and vibrant entrepreneurs requires embracing a vision of venturesome lives of creativity and discovery.

Harking back to Odysseus?

Medieval Times in Moscow

The international arena is a major topic stream at COTTonLINE. See a Daily Beast article about the deteriorating situation in Russia.

A strange focus is the rise of the power of the Russian Orthodox Church, a Putin avatar in these peculiar times. Russia is becoming again an international outlaw, a role it relished during the Soviet era.

Klavan on the Debate

Andrew Klavan blogs at PJMedia, here his topic is the 1st GOP debate, specifically what happened among the non-Trump aspirants:

Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, Scott Walker, John Kasich and Mike Huckabee all helped themselves and looked good, I thought. Ben Carson ought to get out: It’s painful to watch a great man out of his element. Rand Paul ought to get out: He’s nuts. Chris Christie ought to get out: He hugged Obama and, no, I don’t forgive him either. I wish Jeb Bush would get out, but I’ll just have to wait.

Klavan largely summarizes my sense as an interested non-viewer who has read a lot about it. The consensus on Carson is that he is a fine man but no president.

Both Pauls - father and son - are weird dudes if not crazy, marching to a drummer that isn't Republican. Christie can't even carry his own state, and doesn't belong on-stage.

Bush represents the cheap-labor moguls who largely fund the party but don't represent its views on immigration. He and Kasich are still beating the drum for the thoroughly discredited "compassionate conservatism" which means they would spend big.

Whether Trump?

Roger Simon writes at PJMedia that Trump will not go 3rd party because he'd lose, expensively. In other words, revenge would come at too high a price in both money and prestige. Simon may be correct, I am uncertain about anything Trump-related.

Not running as an independent is one thing, but what if Trump decides to get revenge by asking his supporters to boyott the GOP?  A series of events at which he declares there is no practical difference between the two major party candidates - declaring both anathema - would accomplish the same outcome at far less cost to Trump.

Balz Opines

I find Dan Balz of The Washington Post one of today's most careful political observers. See what he wrote about last night's debate, including the fact he doesn't mention the undercard at all. Balz sees a number of talented guys who could give Clinton a real race in 2016.

The Debate

Being out of the country for the first GOP debate wasn't by choice, so I spent a couple of hours today reading various online pundit reactions thereto. I envision the "main event" as an ink blot in which the pundit saw what s/he expected.

Some consensus that Paul did himself no good, ditto Bush and Carson while Kasich apparently exceeded low expectations. Trump likely confirmed the opinions both of supporters and opponents, making it a wash for him. Opinions about the performance of Rubio, Cruz, Walker, Huckabee and Christie were, to say the least, mixed.

Opinion seems unified that Fiorina "won" the undercard matchup. People like what they hear from her yet her poll numbers seem to go nowhere. I wonder if Republicans are ready to support a woman for president?

Travel Blogging VI

Zermatt: In the last two days we've spent significant time on cog or "rack" railways, engines laboring to the top of tall peaks from which to enjoy views of other tall peaks, vertiginous valleys, and glaciers. Yesterday we steam trained up the Rothorn, had lunch on top, and trained down.

Today we climbed to 10,132 ft. at Gornergrat. Again we ate lunch and descended. From there the view includes the Matterhorn and scores of less-well-known peaks, plus many glaciers the size of small towns. It is substantially above timberline and the ground cover is tundra.

These two cog railways prove the Swiss will build a rail line to anyplace that will draw tourists, regardless of difficulty. Both lines include tunnels, trestles, snow sheds, and lots of engineering work.

Zermatt town, from which the Gornergrat train departs, is totally a tourist trap, worse than Jackson, WY, by an order of magnitude. It's full of hotels and restaurants, shops and bars, places selling watches and multi bladed knives of questionable utility and inconvenient bulk.

Tomorrow we're off to Davos, and along the way for part of the journey we take a steam train over one of the country's many passes.

Travel Blogging V

Interlaken: Today we only rode 5 trains. However, we also rode 6 cable cars high into the Alps. The first three took us from the valley floor to the top of the Schilthorn, a tall mountain (9740 ft.) towering over the village of Stechelberg.

We lunched at the revolving restaurant there called Piz Gloria which was a set for the Bond film On Her Majesty's Secret Service.  It was incidentally the only Bond film starring George Lazenby as Bond. Avengers costar Diana Rigg was the film's "Bond girl," a bonafide filmic category, by the way.

On the way back we took two of the three cable cars down the mountain, then walked the tiny hillside village of Murren before taking a cog rail line and a final cable car to Wenger, and two more trains back to our "base camp" hotel in Interlaken.

It was a long day, and tiring. We were jammed into those cable cars like riders in a Japanese subway. Switzerland has been having a heat wave and isn't accustomed thereto. Even at nearly 10,000 ft. we were comfortable in shirtsleeves on the observation deck; we never took our windbreakers out of the daypack.

We haven't seen the Himalayas, but the Alps are truly more spectacular than any mountains in the Americas. We love the Tetons but alongside the Alps they are insignificant. The scale of the Alps is overwhelming, they are immense.

The Swiss seem to major in "verticality" as they build most buildings on relatively steep slopes. They run roads and rails to places most would find daunting or ridiculous. maybe they've made a virtue out of necessity.

Many grassy hillsides resemble sets from The Sound of Music; a young Julie Andrews should come running in her postulant's outfit, singing about the hills being alive with the sound of music. The whole country looks like Disney staged it.

Incongruity abounds, our hotel window overlooks the koi pond of a formal Japanese garden. The morning walk to the rail station is no chore, dragging our tired selves home from there at day's end is harder. E's cell phone ap says we're walking about 4 miles a day and I am not accustomed to it.

Gig Economy Blues

The Financial Times weighs in with an article about the upsides and downsides of the "gig economy" wherein many no longer have full-time, career-type jobs. As we've called it here at COTTonLINE, the "McDonaldization" of the economy continues apace. All is proceeding as we have foreseen.

Our view: the downsides outweigh the upsides, or as Woody Allen was heard to say, "Things will get worse and worse, and they'll never get better again." This is probably an intermediate stop on the road to most people not working at all, living on some sort of dole.

Our electronic successors are beginning to crowd us out. It's called survival of the fittest, and we aren't fittest.

Travel Blogging IV

Interlaken: What follows are some random thoughts following a day of riding some 12 trains around Switzerland. First thought, the Swiss must be the neatest people on the planet.  I mean "neat" in the not-messy sense. This whole country is characterized by tidiness, neatness, square corners, order, and a lack of entropy, for physics enthusiasts.

The German-speaking parts of the country may be marginally tidier than the French-speaking parts, we visited both today. Both, however, are world-class squared away. The main thing you notice in the French-speaking cantons is that more of the homes are all-stucco. In the German-speaking cantons you see a much higher percentage of homes with a stucco or masonry ground floor and a wood-sided second floor.

Many homes in this heaviliy forested country burn wood for heat. Their wood piles must be seen to be believed. Each piece is exactly the same length, and they are stacked with military precision, and each stack covered with a roof or piece of corrugated metal or a tarp, if nothing else avails.

The Swiss are gonzo-crazy for trains, they run trains to places we might not even bother with a road to. They run trains in multiple gauges: standard, narrow, and somewhere inbetween.

Today, 2 of the trains we took were "cog-assisted" which means they can function as a cog railroad but only do so in steep sections. Where it is flatter, they motor along like a streetcar. Our guide, Geoff, assures us there is a difference between a true cog railway and a cog-assisted railway, and we're inclined to take his word for it. The one we took could sure pull some steep grades. It could also descend those same steep inclines with no drama from overheating brakes.

There is a lot of building going on in Switzerland, the building crane is seen everywhere.  Actually we've only seen one new homesite, the rest have been commerical or multiple dwelling. The country appears prosperous and obvious signs of militarization are less in evidence than formerly - better concealed, fewer in number or both. The Swiss will build a house or barn on the slope of a very steep hill, apparently think nothing of it. The effort to get a road or driveway to some sites must be Herculean.

The place is overrun by Muslim couples with wives covered up like nuns of old, or moreso. We're unclear whether they are tourists, or residents. If the latter, Europe has an immigrant problem much worse than ours in the States. It feels like I imagine it did long ago when some people had slaves following them around docilely ... creepy.

WSJ Bearing Bad News

Politico reports the findings of a new Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll with bad news for Hillary C.

In July, 34 percent of white women held a favorable view of Clinton, while 53 percent held an unfavorable view. Those numbers were down from June, when 44 percent held a favorable view of Clinton and 43 percent held an unfavorable view.

Women  are a crucial target demographic for Clinton, who hopes women eager to witness the first female president will support her as enthusiastically as African-Americans supported President Obama in 2008 and 2012.

There's more bad news for Clinton in the article, her unfavorables are up among millennials, independents, and African-Americans. Perhaps there won't be a coronation after all?

Hillary has never been the good platform performer her husband is. Horndog Bill is a natural BSer whereas she always leaves the feeling she does politics unwillingly, with no relish, no joy. Her heart isn't in the con, his is.

Cost: Blame Boehner, McConnell

The Weekly Standard's Jay Cost describes the Trump phenomenon as the manifestation of a "principal-agent" problem between Republican voters (principals) and the party leaders (agents).

Donald Trump is not the Republican party’s real problem; he is a symptom of the problem. There is a generationu-long climate of distrust between conservative voters and Republican politicians. Trump is simply taking advantage of this weakness.

I believe Cost is correct. The whole article is worth your time.

A Peronist, Not a Socialist

The Washington Post takes on the issue of whether Pope Francis is a leftist. Their short answer: no. In fact, they allege, he is something different but in the opinion of COTTonLINE, equally bad: a Peronist.

Juan Peron was one of a group of third world tinpot dictators who believed they discerned a "middle way" between socialism/Communism on one hand and capitalism on the other. Libya's Gaddafi was another, as were Egypt's Nasser and the Bathist lovelies Saddam Hussein in Iraq and Haffez Assad in Syria. All were noted for favoring a strong leader and government intervention in the economy.

As regular readers know, we've often bemoaned the deleterious effects Peronism has wrought on the Argentine economy. It regularly manages to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. This in a country that should be one of the world's wealthiest but is normally within sight of bankruptcy.

Strange thought: Pope Francis would like all of us to share the Argentine travails, to experience the "joys" of Peronism first-hand. No thank you, Holiness, a fascist is no improvement over a socialist.

Travel Blogging III

Zurich: We spent most of the day on two trains - the Eurostar that runs London - Paris and the TGV Lyria which runs Paris - Zurich. At various points on the TVG we hit 202 mph with no drama whatsoever. The Eurostar is a bit cramped, the TVG less so.

Both Britain and France have much more farmland than you tend to suspect, most of France is fields of grain, corn, and hay. I actually saw some French farmhouses today, although many farmers live in the village and commute out to their property.

SOPs for Europeans and Americans are simply different, they're used to taking trains from one city center to another, then dragging their rollalong suitcase to a nearby hotel along the sidewalk. Being without a car at the destination is normal for them, not for us.

Urban planners (a COTTonLINE pet peeve) ask Americans to live like Europeans. Our typical response is to just ignore them. When forced to react we tend to say something like "Oh, hell no." We love our cars (and pickups and SUVs and RVs) and will not be dissuaded.

Living like a European is okay for a couple of weeks, longer than that is unAmerican. Yanks who want to live here are embryonic expats, something we've always produced in small numbers.

Tomorrow we are off to Interlaken via Bern. It's a resort town between two lakes, as the name suggests. We're there for four nights, we'll spend the days taking train daytrips that will return to Interlaken in time for supper.

Travel Blogging II

London: A weird weekend to be in London, they've closed a number of main streets to facilitate bicycle racing, first amateurs, then professionals. Cabbies are furious with Mayor Boris Johnson, a rising star in the Tory/Conservative Party, for the closure which makes their lives miserable. Since it is a weekend, I'm not sure how the rest feel about it, maybe indifferent.

We depart from St. Pancras station tomorrow morning on the Eurostar , the train that takes the "Chunnel" or Channel Tunnel to France. It should have us in Paris in a very few hours. There we change stations via taxi and get another train to Zurich.

Anyway, we have a very early get-up tomorrow which will be less trouble since we're still jet-lagged. Tomorrow is also when we meet a few members of our tour group and the group leader, Geoff. The rest of the group join us in Zurich tomorrow evening.