Becoming Chinese

At the Volokh Conspiracy, Kenneth Anderson asks what those lending money to companies will do now that Barack Obama has shown he will ignore contracts and bankruptcy law to reward political allies:

The United States seems, in these contract matters, not to resemble the rule of law in Angola, sure — but it is distinctly starting to resemble, ever so little-bit-by-little-bit, the rule of law in China. There is a certain amount of neutral contract enforcement, but also a hefty amount of political thumb on the scale, and many uncertainties attached — and without getting hysterical about it, the American trend line is going that direction. It might be most useful to look at Western contracts with Chinese companies to get good ideas on "mixed" cases of this 'sort-of-rule-of-law, sort-of-not', because that seems to be the drift of Obama administration industrial policy.

Julian Sanchez Is Angry

He writes of conservatives attacking Sonia Sotomayor as a racist mediocrity who only rose in life because of affirmative action:

I’ll cop to sharing some of Yglesias’ irritation at the treatment of Sonia Sotomayor, and if Republicans are managing to get a rise out of my pallid ass, I can only imagine the kind of damage they’re doing to their brand among, you know, real Latinos.

Yglesias is fellow "not-especially-Hispanic blogger/pundit" Matthew Yglesias, who writes:

Conservatives ought to picture an anti-abortion, gun-owning, married, male, prosperous, Cuban-American small businessman living in the suburbs of Miami. Picture him reacting to the news of Sotomayor’s nomination. Perhaps he’s happy in some sense to contemplate a Latina on the bench, but perhaps not. Either way, the guy’s still a solid conservative. Now picture him listening to G. Gordon Liddy say “I understand that they found out today that Miss Sotomayor is a member of La Raza, which means in illegal alien, ‘the race.’” That’s not going to play well.

Is Atlas Shrugging?

Good question from Amity Schlaes.

Nostalgia, Immigration and Inequality

I'm not a big fan of Brink Lindsey, but his article on nostalgia economics in Reason is worth reading.

A sample

Under the system that existed between 1924 and 1965, immigration quotas were set for each country based on the percentage of people with that national origin already living in the U.S. (with immigration from East and South Asia banned outright until 1952). The explicit purpose of the national-origin quotas was to freeze the ethnic composition of the United States—that is, to preserve white Protestant supremacy and protect the country from “undesirable” races. “Unquestionably, there are fine human beings in all parts of the world,” Sen. Robert Byrd (D-W.V.) said in defense of the quota system in 1965, “but people do differ widely in their social habits, their levels of ambition, their mechanical aptitudes, their inherited ability and intelligence, their moral traditions, and their capacity for maintaining stable governments.”

But the times had passed the former Klansman by. With the triumph of the civil rights movement, official discrimination based on national origin was no longer sustainable. Just two months after signing the Voting Rights Act, President Lyndon Johnson signed the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, ending the “un-American” system of national-origin quotas and its “twin barriers of prejudice and privilege.” The act inaugurated a new era of mass immigration: Foreign-born residents of the United States have surged from 5 percent of the population in 1970 to 12.5 percent as of 2006.

This wave of immigration exerted a mild downward pressure on the wages of native-born low-skilled workers, with most estimates showing a small effect. Immigration’s more dramatic impact on measurements of inequality has come by increasing the number of less-skilled workers, thereby increasing apparent inequality by depressing average wages at the low end of the income distribution. According to the American University economist Robert Lerman, excluding recent immigrants from the analysis would eliminate roughly 30 percent of the increase in adult male annual earnings inequality between 1979 and 1996.

Although the large influx of unskilled immigrants has made American inequality statistics look worse, it has actually reduced inequality for the people involved. After all, immigrants experience large wage gains as a result of relocating to the United States, thereby reducing the cumulative wage gap between them and top earners in this country. When Lerman recalculated trends in inequality to include, at the beginning of the period, recent immigrants and their native-country wages, he found equality had increased rather than decreased. Immigration has increased inequality at home but decreased it on a global scale.

Turning Japanese

From Reason magazine, a disheartening account of how President Barack Obama is enacting economic policies similar to those that produced Japan's "lost decade."

Johnny Can't Dance

The great Ray Abshire

Keeping a Wary Eye on Obama, Part VIII

Fearing devaluation of the dollar, the Chinese are putting more of their money into hard assets.

Meanwhile, Chinese students laughed at Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner when he told them the country's investments in U.S. bonds is safe.

Total Eclipse of the Heart

Head of Tom Tancredo's PAC to Be Sentenced for Assault

He apparently called a black woman the N-word and struck her.

Charles Johnson notes that the guy has a history of unsavory connections.