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Opportunity Costs

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I’m too upset by the prospect of a government shutdown to write anything coherent.  It happens.  So I dug through the last time we had this problem potentially looming in 2011 and found this piece.  It’s not only still relevant, but it ties into our recent piece on the Triple Threat of forces on our economic health that no one is really dealing with.  I hope you enjoy this repeat from 31 August 2011.

You can’t have your cake and eat it, too.  It’s a silly old saying with a huge dollop of folk wisdom hidden in the middle of it.  But money spent is sometimes more than just money gone – in an integrated world it’s a choice to make one connection when another one might have been a better choice.

Rather than just measure how much money is going in and out, it might be better to understand what we could buy with the same money.  The technical term for this is “Opportunity Cost”, or what we give up by making the choices we do.

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Gameday in Washingtoon

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Another year, another battle over the budget.  This time the threat is a trifecta, a showdown over shutting down government, defunding Obamacare, and a default on the Federal Debt by not raising the debt ceiling.  The stakes could not possibly be higher – and yet just about no one outside of Washingtoon wants to be in this game in the first place.  How did it get to this?

First of all, this is about the Republican Party and absolutely nothing else.  Boehner and the leadership had to prove their mettle to more vocal Tea Party members if they wanted to have a chance to keep their positions.  But there is little doubt that even if they win the greater party outside stands to lose the most in this game.  For the rest of us, all we can do is hope that nothing stupid winds up happening.

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Bernanke in Charge

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Another Federal Reserve policy meeting, another restatement of the QE3, another big rise on Wall Street.  The breakdown on the Fed’s continuing to buy $85 a month in treasury bills was predictable, if generally wrong and leaving just about everyone to speculate on why, regardless of how plainly the case was made.  Make no mistake about it, though – Ben is still in charge and things are going pretty well in many ways, at least until the showdown on the budget and debt ceiling.

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Sovereignty

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The year was 1648.  After 30 years of Lutherans slaughtering Catholics and Catholics slaughtering Lutherans, Europe had become tired of war. The heart of western Germany, the Palatine, was utterly destroyed.  A treaty was concluded at Westphalia, near the heart of the conflict, which crafted peace through a new concept – sovereignty.  The warring monarchs agreed that each side had territorial integrity and that neither would interfere in the internal affairs of the others.

The entire world was eventually divided up into “sovereign nations” based on this principle.

The year was 2011.  Protesters igniting the “Arab Spring” in Syria were slaughtered by their sovereign national army, and eventually formed something like an armed rebellion in what is now known as a civil war.  The world watched in horror as at least 100,000 people were killed, about half civilians, for more than two years.  Sovereignty means that no one is supposed to intervene, at least not directly.  That has held until repeated attacks by chemical weapons occurred, crossing an apparent “red line” that denotes the limits of sovereignty.  The world wants to act to stop it.

Why this line?  Why now?  What is the real limit of “sovereignty” and what does it mean to be a nation-state today?

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March of History, Made and Unmade

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Two score and Ten years ago today a crowd descended upon Washington.  They were assembled as a movement that traversed the South with Freedom Riders, sat-in at segregated lunch counters, and refused to move to the back of the bus.  It was a black crowd that filled the Mall that day, but it was also a white crowd as well.  It was an American crowd.  The movement crystalized into a moment when Dr. Martin Luther King spoke.

I am happy to join with you today in what will go down in history as the greatest demonstration for freedom in the history of our nation.

Five score years ago, a great American, in whose symbolic shadow we stand today, signed the Emancipation Proclamation. This momentous decree came as a great beacon light of hope to millions of Negro slaves who had been seared in the flames of withering injustice. It came as a joyous daybreak to end the long night of their captivity.

But the threads of history ran deeper than that moment, as Dr. King explained.

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