| From: TimF | 3/22/2012 11:04:52 PM | | | | | | Does the Obama administration know anything about world markets? If Japan buys less Iranian oil and more oil from some place else, another country will buy more Iranian oil and less from that other place. There very little effect on anything. Possibly the only loss is presumably the oil went where it did to begin with because it minimized transportation costs.
On the other hand exempting 11 major countries from penalties for dealing with Iran's central bank means that any international transactions will be taken care of through those countries (in addition to China or Russia that would ignore the sanctions anyway).
From Foreign Policy:
The State Department announced on Tuesday that it would exempt 10 European countries and Japan from penalties for doing business with Iran's central bank, because those countries are making significant progress toward weaning themselves off of Iranian oil.
"I am pleased to announce that an initial group of eleven countries has significantly reduced their volume of crude oil purchases from Iran -- Belgium, the Czech Republic, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Poland, Spain, and the United Kingdom. As a result, I will report to the Congress that sanctions pursuant to Section 1245 of the National Defense Authorization Act for 2012 (NDAA) will not apply to the financial institutions based in these countries, for a renewable period of 180 days," Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said in a Tuesday statement. "The actions taken by these countries were not easy. They had to rethink their energy needs at a critical time for the world economy and quickly begin to find alternatives to Iranian oil, which many had been reliant on for their energy needs."
The European Union banned all new purchases of Iranian crude oil as of Jan. 23 and will phase out existing contracts by July 1, Clinton said. Japan was able to reduce its dependence on Iranian oil even despite energy shortages created by the Fukushima nuclear disaster.
"We commend these countries for their actions and urge other nations that import oil from Iran to follow their example," said Clinton. "Diplomacy coupled with strong pressure can achieve the long-term solutions we seek and we will continue to work with our international partners to increase the pressure on Iran to meet its international obligations." . . .
johnrlott.blogspot.com |
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| To: TimF who wrote (10066) | 3/22/2012 11:07:32 PM | | From: Farmboy | | | | | "..making significant progress toward weaning themselves off of Iranian oil." could just be the administration's code talk for "They told us to kiss their A**!" |
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| To: koan who wrote (8720) | 8/16/2012 3:22:07 PM | | From: TimF | | | | Milton Friedman: An Economics of Love
By Kevin D. Williamson
July 30, 2012 8:51 P.M.
...Today marks the 100th anniversary of the birth of Milton Friedman, whom I never met but have always regarded as one of my favorite teachers. William F. Buckley was the reason I wanted to become a writer, but it wasn’t until discovering Milton Friedman that I really understood what it was I wanted to write about.
If those of you from outside of Texas need another reason to envy the Lone Star State, wrap your head around this fact: When I was at Lubbock High School, economics was a required course, and Milton Friedman’s Free to Choose was required reading in that course. This meant that I spent my teen-age years among friends and classmates among whom there was practically none who had not read Milton Friedman. Some were moved by Free to Choose, some merely digested it for examination purposes, and some hotly rejected it, but everybody knew it, at least superficially. That was really something. T. S. Eliot once remarked that he thought his students at Harvard might have been better off if they had read fewer books but had read the same books, and there is much to recommend that belief. Education is a conversation.
I had learned many things before encountering Free to Choose, but the work of Milton Friedman was the first thing I learned that seemed to matter. I had been a good student, and schoolwork had been for me simply a theater for performance: I was good at most subjects, but none of them seemed important to me. I gravitated toward literature not because it seemed to me (dread word) “relevant,” but because reading books and writing about them was pleasurable. I was going to be reading books and writing, anyway. But Friedman was something different — my first real memorable contact with organized political thinking. Everything of course seems intense and unprecedented in adolescence — because everything is new — and there is something of the quality of romance to a first intellectual love. For me it was Walt Whitman and Milton Friedman, my church and state. I thank the heavens that my literature curriculum hadn’t included Ayn Rand and that my economics teacher didn’t assign us John Kenneth Galbraith. (And surely you know the joke: All great economists are tall, with two exceptions: Milton Friedman and John Kenneth Galbraith.)
The libertarianism of Rand (and she hated the word “libertarian”) was based on an economics of resentment of the “moochers” and “loafers,” the sort of thing that leads one to call a book The Virtue of Selfishness. Friedman’s libertarianism was based on an economics of love: for real human beings leading real human lives with real human needs and real human challenges. He loved freedom not only because it allowed IBM to pursue maximum profit but because it allowed for human flourishing at all levels. Economic growth is important to everybody, but it is most important to the poor. While Friedman’s contributions to academic economics are well appreciated and his opposition to government shenanigans is celebrated, what is seldom remarked upon is that the constant and eternal theme of his popular work was helping the poor and the marginalized. Friedman cared about the minimum wage not only because it distorted labor markets but because of the effect it has on low-skill workers: permanent unemployment. He called the black unemployment rate a “disgrace and a scandal,” and the unemployment statute the “most anti-black law” on the books with good reason. He talked about two “machines”: “There has never been a more effective machine for the elimination of poverty than the free-enterprise system and a free market.” “We have constructed a governmental welfare scheme which has been a machine for producing poor people. . . . I’m not blaming the people. It’s our fault for constructing so perverse and so ill-shaped a monster.”
...
Free to Choose gave me the intellectual framework to understand what I already intuited about the welfare state, about the man from the government who says he is here to help. And that is what really should be remembered about Milton Friedman: He didn’t argue for capitalism in order to make the world safe for the Fortune 500, but to open up a world of possibilities for those who are most in need of them. The real subject of economics isn’t supply and demand, but people, and to love liberty is to love people and all that is best in them. And it is something that can only be done when we are free to choose.
nationalreview.com |
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| To: koan who wrote (10069) | 8/16/2012 3:58:22 PM | | From: TimF | | | | Exile and/or enforced shunning isn't libertarianism.
(I meant to post that to you on another thread, but I suppose this one serves just as well.) |
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| To: koan who wrote (10069) | 8/17/2012 2:25:14 PM | | From: average joe | | | | Koan believes ancient Greece was some kind of democratic state that lived in balance with nature. He does not know that Greece was a loose conglomeration of city states that routinely went to war with each other. He does not know that Plato believed might was right and had no problem with slavery or that Aristotle held a philosophy closer to Ayn Rand than his own. For Koan everything ends with an lol and another hit of the the bong while his little notions go up in smoke.
GZ said it best...
Message 25251854 |
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