Month: May 2013

The Triumph of Liberalism Over Socialism

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

The Economist has a great piece on France’s current socialist government and the scandal of wealth that has recently erupted there. From the report:

Now the Socialist president’s new disclosure rules reveal that seven of his ministers, including his prime minister, Jean-Marc Ayrault, are millionaires.

The French are discreet about money and flinch at ostentatious displays of wealth. So the new rules have prompted much discomfort, with ministers given only a week to declare their wealth. On April 15th Laurent Fabius, the foreign minister, who comes from a family of art dealers, duly declared over €6m ($7.9m) of assets, including a flat in Paris worth €2.7m and two country houses. Michèle Delaunay, minister for the elderly, reported €5.2m of assets, including two properties in Bordeaux and two houses in different south-west resorts. Michel Sapin, the labour minister, declared three country houses, some large tracts of farmland and a flat in Paris, for a total of over €2m. Even Mr Ayrault, a former schoolteacher, is a millionaire, with two properties to his name.

Other details raised eyebrows. Cécile Duflot, the Green housing minister who makes much of taking public transport, owns two cars, neither of them electric. Mr Fabius, despite his millions, has a €30,000 overdraft. Arnaud Montebourg, the left-wing industry minister, owns three properties and a Charles Eames armchair worth €4,300. French Socialist ministers turn out to be keen property investors; almost none holds shares.

Mr Hollande hastily devised the new rules after his former budget minister, Jérôme Cahuzac, had confessed to lying about a secret foreign bank account. Until now, only the president had to publish his wealth. Mr Hollande’s 2012 declaration included two flats in Cannes and a villa nearby, valued in all at nearly €1.2m, just under the threshold at which France’s annual wealth tax kicks in.

Now the president wants to extend the disclosure rules to all of France’s deputies. This will be tough. Even Claude Bartolone, the Socialist parliamentary speaker, denounced the exercise as “voyeurism” and expressed fears of the advent of “paparazzi democracy”. And Jean-Luc Mélenchon, a fiery hard-left European deputy not bound by the rules, mocked them by revealing on his blog his height and weight, and stating that he owned no paintings, cars, yachts or horses—and did not dye his hair.

Be sure to check out the graphic, too. The reality of the world today is that socialism is truly dead and done. Something else – equally reactionary – will arise in its place to challenge the liberal order’s peace and prosperity, but for the next few decades the world will know nothing but relative calm as it enjoys the benefits brought about by individualism and world trade.

When a new collectivism arrives to challenge liberalism, you can be sure that it will look very much like the collectivisms of old. Do you know what collectivism looks like?

Around the Web

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

Hope y’all like the new layout of the blog. Take a few minutes to get comfortable. Take off your coat, your shoes and your troubles. Now have a glass of red wine and a look around.

  1. IRS specifically targets conservative Tea Party groups; So the Washington Post‘s Ezra Klein naturally defends the IRS for not doing more: Listen to the fascists sing
  2. Ken White has an update on the man who made the anti-Islamic film “The Innocence of Muslims”
  3. Dear life (gun control and gun violence). Again and again: gun violence has been declining for about two decades now.
  4. The Crushing of Middle Eastern Christianity
  5. A Brutal Peace: the Postwar Expulsion of the Germans
  6. Barack the buck-passer. A laudatory account of Obama’s foreign policy that I largely agree with.

Petitioning for a Redress of Grievances: Chinese Style

Brandon Christensen Current Events, Politics , ,

Has Beijing suddenly begun hearing the demands and complaints of its citizens? Not quite. From the Economist:

In recent days Chinese internet users have begun to petition the White House on other issues; for instance, asking President Obama to “remonstrate” with China over a proposed paraxylene chemical plant in the south-western city of Kunming, where thousands of people staged a protest on May 4th. Others are more frivolous, asking America to send troops to liberate Hong Kong, or that the official flavour of tofu be designated as sweet rather than salty.

The petitions obviously have no legal force, but they reflect a popular lack of faith in Chinese justice and the seductive soft power of America. China has a petitioning system of its own, but those who use it are often threatened or detained.

Read the whole thing.

This is quite interesting for a few reasons:

  1. I think it helps lend credence to arguments that claim a functioning democracy is a byproduct of capitalism.
  2. I think it just goes to show you that no matter how hard Beijing tries to initiate a nationalism compatible with its aims, the reality of American prestige and liberty – despite all its many faults – is simply too high a hurdle for Chinese statebuilders.
  3. Let it be duly noted that many collectivists on both the Left and the Right here in the US have pointed to China as a great model for the future (unlike the reactionary federal system currently in place).

I mean, just imagine if Americans began writing to Mexico City or Ottawa rather than Washington to air out their grievances. What kind of signal would that send to others around the globe? It wouldn’t necessarily mean that the US is bad so much as it would signal that Mexico and Canada set the standard for excellence in governance (not an oxymoron, by the way; see Dr Foldvary’s piece for details).

Another fact the article takes care to point out is that authorities in Beijing have been quick to clamp down on internet usage. Check out this map of worldwide internet connected devices. It’s a little bit more honest than the maps showing China to be a giant “dark spot” of internet usage that I’ve seen displayed around the web.

Lastly, the article in question shows, once again, that the US has nothing to fear from Beijing.

El grave error del libertarianismo guatemalteco en el juicio contra el ex-dictador Efraín Ríos Montt

Guillermo Pineda History , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Justicia

El presente artículo busca conversar con un grupo específico de personas: libertarios y/o simpatizantes con las ideas libertarias que han tomado una postura pública en defensa de los generales Efraín Ríos Montt y José Mauricio Rodríguez Sánchez, acusados de los delitos de genocidio y crímenes de lesa humanidad durante los años 1982-83 en Guatemala quienes no han dicho, también, y con el mismo peso en sus artículos impresos, entrevistas y demás presentaciones públicas que exigen se haga justicia por los crímenes de lesa humanidad cometidos contra civiles durante el gobierno de facto de estos militares y por los crímenes cometidos durante los 36 años de conflicto armado por el ejército y la guerrilla. Continue reading →

Eye Candy

Brandon Christensen Liberty , , , , ,

Just beneath the fold. Continue reading →

L’Amérique et les armes: mise à jour.

Jacques Delacroix Current Events, Liberty , , ,

Le taux de crimes à main armée (presque toutes avec armes a feu) a chute environ de moitié depuis 1990.

Pendant la même période, tous les chiffres liées à la possession d’armes privées ont augmenté.

D’accord, ça ne prouve rien. Il n’y a pas nécessairement cause à effet.

Quand même, si je gagnais ma vie le revolver àla main, j’y regarderais à deux fois avant de m’en prendre à un porteur de revolver de calibre plus ou moins égal.

Quand même, si je pensais évoluer dans un milieu où de nombreux citoyens sont armés àtitre privé, je songerais sérieusement à me reconvertir dans la fraude bancaire.

“Europe’s Job Seekers Flock to Germany”

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

That’s the title of a recent piece on immigration in Europe, as told through a Greek family settling down in Germany, by the Wall Street Journal. Among the gems:

Despite the enmity often directed at Berlin for its insistence on painful austerity as the cure for Europe’s sovereign-debt crisis, Germany has become a new land of opportunity for tens of thousands of people fleeing their recession-racked homelands.

Data released Tuesday by the German statistics agency showed immigration hit a 17-year high last year, with the increase from Europe’s crisis-riddled nations “particularly evident.”

And this:

Germany has long had an uneasy relationship with migrants. Previous generations have often integrated poorly, facing high hurdles to gain citizenship—if they even try. Many Germans also believe that migrants come to live off welfare benefits or criminal activity [but] experts say today’s renewed influx of migrants is good for Germany. As its population declines and ages, the nation badly needs qualified workers to fuel economic growth and support its pension and health-care systems […]

The youngest, Nikos, at 15 years old, told his parents he missed his friends. Don’t worry, Mr. Karoustas replied. He’d see them again.

“I don’t hope for it,” the father told his son, “but all of them will come to Germany too.”

Read the whole thing. You can get around the WSJ‘s subscriber firewall by copying-and-pasting the title of piece and Googling it. Once you do that, just click on the article.

See our past notes on the EU here.

Climate Change Worse (No Matter How You Look At It)

Jacques Delacroix Current Events, Links , ,

In some places, it’s much warmer than usual. That’s so many instances of climate change, of course.

I some places, it’s much colder than usual. That’s also evidence of climate change.

Good technical article in the Wall Street Journal of  5/8/13  to remind us that  CO2 is plant food. The more CO2 the more plants, and the more food for humans. It’s by NASA astronaut Harrison H. Schmitt and W. Happer, a professor of Physics at Princeton.

Around the Web

Amar Ali Liberty

Here’s a great piece on the arts and government funding:  How Commerce Expands Culture
One of the boldest quotes from the piece reads,

“Not only is the market better for creative culture than most people realize, the state can be downright toxic to creative expression and cultural development.”

The author goes on to defend the assertion with a reference to history (something that fellow Notewriter Brandon Christensen will appreciate),

The state exerts its tyranny on social culture through paternalism and imperialism. In the case of the Jarawa “primitives” of the Andaman Islands, their government’s desire to preserve their “pristine” culture resulted in laws that forcibly prevented these people from culturally assimilating.

Welcome to the New Bohemia

Brandon Christensen History, Politics , , , , , , ,

[Editor’s note: I first came across this article while living in Santa Cruz. It was in one of those trashy “arts and events” weeklys that you find littering every city in America. I have tried to locate the author of the piece but he appears to have written it under a pseudonym, and the weekly is now defunct. So, I figured I’d reprint the whole damn thing here. You can find an archived copy here]

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We are the modern equivalent of the ancient city-states of Athens and Sparta. California has the ideas of Athens and the power of Sparta. —Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger

California is like an artificial limb the rest of the country doesn’t really need. You can quote me on that. —Saul Bellow

Perhaps Schwarzenegger and Bellow divined what’s now painfully clear to everyone: Arnie’s California is Humpty-Dumpty, the Hindenburg and some kind of sociopolitical Holocaust all rolled up into one overstuffed exploding burrito. It’s an ungovernable, near criminally impotent and outdated mess. Remedying California’s woes requires draconian cutbacks to essential services and infrastructure. Anyway, that’s what we are told, grand allusions to Athens and Sparta notwithstanding. Others insist the fix lies with the Feds, that the U.S. Treasury need to bail California out at the begrudging consent of Congress. But another still largely muted scenario is slowly gaining traction. Continue reading →

Words of Wisdom

Brandon Christensen Economics, Links ,

From Tyler Cowen:

This is a post about Jamaica and also about macroeconomic inference.  If you are tempted to write a post in response, criticizing me on the grounds that I am postulating a historical equivalence between the United States and Jamaica, or if you try to cover your tracks with semantics, by suggesting that I am “implying” such an equivalence, or implying some other mistake, or if you are committing any number of other fallacies or equivocations in response to this post, put on the dunce cap and go to the back of the class.  Please consider this a general warning to be attached to everything written by me on this site.

I just liked this because Dr Cowen is usually very polite, and if there is one thing I enjoy in this world, it is watching polite people dish out some wholesome snark casserole for the masses to devour. Read the whole thing.

Around the Web

Brandon Christensen Current Events, Links , , , ,

Hey all, I’m entering into a tough stretch at school, so my posting will be minimal for the next little while. Before I get to the cool links I’ve been reading, I thought I’d highlight Evgeniy’s recent piece on the chemical warfare taking place in Syria. If I am not mistaken, it is the rebels – al-Qaeda and Hizbollah – who are responsible for using chemical weapons. These are the same rebels that Dr Delacroix advocates the United States not only support morally, but militarily as well.

You can spot weak reasoning – morally as well as logically – when a person starts to hurl epithets like ‘isolationist’ or ‘pacifist’ around even after the other side insists that their position is anything but.

  1. Gun Homicide Rate Down 49% Since 1993 Peak; Public Unaware.
  2. China: Year Zero. 1979 and the Birth of an Economic Miracle.
  3. “Of the vast increase in the well-being of hundreds of millions of people that has occurred in the 200-year course of the industrial revolution to date, virtually none of it can be attributed to the direct redistribution of resources from rich to poor.”
  4. GMO Opponents are the Climate Skeptics of the Left. Not quite. Climate skepticism is rooted in scientific inquiry and politics, whereas the anti-GMO backlash is rooted in superstition. Nevertheless, a good read.

Y’all have a great week!

Looking into the Crystal Ball

Amar Ali Liberty , , ,

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.

Economic Rationality

Fred Foldvary Economics, Liberty , , , , , , ,

[Cross-posted at the Foldvarium]

The concept of rational action is a frontier of economic theory. The new field of behavioral economics combines economics and psychology to analyze actions that seem to be irrational. For example, people value health and long life, yet they smoke and eat unhealthy food. A related field, behavioral finance, examines psychological and emotional traits that prevent people from making wise investments. Perverse psychological biases include anchoring to past prices and facts, the bias of weighing recent events too highly relative to the more distant past, being overly confident in one’s abilities, and following the herd to a cliff.

Neoclassical economics often assumes that people are purely self-interested and always seek financial gain, and that therefore altruism is irrational, whereas as Adam Smith and Henry George wrote, human beings have two motivations: self interest and sympathy for others. Since people get satisfaction from serving others, it is incorrect to label altruism or actions based on subjective views of justice as “irrational.”

The Austrian school of economic thought has a different perspective on rationality. The Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises envisioned human action as inherently rational. A person has unlimited desires and scarce resources. Human beings economize, seeking maximum benefits for a given cost, or minimizing costs for a given benefit. At any moment in time, a person ranks his goals, ranging from most to least important. He chooses the resources to achieve the most important goal at some moment, then the second most, and so on, until his gains from trade have become exhausted. This is the inherent rationality of human action. Continue reading →

Zarine wind over Syria

Evgenii Grigorev Current Events , ,

Привет, сообщество! На днях прочитал свежие новости по теме сирийского конфликта и с ужасом обнаружил сообщения о том, что сирийская оппозиция применила химическое оружие. В качестве поражающего вещества был применен нервно-паралитический газ зарин, печально известный еще по токийскому инциденту 1995 года, когда организация Аум Синрикё применила это вещество против мирного населения на нескольких ветках токийской подземки. Я в свое время прочитал две книги на тему этого прискорбного случая из страниц истории Японии (в ближайшей записи я еще раз вернусь к этой теме) и имею достаточно полное представление о принципах действия этого газа, о симптомах, и последствиях его применения. Книги оказали на меня очень сильное воздействие, и с тех пор любое упоминание о применении зарина становится личной трагедией для меня. Самое мерзкое в данной ситуации, что газ убивает медленно и изначально не чувствуется в воздухе. Первые симптомы проявляются не сразу, что затрудняет правильную постановку диагноза и во многом определяет смертельный исход болезни. Вылечиться можно, более того, принципы лечения весьма просты. Об этом я тоже расскажу в следующей записи. Я хочу чтобы каждый человек понял, каково это – подвергнуться воздействию зарина – пусть не на собственном опыте, но хотя бы теоретически.

Так вот. Зарин применен, и Америка пообещала “полностью пересмотреть свою политику по поводу конфликта в Сирии, так как оппозиция переступила красную черту”. Будем следить дальше. Теперь эта трагедия, во многом благодаря зарину, стала еще ближе мне. Будем следить за развитием событий.