Megan Mcardle has a great discussion on the living wage nonsense:

n the popular mind, every blue collar worker in 1950 was pulling down a hefty wage at GM, but union membership peaked at about a third of workers, and most of those jobs were at companies that didn’t have the profits, or the freedom from competition, to support those kinds of wages. A lot more blue collar workers were people like the mechanics and pump operators at my grandfather’s gas station, who raised families on . . . the kind of money you could generate working at a gas station.

Read the whole thing.

Because no one else will. Me, in October:

I’m going to make a prediction right now. We’ve endured a .com bubble and a housing bubble. Bubbles are, unfortunately, inevitable in a free market.

I predict that the next big bubble is going to be alternative energy. Billions of dollars are going to be sunk into untenable technologies. Millions of jobs will be wasted on useless endeavors. There’s nothing wrong with this — so long as it’s the private sector and not the government — creating the bubble. But when governments doing it, we will get a catastrophe on par with the housing crash we’re experiencing now.

Now, the American Spectator has discovered the bleeding obvious:

You can see in all this the essence of how government meddling promotes economic meltdowns. What happened with the subprime debacle? The federal government became obsessed with the idea that home ownership was good for everyone. It subsidized mortgages among people who couldn’t afford them, assuming some of the risk itself and forcing banks to take on the rest. Pretty soon the whole thing comes crashing down, carrying the rest of the economy along with it.

What’s happening with alternate energy is the same thing. Governments have assumed that windmills, solar collectors, and biofuels are the wave of the future. Therefore the only logical course is to hasten that future by subsidizing it and forcing utilities to adopt it ahead of schedule. What’s lost in this is that windmills are producing almost no useful electricity and will become a huge drag on the economy — just as biofuels have done nothing to reduce our dependence on foreign oil and have just led to hundreds of millions in wasted investments.

But it’s a stimulus! Oh, and then there’s this:

Yesterday, President Barack Obama signed the $787 billion economic stimulus bill after touring the solar panel installation on the roof of the Denver Museum of Nature and Science.

…

But as nice as those panels look, just how practical are they? Well, the Denver Business Journal looked into the project last summer and found that the 465 panel 100-kilowatt installation cost $720,000 and will produce about 130,000 kilowatt-hours of electricity annually. According to the Journal, electricity from the solar array will replace between 2 and 12 per cent of the museum’s electricity demand. In fact, an internal museum report says the solar panels will supply only 1 to 2 percent of the museum’s electricity needs.

It will take 110 years to pay for itself.

110 years.

Green jobs, my aching ass.

Cato is off again on high-speed rail systems.

Over the past two decades, U.S. cities have wasted close to $200 billion on high-cost, low-performance rail transit projects. But that will nothing compared to the plans rail nuts have for high-speed intercity rail.

Last November, 52 percent of California voters approved $9 billion in funding for a San Francisco-to-Los Angeles high-speed rail plan. The total cost of the plan is expected to exceed $45 billion, and California expects Uncle Sam to pick up at least half the tab. If it does, Florida, Illinois, Texas, and a few dozen other states will all want federal funding for their own high-speed rail plans.

…

Based on the projected costs of California’s system and the length of high-speed rail proposals in the rest of the U.S., I estimate that a national high-speed rail network will cost the U.S. well over $500 billion. By comparison, the Interstate Highway System, adjusted for inflation to today’s dollars, cost $450 billion.

What will high-speed rail do? As my Cato policy analysis reveals, studies in California and real-life examples in Europe shows that its main effect will be to put profitable airlines out of business. It will only take about 3 or 4 percent of cars of the roads in rail corridors. Though costing more than interstate highways, a national high-speed rail network will never carry even a fifth as many people as the interstates, and virtually 0 percent of the freight. High-speed rail operations might save a little energy, but the energy cost of construction will more than wipe out any long-term operational savings.

I’m sure there are other studies that claim the opposite. I happen to think the issue is not that simple. A high-speed rail system in the Northeast might make sense. But then again, if it did, private contractors would be all over it, no?

I do know that Austin was exploring light rail while I was there, which was insane. No one is going to use light rail in Austin except a handful of University people. In Austin, I could get to the airport in 15 minutes. There was no way I would ever take light rail.

Yeah, right. We all know how lucrative the counterfeit trash bag industry is.

But that leaves aside the big issue — what the sam hell is a city doing forcing its residents to buy “official” garbage bags?

Only in New York would the state pump life into one of the dumbest economic ideas of the last century — rent control. Take it away, Megan:

In times like this, it’s easy to believe that if you laid all the economists in the world end to end, they still wouldn’t reach a conclusion. But here’s one of the things that basically everyone, left to right, agrees on: rent control is the surest way to destroy a city’s housing stock short of aerial bombing, and one of the major culprits behind New York’s painfully low vacancy rate. Rent control allows some people to stay in artificially cheap apartments, but only by forcing the people who would have rented them into some other, less desireable place. Those people bid up the price of the uncontrolled housing, so that you essentially end up with two housing markets, one with rents above the natural market price, and one with rents below it. There is no way to ensure that the deserving middle class folks you want to see stay in the city end up in the latter, and indeed, many of the owners of rent stabilized apartments were notorious for finding the richest tenants they could. Rich tenants rarely get behind on the rent, and move sooner than people who can just barely afford their below-market place.

Meanwhile, the stabilized stock deteriorates, because, especially in inflationary times, it does not pay the landlords to maintain them beyond the barest minimum required by law. And no one wants to build any new housing except luxury units which will not be controlled.

Then everyone wonders how come there are no houses for middle income people in the city.

Trying to repeal the law of supply and demand is like trying to repeal the law of gravity. If you artificially try to lower prices — on housing, on healthcare or on gas — the supply of it will dry up. This isn’t some fancy-shmancy economic model that only three guys understand. This isn’t some esoteric libertarian intellectual cul-de-sac. This is Econ 101. It’s something so basic that I bet even Paul Krugman would acknowledge it.

On the other site, I blogged about a poll showing that 2/3 of Americans think they could manage the economy better than Congress. I bet 100% could manage it better than the New York Assembly.

You know, I disagree with Obama about a lot. I’ve been posting a series of article at Right Thinking opposing aspect of the stimulus package. But I am still relieved to see a press conference involve a President who can complete a coherent sentence. When George Bush started answering a question, you had no idea where he was going to end up.

Another thought: I have every respect for Helen Thomas, but she needs to be retired, not asking questions of the President. She’s borderline incoherent. “So-called terrorists?” “Who has nukes?” WTF?

Some great commentary on the stimulus package today:

I’m opposed to the current stimulus, but my conservative streak has lots of misgivings. I’m not sure I’m right and the stakes seem awfully big. The downside risk of not acting — a prolonged recession — seems better the downside risk of acting — inflation and a lost decade. But that’s just me.

I also refuse, on principle, to join with the science blogs in protesting the elimination of NSF budget hikes. I can’t be opposed to runaway spending in principle but support it for my specific bailiwick.

South Carolina authorities are thinking of pressing charges against Michael Phelps for taking a bong hit. For some reason, I don’t think a nation filled with drunk, obese, cigarette-smoking fast food addicts has any business getting its boxers in a bunch over a 23-year-old taking a bong hit. Half of Americans have done what Phelps did, including the current and past Presidents.

A look into what the Save Darfur movement doesn’t understand. I am constantly astonished by the number of people who think that complex and difficult problems can be solved just by choosing to care about them.

Radley Balko fires back on the stupid controversy about a 23-year-old kid smoking pot. I agree with every word.

The rain forests are recovering as nations grow richer and people cease having to chop down jungle so that they can farm or log.

This is an idea libertarians have been pushing for 30 years or more — that the best way to keep people from chopping down the rain forest was to make them so rich that they didn’t need to.

Cato has a rundown of the more than 200 economists who oppose the economic stimulus package. Reasonable people can disagree and I’m not saying those 200 are right. What I am saying is that the contention made by the President and Vice-President that no one disagrees on the idea of the stimulus; that Paul Krugman’s depiction of anti-stimulators as mere partisan hacks, is just garbage.

It’s. Just. Not. True.

I know why they are being so vociferous and trying to shout down dissent. It’s because the more people look at this bill, the more ridiculous spending they find.