Does John Faso believe in "crisis actors"?

It’s been a while since I’ve been in touch with the office of John Faso, my elected representative from New York’s 19th Congressional district. I was semi-regularly in touch last spring regarding the attempt to strip health insurance from 10’s of millions of Americans, and some regarding issues like Trump apparently sharing Israeli intelligence with the Russian ambassador.

His office would send standardized letters about health insurance that of course didn’t answer my specific question and that revealed a high level of, at best, ignorance about how health insurance works.

As for the Russian issue, he never did reply to my questions about that, so it’s entirely possible that Mr. Faso is in favor of sharing all sorts of goodies with the Russian government.

I called this morning (afternoon Prague time). Here’s how it went (rough transcript – I took notes as I went, but I wasn’t recording the call).

“Good morning,

I’m calling in regards to the shooting in Parkland a couple of weeks ago.

I just checked the congressman’s website, and I didn’t see any response there. Am I overlooking something?”

As has always been my experience with Faso’s office, the staffer was polite and proper.

She said she thought there was something. I had the “Press Releases” page up and read her the subjects of the three items posted since February 14th. She said it might be on FB. She scrolled around on FB for a while, then I said I’d look for it myself, but that I had another issue.

“I’ve seen repeated claims that the teenagers shown on TV as survivors of the shooting aren’t actually survivors of the shooting, but are in fact so-called “crisis actors” brought in to play the part of victims and ratchet up pressure for gun control.

“I was wondering if Mr. Faso has a position on those claims?”

“I haven’t spoken to him about that personally.”

“Is it possible that he thinks those claims are true?”

She couldn’t say.

Adventures in public relations

The other day Kate was looking at an online map of Prague and noticed something called the KGB Museum.

“That looks interesting.”

So I looked it up.

We haven’t gone, so I can’t speak from experience, but looking over the positive and negative reviews on TripAdvisor, it seems like the museum is two rooms filled with the idiosyncratic collection of one particular Russian man.

It’s quite clear that you are only allowed in for a guided tour, and that the owner/operator does not provide tours for just one person.

Judging again by uncontested descriptions, it seems as if the exhibits—photos, guns, knives, cameras—are not labeled, and so the only information about what you’re looking at comes from the guide’s narration, in imperfect English, assisted by a laser pointer.

Even if you can’t make it to Prague, the museum can still be educational, through the TripAdvisor reviews I mentioned above.

Most of the reviews are positive, but some visitors did leave 1-star write-ups, and the value comes not so much from the negative reviews themselves, as from the responses left by the owner.

I could put together a long post by just pasting in whole reviews with the accompanying responses, but to keep on the right side of the Fair Use doctrine, I’ll just give you some excerpts with links to the material in question.

One review is titled “Too expensive,” and the customer says, “It was really a nice but modest collection of Russian spy and military memorabilia with a wild-eyes storyteller.”

The respondent bills himself as, “MuseumKGBinPrague, Public Relations Manager at KGB Museum”, and says, “Yes, exactly. And see the unfortunate dead donkey on the next street is free. A true connoisseur of the History ...”

Another reviewer says, “I didn't learn anything about the KGB and was stuck in this small crowed display area for over an hour. Very disappointing. Also, it didn't smelled good. Not bad, but like badly scented candles, which gave me a headache.”

This time, the response comes from “MuseumKGBinPrague, Manager at KGB Museum,” and says in part,

Peak peak?

My obsession as an economist is the perspective that the economy is grounded in the physical world. Everything—even finance—is ultimately tied back to the processes of pulling things from the earth and transforming them for our use and pleasure.

A tangentially related concern is to get a 30,000-foot view of the financial system. Rather than losing my way in individual assets, is there some place where I can see the thing as a whole.

One place to get a sense of that is in what’s known as the “Flow of Funds” accounts prepared by the Federal Reserve.

Ideally, I’d like to get to a few different posts on this, but I’ll at least post this one.

The graph below shows the net worth of households and nonprofits in the U.S., from the beginning of 1952 through the third quarter of 2017 (as far as the data ran when I downloaded them a couple of weeks ago).

The green line on top is the value of assets (things people own).

The red line at the bottom is the value of liabilities (things people owe).

And the black line in the middle is net worth: assets minus liabilities.

All three lines are portrayed relative to potential GDP. For example, net worth in late 2017 is at a level of about 5 on the graph, which means it was five times as big as potential GDP.

It may be a spoiler to say that this post is about those peaks in the net worth line, in 2000, 2006-08, and now.

But to get to what I see in those peaks, I have to step back to the meanings of “wealth” and “net worth.”

Don't ask for an apology

Some light morning reading:

The Museum of Roma culture is demanding that Tomio Okamura, the chair of the SPD party publically apologize for his statement about the concentration camp for Roma in Lety u Písku. In a conversation for DVTV on Saturday, citing a book, he said that the camp wasn’t fenced in and that the people there were free to come and go. According to experts from the Museum of Roma Culture this is an untrue claim which exacerbates anti-Roma attitudes in society and tramples the memory of victims of the persecution and genocide against the Roma during the Second World War. It was not possible to get a statement from Okamura. According to the spokesman of the SPD, he was ill.

No. Don’t ask for an apology.

Don’t demand an apology.

Don’t talk about an apology.

Some context, for those three out of the four of you reading this who have no particular reason to follow Czech politics.

“SPD” stands for “Freedom and Direct Democracy”. The second part of the party name represents their support for governing by referendum, and the “freedom” part is, I guess, freedom from the evil diktat of Brussels.

Tomio Okamura, the head of the party, is the son of a Czech mother and a Japanese father (hence the name). He spent some of his youth in each of his two ancestral countries, but since the fall of communism in 1989 he has essentially lived here in Prague. He made bank as a travel agent, using his natural advantage to cater to the market in Japanese tourism to the Czech Republic.

He seems to be a political opportunist with few beliefs but no qualms about jumping on any cause that he thinks will get him votes. As I wrote about him here, he jumped on board the “Dawn” party in 2013. The original purpose of the party was to rework the Czech constitution in the interests of making a more effective democracy.

Okamura figured out how effective it was to slam the local Roma population for being slovenly, and instead of reworking the Czech constitution, he rebuilt the party platform on the basis of ethno-nationalist hatred of Roma.

Then he siphoned into his own pockets the money the party had received from the state for funding its operations.

Can they be broken up?

This is a follow-up to yesterday’s post, dealing with the suggestion of breaking up and regulating the social-media giants.

I think there’s a good case for a breakup (see the Soros article that prompted the discussion in the first place), but I don’t yet understand technically how that would work.

Would it be measures like, say, pulling YouTube (and Blogger) apart from Google?

Or breaking up Google itself?

The second one seems very hard to do, because a function like "search" is one where there are real advantages to having one giant. If you break up that search engine, does it actually function less well as a search engine?

Splitting off items like YouTube seems much more technically feasible. And maybe it would partly address the underlying concern about social-media platforms having undue social control, but it's not clear that it would.

Particularly in the case of Facebook, the undue social control comes primarily through Facebook itself, not the ancillary businesses it has acquired. And even more than Google’s search engine, it seems to me that Facebook is effective for its users in part because it is the go-to site for that sort of social sharing.

If half of the people I want to share with stay on Facebook, and the other half end up on the new spin-off, “Footbook”, which one should I be on?

Whose money is it, anyway?

Over on Facebook, my colleague Jason Antrosio got into a polite spat with another reader over the issue of expropriation. The impetus was this article about George Soros, who sees dangers posed by social-media companies and is calling for their regulation.

The very first comment asked, “Expropriated? Who is going to reimburse the owners?”

Which was an interesting take, because the article itself says nothing about expropriation. It talks about regulating Facebook, Google, etc. as public utilities (the way we regulate the companies that bring electricity to our houses), but the first respondent thought that was expropriation and responded accordingly.

(Edit Feb 5th: In writing the paragraph above I had missed the fact that when Jason shared the Soros article to the "Anthropology Report" Facebook page, he had added his own comment that the companies should be either broken up/regulated, or expropriated. See his comment below.)

Jason suggested the owners of social-media companies would still be just fine under Soros’s proposal.

The first commenter responded, “Just because you have a lot of money, that doesn’t mean others have the right to take away what belongs to you. It’s yours, you worked for it.”

Jason admitted some role for compensation, but thought it could be limited to, say, some generous multiple of a society’s median wealth. 10 times, 50 times, maybe even 100 times. But that it was reasonable for there to be a limit on the extent of compensation.

The logic behind Jason’s proposal is essentially the logic behind strongly progressive taxation.