Exit visas

At tomorrow's debate, someone should ask Obama what he thinks about this ACORN idea.

At times, ACORN opts for undisguised authoritarian socialism, as when it proposes that “large companies which desire to leave the community” be forced to obtain “an exit visa from the community board signifying that the company has adequately compensated all its employees and the community at large for losses due to relocation.” How much longer before ACORN calls for exit visas for wealthy or middle-class individuals before they can leave a city?

Fannie Mae in space

Taylor Dinerman has an astute piece at the Space Review about "Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and Lessons for Space Commercialization."

Northern exposure

Well, here's one sign the McCain-Palin campaign is opening up to the press: Levi Johnston speaks.

Volatile indicators

Roughly speaking, every 1,000-point drop in the Dow over the past month has correlated with a 2-to-3-percentage-point gain by Obama in the polls. Without attempting to disentangle causation from correlation, or even guess which way the cause-and-effect arrow might be running, it should be interesting to watch that relationship over the next few volatile weeks.

UPDATE 4:15 PM: And then there was a wild 900-plus point rally. Who should be worried about that?

Total media accessibility

I agree with this prescription for McCain and Palin from Bill Kristol:

Provide total media accessibility on their campaign planes and buses. Kick most of the aides off and send them out to swing states to work for the state coordinators on getting voters to the polls. Keep just a minimal staff to help organize the press conferences McCain and Palin should have at every stop and the TV interviews they should do at every location. Do town halls, do the Sunday TV shows, do talk radio — and invite Obama and Biden to join them in some of these venues, on the ground that more joint appearances might restore civility and substance to the contest.

McCain should do what he used to do -- sit down with the press and talk with them until they have no energy left for more. And he should ask Palin to do the same thing. They'll make headlines, they'll inspire some Obama-leaning voters to rethink, and really they have nothing to lose.

A real debate

I agree with the cross-ideological Open Debate Coalition that wants to change the rules for the next presidential debate. Let's have a real debate, with follow-up questions and audience input, rather than the stilted events we've seen so far. Todd Seavey does a better job in a Lower East Side bar basement than the smugly incompetent Commission on Presidential Debates does with its national forum.

Human capital transfer

Fareed Zakaria has an intelligent article on the silver lining of the crisis: "A More Disciplined America." Among other things, here's one major benefit: As the financial sector reels, a lot of math and science degree-holders who would otherwise be inventing incredibly complicated ways to lose money are now going to be doing something way more productive.

The financial industry itself is likely to shrink, and that's not a bad thing, either. It has ballooned dramatically in size. Curry points out that "30 percent of S&P 500 profits last year were earned by financial firms, and U.S. consumers were spending $800 billion more than they earned every year. As a result, most of our top math Ph.D.s were being pulled into nonproductive financial engineering instead of biotech research and fuel technology. Capital expenditures went into retail construction instead of critical infrastructure." The crisis will stop the misallocation of human and financial resources and redirect them in more-productive ways. If some of the smart people now on Wall Street end up building better models of energy usage and efficiency, that would be a net gain for the economy.

I suspect some of them are also going to do some real rocket science.

Not Cobra Verde

"What's your favorite movie?" Compare the presidential candidates' responses.

Asteroid entrepreneur

I'm sorry to read that Jim Benson, the founder of SpaceDev, has passed away. I interviewed him a decade ago, and I think he was, in a good way, ahead of his time. It may be hard to believe amid the current economy, but the era of people owning asteroids and such is still on the way.

Jim Benson plans to declare ownership of an asteroid orbiting between Earth and Mars. And he doesn't much care what the United Nations has to say about it. "If the U.N. doesn't like it, they can send a tank up to my asteroid, which of course they can't," he told the San Francisco Examiner this past February. In an interview with REASON, the 53-year-old entrepreneur is in a less belligerent mood, but the gist of his message remains the same. "There's really no entity to which such a claim of ownership can be made," he explains. "Therefore I believe it just needs to be made to the public in general."

Political twists

Yesterday I gave my take on what McCain should say, which boiled down to a more market-oriented rescue with Mitt Romney as Treasury Secretary to lead it. But I see some people are coming up with yet more dramatic gambits McCain might make at this time. (Via Kausfiles.)

Market rebound

Good grief, the Dow's actually up as of this moment (8,726.61; +147.42 / +1.72% Oct 10 3:34pm ET). That seemed as unlikely this morning as, well, a McCain rebound. As for the Italian prime minister's suggestion that world markets be closed, I think that would be folly. That might work when you're preempting a selloff, as at the outset of World War I, but not when you're already well into one. Here's how J.P. Morgan regarded such an idea in the 1907 Panic:

Then, on October 24, J.P. rescued the stock market. That day, the president of the New York Stock Exchange, the intriguingly named Ransom H. Thomas, rushed over to Morgan’s Wall Street office to tell him that some 50 brokerage firms were about to collapse, unless massive rescue funds could somehow be provided. Thomas began talking about shutting the Exchange.

Morgan asked Thomas what time the Exchange normally closed — a datum the financier did not know even though he worked just yards away. (“Stock trading was vulgar,” explains historian Ron Chernow in his book The House of Morgan .) Informed that would be 3 p.m., J.P. wagged a finger at Thomas and commanded, “It must not close one minute before that hour today.”

Solar opening

Interesting: Solar-power shares have fallen even more than the rest of the market, even though Congress just passed an extension of tax incentives. I suspect that somewhere some little-known investor with cash on hand is starting to buy up solar shares now, and that this person will someday be regarded as an investment genius.

What McCain should say

Memo to John McCain: You should make an announcement like the following:

"My friends, we face an economic crisis of major and deepening severity. I have supported the rescue plan developed by the Treasury Department, and I have proposed measures to ensure that homeowners receive a helping hand. But I am determined to make sure the free-enterprise system survives and thrives in America, and that means we must rely on markets, no less than government, in working our way out of the current mess. That's why I have determined that when I am President, the government will provide capital to banks by matching the funds that the private sector is willing to invest to finance those banks. There will be no free gifts to the bankers. They will have to earn every penny of federal help they receive."

"Moreover, I am now ready to announce, in advance, my choice of Mitt Romney to be the Treasury Secretary of the United States in a McCain-Palin administration. Mitt was my opponent in the primaries, but we've become friends and colleagues. And, as an expert on corporate restructuring with a history of economic turnarounds, Mitt Romney is the most qualified individual to implement the McCain-Palin solution to the current economic crisis."

Science pork defenders

A bunch of scientist-bloggers are complaining about McCain's criticism of Obama's planetarium earmark. These scientists are dead wrong. Pork-barrel spending is a threat to science. It circumvents peer review and allocates money based on politics rather than merit. Moreover, it opens the way for money to be diverted from science altogether and into other areas. I wrote about science pork back in the early '90s and the problem has not gotten better since.

All candidates have stupid supporters

David Weigel and Andrew Sullivan are impressed that someone caught on tape some mindless drivel by some McCain-Palin supporters. (But note: not everything they say is wrong; for example Obama did work with Acorn, which the woman described accurately.) And then there's a seemingly drunk woman who spouts nonsense about Obama but says she wants Hillary Clinton for president; somehow, Weigel thinks that reflects poorly on McCain-Palin too.

Fortunately, one never sees any obnoxious know-nothingism from Obama supporters in more intellectual places like the Upper West Side....

Double your money II

The Bush administration is considering taking ownership stakes in banks, injecting money directly into banks that request it. I hope, but don't particularly expect, they'll do it in the market-oriented way proposed by Greg Mankiw; see below.

Double your money

Greg Mankiw has a plan for fixing the financial system: The government matches the funds raised by banks from private capital, taking non-voting equity stakes in the institutions. This can be done, he thinks, based on the already passed rescue/bailout legislation, using a portion of the $700 billion. It seems to me that the ideas needed to get past this crisis will use government to bolster rather than replace free markets, and this idea seems to fit that bill.

Meanwhile above Enceladus

The Cassini space probe is about to make a flyby just 25 kilometers from the Saturnian moon's surface. That's less than the distance from New York to Paramus.

A McCain weakness

Ross Douthat is right:

This has always, always been a problem for McCain: His strongest instinct, when confronted with any domestic-policy problem, is to find a black hat to pin the blame on and then punish them for it, rather than looking for the smartest possible solution. And in a crisis that nobody really understands, and where the blame for what's happened runs through Main Street as well as Wall Street as Washington, McCain's usual "punish the bad guys" message just doesn't seem like what voters want to hear.

McCain should pin blame (rightly) on the Democrats for Fannie Mae and the Community Reinvestment Act, and on Wall Street for too-clever-by-half financial engineering, and then say something like: "Let's have some real straight talk. Irresponsible borrowers helped bring this on, as well. But the key thing now is to fix it."

Palin presser

It's been a while since I've agreed with Andrew Sullivan on much of anything, but I think he's right that Sarah Palin should have a press conference before the election. It would be a high-profile opportunity to discuss just about everything--from the financial crisis to Bill Ayers to the mindless anti-Palin vitriol spread by the likes of Andrew Sullivan. It might even be the elusive "game changer."