Year: 2012

La choucroute garnie de Californie et les méfaits d’Obama.

Jacques Delacroix Politics

DEAR READERS: THIS TIME, I AM TRYING FOR A POSTING IN FRENCH, AS AN EXPERIMENT. I WILL RETURN TO MY REGULAR ENGLISH BLOGGING RIGHT AWAY.

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(Note: Je suis né et j’ai été élevé à Paris. Je vis en Californie du nord depuis quarante ans. Jacques J. Delacroix)

Il y a quelques jours, j’avais le cafard. Cela m’arrive rarement. Je suis le plus souvent de bonne humeur, avec raison. Je vis dans une gracieuse ville très animée, au bord de l’ Océan Pacifique. Je passe mon temps à lire et à écrire, sauf quand je vais à la pêche sur mon joli voilier à moteur. Le tsunami de mauvaises nouvelles économiques et autres était la cause de ma mauvaise humeur, bien sur.

Pour me remettre en forme mentale, j’ai décidé de me fabriquer une choucroute garnie strasbourgeoise, hors-saison et hors-pays,évidemment. L’expérience fut une belle réussite, malgré tous les obstacles: Bonne choucroute en bocal, saucisses façon Strasbourg, jarret de porc, jambon cru, grillades de porc, et même des cuisses de canard confit. J’y ai ajouté un peu de graisse d’oie, habilement congelée après le rôti de Noêl.

D’ habitude, je mange sagement, du poisson, beaucoup de légumes, cuits et crus, des céréales complètes, un peu d’huile d’olive. L’assaut des graisses saturées de la choucroute sur mon organisme aura raccourci ma vie d’au moins une heure. Comme la préparation et la consommation de la choucroute strasbourgeoise de Californie m’auront mis de bonne humeur pendant deux jours au moins, cela en valait bien la peine.Même ma femme, originaire de l’Inde et d’ascendance végétarienne, s’estrégalée. Continue reading →

Systeme D

Warren Gibson Books, Current Events, Economics , , , , , , , ,

In French, a man (or woman) who is particularly resourceful is called a débrouillard (débrouillarde).  In the former French colonies of West Africa, people have used this word to form a phrase, “l’economie de la débrouillardise” which refers to the vast network of “inventive, self-starting, entrepreneurial merchants who are doing business on their own, without registering or being regulated by the bureaucracy and, for the most part, without paying taxes.” Systeme D for short.

The concept and the quote are from a nifty and fairly new book I’m reading just now, “Stealth of Nations” by Robert Neuwirth.  He claims that the world-wide Systeme D economy would, if aggregated, amount to more than any other nation’s economy save the U.S. The claim may be hyperbolic but he leaves no doubt that in most of the developing world it is a major factor in the flow of goods and services.

He cleverly begins each chapter with a quote from Adam Smith’s “Wealth of Nations” and gives accounts, mostly first-hand, of how the Systeme D economy, or the informal economy or the black market if you will, works in various countries.

The participants in this economy sometimes operate entirely outside the law and sometimes with one foot in and one foot out.  They seldom count on the police or the courts for protection or redress.  Yet informal systems of protection of life and property spring up and seem to work pretty well.

Take the bustling street market that operates along the Rua Vinte e Cinco de Março (Avenue of March 25) in São Paulo, Brazil.  The daily routine begins at 3:30 AM when vendors of pirated CDs and DVDs set up their stands.  One vendor has done well enough buying movies for 50 centavos and selling them for double that, that he has moved into the middle class.  He and his wife own an apartment and a rental house.  At 4:30 a woman parks her truck and opens the back, where she offers homemade cakes and bread for sale.  Everyone respects her “ownership” of that particular parking space.  At 6 AM come the vendors of clothing, sunglasses, pirated NY Yankees baseball caps, you name it.  At 8:30, Paulo shows up and spends the next seven hours tossing plastic spider-men against a wall, watching them rappel down the wall.  They are made in China, trucked to Paraguay, and smuggled across the border into Brazil.  Paulo buys them for 80 centavos and sells them for about triple that.  So it goes, all day long.  By late evening all the stands and stalls are packed away, ready for the daily cycle to begin anew.

The rules are simple: “Vendors pay no rent to occupy the curbside, and there’s no protection money, taxes, or other fees … You simply ask, ‘Can I set up next to you?’ and if the answer is no and you do it anyway, you have a fight on your hands.”

What’s the volume of business on the Rua?  An estimated 400,000 people (!) per day and up to a million on major holidays, most of whom come to buy.  Annual turnover for this one street market, with its estimated 8,000 vendors, mostly unregistered, is estimated at US$10 billion.  If that figure is anywhere near correct, this one market would rank with Brazil’s five largest corporations.

The description of the Systeme D economy of Lagos, Nigeria is particularly fascinating.  This is a huge city that lacks most of what we would consider basic public services, even sewers and running water.  Yet thanks largely to Systeme D it works, after a fashion.

Author Neuwirth does not gloss over the problems of the world’s Systeme D economies.  There is fraud and sometimes violence, but not necessarily any worse than that of the above-ground regulated economy.  There is wide-open pirating of software, games, music and movies.

The bizarre private bus system of Lagos, though it works for the Nigerians after a fashion, is not something any of us in the developed world would be happy with.  Most of us are happy with our clean, well-lighted supermarkets (see my article “Sardines at Midnight.”) Yet there is a lesson we can take from the Systeme D economies.  Our economy is becoming increasingly hog-tied with regulations. We could make a big dent in unemployment if the politicians and bureaucrats would lighten up a bit and allow the “informal economy” to grow.  Yes, the politicians and bureaucrats and lawyers are to blame but they take their cues from consumers who demand near-perfection in product offerings and unlimited product liability.

I highly recommend “Stealth of Nations” as light but informative summer reading.  Read it for the stories and pay no attention to occasional stumbles into bizarre generalities like “There’s nothing natural about the free market.  It’s a fiction, an artificial construct created and held together with the connivance of government.”

Around the Web

Brandon Christensen Current Events, Economics, Links , , , ,

Be back to blogging soon. Hope these tide you over.

Speaking of tides, co-editor Fred Foldvary on regulations and swimming pools.

NAFTA has reduced income inequality in Mexico. Just think of what could be created if we continued to liberalize our relations with our neighbors (especially our labor markets).

Hypocrisy in the Democratic Party. See if you can spot it!

The myth of socialist Sweden. Libertarians have been saying this for years, and yet…

May Day: The Conspiracy of Silence Around the Romance of Evil. A nice debunking of the persistent lure of Communism.

The Future of ObamaCare: Massachusetts Edition

Brandon Christensen Politics , , , , ,

I apologize for the lack of activity on this blog lately. School is either just out or finishing up, so I’m sure blogging will pick up in a few days or so.

Anyway, I found this article via Twitter the other day. It’s about the debate going on in Massachusetts about RomneyCare and how to control the costs that are spiraling out of control. Unfortunately, the article is a bit skinny on details and I am sure the debate is focused on keeping the status quo or giving the government an even greater role in health care markets, but I found this line from a state representative (and Democrat) to be most informing:

“The market is most certainly not working. The market is absolutely broken. Health care costs have been rising at 6.7-8% annually over the past decade.”

Yikes. I have a question: if you break a man’s legs and then tell him to run a five-minute mile, will he succeed? The rising costs, of course, are the real problem here, and one that won’t be fixed by introducing more incentives to keep prices both ambiguous and in some cases arbitrary.

RomneyCare, for those of you who don’t know (on this blog? yeah right!) has served as the blueprint for ObamaCare and it involves a nasty combination of forcing people to buy to buy insurance and subsidizing those who do not (or cannot due to the predictable price increase of insurance after the mandate went into effect).

There is no doubt in my mind that actual market-based solutions were proposed in the debates. Here are a couple via economist Tyler Cowen: Continue reading →

The Gulf Spill and the Hidden Vice of Capitalism

Jacques Delacroix Current Events , , , , , ,

Here is one aspect of the Gulf spill no one seems to be talking about. It concerns the same thing that conservatives commentators, libertarian journals, and economists seldom take into consideration: Persons in the upper management of large corporations are not necessarily very intelligent and few are well-educated. That is the hidden vice of capitalism. For once, I am speaking as an expert. (Go ahead, check my vita linked to this blog (pdf) and then, re-check the facts on Google. Make my day!)

The BP-caused oil spill – going on for more of a month as I write – is also a public relations disaster for the corporation. As I said earlier (“The Louisiana Oil Disaster?” Posted 5/21/10), we are still missing the moving photographs of thousands of dead, soiled aquatic birds. There is in and around Plaquemines parish a group of stake-holders that is becoming increasingly vocal: The fishermen. I heard some on NPR on 5/25/10 complaining that BP has mostly ignored their wishes to “volunteer” to help. It sounded true and it sounded incredible to me.

Whatever happens, BP is going to be on the hook for hundreds of millions of dollars, possibly for more than a billion dollars. The fishermen whose livelihood and whose future appears to be threatened by BP’s negligence number in the hundreds. I doubt that there are a thousand of them altogether. At the risk of sounding cynical, I will say that they are the only easily identifiable group of human victims who tug at ordinary Americans’ hearts. It’s easy to imagine that most Louisiana fishermen don’t have a doctorate in solar energy science, for instance; it’s easy to recognize that few can readily switch to another occupation. That they may want to transmit their legacy to their children is also understandable from an emotional standpoint. Finally, the tens of millions of American who fish recreationally will have no trouble grasping that the Louisiana fishermen may love their occupation and the lifestyle that goes with it. I am skeptical myself about the extensiveness of the damage. I don’t hope it will become Obama’s Katrina. Yet my heart goes out to those unknown fishermen deprived of both livelihood and, it seems right now, of a future. Continue reading →

Socialism: Sinister, Silly

Jacques Delacroix Politics , , , , , ,

Many of the conservative comments about President Obama I hear on the radio have been leaving me vaguely non-plussed. (If you think about it, it’s not easy to be non-plussed in a vague way, or on the contrary, is it a redundancy?) Little by little, I began realizing that the cause of my non-plussness is the frequent allegation that the President is “a socialist.” Nearly always, the implied suggestion is that something sinister is about. The French side of my mind, well versed in things socialist, perceives a strong discordance between the two concepts, “socialist” and “sinister.”

First, the word socialist does not have a fixed meaning. In the past fifty years, it has meant just about everything, from German genocidal totalitarian (“National Socialist,” “Nazi”), to African plutocrat, to the mild high-tax administrations common in several mild and undoubtedly democratic European countries. (See my series of essays on this blog about various kinds of fascism.) It seems to me that American conservatives who call Obama a “socialist” are implicitly referring to the western European brand of so-called “socialism.” (Although, some of the president’s followers and entourage belong to the brass-knuckle brand of “socialism.”) Here is where the French fraction of my brain feels a discordance. As some of you may know, the candidate of the French Socialist Party was recently elected President of the French Republic. French “socialists” are fresh in my mind, count on it. Now, there is no way they are sinister, except by happenstance and only in the long run. They are not sinister, they are idiotic and deeply ignorant. They are ignorant the way someone is ignorant who has not learned a thing in fifty years say, between 1960 and 2010. Continue reading →

“Stocks Slammed as Dow Erases 2012 Gains”

Brandon Christensen Current Events, Economics , , , , , , , , , , ,

That’s the title to a headline piece over at CNN.

The Dow Jones industrial average (INDU) plunged 275 points, or 2.2%, the biggest one-day drop since November. The blue-chip index gave up all its gains for the year, and is now 99 points below where it finished 2011. The S&P 500 (SPX) lost 32 points, or 2.5%, and the Nasdaq (COMP) dropped 80 points, or 2.8%.

Ouch. The cause of the plunge?

“The U.S. employment report was simply terrible,” said Marc Chandler, global head of currency strategy at Brown Brothers Harriman.

The May jobs report showed only 69,000 jobs were added to payrolls, less than half the 150,000 jobs forecast by economists surveyed by CNNMoney. The unemployment rate ticked higher for the first time in a year, rising to 8.2%.

I take three things away from this: Continue reading →

Vote! Or not.

Warren Gibson Politics , , , , ,

We have an election in California next week.  I offer two gloomy premises about voting:

  1. My vote doesn’t matter.
  2. The outcome doesn’t matter.

As to premise #1, have you ever voted in an election that was decided by one vote?  The odds favoring that outcome are somewhere in the lottery-winning range. The standard objection is, “what if everyone felt that way?”  My answer is, I don’t control everyone, just myself.

As to premise #2, I should say the outcome matters very little.  For many years I deluded myself that Republicans would hold back the tide of collectivism.  What was I thinking?  George Bush, who I would concede was a decent man, made a lot of mistakes and did a great deal of harm.  Must I elaborate?  The wars, the Patriot Act (an Orwellian name if there every was one), torture of “detainees,” the social security drug benefit, and worst of all, setting the stage by his failures for the current White House occupant who I take to be hell-bent for fascist dictatorship. Notwithstanding these premises, I’m going to vote as I always do.  I’ll tell you why at the end.  First a little about next week’s ballot.

I registered Republican in 2008 so I could vote for Ron Paul but then switched back to Libertarian. I find that in the Presidential primary, I can choose from no fewer than nine candidates on the Libertarian ticket.  I thought Gary Johnson already got the nomination at the convention.  What’s this vote all about?

This year California’s new “jungle primary” system takes effect. Now anyone can vote for candidates of any party in the primary (excepting Presidential choices), and the top two vote-getters, even if they are of the same party, will appear on the general election ballot.  This is supposed to make races more competitive but I think it will do the opposite – move us closer to a one-party state.  We’ll see how many of the general election races offer a choice of two Democrats (or in a few districts, perhaps two Republicans).

Leafing through the voter information pamphlet, I find a stew of 24 Senate candidates: six Democrats, 14 Republicans, two Peace & Freedom, and one each American Independent and Libertarian.  Incumbent Dianne Feinstein will win the primary and the general election without mussing a hair of her signature coiffure, and with so many Republicans competing with one another, it’s likely a Democrat will come in second and appear on the general election ballot along with Senator F (who can be quite sensible at times, for a Democrat).

I’ll vote for the Libertarian, the perennial Gail Lightfoot.  The Libertarian Party needs to draw enough votes in each election to keep its status as a qualified party, and it knows that a female name always draws a certain number of votes, and an American Indian name adds a few more.

Not much choice for Congress: the Democratic incumbent, another Democrat, and a Republican.  The other Democrat is a bit of a nut case, so it might be fun voting for him.  On second thought, I’ve never voted for a Democrat in my whole life, so why start now?  The Republican shows a faint libertarian spark.  I suppose I’ll vote for her.

Ours is the only county in California whose supervisors (county legislators) are elected by districts.  Yet every county voter gets to vote in all the districts.  Bizarre.  I did notice that one candidate opposed building a new jail.  I’ll vote for him and leave the rest blank.  I don’t want to become confused or discouraged by learning any of his other positions.

There are two state propositions, a dumb one about term limits and a $1 per pack cigarette tax.  Why not just send all the smokers to the gas chambers?  On second thought, we need to keep them alive so we can work them as slaves.

Three county tax measures are automatic noes.

So why will I vote?  I can only muster two reasons:

  1. With so many people voting by mail, they have consolidated the voting places.  Mine is now a mile away.  I like that because if the weather is good I’ll have a nice hike through the open space to get there.
  2. I feel some sort of emotive satisfaction in voting.  We all like to believe we are having our say when voting, preposterous as that notion is. For many young people, voting for Barack Hussein in 2008 was a positive expression of hope, which one hopes has been wrung out of all but the densest of them by now.  I felt that same youthful enthusiasm when casting my first-ever vote, for Barry Goldwater in 1964, so I understand.  But now the satisfaction, as you can tell, is thoroughly sardonic.

Not only will I vote, but I have actually contributed to candidates: Ron Paul, Gary Johnson, and Art Robinson who is running for Congress in Oregon.  I offer no excuse for this behavior.  I herewith publicly  resolve to make no further donations this year.

It gets worse.  I twice ran for office, once coming perilously close to winning.  That memory is too painful so I won’t elaborate.

In November I will vote for Gary Johnson.  Knowing that B.O. will carry California I needn’t worry about whether Mr. Romney might make a slightly less evil President.  There will be nasty state tax increases to vote against as well.

Santa Cruz Vandals, Drums, and Left-Wing Authoritarianism

Jacques Delacroix Current Events, Politics , , , , , , , , , , ,

I live in wonderful times in a wonderful place. Important history is re-playing itself before my eyes. This a sequel to my recent previous blogs (“Freedom Fighters…” and, “The Leftist Municipality….”)

The story has to do with the fact that a few fast-moving people dressed in black caused about $100,000 worth of damage in six or seven storefronts withing three blocks of each other. (The damage cost estimate comes from the local paper. I cannot verify it.) That was in Santa Cruz, California.

The vandals came out of a demonstration of a few hundred young people with no particular agenda, except the usual vague left-wing slogans and a few more about the new Arizona law on illegal immigration . (See my posting on that too: “Illegal Immigration…,” “The Arizona Immigration Law…,” and, “Immigration: More on Conservative….”) It was supposed to be a “May Day” celebration, but May Day is the first of May and the demonstration was on the second. Well, nobody is perfect and this is a beach town.

I did not learn much from the videos on YouTube except that one demonstrator was wearing a tie. There seems to be a consensus that the window breakers were few and well prepared and that they had kept their intentions secret. I believe there were fewer than ten actively involved in the vandalism.

There were no police present at the scene for a long time. I pointed out in previous postings: 1 That the police had other priorities, and, 2 That it was not surprising that they did, given the nature of the city government. Here is more, more blatant evidence. Again, this is contemporary political history in a small capsule. Continue reading →

Immigration and the Welfare State: Incompatible (With A Comment on the Middle East Too)

Brandon Christensen Current Events, Politics , , , , , ,

A Facebook friend of mine (who I met at a FEE seminar a couple of years back) posted the following link in Forbes about British plans to begin targeting certain citizens of states within the EU in regards to immigration. Individuals from states in the troubled Latin region of the EU would no longer be welcome to reside in Britain. The cause of this:

However, immigration is a sensitive issue for Britain which runs one of the most generous health and welfare protection schemes in Europe.

Can’t be much clearer than that. Along with the fiscal problems that welfare programs create for societies, there are also political and social consequences to be had. For one thing, the very notion of a welfare state creates a type of “ours, not theirs” mentality within a populace, which no doubt contributes the shocking nationalism and racism to be found everywhere in Europe.

Although welfare programs in the US, Australia and Canada have to deal with these social consequence, in the Old World the welfare state also taps into a sort of tribal conscience that the Anglo world cannot really fathom. I hypothesize that the “tribal identity” is actually the main factor behind the stubborn refusal of the welfare to state to go away not only in Europe but throughout the entire Old World. Continue reading →

Some Mistakes Have Been Made

Brandon Christensen Politics , , , , , , , ,

I just finished up the readings for a class on the history of the modern Middle East. The main book issued is one conveniently written by the professor of the course (James Gelvin) and is aptly titled The Modern Middle East: A History. Below is an excerpt that I think sums up the problems facing the Middle East today:

American policy towards the Middle East [after World War 2] was instrumental in promoting both development and the civic order development was to sustain […] To promote development, the United States adopted a multifaceted approach derived, in good measure, from its own Depression-era wartime experiences.

Ooops.

Here is Murray Rothbard’s America’s Great Depression. Now, I know libertarians are infamous for condescending suggestions to “go read a book”, but I don’t think we can really help it sometimes. Hoover’s interventionist policies and Roosevelt’s New Deal were disastrous for the American economy. Most, if not all, of the Middle East’s problems today can be traced to the institutions currently in place, and these institutions in their turn were created and codified based upon models that had entirely failed the West.

For the record, the developmentalist approach led directly to, you guessed it, economic nationalism and political despotism. You can find a convenient ranking of the world’s states based off of GDP (PPP) per capita here. According to the IMF, the US ($48,387) is ranked 6th in the world (the US also repealed or rebuked many of the Depression-era policies of the Hoover and Roosevelt administrations; the few that remain are among the most pressing problems American society faces today). The world average is $11,489. Egypt is ranked 104th, Iraq is 128th, Iran is 69th (coming in slightly above the world average at $13,053), and Syria is 118th.

The Future of NATO

Brandon Christensen Liberty , , , , , , ,

The recent NATO summit in Chicago that produced absolutely nothing has opponents of the alliance smelling blood. Indeed, the only thing that the Chicago summit may have produced is a healthy recognition by many factions that the future of NATO itself is increasingly in doubt. This should come as no surprise to any of us here at the Notewriter’s consortium, but in some ways this development is surprising.

Even mainstream pundits, ensconced as they are in Beltway ideology, have begun to notice that the alliance is on its way out. From CNN’s Security Clearance blog (“security clearance”? Really?):

Europe’s collective fatigue with NATO’s globetrotting has often left the United States shouldering most of the burden, which is considered one of NATO’s greatest shortcomings. The United States now covers 75% of NATO defense budgets, while the majority of allies don’t even allocate NATO’s benchmark 2% of gross domestic product to defense.

Sharp reductions in European defense budgets have only increased dependence on the United States.

While realists have been bemoaning the alliance for decades, it has become apparent that the reality of the situation has finally smacked some sense into the Beltway consensus. This must be kind of like how libertarians felt after the collapse of the Berlin Wall in the late 1980’s.

Like the collapse of the Soviet Union, though, there are many things to be worried aboutwith the impending collapse of NATO. The major issue that the US should be worried about is deteriorating relations with Europe. While the American taxpayer got stuck subsidizing the defense of Europe for well over half a century, the relationships brought about by working together have proved fruitful, and in order to keep these relations on good terms, Washington should undertake policies that will further integrate American and European societies: freer trade.

There is no reason why there shouldn’t be a free trade zone between the whole of the US and Europe on the scale of the US itself or the EU (the same goes for the US and its nearest neighbors: Canada, Mexico, and the Caribbean).

One thing that American policymakers should not fear is the rise of a competitor in the form of a European superstate. This fear (or hope, if you are an American socialist) is off-base. Just think of Europe’s sclerotic answers to the worst economic crisis in its history, and then imagine a European Union trying to implement a common, cohesive foreign policy on a global scale like that of the US.

It isn’t possible. Not even states with highly centralized power structures like China can compete with the US in this regard, and the thought of Brussels actively trying to compete with the US in international relations is ludicrous.

The demise of NATO is ultimately a good thing. There is no need for a collective security alliance to combat a menacing Russia any longer. Moscow’s empire of Soviets is long gone, and its focus in the near future will be domestic and along its borders. NATO’s demise will also save the US a lot of money, and will spare the European people from the negative effects (like terrorist attacks) associated with supporting a worldwide hegemon. We can only hope that NATO’s demise comes sooner rather than later, and that each party involved will recognize that continued relations with each other, especially in regards to trading policy, are still vital to peace and prosperity.

What Would You Do?

Brandon Christensen Current Events , , , , , , , , , , , ,

I picked up a five things to-do list from Grover Cleveland over at Pileus Blog if he were supreme ruler of the land. He in turn got his 5 from a prompt by Angus over at Kids Prefer Cheese. If readers have any more Top 5 lists they’ve come across let me know and I’ll link them accordingly.

Anyway, here are Angus’s Top 5: Continue reading →

Le voisinage. (C’est presque pareil partout!)

Jacques Delacroix Liberty ,

La banque, ma femme et moi possèdons une jolie maison de style victorien. Elle est située dans une petite ville côtière, à 100 kilomètres au sud de San Franciso. Notre maison, comme toutes celles du quartier, date d’environ 1900. Elle est en bois, comme presque toutes les autres, dans ce pays de tremblements de terre.

Le terrain comporte un arrière-jardin clos, avec des arbres fruitiers (qui produisent bien, merci) et un avant-jardin donnant sur la rue. De ce côté-là, nous jouissons d’une vue imprenable sur le parking de la mairie, un bâtiment long et bas, en fer-a-cheval, dans le goût faux-mexicain des années 20, plutôt agréable, à vrai-dire. En saison, un vrai train folklo (pas un tramway) passe devant chez nous, au beau milieu de la rue. Les voyageurs, en wagons ouverts, saluent de la main. On leur rend leurs saluts quand on a le temps.

Les voisins de gauche sont des gens à la cinquantaine accusée, bienveillants et serviables mais pas éclatants de beauté. Lui, est musicien de blues, amateur certes mais tout à fait actif. Elle, est en retraite, je ne sais pas de quoi ou d’où. C’est sans importance; l’étiquette sociale de “retraitée” lui va comme un gant. Elle, est gentille mais elle a l’allure de la retraitée règlementaire: pas toujours coiffée dès le matin, les espadrilles un peu éculées. Ces voisins de gauche se sâoulent plusieurs soirs par semaine, en famille, gentiment, sans troubler la tranquilité du voisinage. Quand ils ont bien bu, ils se déshabillent complètement et font trempette dans leur jaccuzi plusieurs heures d’affilée. Ils ont placé la cuve chauffée, à dessein, sous un gros arbre feuillu censé les abriter des regards, ou censé abriter les voisins du spectacle, ce n’est pas clair. Malheureusement, en Californie, la température reste douce bien après la chute des dernières feuilles. Malheureusement, mon second étage surplombe leur arrière-jardin, lieu de leurs ébats aquatiques. Continue reading →

The Holographic Universe

Warren Gibson Liberty , , , , , ,

Warning: this is not a libertarian post and I may get kicked out of this blog group for going way, way off topic! (It does have repercussions for Objectivists and others interested in ontology and epistemology.) This is an invitation to share a fascinating idea from modern physics: the holographic universe.  As I understand it, the idea is that everything within a volume of space can be thought of as encoded on the boundary of the region – like a conventional hologram.  (You can find runaway interpretations of the idea online which I suspect are bogus.)

Further warning: I am not a physicist.  I do have a Ph.D. in engineering and a decent grasp of mathematics and I have been studying modern physics with Prof. Leonard Susskind at Stanford.  His continuing education classes are just right for the likes of me – people who know elementary calculus, complex variables, etc. but cannot undertake a full-blast graduate physics course.

I commend to you Prof. Susskind’s lecture, The World as Hologram.  He is talking to a lay audience so he uses very little math.  But in his Stanford class he carefully took us through the math that leads to the conclusion that a black hole’s entropy is proportional to its surface area and not its volume as common sense would suggest.

If there’s a lesson here for a libertarian like me, perhaps it’s this: that we shouldn’t let ourselves get into a rut.  Don’t focus exclusively on libertarian issues, but stretch your mind from time to time in a new direction. Allow the possibility that you might learn something from a socialist like Lenny Susskind.  He’s someone I admire very much and I’m fortunate to have gotten personally acquainted with him.

By the way, you could hardly find a more moronic commentary on modern physics than this one, posted on the web site of the Ayn Rand Institute, from which I quote:

Today, physicists suppose that a particle can travel many different paths simultaneously, or travel backwards in time, or randomly pop into and out of existence from nothingness. They enjoy treating the entire universe as a “fluctuation of the vacuum,” or as an insignificant member of an infinite ensemble of universes, or even as a hologram. The fabric of this strange universe is a non-entity called “spacetime,” which expands, curves, attends yoga classes, and may have twenty-six dimensions.

Again, I’m not a physicist, but I have learned enough to recognize this paragraph as a preposterous know-nothing caricature of ideas that have been carefully worked out by physicists who almost without exception remain ruthlessly dedicated to experimental facts and correct logic.