Year: 2013

Homosexual Marriage

Jacques Delacroix Current Events, Law, Liberty, Politics, Religion , , , , , , ,

I don’t care much if homosexuals, a small percentage of the population, gain the right to marry. (The right to marry? What kind of a right is this?) In general, I don’t like the idea that an activist minority can use the armed power of the state to force a cultural change at all, on a well identified majority. (Why no thave a court decree that lies are now included under the definition of “truth,” subject to fines and even to jail terms for recidivism?) I also don’t get all that agitated by the realization that civil union contracts can achieve the same objective, concrete ends, as marriage without hurting deeply the many.

At the same time, I think that both fear of the new and a simplistic reading of the Bible motivates many opponents of homosexual marriage. (By the way, given the California large majority vote on Proposition Eight, it has to include many Democrats, not just Republicans.) I am no theologian but I have trouble imagining a God who loses sleep over the fact that some men love men (and act upon it) or that some women love women (and act upon it). After all, that was His indifferent design that did it.

I am not much concerned either about the example it will set if the right to homosexual marriage becomes the law in the whole country as it is already in several states. I don’t think we are on the eve of seeing a woman marry her two Chihuahuas, one male, one female, for example. The spread of polygamy is a greater possibility. One form, polygeny, might turn out to be OK because there is a shortage of functioning males, I hear. I do believe in slippery slopes though. I have to because I am a three-times former smoker.

Whichever way the Supreme Court decision comes down, I will easily live with it. My friendship for the homosexuals of both sexes I have known and who care about the decision makes this acceptance even easier. (That’s the way it is: Principles regarding abstractions tend to melt a little in contact with the warmth of flesh and blood of real people.) Homosexual activists are not, however making friends with me by their insistence of having the Court (or the courts) overturn the results of a well established democratic process. I mean California Proposition Eight (against which I voted).

Deep inside my brain, there is also a vague notion that the issue does not reduce to morality or to tolerance. It has to do with some very basic structures of human thought based on dualities. I don’t have a good grasp of this. I will wait until I do to discuss the topic (unlike some visitors on this blog who will say anything twenty seconds after it comes to mind.)

FDR, Uncle Fred, and the NRPB

Warren Gibson Economics, History, Law, Politics , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

In Ayn Rand’s epic novel Atlas Shrugged, government officials regulate the economy through something called the Bureau of Economic Planning and Natural Resources. She clearly chose that name to reflect their belief that productive people were bound to produce just because of their “conditioning” and could therefore be treated pretty much like coal in the ground—as resources ripe for exploitation.

One wonders whether she had ever heard of the National Resources Planning Board (NRPB). The NRPB was a real agency, part of the kaleidoscope of bureaus that formed the New Deal. Its history is in some ways as dry as dust, but a closer look reveals some interesting and timeless insights into the planning mentality and the role of personalities in shaping history.

The philosophy underlying Roosevelt’s New Deal, if one can call it that, was to try something and if it didn’t work, try something else. In that same spirit the NRPB mission changed frequently; even its name changed four times before it was killed in 1943. It had been authorized as part of the National Industrial Recovery Act, but that program was ruled unconstitutional in 1935, leaving the National Planning Board, as it was called then, in danger of extinction. It was quickly rescued by FDR, however, and established as an independent agency. Casting about for a new name, one planner suggested “natural resources,” whereupon another commented that human beings were America’s most important resource. “National Resources” was suggested. The President chewed the phrase over a few times, then, pleased with its sound, grinned and announced, “That’s it. Get that down, boys, because that’s settled.” Continue reading →

Around the Web

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

1. Stanford’s online encyclopedia of philosophy has a new entry on ‘markets’.

2. Why the Swedes are moving to Norway.

3. John Stossel explains why Washington DC is the richest area in the US:

Lobbyists and taxpayer-funded special privilege won’t go away unless big government does.

4. BRICS planning to build their own development bank. Does this signal the end of the West’s 400-year period of dominance? No. If anything, this is a triumph of the ideal of the West and especially its thinkers’ critiques of central economic planning.

5. The Sectarian Social Democratic Ideal. A very, very good critique of social democracy.

Liblogic

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

Again (AGAIN) the Midwest is trying to operate in spite of a major snowfall. Its’ a snowfall of extraordinary magnitude for the season according to many of those who know.  And, I have not heard or read any meteorologist arguing that, on the contrary, it’s a normal snowfall for the first week of Spring.

Snow is cold. This cold wave is yet another proof of the reality of a global warming trend that threatens civilization and, beyond it, Earth itself. Of course, this trend is the result of noxious human activities. It’s a done deal that there cannot be any other cause.

If you don’t see that the more industry and cars, the more cold, and the more cold, the more  warming, you are just uneducated or stubborn, or both.

By the same reasoning, the unseasonal cold makes fuels, including natural gas, less essential to human happiness. The president, served by the supine press, must see the current snow storm in the Midwest  as a signal to  redouble its efforts to prevent the rational utilization of America’s abundant fuel resources.

Got it?

There is a pleasant-looking guy in his forties  who often suns himself close to my coffee shop at the beach. He admires my grand-daughter. Of course, I took this to imply that he is a man of taste and discernment. We fell into casual conversation recently about a book I was holding. The conversation quickly turned casually political.

He is an Obama supporter. This being the People Socialist Green Republic of Santa Cruz, it would be surprising if he were not. So, I pried a little.

It took my beach acquaintance a few minutes to fold to the default option that President Obama at least looked presidential. He couldn’t name a single Obama achievement of which he was proud or satisfied. (I had unfairly deprived him of the opportunity to mention Obamacare by designating it  a Pelosi victory.) This is not the fist time I hear Obamites refer to the president’s looks. It’s not clear how you turn such people around. Update: I don’t mean that I hope to turn all, or many around, just a small percentage would do, pehraps 3%..

Suntan Joe was seething with hatred of President Bush. This is remarkable five years later. Curiously, it did not seem to be about the Iraq War. I sense that the antipathy runs deeper, that it’s akin to what some chimps feel about a designated other chimp with an unusual facial expression perhaps. That is also hard to beat.

Since the Republican defeat last November, I have been perplexed by the post-mortem analyses of people I usually trust. I feel that they are off the mark because they are too obvious perhaps, too logical. I am not doing better myself.

A Free Market in Medical Services

Fred Foldvary Economics, Law, Politics , , , , , , , , , , ,

There are two directions for the reform of the U.S. medical services systems. One is towards welfare statism, the control of the medical system by the federal government, and the other is towards economic freedom, providing individuals and families a free choice in medical care.

Economic theory points to a pure free market providing the most productive and equitable economy and therefore medical services. Central planners lack the knowledge to efficiently allocate resources, and politics skews the outcome towards special interests.

Here are the reforms need to have a really free market in medical services: Continue reading →

Lies and Untruths

Jacques Delacroix Philosophy , , , , , ,

Big lies are pretty much the same on all ends of the political starfish. I am more interested in persistent white lies and in the mechanisms of collective self-delusion. I think they are more common on the Left. In fact, I believe they underlie liberal thinking to a large extent.

Although I have been living most of my adult life with these kinds of untruths, in academia, I am only now trying to gain a precise understanding of the relevant psychology. It takes leisure time and some perspective, I suppose. I have spotted two big sources of half-involuntary mendacity, so far .

I have frequent conversations with a young liberal I chose deliberately because he is thoughtful, curious and he seems intellectually honest. (I don’t waste time on older people and I don’t waste time with liars; they are almost always boring.) We have had several exchanges on the reality of global warming. He sent me a long email explaining why he believed it was real while admitting he did not understand the science behind the claim and did not try to. I don’t try either; I don’t understand it either; I don’t have to. I know a liar and a fabricator when I see one. If your cause or your theory is good, you never have to lie about it. The last sentence of his last email stated that he had to go, on this issue, with the “majority” of scientists. I heard a click go off in my brain. This sounds oddly familiar though I have not heard it said so clearly. Continue reading →

Self-identity and self-awareness

Evgenii Grigorev Liberty , ,

В России достаточно популярны юмористические картинки, отражающие суровую действительность: мэр Лондона едет на работу в метро, мэр Нью-Йорка едет на велосипеде – и рядом многокилометровая пробка, созданная каким-то русским предпринимателем, который в состоянии позволить себе кортеж и эскорт с мигалками. Такова действительность: каждый человек, чего-то достигший в жизни, стремится это все облечь во власть, и показную напыщенность, которая, тем не менее, не отражает внутреннего богатства. К сожалению, подобная черта присуща многим моим землякам. Многим – но не всем. Я всегда держу в памяти историю с физиком Перельманом из России, который отказался от престижной международной премии за доказательство теоремы Пуанкаре. При этом, я хочу сказать, он принадлежит к касте небогатых деятелей науки, которые ездят на работу на метро и с трудом оплачивают коммунальные счета. Однако это не помешало ему отказаться от денег ради общей идеи. В этом плане все люди одинаковые. Если человек работает ради конечной цели (политик, ученый, спортсмен, журналист) – то внешняя мишура будет для него на последнем месте. Все настоящие деятели одинаковы, вне зависимости от расы и национальности, и это нас всех объединяет.

Чтобы делать что-то полезное на благо общества либо какой-либо отрасли науки, нужно обладать высокой степенью самосознания и национальной ответственности, представлять результаты своей работы в конечной стадии производства с оглядкой на общество и на полезность нововведений. В таком случае просто не остается времени и сил на всякие декоративные элементы, однако коэффициент полезного действия максимален.

Humanitarian Wars can be Unjust too

henrymoore Liberty , , , , , , , , ,

If you hate evils committed by individuals as much as you hates evils committed by institutions, and vice versa, as I think most people who are even remotely libertarian — wait, no! remotely human! — do, does it truly follow that you must condone one in order to combat the other? Maybe it does, at least in the short term, in a place and time where relationships between all these things have been so distorted. In this case, the distortion is caused primarily by the monopolization of not only judicious force, but very nearly all force, initiative and responsive, at every level, by a single institution (with many manifestations and interlocking jurisdictions). If you haven’t guessed already, that institution is the state.

Taking my cue (I swear there was no collusion!) from Brandon and going with the flow. Jacques Delacroix of Facts Matter and Notes on Liberty has this to say:

No one doubts that the Taliban, both in Afghanistan and in Pakistan, and Islamists in general, want to implement barbaric policies and that they do implement them whenever they have a chance. (Remember, their harsh, extremist rule in parts of Iraq contributed to turning the Sunni population against them.) Among other rolling atrocities, the Taliban close, and often firebomb schools, overwhelmingly girls schools. They are overtly working on perpetuating obscurantism and the savage treatment of women that is undeniably common in much (but not all) of the Muslim world.

He then asks: Continue reading →

Unemployment: What’s To Be Done?

Warren Gibson Economics, Politics , , , , , , , , , , ,

In Part 1 I outlined natural unemployment, government-caused unemployment, and the attempts to measure these. We saw how ambiguous and subjective some of the concepts of unemployment are and how the government, specifically the Federal Reserve, is charged with managing it. Now we turn to current conditions and what can be done about them.

There have been huge advances in technology and substantial declines in trade barriers in recent years. While these developments have raised living standards they have been hard on people whose skills were rendered obsolete or uncompetitive. When changes evolve gradually, as when so many people left farming in the last century, the disruption is not so great. Changes are now coming faster and are extending to some high-paid professional jobs. Automated systems can now handle at least the routine aspects of some legal research and medical diagnosis.

Time and time again new doors have opened to workers as old doors closed. Machines replace workers, but they raise productivity and produce new employment opportunities. We can expect this pattern to continue for a long time to come. Still, it is within the realm of possibility that robots and computers could take over so much work that the demand for human workers would shrink drastically. But those very machines would mean higher productivity and thus higher living standards.

A great deal of work can be now be done remotely, providing an advantage to areas with low living costs. Substantial outsourcing of such jobs to foreign countries has occurred (though that trend may be reversing as low-cost areas of the United States become competitive and as customer dissatisfaction and problems with managing offshore workers come up). The benefits of outsourcing and other productivity enhancements are spread across all consumers, but the job losses are concentrated among small and sometimes vocal minorities. Continue reading →

The Intricacies of Political Life in Afghanistan and Pakistan: Is Islam Prominent?

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

Riffing off of Dr Delacroix’s piece on Afghanistan, and reading through the comments, I thought it’d be a good idea to “go with the flow” (as they say in Santa Cruz). Anatol Lieven has a must-read piece in the National Interest on the US government’s failures in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Among the gems:

I have been struck, both in the United States and in Britain, by the tendency of officers and officials to speak and write as if protecting the lives of troops from Taliban attack is the first duty of the U.S. and British states. In fact, it is the duty of soldiers to risk their lives to protect the civilian populations of their countries, and the only valid reason why the U.S. and British militaries are in Afghanistan at all is to protect their fellow citizens from terrorism. If that equation is reversed, and the needs of the war in Afghanistan are actually worsening the terrorist threat to the U.S. and British homelands, then our campaign there becomes not just strategically but morally ludicrous.

Indeed, one of the most common leaps of logic that neoconservatives and Leftists make in regards to foreign policy and the rule of law is the role of militaries in society. If there is to be a role for the state, it should be limited to maintaining a domestic court system, providing for the defense of the state, and signing trading pacts with other polities. Anything more than this results in things like exploitative generational gaps, trouble paying the bills, and terrorist attacks.

Lieven continues, explaining the geopolitical situation in Afghanistan and Pakistan: Continue reading →

Afghanistan, Conservatives and Libertarians. Telling off the King.

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

There is an upsurge of hostility to the war in Afghanistan in conservative circles. Thus, the Independent Institute, an organization I have been supporting modestly but faithfully for years has a spate of statements against our anti-Taliban operations there. It’s understandable but disappointing.

Part of the reason for some conservative reserve is simply childish tit-for-tat: “You libs berated Bush about his war, in Iraq; the shoe is on the other foot and we will berate you about Obama’s war in Afghanistan.” It matters not to this mindset that it’s only Obama’s war in the trivial sense that he is not using his powers to withdraw.

The main cause of the upsurge of hostility comes from the strong libertarian component in our midst. Libertarians, by definition, dislike big government. They observe, correctly, that every war enlarges the importance and the power of government in relation to civil society, to society in general. They assert further that the taxation capability governments acquires in war time – largely with the help of the suspension of criticality occasioned by patriotism – is seldom rolled back. Thus, war means irreversible growth of the state and a corresponding shrinking of individual liberties. Hence, libertarians tend to be reflexively isolationists.

Of course, I think this is all true. However, this is only part of the story. It’s futile to ignore the concrete, short-term questions facing this country with respect to its involvement in Afghanistan. Here are three: Continue reading →

Around the Web

Brandon Christensen Current Events, Links

1. The Liberalism of Classical Liberalism. This is a concise essay by economist Peter Boettke that is pretty self-explanatory. If you read it, be sure to keep my observation about socialists only caring about the rich in the back of your minds.

2. The Arctic is the Mediterranean of the 21st century.

3. A new witchcraft law being drafted in Indonesia needs to be implemented with the cooperation of witches and psychics (“experts in their field”) if it to be fair and just, says one lawmaker. Be sure to check out the ‘comments’ thread.

4. A long essay on John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice. Here is a juicy quote:

The next argument, of the late 1970s, took place within rights-oriented liberalism, and pitted Rawls’s brand of liberal-egalitarianism against the sort of right-wing libertarian views which found their most powerful voice in Robert Nozick’s Anarchy, State, and Utopia. This debate, Sandel says, “corresponds roughly to the debate in American politics between defenders of the market economy and advocates of the welfare state.” There is a sweet irony in the fact that the egalitarian position should have been defended by Rawls, a wealthy “wasp,” and the neo-liberal one by Nozick, a poor Jew from Brooklyn.

Rawls’s book. I think this debate will continue to be the most important one of the 21st century, at least in the West.

How to Extirpate Poverty

Fred Foldvary Economics, Liberty , ,

To “extirpate” means to complete eliminate, from the Latin word meaning to pull out by stem and root. To extirpate poverty means to eliminate its cause, so that it does not come back. Fundamentally, poverty comes from a low wage level, so we need to examine what makes a wage level low.

The wage level of an economy can be thought of as the wages paid to unskilled people. Those with greater skill and talent get higher wages, so some think that the solution to poverty is better education. But a stagnant economy also depresses the return to human capital, the extra wage for those who are more productive. In a thriving productive economy, even those with few skills are better off than skilled labor in a depressed economy. Indeed, in an unproductive economy, those with skills often find little market for their human capital.

The wage level of an economy is set by marginal labor, those who work at the least productive land in use. The classical “law of wages” says that when workers are mobile, the wage at the margin of production will set the wage level for the rest of the economy.

The margin of production has several edges. There is the horizontal extensive margin of land that is just barely worth using, land so unproductive it fetches no rent. There is the vertical extensive margin of the space above a city, into which taller buildings can rise, without increasing the site rent. There is also the intensive margin of adding more workers to land already being used. The wage at the intensive margin will equalize to that of the extensive margin. Workers are paid what they add to production, which is called their marginal product. Continue reading →

From the Comments: China and the Future of Nationalism

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

Riffing off of my recent post on Chinese porn searches, Dr. Delacroix writes:

This piece is opening a big closed book about contemporary China. Many Western intellectuals keep pretending that Chinese society and contemporary Chinese culture are inscrutable. I am one of these but I can’t fool myself forever: The pretense is largely a way to avoid commenting on what we really, readily see […]

Think of the psychological implications of having no interest in seeing how others do it! Does it imply anything about the extent of the otherness of others?

Dr. Delacroix goes on to encourage more research on China in the near future and rightly points out that libertarians have not adequately studied the region. I wholeheartedly agree on this point. Libertarianism is extremely weak in most areas of intellectual pursuit. In fact, the only reason libertarianism has any clout at all in academia is because it has a strong showing in two of the most important academic fields of inquiry: economics and philosophy. Perhaps this blog will contribute towards shrinking that gap.

My own impulse is to look at institutions for cultural, economic and political explanations of society. I’ll have more on this later, but another fascinating post by Shanghaiist on the Russian state’s recent debut on Weibo (the Chinese version of Twitter) is worth highlighting. From the report:
Continue reading →

A Wide Net; Cyprus Lesson; Conversations with my Ghost; Unfeminism; the Blooming Sequoia

Jacques Delacroix Current Events , , ,

I am too busy, because I am completing my memoirs and because I am refinancing ( a real bitch!), to do proper postings. So, here are pellmell thoughts  to stay in your minds and in your hearts during this dry spell. (That goes for my enemies too. I love being in their hearts, festering.)

Yesterday and today, I had hits from India, Mauritania, Ecuador, Yemen, and Estonia among others on this blog. I don’t  know many actually read my stuff. I hope all the hits correspond to actual readers although I cannot be sure, obviously. That is the miracle of the Internet. In spite of all the garbage it carries, like a large river, it’s good for development, the development of knowledge, in this case, and of rationality. There is a special spot in my heart for forthright, brave, tiny Estonia. Read up on it.

Once in a while, I even  have a spirited discussion on the Internet with people I would not meet in the other life, the life many persist in calling “real.” I am glad I cast a wide net on the Internet.

This week  the Cypriots gave the world a lesson. Hardly anyone  noticed because our commentators keep spreading boring cliches instead of looking for that which is both unusual and meaningful. Their government tried to make palatable the prospect of taxing bank deposit by promising to do it only to the rich. Ordinary Cypriots did not take the corrupting bait. They still said “No!”

I am like them: I don’t want to tax more the rich, the very rich, the billionaires,  the crooks, the mafias, the zebras, the giraffes, anyone! I just want the  federal government to shrink radically. I don’t know a single liberal who is aware of this principled position, not one.  Listen to them on this blog’s “comments” section. Their heads are full of silly stereotypes about conservatism as a political philosophy. I think they are not evil but lazy.

A couple of days ago, a high-school buddy recognized me through the excerpts of my memoirs on this blog (“I Used to be French: An Immature Autobiography“). Frankly, I had not thought of him for fifty years. His name  acted like a key that unlocked a door I had not entered in decades. It’s not that the door was double-locked or anything like this. The door was closed and I had no reason to bother to look for a key. I just ignored it. It contained no treasure in fact, just a few objects of interesting memory. But inside, there was also a ghost, the ghost of me when I was a teenager.

I don’t know if the French have high-school reunions. They might because they imitate eventually everything that America does.  If they had reunions and I knew it, I would probably not go. First, I failed there. I would sound stupid saying one hundred times in one evening, “No, I did not get it.”  Or I would have stopped going after ten years, when the  prospect of scoring with the girls you secretly lusted for as a teenager begins to  turn into a nightmare. I have no wish to see my own aging in others’ waistlines. I would think unkindly both of those who looked worse and of those who looked better than I. Does this make sense?

My high-school buddy reminded me of an episode of which I have nearly no memory. He recalled a time when he and two girls and I were waiting for admission to an expensive swimming pool . (That was the same  central Paris swimming pool. “Piscine Molitor,” that figures into the great movie “Life of Pi ” and that gave  its hero his name.) My classmate must have expressed admiration for the light gray flannel pants I was wearing. (That part must be true; I was already a flea market super-champion then, a superman picker.) He says I gave him the pants. I think he means then and there; I am not sure. I love the  story, of course. It depicts me, the young unformed me, as a generous person. Or was it only the love of the grand gesture?

URGENT UPDATE THE NEXT DAY: I did not give him the pants, I sold them to him. It means that I made up in my own mind by myself a story of generosity. That’s awful! Too bad, it was a good story.

I don’t know about you but I really enjoy this kind of adventure that comprises tiny, bearable elements of disorder. The Internet does not replace reading books though. It’s different but equally attractive.

Random pearls of wisdom: I overhear parts of a conversation while treating myself to  a rare greasy breakfast at my local diner:

“You have to kill them with silence.”

I stop the waitress who said this to ask,

“Is that what women do to men when they are angry?’ She never skips a beat, “No – she says – that’s unscientific.; women can’t do this, I mean stay silent.”

Smart women like this are dismantling stone by stone the phony monument put up by feminists over thirty years. It’s good that there are women equal to the task because feminists have been partly successful in  emasculating American men. (Many of the poor saps actually think showing sensitivity will get them laid!) How can I be sure? I am old enough that young women actually confide in me on the topic.

There is a completely incongruous redwood tree in my front yard about which I bitch periodically. It’s breaking up my portion of the sidewalk. It’s already cost me over $10,000 in sewer  repairs. One of these days, in a big wind, it will fall on my house, I fear. It gives us unwanted shade.

I like redwood trees but there are tens of thousands in the forest a mile away. This is not New Jersey or New Mexico; it’s not a rare tree around here. The city of Santa Cruz forbids me from cutting it. (Yes, it’s on my property.) The city has the criminal stupidity to demand a fee before it will even hear my appeal!

Well, several years ago, my wife planted a  bush bearing small yellow roses not far from the redwood. There was not foresight, no planning, no knowledge involved, maybe not even a green thumb. For some reason, the rosebush loves it there. It spread to everything. It’s a good climber. Right now, it has climbed about fifty feet up the redwood tree trunk and branches. The redwood looks like it’s in bloom with many yellow flowers. A deep part of me loves this display of joyous anarchy. I wonder if it violates some city ordinance I have not heard of though.