Looks like the first thing that House Speaker Boehner’s replacement can do is stop having the US Government sign stupid crap like this at the UN. I’ve bolded the ‘hook’ to Global Warming. I’ve also bolded places where some other issues caught my eye.
UN summit to approve 15-year blueprint to eradicate extreme poverty and combat climate change
Danish Prime Minister Lars Lokke Rasmussen, right, and United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon celebrate after the passing of a draft resolution during the 2015 Sustainable Development Summit, Friday, Sept. 25, 2015 at United Nations headquarters. (AP Photo/Seth Wenig)
Note the “Sustainable Development” line straight out of Agenda 21 and the push for UN control of your life and property.
Associated Press Sept. 25, 2015 | 12:13 p.m. EDT + More
By EDITH M. LEDERER, Associated Press
UNITED NATIONS (AP) — World leaders on Friday unanimously approved an ambitious and costly 15-year blueprint to eradicate extreme poverty, combat climate change and address more than a dozen other major global issues.
Presidents, prime ministers and diplomats from the U.N.’s 193 members stood and applauded loudly after General Assembly President Mogens Lykketoft gaveled approval of the development roadmap.
Discussions on how to implement the new goals — expected to cost between $3.5 trillion and $5 trillion every year until 2030 — is expected to dominate the three-day summit that will include speeches by U.S. President Barack Obama, China’s President Xi Jinping and the leaders of Egypt, India, Iran, Germany, Britain and France.
Guess the prior $200 Billion / year Agenda 21 goal wasn’t high enough to grease enough palms…
Now since the USA is functionally insolvent going into debt a further $1 Trillion / year (give or take a few hundred $Billion) and have a $19 Trillion nominal national debt, a few dozens of more State and Local debts, and somewhere near hundreds of $Trillions of ‘unfunded liabilities’: I suggest the UN just bypass our already overloaded credit card and go straight to the people from whom we would need to borrow any money anyway. We need our elected representatives to stand up and be counted telling the UN “Go talk to China. They are the only one with any money. We beg from them too, so ‘go for it'”.
[…]
The document — called “Transforming our World: The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development” — sets out 17 broad goals and 169 specific targets. Its overarching aims of reducing poverty and inequality and preserving the environment got strong support from Pope Francis who addressed the General Assembly immediately before the summit opened.
When President Johnson declared war on poverty nearly half a century ago, writes Tanner, “the poverty rate in America was around 19 percent and falling rapidly.” Increasing prosperity brought about by the free market, coupled with strong civil institutions such as churches, charities, and fraternal organizations, was already accomplishing the unthinkable: making poverty, the general condition of mankind throughout most of history, a rarity in the United States. A rising tide, as Johnson’s predecessor observed, does indeed lift all boats.The man at the helm of the ’64 ship of state, however, decided the tide wasn’t rising quickly enough and so he would help it along by filling buckets with water from the port side of the ship and emptying them on the starboard side. Not surprisingly, this strategy failed to increase the water level. Thus, despite $12 trillion in federal welfare spending and $3 trillion in state and local government welfare spending over the past 48 years, says Tanner, “the poverty rate never fell below 10.5 percent and is now at the highest level in nearly a decade” — 15.1 percent and climbing. “Clearly,” he adds, “we have been doing something wrong.”
The non-binding goals will succeed the eight Millennium Development Goals adopted by world leaders 15 years ago.
So we sign onto this crap, making it ‘unanimous’ as some kind of ‘symbolic gesture’, but the reality is that folks are expecting to transform that ‘symbolism’ into real law. Note that the World Court is not exactly symbolic any more…
Where is the person standing up to say “This is a fools errand, and doomed to fail in corruption and incompetence. We do not endorse it.” Who and Where?
The USA “War On Poverty” has also shoveled a lot of money around, and also done nothing of worth:
Tuesday, 26 June 2012
The War on Poverty: $15 Trillion and Nothing to Show for It
Written by Michael Tennant
Fifteen trillion dollars: That’s how much American taxpayers have forked over in the name of helping the poor since 1964. And what do we have to show for it? A poverty rate that has barely budged, an entrenched bureaucracy, and a population — like that of Greece and Portugal, two welfare-state basket cases — increasingly dependent on government handouts.
These are the conclusions of a recent Cato Institute report on the American welfare state by Michael Tanner, Cato’s director of health and welfare studies and author of The Poverty of Welfare: Helping Others in Civil Society. It is hardly an encouraging read, to say the least.
When President Johnson declared war on poverty nearly half a century ago, writes Tanner, “the poverty rate in America was around 19 phttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_justiceercent and falling rapidly.” Increasing prosperity brought about by the free market, coupled with strong civil institutions such as churches, charities, and fraternal organizations, was already accomplishing the unthinkable: making poverty, the general condition of mankind throughout most of history, a rarity in the United States. A rising tide, as Johnson’s predecessor observed, does indeed lift all boats.
The man at the helm of the ’64 ship of state, however, decided the tide wasn’t rising quickly enough and so he would help it along by filling buckets with water from the port side of the ship and emptying them on the starboard side. Not surprisingly, this strategy failed to increase the water level. Thus, despite $12 trillion in federal welfare spending and $3 trillion in state and local government welfare spending over the past 48 years, says Tanner, “the poverty rate never fell below 10.5 percent and is now at the highest level in nearly a decade” — 15.1 percent and climbing. “Clearly,” he adds, “we have been doing something wrong.”
I don’t have to like something to recognize what works and what does not work. What works is free market capitalism and what does not work is government programs. This is not improved by running the money though the UN. (See long history of failed programs including oil for food and so much more).
Yes, capitalism is a Royal Pain In The Ass. You must get up each day and find a job, and keep it, and actually do something someone else wants enough to pay you for it. Unfortunately, taxing productivity to give it to unproductive folks just ends up with a whole lot LESS productivity and a whole lot more “takers” happy to watch TV and not be productive. Doing that at the national and international levels does not make it work differently.
No, I don’t like it. No, I don’t want it. And yet, it is.
“Reality just is. -E.M.Smith”.
So you can accept that, call this kind of crap the stupid socialism crap that it is, and move on; or you can not accept it, sign up for a good group hug picture, and cause $Trillions of damage to the global economy while creating MORE poverty, not less. But you can be part of the “cool club” and be invited to the after party…
Look at the history of failed national economies sacrificed on the altar of “economic justice” or whatever brand of socialism is the fad these days. Argentina was the 10th largest economy in the world under capitalism. Now a sad footnote of collapse. Brazil was a wonder of wealth creation and economic growth, now with collapsing currency (again) and economy (again) as they play with the Socialism Shiny Thing (again). Brazil alone has had a few turns on this cycle. You would think they might notice that the outcome doesn’t change. USSR, gone. UK nearly bankrupted until The Iron Lady got things going for a while. The whole of Eastern Europe taking off now that they have moved to more market oriented economics. Even Communist China figured out that moving away from pure socialism brought spectacular economic growth. (But they have not yet realized that they need to keep moving toward free and open markets to keep the process improving. Brazil did a back slide, and is now collapsing (again) so one hopes the Chinese are able to notice that.)
One can forgive The Pope for having loony lefty economic leanings. He comes from a life long immersion in such thinking. Argentine and Hispanic cultures both leaning that way. And the Jesuits are big on the whole Social Justice thing:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_justice
Social justice is “justice in terms of the distribution of wealth, opportunities, and privileges within a society”. Classically, “justice” (especially corrective justice or distributive justice) ensured that individuals both fulfilled their societal roles and received what was their due from society.
Social justice assigns rights and duties in the institutions of society, which enables people to receive the basic benefits and burdens of cooperation. The relevant institutions can include education, health care, social security, labour rights, as well as a broader system of public services, progressive taxation and regulation of markets, to ensure fair distribution of wealth, equal opportunity, equality of outcome, and no gross social injustice.
While the concept of social justice can be traced through Ancient and Renaissance philosophy, such as Socrates, Thomas Aquinas, Spinoza and Thomas Paine, the term “social justice” only became used explicitly from the 1840s. A Jesuit priest named Luigi Taparelli is typically credited with coining the term, and it spread during the revolutions of 1848 with the work of Antonio Rosmini-Serbati. In the late industrial revolution, progressive American legal scholars began to use the term more, particularly Louis Brandeis and Roscoe Pound. From the early 20th century it was also embedded in international law and institutions, starting with the Treaty of Versailles 1919. The preamble to establish the International Labour Organization recalled that “universal and lasting peace can be established only if it is based upon social justice.” In the later 20th century, social justice was made central to the philosophy of the social contract, primarily by John Rawls in A Theory of Justice (1971). In 1993, the Vienna Declaration and Programme of Action treats social justice as a purpose of the human rights education.
So he’s been soaked in Socialism so long he can’t even recognize that it is what he is pushing. (He has claimed to not be a socialist… rather like most of them seem to do while pushing a socialist agenda with a socialist history to it… but I digress.)
The truly sad thing being quite simple: It Does Not Work.
It makes the folks pushing it feel better, all the while moving ever more of the folks it is supposed to benefit into ever worse abject poverty, dependence, squalor and despair. Look at the implosion in Greece right now as a current work in progress.
I would have thought the Pope might recognize greed and envy as deadly sins, not promote them, but I guess he is just as prone to human failures as the rest of us.
One side bar on economics:
It has to do with ‘why’. It comes down to “marginal propensity”. For folks with a lot of income, they want to save and invest more. Over time, this builds up large productive economies with oodles of goods for everyone. It removes poverty by lifting the poor, just not quite as much as it lifts the rich. This is called “marginal propensity to invest”. Folks who are poor consume 100% of what they have. (In extreme cases even having ‘negative investment’ when you start burning the furniture to stay warm and eating the oxen that pull your plough as the last of the seed corn is devoured).
Raising poor up to above their consumption level via jobs and markets causes them to start saving and investing. Leaving them dependent on handouts from governments does not.
Taxing the rich to pay for it reduces investment. So a “tax the rich to help the poor” must inevitably have lower levels of savings and investment, so declines in economic performance. That is, less for everyone. Now as there is less for everyone, more folks end up in the ‘poor’ end of things. The Middle Class finds themselves closer to the bottom, so saving and investing even less.
Repeat that cycle until everyone is malinvested and in poverty. Now you have a collapsed socialism in poverty. But everyone is ‘equal’ in their poverty…
All because marginal propensity to invest is not subject to manipulation and it will “do what it does”.
Having the government “invest” can be helpful when one is at the extreme collapse end of things as they can act like the ‘rich guy’ who is absent from the system; but as economies grow, governments are shown ever poorer at making decent investment decisions. It just isn’t possible to have that fine grain information at a Central Authority. So Stalin mandating “make steel mills and tractors” is pretty clear when you have none of either. Having the Central Computer Bureau decide to invent the iPhone is not in their skill set… so once out of abject poverty as a nation, they must proceed ever more toward free and open markets to keep the marginal investments going to the right places.
And that is why handing giant boat loads of cash to the UN Central Authority to “manage” in the global poverty market is doomed to fail.
The money MUST come from the folks who have it, which will result in less investment, lower economic growth globally, and reduced standards of living (with more of the reduction happening in the middle and lower classes). It will then be washed through ineffective bureaus that will increase consumption and destruction (i.e. exactly the opposite of economic investment) and further decrease global prosperity.
This sets in place the Spiral Decent Into Economic Hell as ever more money is demanded “This Time For Sure!” to fix the intractable poverty that seems to increase the more you “fix it”. Repeat until the economy collapses into poverty for all.
In Conclusion
For what it is worth, I am not a rich retired mogul. I’m semi-retired, but not exactly sure where the meal ticket will come from next month. I have assets I can sell, but don’t want to do that. So I’m more of a ‘wage slave’ looking for a gig than a ‘rich fat cat’.
My advocacy for The Rich comes not from a love of the Elite Wealthy Class (of which I am NOT a member and don’t even get invited to parties for show and tell about The Forgotten Man…) It comes entirely from a recognition that be it from high ability, high social status, or just being greedy and well connected enough to work the system: When rich folks get richer they save and invest more and that creates economic growth for everyone. Some even eventually getting to me.
I don’t have to like that to understand it and to know that “reality just is” and accept it.
What I fail to grasp is why so many folks let the sins of greed, envy and avarice dominate them so much that they will take the money of the rich and drive all of us into poverty; despite their being ample proof that is what always happens. It’s just stoopid… And I don’t do stupid well. Yet even intelligent and well educated folks like Popes and Presidents regularly “go there”.
The only really good news for me out of this is that there simply isn’t $5 Trillion / year to be had. The EU is on the brink of collapse with only Germany and a couple of other northern states doing well. UK is marginal. Australia is hitting the skids as China slows down purchase of iron ore, coal, etc. USA (as mentioned) is $19 Trillion in the hole and sinking fast into the abyss of poverty. China is still growing, but down from 12% / yr to more like 6% (and 3 or 4% of that might be fictional…).
Things are so bad globally that the collective Central Banks of the world are far far closer to zero interest rates than anything sane in a failed attempt to use monetary policy inflation to fix fiscal policy failures. Layering on an even greater fiscal policy failure of $5 Trillion / year will just make the “busted flush” come sooner.
Oh, and in the ‘developed world’ there are a few hundred million folks expecting to retire and turn into ‘takers’ as the post W.W.II boomers retire. So prospects for more global production are “not good” as the major wealth creators of the last 40 years turn into major wealth consumers. “Demographics is destiny” is the usual economic mantra. To that I can only add that “Demographics are a cold hearted bitch who will not be changed”.
In the next 20 years, just those places with accumulated wealth that the UN wants to raid are just the places where wealth creation will slow. So not a source of excess to ‘redistribute’.
Now in a global market based world, those folks would have invested in plant and equipment in low wage (i.e. poor) countries and provided a big economic lift out of poverty to those folks. Profits from that investment to fund their retired years. Unfortunately, in a world with governments dominated by socialism, graft, corruption, and “Central Authority”, they often chase out such capital (and keep the poverty) via all sorts of ‘capital controls’ and excess taxation. Moving that broken government model to the UN will not fix the basic problem, it will just chase ever more capital out of economic growth and real investment; and lead to ever more poverty for just the folks it claims to care about helping.
Expect a “carbon tax” on fuels and production and likely a “Tobin Tax” on financial transactions and ever more taxes on ever more things. This will just result in ever less of them, and ever less of the investments to which they attach, and ever less money created and ever more accumulated poverty. Eventually ending when the seed corn has been eaten, the furniture burned, and the last oxen has been gored. Then after a Great Dying, we might be able to start again with free markets, as even the government agents will have died out (paper money not being very nutritious).
I’d like to say I expect the USA to revolt from that path. To once again find a Ronald & Maggie moment and pull back from the brink. I hope so. I just don’t see it as very likely. The Left has done a much better job of stacking the demographic cultural deck with folks from places who’s cultures lean left. They have dominated school based indoctrination, and clearly own the UN and most media outlets. One only needs to look at the incessant din of Global Warming / Climate Change doom and gloom stories to see that. They also even as the minority manage to run the House and Senate. There is no effective opposition. So until there is: the “Spiral Decent” scenario is the most certain. And, as this is being pushed at the global UN level, there will be few corners to which one can escape the stupid.
But hey, what’s a few $ Trillion among friends…
(I just wish it wasn’t so blindingly obviously going to fail and take us with it.)
Musings from the Chiefio 
I’m confident that Obama will be generous! Very Christian, too.
As mentioned in my comment a few days ago, income in a population always falls on a Zipf distribution which is an exponential curve (straight line on a log log graph with a characteristic slope). In order the raise the low end of that curve you must raise the whole curve, you simply cannot bend the curve any significant amount. If by some magic you could suddenly increase the income of the low wage earners (cough minimum wage), they quickly spend it on things they want or need, and those purchases quickly push up the income of all the suppliers who provide those goods and services, and the bulge just walks up the graph enriching each cohort in turn up the scale until it gets to the rich folks at the top of the curve. You have not increased the real income of the poor because that sudden influx of income pushes prices and consumption across the board as well as adds pressure to increase wages for the folks which just missed the new incentive income. They invariably try to get back their margin above those who by their view are less productive or less skilled workers. You can’t push a rope, you must pull it.
Those in poverty in the U.S. are in the top percentiles of world incomes. Poverty in that context only has meaning in the local economy. The folks living in a cardboard shack near the garbage dump in some Central American country would love to be blessed with American poverty and be forced to settle for a 42″ TV instead of the 60″ flat screen they wanted in their 800 square foot apartment just walking distance from a bus stop.
The UN is really the security council, which are the top 5 arms makers. Any money they receive will end up paying for weapons lol
Check out the various Church, Council and other Pension Funds who have all their money invested through the many national Investor Groups on Climate Change round the world. They control trillions of the various currencies and have a real vested interest in continuing to promote the CAGW scam.
This is the link to Australia/New Zealand chapter.
http://www.igcc.org.au/
Well, thanks to Frau Merkel Germany is going to get another million or so free loaders. It is surprising that those interviewed on TV may not be very good at English ( or German or even Arabic ) but they all know about the free medical and dental services, and the waiting period on social security until they can send for their family to join them.
Having volunteered for 800,000 the normal ‘efficiency’ will see at least 3 times that enter – notice the preponderance of young people? Expect 5 times that to swarm in. The EU will collapse, with the UK leaving, with or without those mad Scots, and Poland, Hungary, Slovakia and Denmark likely to follow quickly after. Indeed the whole eastern group of the EU might go as a block to deter Putin.
That will be the end of any contributions from Europe. China and India will laugh heartily at any suggestion they pay, and Russia, Korea, Japan won’t even laugh, so who will pay? Who will be first willing and second able to pay?
“justice in terms of the distribution of wealth, opportunities, and privileges within a society”
The only “justice” involved is the freedom for those who seek wealth, opportunities and privileges to be able to work for them.
Welfare support must be just a basic support system, not a life-style choice. Welfare must be just enough to keep one dry, free from hunger (not being able to become fat) and with basic health care, the emphasis being on ‘basic’.
Work and get a better life. Refuse to work and get just enough and no more.
Stephen Brown,
Exactly! And it should be mostly administered by the unemployed.
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-09-26/un-unleashes-plan-pushing-worldwide-internet-censorship
http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2015/09/25/u-n-womens-group-calls-for-web-censorship/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social
“For what it is worth, I am not a rich retired mogul. I’m semi-retired, but not exactly sure where the meal ticket will come from next month. I have assets I can sell, but don’t want to do that. So I’m more of a ‘wage slave’ looking for a gig than a ‘rich fat cat’.”
I am more than ten years older than you but I am still working (flipping hamburgers). I could call myself semi-retired if my job had not expanded to the point that I do not see my home for a month or more.
I plan to work for one more year to pay for my youngest son’s fifth year at UCF. While it is a struggle getting into work on time aged 78, I consider myself fortunate that I can still do it!
If I was still living in the UK I would be criticized for working and thereby making a younger person “Jobless”.
Hopefully it will take a few more years before this kind of lunacy spreads to the USA. It should be beyond obvious that prosperity is increased by extending the working lives of citizens to the greatest extent possible.
E.M.
http://captaincapitalism.blogspot.com.au/2015/09/there-is-no-such-thing-as-market-failure.html
Via Small Dead Animals
https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2015/07-08/machine-hell-euro-wrought/
What the Euro and Brussels technocrats have wrought. The Euro,
a machine from hell.
Looks like the Propaganda Campaign is in full swing too:
http://www.msnbc.com/global-citizen
“Respond”? More like well coordinated social “engineering” effort to suck $Trillions out of the Rubes Pockets.
So why is there no such well coordinated effort on the side of liberty and individual responsibility…
@Another Ian:
Very nice article.
I’d assert that there are “market failures” but not at all in the sense commonly used. As the article pointed out, that typically means ‘the market didn’t do what someone thinks it ought to have done’ and they think they can make it better.
What market failure really means is that the control system of informed buyer and informed seller has had some kind of strong discontinuity. Now that can be due to a valid cause (say, onset of W.W.II …) or it may be due to folks NOT letting a free market function (say, massive regulation causing so much distortion you get $5000 / dose drugs in a ‘regulated’ market…), or it can be due to Natural Causes.
Those Natural Causes include things like collusion of Evil Bastards (be they ‘competing’ industry leaders deciding to band together to screw over everyone else – see the long history of Trusts and monopoly practices; or be they by ‘Crony Capitalism’ where Evil Bastards in business and government do the collusion – see Solyndra, most 3rd World Development and Aid programs, National State Socialism in Germany pre-W.W.II, Fascism in general, AlGore and the family history with Oxy Petroleum where his Senator dad bought it cheap from the USA… and on and on…); and the failure of market participants to be “informed” (most everything in late night info-mercials for yet another plastic bit of crap for $19.99 in 4 easy payments… But Wait, There’s More!!! and a long laundry list of Quack Medicine Snake-oil…).
One of the most universal Natural Causes being that once one market participant is “too big” they can then act to control the market rather than participate in it. Monopoly practices, monopsony (i.e. Labor Unions as a prime example. Only one buyer for your labor allowed, the collective Union Shop. Just try to get a job and not join ‘the union’…), and just being the biggest gets you lower interest rates and easier loans even if you are not the best product. This leads to endless “roll ups” of one large company who gets big first buying up all sorts of smaller ones (then either crushing their changes out of existence or adding them to the monopoly push power…).
So it isn’t quite as simple as just saying “Markets Good” and “Intervention Bad”. Markets, too, can behave very badly; even if it isn’t a ‘failure’ but a natural caused outcome.
So do you want ONE global car company? That’s were you end up, with the GM Tin Box. Buying gas from ONE oil company? (It would have been Standard Oil had the trust busters not broken them up into the oligopoly we have today). We are well on our way to ONE big beer company as BUD Inbev tries to buy the Molsen Coors giant. Think they will be making low priced great beer for everyone? Or using their market size to force more money out of stores, lower costs to advertize, and giving you a choice of watery Bud vs watery Coors? Hmmm?
Unfortunately, having an even bigger Monopoly Evil Bastard in government step in and stir the pot usually dramatically changes it, but can either make it better or worse. So the fix is sometimes a Good Thing (like enforcing at least the minor competition of not allowing monopoly practices to some extent) but just as often far worse (as when Industry captures government agencies and you end up with crap like “Too Big To Fail” means we consolidate them into even bigger and fewer banks and hand them a few $Trillion… instead of breaking them up into a few hundred banks and letting the guys in charge now be in charge of the ‘bad banks’ with no bonuses…)
The basic problem is that people have a high percentage who are fundamentally Evil Bastards and they gravitate to being in charge of both industries and governments (being attracted to power in any form) so neither really works perfectly.
To paraphrase the late, great, Senator Everett Dirksen:
A trillion here, and a trillion there, and pretty soon you’re talking about a whole lot of money…
A few other cogent quotes from him:
“I have said, with respect to authorization bills, that I do not want the Congress or the country to commit fiscal suicide on the installment plan.”
“We are becoming so accustomed to millions and billions of dollars that ‘thousands’ has almost passed out of the dictionary.”
and
“When a member of the House moves over to the Senate, he raises the IQ of both bodies.”
@Jeff, add this to your list…pg
“The collective IQ of a deliberative body is always lower then the individual member’s lowest IQ .”
Hey Graeme No.3! “Having volunteered for 800,000 the normal ‘efficiency’ will see at least 3 times that enter – notice the preponderance of young people? Expect 5 times that to swarm in. The EU will collapse, with the UK leaving, with or without those mad Scots, and Poland, Hungary, Slovakia and Denmark likely to follow quickly after.”
Well, maybe The Powers That Be are just replanting the fields of Europe for another big (and very profitable) war in another twenty years. Looks like the human fodder should be just about ready to harvest by then.
(sigh) Madness!
That war is already underway. We should harvest those young men to create an army to subjugate the Muslim warlords. GOD is giving us the tools, shall we use them?..pg
Eradicating poverty is not a sustainable endeavor.
Hey Don! It is especially difficult to eradicate poverty when certain types of poverty are made more and more profitable for those who are in it.
Changing subjects only slightly, here is a thought provoking commentary by Stephan Molyneaux regarding the current European sanctuary being offered to Syrian migrants. https://youtu.be/1jxMZRK3ufY
E/M.
Thanks for that response. I’m doing my best to educate another [ a different ] economist!