Sure, US companies are probably the biggest market for your web search history and the list of stores that you shop at, but the market for information like your credit card number, your checking account number and routing information, and your mother's maiden name is world wide. So the question is are we talking about "3rd party cookies" spying or "malware with keylogger" spying?

Although these problems are bound to occur in any large organization, their impact is disproportionately large when a monopolist power screws up. In areas where there is competition, people at least have alternatives (even if they aren't ideal). When Apple launched a broken maps app, people used Google maps on safari until Google released their own app. Windows 8 sucks? Buy a Mac, an iPad, or Galaxy Tab. But for a federal government fail, the alternative is to, what, move to Canada?

But both conservatives and liberals can take away valid arguments from this; liberals can say that in order to get government to do all the things that we (for certain definitions of "we") want then we have to be willing to spend the money to do it right, and conservatives can say that having the government run (for certain definitions of "run") something creates a single point of failure and should therefore be avoided.

Your grandfather's trip probably averaged about 60 mph. Although he probably wasn't putting illegal gasoline tanks in the backseat, so stops were more frequent, I would guess that the "typical" driving of your grandfather on those trips was a lot slower that this guy. And your dad thought it was irresponsible, so imagine how crazy this guy must have been driving most of the time. I personally can't believe that anyone can find 3,000 contiguous miles of highway in America where you can safely drive an average of 100 mph.

Making profit (at least in America) is a right derived from basic property rights under English common law. The fact that I own the furniture in my house even when I am not there, or a shopkeeper owns the inventory in their store is a concept that was a huge advance in civilization, which throughout most of biological history defined "your property" as merely whatever you could successfully guard against the imposition of others.

Once you have the concept of property that you can use, destroy, sell, lease, etc. as you see fit, the right to profit from acquiring something and disposing of it at a higher price (to and from a willing buyer and seller) is in fact well grounded in law (albeit limited in many ways). You don't (typically) have a right to force someone to buy your stuff under terms that they don't agree to, and he doesn't (typically) have a right to take it from you under terms that you don't agree to.

Actually, gp is a little right, although most people misunderstand the Amish relationship with technology. They don't ban all technology; rather, they make a conscious decision about whether to adopt or not adopt a new technology, based upon their values. In the same way, instead of using every new technology that someone tries to sell to us, we should evaluate it using non-technical metrics to determine whether using it is really the right thing to do. Much of social media, cloud storage, and proprietary crypto would have a very difficult time passing this test, and we would probably be better off being more Amish-like and avoiding technologies that are not consistent with the way we want to live rather than jump onto every new shiny shiny that's put in front of us.

No this is still the budget crisis. You know, the one after the Syria crisis and before the borrowing limit crisis (that's scheduled for later this month). Like bad guys in a bad kung fu movie, they only come at you one at a time, but there is an endless supply of them.

I don't think your first argument is very strong, because insurance will always be required for the vast majority of construction. Every hospital, shopping mall, office park, etc. is built with borrowed money, and those lenders are never going to waive the insurance requirement. What it may do is change the location of where those get built going forward, but hardly anybody is in a position, financially or legally, to self insure against catastrophe.

As to your second point, actually I see RMS as being similar to reinsurers, in that both provide a way for insurance companies to "collude" to set rates, without actually colluding, by providing a justification to set rates at a particular, anchored, level. Of course some of those excess profits (above what you would get in perfect competition) get shared with RMS and the REs, but it's a lot better than being in the airline business, where every so often you get a price war and you can't charge enough to cover your costs so a few of you go bankrupt.

Even with that, as you know, cat insurance still goes through cycles and the only time they make real money is on the up part of the cycle. But they can only charge more when their customers think they will have to pay more, typically because a sensational hurricane hits a populated area in North America, but it could also happen because of news such as a major recalibration of the model.

I don't think you understand what RMS is. They are not an insurance company, who has to compete on premiums, they sell a model of losses to many insurance companies and they are the de facto standard (there are two or three more but RMS is the 800 lbs gorilla). So when their model says, you have to charge much more, insurance companies like that because they can all increase premiums without being perceived as colluding together in violation of antitrust laws. Although an individual insurance company cannot charge much more than what the rms model says, in aggregate the insurance companies are all quite happy when RMS says that they all have to charge more.

To the contrary, that happens only if the the change in prices is real, not inflationary. Let's say that the central bank decides to inflate by buying huge amounts of financial assets from banks. Assuming that the supply of those financial assets is large enough such that the central bank's purchases do not have an impact on the price of those securities (a good assumption for huge fixed income markets such as Treasuries and MBSs, not a good assumption for smaller markets like individual stocks, but I'll address that later), the inflation that occurs does not benefit the banks. Think about it this way; if the central bank buys $100MM of Treasuries from a bank, then the bank is no better off because there is no difference between holding $100MM worth of Treasuries versus holding $100MM worth of cash. It's the same thing as the old joke about, what weighs more, a ton of bricks or a ton of feathers - neither, they both weigh the same.

However, if the central bank purchases do affect the price of those financial assets, then the gains to the banks is not a benefit because of the inflation being caused, but rather it is a benefit due to the increased real demand for those financial assets. In my earlier post, it is like the price of apples going up because McDonalds (or some other large purchaser) decides to buy a whole lot more apples than oranges. Apple growers benefit from the increase in price of apples, but that is a real increase in price, not inflation.

The other thing I want to mention is that your comment about "politically well-connected" benefiting is absolutely true, with a caveat. It is not so much that the well-connected benefit from the central bank purchases, again, as long as those purchases are at fair market value, you are just exchanging $X wealth for $X wealth. However, let's assume that the central bank needs to put some amount of money into circulation just to keep some even amount of inflation (you could even assume 0% inflation if you think about net injections and allow for net currency injections to be negative). But let's say that the government runs an expansionary fiscal policy, which of course, is chosen by political means, and there is no reason to believe that there is an $X for $X exchange; rather, it is likely that there are politically chosen winners who get more than $X in exchange for $X and losers who get less than $X in exchange for $X.

If the central bank a) allows the government to run a deficit, and b) does not change its original monetary plan, then there will be more inflation because there is more net currency added into circulation than the central bank had determined was "appropriate," and there are politically chosen winners and losers. But it is not the result of the central bank's purchases, rather, it is the result of the inflationary fiscal policy. Also note that even if the central bank negates the fiscal expansion by withdrawing exactly as much money from circulation as the fiscal policy adds (and therefore there is no inflation at all), the winners and losers are the ones that were chosen by the government. So the fact that politically connected groups benefit from their relationship to the government is independent of whether the central bank allows inflation or not.

In all fairness, just being "art" was pretty groundbreaking, oh, 50 or 60 years ago - a little meta that no one had ever seen before. But like patents, you can take an old idea, add "on a computer" (or even better "on a networked computer"), and it becomes innovative!

And imagine how much more software we could release if they re-assigned marketing staff to software development!

No, you are still misunderstanding. Gross Domestic Income is equal to Gross Domestic Product by construction (definition). While the change in *my* paycheck may lag or lead changes in GDP, the aggregate income of everybody must exactly match those changes at the exact same time, by definition.

What you may be thinking of is that since the increases that I see in my paycheck are nominal, there is some portion of that change attributable to real growth in income and some portion attributable to inflation. But just like the real price of objects changes (e.g., apples could get more expensive and oranges get cheaper, even though overall inflation is zero, due to actual changes in apple/orange production or changing consumer taste), changes in the real value of my paycheck relative to the real income of others can occur that make it difficult to see what inflation is really doing. If there is overall inflation, and I am not seeing an increase in my paycheck, then somebody else must be seeing that increase in their paycheck/wages/income, or else GDP != GDI which is not possible.

In an economic sense, "inflation" is actually only the first, because inflation is where there is a general rise in the cost of all goods and services. But income to a consumer is a cost of good or service to an employer (labor cost). If more people realized that "inflation" doesn't mean that a gallon of milk costs more, it means that you will see a nominal rise in your paycheck, it wouldn't be such a boogeyman.

The source of the confusion was from the 1970's, when you had inflation combined with an oil supply shock, such that the costs of everything was going up, at the same time that the economy became less productive. People think the bad thing was the costs of things going up, when the real problem was that real incomes declined because of the oil shocks - nominal incomes were relatively flat.