NEOLIBERALISM OR BUST…LITERALLY:

Jamaica’s IMF Success Story (Catherine Osborn, Aug. 30th, 2024, Foreign Policy)

For the IMF, Jamaica is a success story—a country that carried out strict pro-market reforms and saw key social indicators improve along the way.

The IMF programs that led to Jamaica’s turnaround date back to 2013; continued buy-in from successive governments helped make them effective. Clarke has been the IMF’s main counterpart in Jamaica since 2016. He “stewarded his country’s economy to a stronger and more sustainable position,” Georgieva said on Monday.

Jamaica’s openness to reform came after a moment that Clarke has described as “rock bottom.” In 2012, the country’s national debt was ballooning as the government struggled to get a bailout. Jamaican economists and officials wracked their brains for possible ways to turn the country around.

They even called in Donald Harris, U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris’s Jamaican father, an economics professor emeritus of Stanford University, for policy planning help. He recommended steps that included instituting a corporate land registry and reducing taxes on certain businesses, according to the Washington Post. […]

Jamaica agreed to strict targets to reduce its deficit—and it stuck with them. In an unusual step, the country established a committee to monitor and report regularly on its economic performance that included representatives from private businesses and civil society.

That committee “reports publicly to the people, literally on the street corner, [at] the rum shop, on a quarterly basis; also on social media,” economist Marla Dukharan told The LatinNews Podcast. “Nobody else in the Caribbean holds itself to account publicly for what it says it’s going to do.”

In addition to reducing its national debt, Jamaica also gave its central bank more independence, overhauled its pension system, and privatized several government agencies, among other changes.

IT’S IMPOSSIBLE TO OVERSTATE DEFLATIONARY PRESSURES:

How to Best Prepare for the AI Jobs Apocalypse: Companies are turning to AI to boost profits – and it’s working (Luke Lango, 8/28/InvestorPlace)

This quarter, on average, companies across the S&P 500 reported nearly 10% earnings growth.

That is one of the best earnings growth rates the S&P 500 has reported since the COVID-19 pandemic emerged in 2020.

At the same time, unemployment rates are rising sharply. Indeed, earlier this year, the national unemployment rate stood at 3.7%. Since then, it has spiked to 4.3%. Most folks expect it to keep rising.

In other words, right now… unemployment is rising… while corporate profits are also soaring.

That’s unusual. And it tells us that companies are using AI to replace human labor and productivity – and boost profits.

THE FIRST RULE OF TEXTUAL CONSTRUCTION:

Direct Taxes and the Founders’ Originalism (Robert G. Natelson, 8/29/24, Law & Liberty)

The Founding-era interpretive rule most relevant to the Constitution is this: When construing a document, the primary goal is to discern the intent of the makers. This rule applied to nearly all documents—real estate conveyances largely excepted. Of course, the identity of the “makers” varied according to the nature of the document. Of a will, the maker was the testator; of a contract, the contracting parties; of a statute, the legislators; and of a constitution, the ratifiers. As James Madison wrote, the sense of the legitimate Constitution is “the sense in which the Constitution was accepted and ratified by the nation.” One whose only role is as a drafter—whether the scrivener of a will, a lawyer in the legislative counsel’s office, or a constitutional framer—did not qualify as a maker.

Construing a document by discerning the intent of the makers is a very old practice. This antiquity may come as a surprise to those who think originalism has just “been around for several decades” or that it is merely a white supremacist scam. But it is incontrovertible.

it’s why the amendments can not be absolute: “We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”

NEVERMIND HOW LITTLE WE SPEND AS A PERCENTAGE OF WAGES:

Food Profit Margins Shrink, But Harris Blames Them for Rising Grocery Bills (Joel Griffith, August 29, 2024, AIER )

What about industry-wide? Profit margins are shrinking as food manufacturing costs rose 28.4 percent since January 2020, exceeding the 26.3 percent retail price hikes on food items. Grocery store profit margins sank to 1.6 percent in 2023, the third consecutive year of decline after peaking at 3.0 percent in 2020.

In other words, grocer profit on $100 of sales is just $1.60. Profit margins contracted as overall food inflation totaled 20.6 percent in those three years. The biggest grocers have experienced this margin crunch. The Kroger Co. — the nation’s largest traditional supermarket — eked out an operating margin of 1.93 percent this past year, a margin lower now than it was pre-pandemic. These trends are the opposite of gouging.

History provides endless proof that prices set by governments under the market price results in shortages. Demand expands as supply shrinks. What good is a lower price if the shelves become empty?

CHASING FADS:

The Case for Hypochondria (Anna Altman, August 21, 2024, New Republic)

“Hypochondria has been called ‘the ancient malady,’” writes Caroline Crampton in her lyrical new book, A Body Made of Glass: A Cultural History of Hypochondria. “For as long as humans have had an understanding of health, there has been anxiety about it”—especially when that understanding is subject to superstition and misconception.

What happens with that worry—what behaviors develop, how much it hampers or deforms us, how it relates to our symptoms and our interpretation of them—is where things get tricky. If doctors tell us there is nothing wrong with us, but we persist in our anxiety, are we acting pathologically? Or are we experiencing something as yet unknown, at the edge of medical knowledge? Is hypochondria a somatic condition—a form of mental illness, an experience of the mind expressed in the body—or is it rooted in physical experience? Is it a diffuse anxiety about health, fear of contracting communicable disease, or the conviction that an illness is already present? Is it a form of obsessive compulsion? What is hypochondria’s relationship to diagnosed illness, anyway? Is it always an unhinged departure from what’s happening in the body, or is it sometimes a reasonable response to the uncertainty of corporeal experience?

It was bad enough when hypochondria was just a form of keeping up with the Joneses, but now that so many “conditions” have been valorized it’s also a way of making yourself seem special, without any risk of being judged weak.

THE CONTINENT VS THE ANGLOSPHERE:

When Keynes Killed Laissez-Faire (Samuel Gregg, 8/26/24, Law & Liberty)

As if, however, he recognizes the inescapability of some type of intellectual framework to order our decision-making about what governments should and should not do, Keynes distinguishes between “those services which are technically social from those which are technically individual.”

The “technically social,” Keynes says, are those “decisions which are made by no one if the State does not make them.” While that sounds like a public goods argument, Keynes’s “technically social” turns out to involve not only an incipit embrace of state macro-management of the economy but also full-blown corporatism.

Keynes the Corporatist

One of market liberalism’s failures, Keynes claimed in his lecture, was its inability to address problems generated by the prevalence of “risk, uncertainty, and ignorance” in the economy. These, he stated, produced “great inequalities of wealth” and “are also the cause of the unemployment of labour, or the disappointment of reasonable business expectations, and of the impairment of efficiency and production.”

Keynes deemed it possible to minimize these difficulties through “deliberate control of the currency and of credit by a central institution.” Another of Keynes’s “technically social” policies involved state agencies collecting and disseminating “on a great scale” all “data relating to the business situation, including the full publicity, by law if necessary, of all business facts which it is useful to know.”

How we distinguish useful from non-useful facts is not specified. But such information, Keynes insists, must be collated so that “society” can exercise “directive intelligence through some appropriate organ of action over many of the inner intricacies of private business.”

This, Keynes hastens to add, “would leave private initiative and enterprise unhindered.” Keynes, however, does not elucidate why this is the case—perhaps because he cannot. Indeed, one reason why Keynes underscores the need for a government agency to assemble business facts is his belief that:

some coordinated act of intelligent judgement is required as to the scale on which it is desirable that the community as a whole should save, the scale on which these savings should go abroad in the form of foreign investments, and whether the present organization of the investment market distributes savings along the most nationally productive channels. I do not think that these matters should be left entirely to the chances of private judgement and private profits, as they are at present.

In other words, Keynes does want to hinder the workings of private initiative and enterprise by means of “the community as a whole” making decisions about the aggregate distribution of savings between domestic and foreign investments.

Things get even more complicated once we discern what Keynes means by “society” and “the community.” In some cases, this functions as Keynesian shorthand for direct state intervention. In other instances, Keynes holds that “many big undertakings, particularly public utility enterprises and other business requiring a large fixed capital … need to be semi-socialized.”

By “semi-socialism,” Keynes has in mind something akin to “medieval conceptions of separate autonomies.” In general, he comments, we should “prefer semi-autonomous corporations to organs of the central government for which ministers of State are directly responsible.” As examples, Keynes suggests institutions like universities, the Bank of England, and railway companies, all of which operated at one or more removes from the state but whose legal status was not that of a strictly private association. “In Germany,” Keynes observes in a casual aside, “there are doubtless analogous instances.”

That reference indicates Keynes’s awareness of corporatism’s influence throughout the early-twentieth-century German-speaking world. Nor should we forget that corporatism had become official government policy in Italy following Mussolini’s seizure of power just two years before Keynes’s laissez-faire lecture. In short, corporatist ideas that posited the corralling of individuals into state-supervised groups and promoted the public-private amalgams envisaged by Keynes were “in the air”—and the Cambridge don had breathed deeply.

The Left is the Right.

UNIVERSAL BASIC INVESTMENT:

11 Charts Showing Why You Should Invest Today: Why start investing now? Because the stock market rewards the faithful. (Coryanne Hicks, 8/26/24, US News)

An investor who put $15 a day into the stock market could grow their portfolio to more than $1.2 million in 40 years. If they kept investing $15 a day for 50 years, they could amass almost $2.5 million. It makes you realize how early frugality in life can really set yourself up for comfort in your later years.

Do it for people starting at birth.

IT’S A HOMOCENTRIC UNIVERSE:

Scientists Discovered Something Kinda Alarming: The Universe Shouldn’t Actually Exist
(Jackie Appel, Aug. 8th, 2024, Popular Mechanics)

The research team asserts that if primordial black holes existed during this early period of inflation as many current models suggest, the field would have been bubbling away like a shaken can of soda. So much so, in fact, that nothing should have ever been able to form in the first place.

But we exist, as does everything around us. So, where does that leave us?

Science always affirms Design.

THE PROSECUTION RESTS:

Full Transcript of Kamala Harris’s DNC Speech

In many ways, Donald Trump is an unserious man.

But the consequences of putting Donald Trump back in the White House are extremely serious.

Consider not only the chaos and calamity when he was in office, but also the gravity of what has happened since he lost the last election.

Donald Trump tried to throw away your votes.

When he failed, he sent an armed mob to the United States Capitol, where they assaulted law enforcement officers.

When politicians in his own party begged him to call off the mob and send help, he did the opposite. He fanned the flames.

And now, for an entirely different set of crimes, he was found guilty of fraud by a jury of everyday Americans. And separately, found liable for committing sexual abuse.

And consider what he intends to do if we give him power again.

Consider his explicit intent to set free the violent extremists who assaulted those law enforcement officers at the Capitol.

His explicit intent to jail journalists. Political opponents. Anyone he sees as the enemy.

His explicit intent to deploy our active-duty military against our own citizens.

Consider the power he will have— especially after the United States Supreme Court just ruled he would be immune from criminal prosecution.

Just imagine Donald Trump with no guardrails. How he would use the immense powers of the presidency of the United States. Not to improve your life. Not to strengthen our national security.

But to serve the only client he has ever had: Himself.