Category Archives: Free Trade

Un petit baiser pour le cinéma Français

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Au cours des longues annéees de ma vie américaine, j’ai eu l’occasion de dire des tas de choses désagréables sur la pauvreté du cinéma français pourtant surnourri de subsides publics. J’aimême publié un article méchant en Anglais sur la question.( “Can protectionism ever be respectable? A skeptic’s case for the cultural exception, with special reference to French movies.” The Independent Review 9-3:353-374. 2005.)

Malgré tout, de temps en temps, le même cinéma me procure une agréable surprise, souvent une si minuscule surprise qu’on aurait pu la rater. Je viens de regarder “Emma”, un film sorti en 2011. C’est l’histoire d’une jeune fille mal dans sa peau. Il y a une scène avec un garçon de quinze ou seize ans quelle n’avait pas vu depuis leur petite enfance. En vacances dans la même maison, ils sont assis ensemble sur un lit. Ils parlent de tout et de rien,évoquant même la peluche que le garçon aurait volé, jadis, à la fille.

Soudain, le garçon se penche et dépose un baiser sur le genou (couvert) de la fille. Il y a dans ce geste infime toute la tendresse du monde. C’est le geste juste, plus que juste. Après cela, la fille lui appartient corps et âme, bien entendu.

Malgre tout ses péchés, je pardonne beaucoup au cinéma français pour ce simple baiser au genou.

Mais bien sûr, c’est un film français où donc, le tordu, l’insolite, le gratuit remplacent l’émotion, l’imagination, et même l’érotisme. Le petit ami se revèle vite être plus précoce voyeur qu’ enthousiaste pénétrateur. Enfin, personne n’est parfait, comme on dit.

A la fin du film, aussi la fin des vacances, la jeune fille dit au revoir à son demi-frère. Elle se fait la réflexion, dans son fors intérieur, qu’elle souhaiterait être plus libre des ses paroles, pour pouvoir lui dire, “Je t’aime” - “comme dans un film américain.”

* “Instead of the eager penetrator you would expect, the boyfriend turns out to be mostly a voyeur.”

Looking into the Crystal Ball

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Since the rise of the first civilization, a centralized organization having access to the levers of influence on certain types of infrastructure has been a given. Specifically these are information, commercial transactions (especially the flow of goods), and human movement. The institutions of government and society have been structured to reflect this circumstance.  As I will demonstrate below, this paradigm will shift dramatically. Of course, new institutions will be needed to adapt to this reality, which is where my interests lie as should those of other liberty lovers concerned with the future.

The introduction of the internet is beginning of the direct unraveling of the first lever, and indirectly of the second. With the advent of global real time communication, boundless storage capacity and near universal access, centralized control of information is coming to a close. The internet is decentralized compared to other infrastructure.  So the only way a centralized organization, for example, the state, can control information is by a complete shutdown of the internet, i.e., the internet kill switch used in Syria during civil unrest recently and championed by many government officials around the world. The way this works is if there is a centralized structure, which in this case is your local Internet Service Provider (ISP), through whose lines people access the internet. However, advancements are being made to create a fully decentralized internet, void of middle men ISPs, functioning like a peer to peer network. Silk Road, an invitation only “internet” on which many things are traded, is a prototype of a fully decentralized network.

The internet has also a great deal of influence on the second lever. It has unleashed three dimensional printing, or the ability to create or scan and recreate practically any non-biological or electronic object. From wrenches to shoes soles to burritos to guns and even a house, they have all been constructed without any physical human labor. It is only a matter of time till this becomes widespread and supersedes the need for most objects to be centrally created, hindering any potential efforts to limit production and distribution of such products. Once this happens, economies of scale will struggle to remain relevant as customization, ubiquity, and efficiencies in material usage achieved by 3D printing will supersede any value created by mass manufacturing.

If the first two sound tantalizing, the end of final lever of influence will be even more consequential than the first two combined. That is the advancement in what I like to call three dimensional travel. Vehicles that are ubiquitous such as cars and ships are limited to what is known as two-dimensional travel, meaning they can only go forwards/backwards and left/right.  The rise of private rocket company SpaceX , successfully accomplishing what only the government agencies of the U.S.A. China and Russia have been able to accomplish in space, shows private space exploration is catching up to the established players. It’s not the only rocket company with massive firepower behind it.  But getting back to Earth, nine different companies vying are for governmental approval to launch flying cars. Both are examples of three dimensional movement which aim to be available to the masses. Once successful, no one will have an inescapable dominance nor be able to realistically limit the movement of people as they will be able to escape barriers otherwise impossible in the prevalent “two dimension” travel.

As the control of these levers is decentralized, it will become imperative to understand the transformation of institutions and concepts such as economies of scale being overturned and anticipating the challenges that such innovations will bring. This however will not be enough. A focus on developing alternative institutions and solutions to mitigate those hazards must also be taken into account.

And that is where I believe libertarians need to focus. On the institutuions of the future. If we are to secure liberty for our prosterity and its future, we must study and build the institutions that will anticipate and seek to amelorite that challenges of the future well before and better than the state. Then and only then will we see the permananet demise of the state as a temprary blot on human history and a relic of agricultural society.

Has Foreign Affairs Been Reading NOL?

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Hello all, I signed up for a pretty challenging final quarter here at school, so my postings will probably be scarce for the next two or three months. It seems Foreign Affairs, one of the more sober foreign policy journals out there, is finally starting to read us here at the consortium. I’ll get to that in a minute but first: editorial duties call!

  1. Be sure to read Dr. Delacroix’s Bush-worshiping piece for an example of how obstinate ignorance works. The very man who mocks smart, well-educated people for their acceptance of scientific consensus on global warming as ‘cultists‘ seems to believe that “there were very good reasons for any reasonable person to be misled about the existence of  [WMDs] in Iraq.” You have to admit, the man has a lot of brass!
  2. I still have to get to co-blogger Andrew Roth’s recent comment chastising conservatives and libertarians for failing to recognize the many nuances associated with Bismark’s statecraft and Roosevelt’s New Deal.
  3. We’ve got a couple new writers who will be blogging here at the consortium. One is an economics major at UC Merced and the other is a Guatemalan national doing graduate studies in Denmark, so stay tuned!

Political scientists Roland Benedikter and Lucas Kaelin have a fascinating piece in Foreign Affairs focusing on the one bright spot in Europe these days: Switzerland. Libertarians who have read the political and legal works of Friedrich Hayek, Ludwig von Mises and James Buchanan will recognize the gist of the arguments right away. To summarize: small, democratic states are the best form of government available to man, given our vast shortcomings, and these small states are, in turn, much better off operating within vast free trade zones that do not hinder the small-scale democracy at work in these states. From the piece: Continue reading →

Cyprus, the EU and Competing Currencies

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There have been many critiques over the European Union from many different quarters over the decades since its inception. With the seizure of cash from customers of banks in Cyprus, the worst threat imaginable has now come to pass for Euroskeptics. Economist Frederic Sautet explains how the heist has so far gone down:

Some depositors at Cyprus’ largest bank may lose a lot of money (e.g. see article in FT). Those with deposits above €100,000 could lose 37.5 percent in tax (cash converted into bank shares), and on top of that another 22.5 percent to replenish the bank’s reserves (a “special fund”). Basically “big depositors” are “asked” to pay for (at least part of) Cyprus’ bailout (the rest will be paid by other taxpayers in the EU).

I cannot think of a faster way to completely destroy a banking system than to expropriate its depositors. This is the kind of policies one would expect from a banana republic, not from a political system that rests on the rule of law. But this is the point: the EU does not respect the principles upon which a free society is based.

An economist over at ThinkMarkets also has a good piece on the Cyprus heist. The EU has taken an incredibly good arrangement – free trade throughout Europe – and turned it into an attempt to unify Europe into a single behemoth of a state. And all under the auspices of “federalism.” This is a bad development for a number of reasons. Continue reading →

Borderless Economics: Chinese Sea Turtles, Indian Fridges and the New Fruits of Global Capitalism

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Robert Guest, the business editor for The Economist, has organized insights gleaned from 20 years of reporting on and analyzing events around the world into a breezy yet profound account of the flow of people and ideas across borders.

Raw immigration statistics miss the “networks of innovation,” as Guest calls them. Immigrants may find it difficult to adapt to a new land with strange customs and a new language. But in just about any American city they find a community of people like themselves who can ease the transition and help them get established. This process is good for everyone involved.

For example, Indian immigrants to America—most notably Silicon Valley engineers—are tightly networked among themselves and have contacts in India and around the world. Having made their fortunes, some then return to India to pursue business or philanthropic activities. To illustrate, Guest describes the Universal Identity program. Hundreds of millions in India have no public identity beyond their immediate communities. A team of Indian expatriates returned to India and launched a program to create a computer-based system that would allow Indians to submit to fingerprinting and retina scans and to receive a national ID number that would serve as their entrée into the modern Indian economy. Libertarians look askance at government identification numbers, but in rich countries we take for granted our ability to prove our identities. Continue reading →

How to Rebut the Condescending Leftist

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Economist Bryan Caplan, in responding to calls for more to be done by governments for the world’s poor, writes the following:

Isn’t the entire problem that the world’s poor have little of value to sell on the world market? The answer, surprisingly, is no. The world’s poor have a very valuable good to sell: their labor. Though Third World workers often earn a dollar or two a day, even unskilled labor is worth $10-$15,000 per year on the world market.

There’s just one problem: First World governments’ immigration policies effectively forbid international trade in labor. The world’s poor cannot legally work in a First World country without that government’s permission. For most current residents of the Third World, this permission is almost impossible to obtain. If you’re an unskilled worker with no relatives in the First World, you have to endure Third World poverty, win the immigration lottery, or break the law.

Do read the whole thing. It’s from the recent Cato Unbound symposium on “Authority, Obedience and the State.” The Cato Institute is probably one of three think tanks that actually puts out work I can count on (the other two being Brookings and Hoover). Their monthly Cato Unbound is one of the best symposiums on the web.

Dr. Delacroix has written on immigration before. Here is a piece he produced for the Independent Review. Here are his blog posts on immigration.

Sardines at Midnight

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Sardines at midnight? If the mood should strike me, I can zip down to the local Safeway store here in Belmont, California, which is open 24/7, and be back with a can in 20 minutes. My biggest problem would be choosing from among Thai, Canadian, Polish, or Norwegian sardines packed in water, olive oil, tomato-basil, or soybean oil.

So what? It’s darn near a miracle, that’s what, and would seem so to most inhabitants of today’s world and everyone in yesterday’s world. Leonard Read’s phrase “The Miracle of the Market” was only a slight exaggeration. I won’t attempt to describe how markets miraculously motivate and coordinate the actions of the thousands of people who cooperate in providing me with sardines. Nobody can do that better than Leonard Read did in his classic “I, Pencil.” If for some reason you haven’t read it, stop now and do so.

The increased quantity and quality of the conveniences available to us are really amazing. We should stop to think about them from time to time, paying special attention to the incentives that brought them about.

I have vague memories of the Fisher Brothers grocery store where my mother took me around 1950. The place was tiny and the selection limited. Looking back, I wonder about its cleanliness: The owners kept sawdust on the floor to soak up spills. Later they built a supermarket that was much larger but still only a pale precursor of today’s Safeway. A mix of union coercion, government regulation, and perhaps just plain custom kept all supermarkets closed after six p.m. Monday through Saturday and all day Sunday. A working woman had to scramble to get her shopping done before closing time or join the mob on Saturday. Continue reading →

The Tragedies of Haiti

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The greatest tragedy of the earthquake of 12 January 2010 in Haiti was that the devastation was caused more by human failure than the natural disaster. The earthquake that hit the San Francisco Bay Area in 1989 was about as strong, causing the Bay Bridge to break, but killed only 63 people.

Before the Spanish came, the island of Hispaniola had been divided into chiefdoms, and the two western ones, Jaragua and Marien, became Haiti. Haiti’s first tragedy began with the arrival of the Spanish, who sickened, enslaved and killed off the native Taino Indians.

The second tragedy of Haiti was the importation of African slaves by the Spanish. French pirates and colonists cam to Haiti, The Treaty of Ryswick of 1697 split Hispaniola between Spain and France. Many more French settlers arrived and established plantations producing sugar, coffee, and indigo with slave labor.

A slave rebellion, inspired by the ideals of the French Revolution, fought the French government from 1791 to 1803. The liberated armies were commanded by General Toussaint L’Ouverture. The French National Assembly abolished slavery in the French colonies in 1794, but later Napoleon sent troops to regain French control. Continue reading →

L’ Anarchisme et la recherche de la liberté: recommendations des Déserts du Nouveau Monde.

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Je suis vieux mais j’ai quand même un copain lycéen à Paris. Je l’ai rencontré un Quatorze Juillet justement, en Californie où je vis depuis déjà longtemps. Ugo a quinze ou seize ans. Il me dit par courriel qu’il lit Bakounine et Kropotkine. Cela me fait plaisir à deux titres. D’abord, cela signifie qu’il a échappé à la malédiction du relent de totalitarisme collectiviste qui habite toujours de nombreux Français comme une croûte en Octobre colle encore aux lèvres des revenus de la colonie de vacances du mois d’Août.

La deuxième raison de ma réjouissance c’est que de telles lectures ne peuvent qu’allonger l’aune à laquelle Ugo mesurera la liberté. (J’allais dire la “liberté individuelle” mais, il n’y en a pas d’autre, c’est une mauvaise manie verbale.) Il me semble en effet que quand on vit dans le brouillard d’une societe étatique comme la France il doit être difficile seulement de reconnaitre le simple fait de liberté. Dans une telle société, on doit être menéinconsciemment à une mesure de la libertéétriquée pour la simple raison que les nombreux “droits” des autres ne peuvent que limiter naturellement, automatiquement les siens propres.

L’un de ces soi-disant droits est le droit de vivre correctement sans avoir jamais às’efforcer, c’est-à-dire aux crochets d’Ugo et d’autres qui ne rechignent pas à travailler ou àinventer. Continue reading →

“How China Became Capitalist”

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That’s the title to this short piece by Nobel laureate Ronald Coase and his co-author Ning Wang published by the Cato Institute. Among the gems:

The presence of two reforms was a defining feature of China’s economic transition. The failure to separate the two is a main source of confusion in understanding China’s reform. The Chinese government has understandably promulgated a state-centered account of reform, projecting itself as an omniscient designer and instigator of reform. The fact that the Chinese Communist Party has survived market reform, still monopolizes political power, and remains active in the economy has helped to sell the statist account of reform. But it was marginal revolutions that brought entrepreneurship and market forces back to China during the first decade of reform when the Chinese government was busy saving the state sector.

Do read the whole thing. The Cato Institute ranks third on my list list of trustworthy think tanks. Hoover and Brookings are two that I think produce university-caliber research. Cato ranks far below Hoover and Brookings in my estimation, but it occupies a lonely third place, as none of the other think tanks out there are even close to Cato’s stature, either.

You can check out Cato’s website here.