Year: 2013

Gentrifying Tacky Sac: not bad if you can stomach the corruption and iniquity

muricaderp Economics, Law, Liberty

A few months ago, I lit into the Capital Area Development Authority, or CADA, for redlining a significant portion of Midtown Sacramento to exclude poor and middling tenants. What I find particularly objectionable about this redlining is that it is done as a matter of deliberate government policy, since CADA is a joint powers authority chartered by the Sacramento municipal and California state governments, and that there seems not to have been any pushback from local activists or the courts.

CADA administers a huge amount of residential property to the east and south of the Capitol, enough to unilaterally set housing policy on a number of blocks. Some of the conditions that it sets for tenants are draconian, among them, open lines of credit with on-time payment histories, high credit scores, stable, long-term tenancies with landlords who are not friends are relatives, and absolutely no negative references from past landlords. These conditions are objectively discriminatory against poor applicants, who are often forced to rely on makeshift living arrangements with friends or relatives, unable to pay bills on time because they simply lack the money, and preyed upon and retaliated against by systematically criminal slumlords. The question is not whether discrimination against the poor is taking place here, but whether or not it is morally and legally acceptable.

There’s another question that really muddies the waters: is discrimination against the poor practical? Having spent quite a bit of time in Midtown and Downtown over the past few months, I have no doubt that CADA has done a lot to clean Midtown up. Midtown doesn’t have anything like the hordes of shambling homeless mentally ill, patina of grime, and trails of trash that one finds on the K Street light rail mall, or, as it’s lovingly called by its marketeers in the (posh) drinking industry, “The Kay.” The 16th Street light rail station has a bit of that dysfunction going on, but it’s safe to assume that CADA’s redevelopment activities, some of them only a block to the north, have brought some degree of improvement to the station by increasing the sheer number of non-derelict passengers using the station at off-peak hours. If this is the case, it has to have marginally improved the quality of life for the disproportionately poor passengers who change trains there. (16th Street is the last station leaving downtown before the Gold and Blue Lines split, the former east towards the dodgy neighborhoods of Rancho Cordova, the latter south towards the much scarier ghetto sector of inland South Sacramento.)

CADA’s territory in Midtown is more or less free of the malt liquor bottle shops, intractable pants-on-the-ground al fresco alcoholics, undermedicated long-term outpatients, and criminal underclass elements that plague many parts of Sacramento and its suburbs. These things have been driven out by clean and orderly businesses and the sort of clean and orderly people who patronize them, who are also the sort of people one is not scared to encounter on the streets late at night. I’ve come to the conclusion that, questions of equity aside, CADA is clearly doing something right.

This still leaves troubling questions of civics. I would have much weaker objections to a private developer applying such conditions to prospective tenants at a luxury apartment complex that was built entirely on the free market, i.e., completely without eminent domain, weaselly tax-break inducements, or other government favors. (These conditions are met disgustingly less often than developers would like us to believe). At a high enough level, any residual objections I might have to the abuse of credit rating inquiries or other background investigations would be moot anyway, since serious high-rollers in real estate consider cash on the barrel head the offering that covers a multitude of sins, a most fitting sacrifice of first fruits.

The problem is that draconian tenancy conditions are applied most heavily against those who can least manage to meet them. Many rental markets are monopolies or oligopolies controlled by slumlord thieves who steal tenants’ security deposits as a matter of course. In these markets, the idea of tenants of limited means being able to exercise a right of free association to find better landlords or some sort of roommate arrangement sounds like a cruel joke. On the whole, American housing law is de jure equitable but de facto a dual system of high and low justice.

The proper role of government intervention in such a market is to enforce equity standards on landlords, many of whom are easily shown to be in willful and material violation of federal racketeering law. As a matter of equity at law, government agencies have absolutely no business helping unethical and often criminal landlords and banks entrench themselves as private tyrants by allowing them to help redline the poor out of apartment complexes that are tantamount to public housing.

One of the great intellectual frauds of agencies like CADA is their false promotion as civic and community organizations. CADA is more accurately described as a regulatory capture apparatus operating at the behest of neighborhood business interests. A huge amount of what passes for community civics in the United States is in fact business marketing strategy enforced through government policy. This is classic regulatory capture. What business owners want in these cases is to flood the neighborhood with their target demographic. Sure enough, CADA’s rental conditions are perfectly designed to flood Midtown Sacramento with yuppies and their disposable incomes.

This is a point that cannot be made clearly enough: the purpose of CADA’s draconian rental conditions is NOT to ensure that its tenants are orderly, peaceable, acceptable risks to their landlord, and capable of improving community life through their presence; it is to ensure that they’re moneyed enough to patronize the local yuppie joints at a suitable price point. These conditions are patently not designed just to screen out risky applicants who have trashed previous rental units, worked crack territories on Hella South Stockton, held meth bake sales in Rancho Cordova, or had regular 3 am bruiser sessions with their live-in lovers and the Sheriff’s Department’s night watch. They are also designed to screen out perfectly peaceable and civic-minded applicants who brew their own Sanka at home and eat pork and beans out of a can instead of dropping thirty dollars a day on lattes and Thai food. Some of these people are exactly the types whose eyes are good to have on the street. Do we want maternal 7-Eleven clerks and home health aides from the trailer parks and the ghettos moving into the neighborhood to keep their eyes on the streets? As a matter of civics, we do. As a matter of economics, it probably depends on whether they’ll buy their pork and beans at the Midtown Safeway or trek out to the Rancho Cordova Grocery Outlet, but the answer is: No, they’re poors.

And no, this is not being done so that these mother hens will continue to grace their old neighborhoods with their wisdom and supervision. Any self-described progressive who says otherwise is concern-trolling the Sacramento banlieue with suggestions that the crabs all work to keep each other safely within the barrel. If anyone in charge of policy at CADA gives a shit about Rancho Cordova, I’m Mother Teresa.

It isn’t about high civics; it’s about marketing through government policy, a much crasser proposition. Many elements in the business community do their level best to elide the difference between civics and business, but it’s a real and serious one. CADA’s class-based redlining is effective policy, but it is not equitable or ethically sound policy. Don’t think for a split second that they’re the same thing.

Filosofiska skillnader och likheter mellan liberalism och libertarianism

Jesper Ahlin Liberty , , ,

Libertarianismen betraktas ibland som en förlängning av liberalismen, men trots att de båda idétraditionerna har mycket gemensamt finns det också mycket som skiljer dem åt. Båda anammar filosofiskt metodologisk individualism och utgår därför i sin verklighetsbeskrivning från individen. Båda är också stora förespråkare av frihet – akademisk frihet, social frihet, ekonomisk frihet, och så vidare. Men tittar man på de båda traditionernas grundvalar är skillnaderna tydliga. Liberalismen förespråkar frihet och endast frihet, libertarianism förespråkar rättigheter och endast rättigheter.

Eftersom liberalismen utgår från att individen ska vara fri utgör idétraditionen av hel familj av idéer. Man kan påstå att frihet är ”frånvaro av hinder”, vilket brukar kallas för negativ frihet, men man kan också säga att frihet är samma sak som ”möjligheter”, vilket brukar kallas för positiv frihet. I det förra fallet krävs endast att omgivningen avstår från att ingripa medan det senare kräver någon slags insats från omgivningen så att individen ska uppnå ett visst tillstånd. Man kan också påstå att frihet kräver en viss variant av rättvisa, vilket åtminstone sedan John Rawls enorma nedslag i den politiska filosofin på sjuttiotalet är en vanligt återkommande tanke. Det går idag knappast att diskutera politisk filosofi på allvar utan att på något sätt förhålla sig till Rawls rättviseteori.

Libertarianismen har (åtminstone enligt många) samma förfader som liberalismen i sextonhundratalsfilosofen John Locke. Locke argumenterade för att människan genom Gud har tilldelats en naturlig rätt till sin egen kropp. Det är ur denna tanke som liberalismen hämtar sin idé om individens frihet, medan libertarianismen hämtar sin idé om individens rätt. Gud, säger libertarianen, har ingenting med saken att göra, men det är ett obestridligt faktum att människan till fullo äger sin egen kropp. Ingen har rätt till hela eller ens en del av någon annans kropp, utan dessa våra fysiska uppenbarelser i världen är våra egna tempel att förvalta efter bästa förmåga och förstånd. En av de mest framstående utvecklingarna av detta sätt att tänka finns att hämta i Robert Nozicks ”Anarki, Stat och Utopi”, som Nozick skrev som svar på Rawls rättviseteori. Liksom att en seriös filosofisk debattör måste ta hänsyn till Rawls måste hon också ta hänsyn till Nozicks undersökning av individens rätt till sig själv.

Libertarianismen är inte lika lätt som liberalismen att dela upp eftersom ”rätten till sig själv” helt enkelt är svår att bryta ned i mindre beståndsdelar. Det är en svår grundsats att bestrida, och det är inte heller där som konflikten med andra idétraditioner utspelar sig – åtminstone inte enligt libertarianismens motståndare. Om det är sant att varje individ har fullständig rätt till sin egen kropp måste det nämligen följa logiskt att ingen har rätt till någon annans kropp, och att man därför inte med moralen i behåll har rätt att inskränka på någon annans handlingar utom när dessa strider mot andras motsvarande rätt till sina respektive kroppar. Det vill säga, jag får exempelvis inte svinga min knytnäve på ett sätt som hindrar ditt huvud från att fungera så som du vill att det ska fungera. Jag är fri att slå med mina nävar, men inte om mina slag träffar dig. Hur går en sådan fullständig själväganderätt ihop med att man måste betala skatt? Med att man inte får använda narkotika? Eller med ett samhällskontrakt som man aldrig har skrivit under? Det går helt enkelt inte. En fullständig själväganderätt är helt och hållet oförenlig med all form av ofrivilligt samhällsdeltagande. Om det är sant att individen har fullständig rätt till sin egen kropp finns det alltså inget sätt på vilket man kan motivera en stat moraliskt.

Den liberala diskussionen om vad frihet är har sin motsvarighet i libertarianismens diskussion om vad individen har rätt till av det som inte tillhör hennes kropp. En fullständig själväganderätt tycks i de flestas ögon vara rimlig, men konsekvenserna av en sådan själväganderätt verkar i stället orimliga. Många tycker helt enkelt att skatt, förbud mot narkotika och ett statligt våldsmonopol är nödvändiga för att samhället ska fungera, och alltså måste det finnas något fel med libertarianismen. Man hittar sin angreppspunkt i externt ägandeskap, alltså individens ägande till annat än sin egen kropp. Kan det vara så, argumenterar man, att individen måhända äger sig själv, men att allt som befinner sig över, under och mittemellan individer tillhör alla?

Liksom att liberalismen delas upp i negativ och positiv frihet delas libertarianismen därmed upp i höger och vänster. Nej, säger högerlibertarianer, individen äger sin egen kropp till fullo och äger därmed också allt som hon med hjälp av sin arbetskraft omvandlar till ägodelar. Det finns ingenting som heter ”gemensam” egendom, för endast individer kan utöva ägandeskap över fysiska ting. Ja, säger vänsterlibertarianer, individen äger sin kropp till fullo, men allt som hon blandar sin arbetskraft med tillhör alla – alltså är det inte individens äganderätt till sig själv och sitt arbete som ska inskränkas på, utan det som hon med sin kropp bearbetar till egendom. Jorden, träden, vattnet och allt annat tillhör alla och måste fördelas därefter enligt något annat och från individen skilt mekaniskt schema. Inkomstskatt är grovt omoraliskt, men skatt på den mark som arbetsplatsen befinner sig på är ett måste så att inte naturens resurser fördelas orättvist.

Det finns alltså både likheter och skillnader mellan liberalism och libertarianism. Ingen seriös tänkare kan utan goda skäl avfärda någon av de två och fortfarande förvänta sig att bli tagen på allvar. Tankeströmningar som vanligtvis tar starkt avstånd från metodologisk individualism och (särskilt) ekonomisk frihet har faktiskt också anammat frön från de båda idétraditionerna. Föreställ dig exempelvis om den politiska debatten inte hade behandlat frågor som ”integritet” och vad det hade gjort för realpolitisk skillnad. Hade sjukjournaler varit offentliga handlingar? Skulle terroristlagar någonsin kritiseras? Vilka begränsningar skulle FRA ha?

En politisk tänkare, oavsett vilken roll denne spelar, borde ägna tid och energi åt att undersöka vad självägandeskap egentligen innebär moraliskt. Det finns handlingar som obestridligt är fel. Man straffar inte en oskyldig för sitt eget höga nöjes skull. Varför inte? Därför att individen har ett värde. Vad detta värde är, och hur det kan och bör realiseras i politiken, är en oerhört viktig diskussion som inte får åsidosättas. Libertarianismen är den politisk-filosofiska gren som har de mest välutvecklade argumenten för individen och borde därför uppskattas och respekteras av varje seriös debattör. Om man inte tar individen på allvar förtjänar man nämligen inte själv att tas på allvar.

On the great and glorious skeeviness of “Lean In” and Sheryl Sandberg

muricaderp Current Events, Economics, History, Links, Politics , , ,

It’s even worse than I had realized:

Joining “the community” was just a click away. In fact, the community was already uploaded and ready to receive them; all they had to do was hit the “Lean In Today” button on their computer screen . . . and, oh yeah, join Facebook. (There is no entry into Lean In’s Emerald e-Kingdom except through the Facebook portal; Sandberg has kept her message of liberation confined within her own corporate brand.)

Thomas enumerated the “three things” that Lean In offered. (In the Lean In Community, there are invariably three things required to achieve your aims.) First, Thomas instructed, “Come like us on Facebook” (and, for extra credit, post your own inspirational graphic on Lean In’s Facebook “photo gallery” and “tag your friends, tell them why you’re leaning in!”). Second, watch Lean In’s online “education” videos, twenty-minute lectures from “experts” (business school professors, management consultants, and a public speaking coach) with titles like “Power and Influence” and “Own the Room.” Third, create a “Lean In Circle” with eight to ten similarly aspirational young women. The circles, Lean In literature stresses, are to promote “peer mentorship” only—not to deliver aid and counsel from experienced female elders who might actually help them advance.

The author, Susan Faludi, later mentions that Sandberg’s career was propelled by very targeted and effective university-president-to-student mentorship from Larry Summers. Those of you who follow idiotic political “scandals” will recall that Summers was drummed out of the Harvard presidency a few years ago for being a rank misogynist, as proven by his impolitic comments about women not being naturals at advanced mathematics. The buried lede in the Summers sexism scandal was that he was by most accounts a rank abrasive in general. If I wanted to hang out with his kind, I’d track down the prep school headmaster who shoved me up against a wall in a crowded hallway and screamed at me from a foot away for uttering something along the lines of “that’s fucking crazy.” These guys bear more than a passing resemblance to each other. I don’t care to keep the company of either of them.

There’s an unseemly and disturbing cult aura surrounding Sandberg. The language that she uses in “Lean In” programming is too meaningless and slick, and her you-go-girl followers are a bit too fawning for sane society. As it turns out, like high court functionary, like boy-king:

On Mark Zuckerberg’s birthday, the women at the company were instructed to wear T-shirts displaying his photo, like groupies.

Kate Losse, the former Facebook employee who recounted this birthday stunt, ascribed it to rampant workplace sexism: “It was like Mad Men, but real and happening in the current moment, as if in repudiation of fifty years of social progress.” It was also, I’d add, a repudiation of other important lessons of the mid-Twentieth Century, such as those of Synanon and Rajneeshpuram. Synanon’s founder and tyrant, a marriage-wrecking compulsory vasectomy enthusiast by the name of Chuck Diederich, presided over a compound in West Marin County where he used a pirate radio station to berate his followers to “get your balls clipped,” terrorized neighboring landowners, and corrupted the sheriff’s department to the extent that the county grand jury received an extended audience with the California attorney general and the incumbent sheriff was voted out of office in favor of a previously obscure San Anselmo police captain (i.e., East Marin outsider, over the hill from Synanon’s cohort of reserve sheriff’s deputies) who promised to clean house.  The Rajneeshees spent the early 1980’s vigorously attempting to subvert local governments and poison the townies in Wasco County, Oregon. Sure, Zuckerberg isn’t that bad, or at least he’s a different kind of bad, but only a megalomaniac orchestrates that sort of self-aggrandizing birthday party stunt. His is the sort of behavior that should be nipped in the bud, because if it isn’t, it may reach a point meriting attention from the state police.

Given that Sandberg reports to a smirking, self-important boy wonder who never quite looks like he completed puberty, apparently has quite vulgar taste in office art, and enjoys being worshiped, one might not expect her to keep particularly upright company at her side gig. Indeed: 

Sandberg’s mantra has become the feminist rallying cry of the moment, praised by notable figures such as Gloria Steinem, Jane Fonda, Marlo Thomas, and Nation columnist Katha Pollitt. A Time magazine cover story hails Sandberg for “embarking on the most ambitious mission to reboot feminism and reframe discussions of gender since the launch of Ms. magazine in 1971.” Pretty good for somebody who, “as of two and a half years ago,” as Sandberg confessed on her book tour, “had never said the word woman aloud. Because that’s not how you get ahead in the world.”

The lovefest continues on LeanIn.org’s “Meet the Community” page, where tribute is paid by Sandberg’s high-powered network of celebrities, corporate executives, and media moguls (many media moguls), among them Oprah Winfrey, New York Times executive editor Jill Abramson, Newsweek and Daily Beast editor in chief Tina Brown, Huffington Post founder Arianna Huffington, Cosmopolitan editor in chief Joanna Coles, former Good Morning America coanchor Willow Bay, former first lady Laura Bush (and both of her daughters), former California first lady and TV host Maria Shriver, U.S. senators Barbara Boxer and Elizabeth Warren, Harvard president Drew Gilpin Faust, Dun & Bradstreet CEO Sara Mathew, Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer, Coca-Cola marketing executive Wendy Clark, fashion designer Diane von Furstenberg, supermodel Tyra Banks, and actor (and Avon “Global Ambassador”) Reese Witherspoon.

Steinem’s feminism, as it happens, did not interfere with her shacking up with Mort Zuckerman, who has the most fascinating highbrow New York accent I’ve ever heard. Fonda is a second-generation movie star who polarized her country by going on a bizarre wartime mission to North Vietnam, quite arguably for nothing more than the publicity and the morality-whoring. Winfrey is a bottomfeeding charlatan who feigns histrionics for a living. Huffington is notorious for abusing unpaid staff writers at her for-profit publication, some of whom have begun suing for back wages. Boxer is a mediocrity at best who looks decent mainly because her most prominent colleagues in the California Congressional delegation, Feinstein and Pelosi, are morally hideous. Mayer is the girl you hated in high school for brownnosing all the teachers, being haughty because she maintained a 4.5 GPA, and talking shit about classmates for the lulz and the feeling of superiority.

What I find most worrisome is that Warren, one of the few sincere and credible populists in Congress, is also cradling this tar baby. The list is otherwise studded with exactly the sorts of oddities and sleazy operators one would expect, people who stand to lose much less esteem among the attentive for their involvement in this scam than does Warren.

And a scam is exactly what it is. By her own description, Sandberg scrupulously avoided saying anything about women until a few years ago. Then, as a high-powered corporate executive in her early forties, she suddenly started giving a shit about all this feminist empowerment stuff, as if after a career of being mixed up with Larry Summers and Mark Zuckerberg she was overcome with concern for other women and what she could do for them. One of my first suggestions would be to not offer them a chance to jump through hoops for an unpaid internship at a foundation run by a dot-com executive in support of her self-help racket. This isn’t about helping women, unless “women” is defined to mean Sheryl Sandberg and her cronies. It’s seedy marketeering sleaze. They would much more like to serve man. (Because, as Stalin put it, “of course it’s a fucking cookbook!”) 

Another way to look at it is as a sort of affinity fraud. Bernie Madoff didn’t swindle prominent New York Jews to make David Duke or Al Sharpton proud; he swindled them because he was one, and being one he knew their values, worldview, and cultural touchstones. Being a member of the same local ethnic and religious community also helped him build his victims’ trust, much like the guy who faked his own death in a staged plane crash in Alabama had done when he moved from Indianapolis to Atlanta to yuk it up about aviation with guys flying the big metal at the Delta crew base, then take their money in a pyramid scheme for pilots and run. If it doesn’t take one to know one, it takes one to dupe one. Sheryl Sandberg and her cronies are successful women, so they’re perfect marketeers for campaigns targeting less successful but aspiring women. By contrast, I wouldn’t succeed as a marketeer to teh wymmynz because I have the male perspective, and I’d have a hard time sealing deals with Madoff’s old crowd as a three-quarters goy son of a Staten Islander. 

These affinity frauds are all about exploiting and destroying the social capital built up by other people in high-trust communities. Why women as an overarching nebulous collective would be anything but a rock-bottom-low-trust community is inexplicable under any sort of logic, but it’s widely held to be the case. Meanwhile, it’s regarded as marginal and crazed (correctly so, I’d say) to make equivalent comments declaring a universal male solidarity bonding all men everywhere. This double standard has been established by little more than the sheer repetition of crude tautologies about differences between the sexes. Bizarrely, the activists advancing these tautologies simultaneously pride themselves on being sexual equalists. Whether they believe their own bullshit (about sexual equality, female superiority, or both) is debatable, but the language and imagery that they use certainly tend not to be conducive to introspection and sanity.

What they’re running on the public is a massive, often coordinated advertising campaign: in other words, a psychological operation, which is exactly what most modern advertising is. Whether it’s better for these psychological operators to be craven and sentient or to go fully native and truly believe the stuff is a matter of personal preference, dictated by whether one prefers to be manipulated by the consciously evil or by those who are simply out of their goddamn minds.

The end result of this process, however it operates, is that many women who would unabashedly describe specific female relatives or acquaintances as crazy bitches are convinced to place their complete trust in the judgment and morals of women utterly strange to them, specifically because they’re women and they’ve been declared leaders. Sure, my sister steals my sterling and china to feed her meth habit whenever she visits, then we catch her and she guilt-trips us about feeding her children and promises to get clean, but I totally trust this Sandberg lady because she says such nice things about empowering women. The key, of course, is that these thoughts are had subconsciously and separately; otherwise they’d be too ridiculous to grok. 

As Faludi shows, much of the “Lean In” programming is devoted to eliding class divisions by focusing on a meretricious sense of cross-class female solidarity. Here she understates her case, just as she does in only tangentially mentioning Arianna Huffington as a “Lean In” supporter without discussing her being a moneyed woman mooching off of unpaid labor to run her for-profit publication. Sheryl Sandberg is a very wealthy and well-connected corporate executive working in an era of extreme income inequality, diminished social mobility, and a ruined job market. She advanced substantially on the basis of her collegiate relationship with a future Treasury Secretary. Sandberg’s biography, as opposed to the self-help pap she’s marketing, is one of class solidarity with other members of the overclass, not one of gender solidarity with other women. Her example is relevant to men at Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and to a lesser extent at somewhat less well-connected universities; it is irrelevant to women at College of the Redwoods or SUNY-New Paltz, let alone women with GED’s working as home health aides in Southie. If you’re wondering why Harvard women don’t hang out in Lowell, Faludi has an explanation: 

In 1834, America’s first industrial wage earners, the “mill girls” of Lowell, Massachusetts, embarked on their own campaign for women’s advancement in the workplace. They didn’t “lean in,” though. When their male overseers in the nation’s first large-scale planned industrial city cut their already paltry wages by 15 to 20 percent, the textile workers declared a “turn-out,” one of the nation’s earliest industrial strikes. That first effort failed, but its participants did not concede defeat. The Lowell women would stage another turn-out two years later, create the first union of working women in American history, lead a fight for the ten-hour work day, and conceive of an increasingly radical vision that took aim both at corporate power and the patriarchal oppression of women. Their bruising early encounter with American industry fueled a nascent feminist outlook that would ultimately find full expression in the first wave of the American women’s movement. 

…

The Lowell factory owners had recruited “respectable” Yankee farmers’ daughters from the New England countryside, figuring that respectable would translate into docile. They figured wrong. The forces of industrialization had propelled young women out of the home, breaking the fetters binding them to the patriarchal family, unleashing the women into urban areas with few social controls, and permitting them to begin thinking of themselves as public citizens. The combination of newly gained independence and increasingly penurious, exploitative conditions proved combustible—and the factory owners’ reduction in pay turned out to be the match that lit the tinder. Soon after they heard the news, the “mill girls”—proclaiming that they “remain in possession of our unquestionable rights”—shut down their looms and walked out.

 Farmers’ daughters working in factories: they must have been poors, no? Indeed: 

The Lowell turn-out was a communal endeavor, built on intense bonds of sisterhood forged around the clock: by day on the factory floor, where the women worked in pairs, with the more experienced female worker training and looking out for the newcomer, and by night in the company boarding houses, where they shared cramped quarters, often two to a bed, and embroiled themselves in late-night discussions about philosophy, music, literature, and, increasingly, social and economic injustice. As Dublin observed of the web of “mutual dependence” that prevailed in the Lowell mill workforce, the strike was “made possible because women had come to form a ‘community’ of operatives in the mill, rather than simply a group of individual workers.” An actual community, that is—not an online like-a-thon. Tellingly, the strike began when a mill agent, hoping to nip agitation in the bud, fired one of the more voluble factory workers whom he regarded as the ringleader. The other women immediately walked out in protest over her expulsion. The petition they signed and circulated concluded: “Resolved, That none of us will go back, unless they receive us all as one.” 

Yup. Icky poors working shit jobs and doing the community organizing thing because they had no alternative. These are the kind of people who obediently go home to the ass ends of Boston after finishing their shifts at Harvard Yard. One does not associate freely and equally with such people as a Harvard woman. And all this community stuff is le hard. It takes too much time away from Candy Crush Saga. 

The result is a nation whose women can’t make it to the Grange meeting either because they’re too busy being socially-climbing careerists or because the meeting conflicts with Oprah. I know, I’m indulging in sentimental agrarian populist fantasy, and that most of my friends would have to ask me what the hell is a grange, but the same thing goes for men who are too busy watching SportsCenter and UFC pay-per-view to get to union meetings or bowling clubs.

The issue here isn’t sex, but class. Get rid of all chauvinism in these downmarket organizations, and the overclass will still be discomfited. Sheryl Sandberg and company don’t want any of us hanging out at the union hall. They want us to mind our own business, not the community’s. They certainly don’t want anyone getting the idea that they’re winning at a rigged game. 

Growing Poverty, a Declining Standard of Living: Watch Out for…. Part 1.

Jacques Delacroix Economics, History , , , , , , , , , , ,

It’s vital to the liberal narrative that pretty much everything has to go generally downhill (except global warming, of course, which is always going up even when it’s not, like right now). Life has to deteriorate, they think. That things are getting worse is an article of faith among liberals; it’s even a tenet of their faith. (If things are swimming along fine, what excuse is there for government intrusion?) You might even say that most liberals hate most good news. Prominent among the liberals’ permanent myths is the belief that Americans have become poorer except for a tiny minority of the very rich __________% (Fill in the blank.) In its most common version the idea is that Americans’ real standard of living has done nothing but decline since sometimes in the seventies. This, whatever the numbers say.

I, for one, know it’s not true. I was there, after all, from the beginning, even from before the beginning! I remember well how bad the good old days were in many respects. I am distressed that some people with apparently conservative or libertarian ideas have now also espoused this false belief. In this essay in two parts, I try to help readers find their way in the midst of often misleading or downright false statements that seem to support this erroneous belief. As usual, I do not address myself to specialists but rather to the intelligent but ignorant. Specialists are welcome to comment if they agree to do it in English or in some other official language.

Two forewords

1 I don’t contend that I understand what happened to American real incomes during the current crisis, say, between 2009 and 2013. I will say nothing about this recent period. (If I told you what I suspect happened, you might be astounded, though.) I refer in this essay only to the period 1975-2007.

2 I believe poverty and prosperity have to be measured in terms of real income, income as experienced by real human beings: It’s not how many dollar bills you have in your wallet, it’s what your paycheck actually buys that matters. This brings up several tough technical problems we will get into presently or in the next episode. If you think of poverty in different terms, I am not sure I have anything useful to say to you.

The superficial facts

General federal statistics, all OECD figures, all World Bank numbers show that on the average Americans have become considerably richer since 1975. Nevertheless, these statistics, contrary to a now common belief – significantly understate the economic progress of Americans. We, in general, have become vastly richer than were were then.

I will deal later explicitly with the issue of possible differences between what the average shows and the economic progress of sub-categories of the US population. In the meantime, I must point out that some common forms of enrichment cannot be confined to a particular group. Cleaner drinking water, for example, is usually cleaner for everyone. It would be impractical to reserve wells of dirty, polluted water for the poor or for racial minorities. (However, if you search a little you might actually find liberal allegations of such segregation or, at least, the intimations of such. National Public Radio is a good bet.)

Here is what I don’t intended to do, don’t do: I do not accuse government statistics of lying. I help others read them and complement them where they need to be complemented. There is not government conspiracy designed to mislead us about the living standards of Americans, I think.

Major (unintended) sources of bias.

There are three major sources of bias in expressing standard of living that understate, underestimate, understate economic betterment. I explain them below.

Ballooning health expenditures

Since the seventies, most employed Americans have taken most of their pay raises in the form of health benefits. This results from a historically accidental peculiarity of the American wage and benefit system going back to WWII. (It may be getting removed by the implementation of Obamacare as I write in 2013). The large increase in health expenditures provided by employers do not appear in wage statistics. Yet, they constitute consumption in a way similar to straight wages. In fact, wherever people are given a choice between more steak and more health care, they seem to chose more steak and more health care. Health care possesses an interesting characteristic all of its own: While there is a limit to how much steak an individual can ingest, there is no limit at all to how much health care -broadly defined – the same individual can absorb. It’s close to infinite. Why, I am considering right now some surgery to correct a nose I have not really liked for more than sixty years!

Whether it is a wise societal choice to spend apparently limitless resources on health care, much of it for the old and economically unproductive is an interesting issue in its own right. However, it’s not my issue here. Health services have been produced in vast quantities since 1975. They were eagerly consumed by Americans. Health expenditures constitute a part of the standard of living. If you don’t believe this, just ask yourself if the withdrawal of all health care would not be a lowering of the standard of living.

Better quality of common goods

Common objects on which comparisons of living standard across time are based have improved tremendously in quality. This is difficult, sometimes impossible to measure. Indices of comparison across time (1975 to 2007) don’t do a good job of it.

Nominal wages, the numbers printed on your paychecks, have to be corrected for inflation. We all know that a dollar does not buy as much as it did in 1975. (Around that time, my salary of $20,000/year was quite comfortable.) Federal international and private organizations in charge of these things do their very best to correct raw numbers in meaningful ways. However, they meet with several limitations because things of 1975 are often radically different from what bears the same name in 2007.

(Note: The agencies in charge do their best and mostly intelligently. Again, I am not faulting their efforts. Also, I think there is little intellectual fraud involved in this work because their results are among the most and best scrutinized in the history of the world.)

Here is an example: I suspect that the average television set of 1975 was like mine was then: It was small, offered only black and white images, often had scratchy sound, and gave access to little more than three national networks. Watching television then was like eating in a mediocre restaurant that offered only three dishes ( and there was maybe a hot dog stand outside).

When economists correct for inflation, they have little choice but to compare that television set with a modern ultra-flat etc… Hence, when they report that the cost of a television set has increased in face dollars by, say, 100%, they are not able to take into account that the actual service (the enjoyment) attached to a contemporary set with precise colors, faithful sound that is a gateway to 300 sources is ten times, or one hundred times, greater than what I derived from my 1975 B&W set.

This example can pretty much be turned into a general rule: Everything is better, works better, tastes better, gives more service than its equivalent back then. When you find a seeming exception, you soon discover that it’s not real. Two examples of exceptions that don’t resist examination:

A     Cars are more expensive now than then by several measures. This means that it takes more days of mean (average) American wages to buy the cheapest car in American than it did then. But the cheapest car on American roads today are vastly better in every way than their supposed equivalent back then. They break down less often; they are safer (weight for weight); they require much less maintenance. (Older people will remember the days when every car required an oil change every 5,000 miles and when prudent car owners changed oil every 3,500 miles.)

In addition, much of the rise in real car prices is due to mandated safety and environmental buffers now built into them that did note exist in 1975. (It’s startling to see in not-so-old movies parents getting into the family car with their children and driving off with no one buckling safety belts because there aren’t any.) No matter how one feels about the current health and environmental restrictions pushing upward car prices, they are undeniably form of consumption. It’s useless to cry,” I don’t want it” when you imposed it on yourself through the political process you deem legitimate in every way.

B     Many older people, and I am often tempted to join them, believe that any number of produce just tasted better back then, produce such as tomatoes and strawberries, for example. This is pure delusion. Here is how I know: Several times, I have steeled my resolve, put cash in my pocket and directed my steps to the local farmers’ market. There, against all my instincts, I purchase a pound of organic tomatoes or a tiny basket of grossly priced strawberries. Now organic produce is not better for you (See “organic food” on this blog.) but it’s often fresher, and often handpicked. Each time, I recovered in my mouth the taste of produce of my youth. Each time, I did the calculations only to rediscover anew that the outrageous cost of the farmer’s market produce was actually less, as a percentage of any income, or in inflation-corrected dollars, than the equivalents did when I was young.

We have become used to paying little for mediocre produce, the better produce of yesteryear are still available. They are not even especially expensive. They appear expensive because we are spoiled by general low food prices.

An then, of course, there is the coffee. It was so vile then, coast-to-coast, in 1975 that if anyone but a drunks’ bar served it today he would probably be indicted. And then, there is bread that would have qualified as light construction material. The list is endless: In the good old days, most things were mediocre to very bad and they were, in fact expensive. Current measures are seldom able to take improvement in quality into account. For this reason, they understate average economic progress in America between 1975 and 2007.

I repeat that this average economic progress is also mostly widespread, available to all parts of the population. There are, in fact, few corner bakeries operating especially in the ghetto and specializing in nutritionally unsound, bad-tasting bread for African-Americans.

There may be an exception to the general rule that things have become cheaper in thirty years with constant quality I am not able to deal with here. It may be a major exception: Housing in all its forms may be more expensive in real terms now than it was in 1975. Much housing is the same now as it was then, so prices matters a great deal. Thus, better quality would not explain superior cost. I am eager to see sources on this issue and to publish them here.

New goods, new services

When comparing the prices of things and services then and now, economists are not able, of course, to take into account objects and services that simply did not exist then. This inescapable fact also understates the real progress in living standards. I repeat: Some good things are not counted at all in comparisons of the standard of living then and now because they did not exist at all then. This fact in itself constitutes an overstatement of the standard of living of then. The Internet and its many manifestations, its many subordinate services, such as Google, are a case in point.

I hasten to add that this judgment does not depend on how much you, personally value the Internet and its multiple offerings. To demonstrate that it’s a form of consumption, it’s enough to observe that few of those who can have access to the Internet actually turn it down. I, for example, like most residents of developed societies probably know more than one thousand people. Of the people I know, only three refuse to gain Internet access (and they periodically cheat by catching a ride on a relative’s network tool!)

I can hear some older readers grumble ( as one did recently on this blog) that newfangled technical innovations, such as the Internet and hugely better television, actually made life worse. I smile sarcastically inside for the following reason: Very few Americans seem to be following the primitivist dream implicit in such judgment and make for the wilderness. This, although it would be easy because there is probably more and more undeveloped, empty space in America as the population become more concentrated in a few mega cities. This is too has improved since 1975: There is more and wilder wilderness.

Summary

Large health expenditures, better products, more products have increased the general standard of living of Americans considerably beyond what wage and income statistics show. This statement is implicitly based on averages. The demonstration above does not exclude the logical possibility that some sectors of American society were worse off in 2007 than they, or their equivalents were in 1975. This issue is dear to liberal sensitivity. I deal with it in Part 2, soon forthcoming.

What do Mexicans read for intellectual nourishment?

Brandon Christensen Philosophy , , , , ,

I asked an old friend of mine (I think he’s a professional economist these days, but I deactivated my FB and haven’t been able to keep up with anyone) to help me find some Mexican media outlets to troll for knowledge and information. I also wanted to know how influential Mexico’s press is outside of Mexico (especially in regards to her smaller neighbors in Central America but also to Spain). He gave me the following heads up:

I’d recommend searching for articles in Nexos and Letras Libres magazines, which are something like the The Atlantic.

Mexico is very insular and there is almost no influence from media outside or from here to other places. However, I believe El País from Spain usually does a good job reporting about Mexico.

My friend and I actually met at a summer seminar put on by the Institute for Humane Studies back in 2009. It’s the same seminar that I met Rick at as well. If you are young and want to be a competent defender of liberty then I would highly suggest checking out the IHS’s programs.

Forty years after the launch of feminism

Jacques Delacroix Liberty , , , , ,

On Halloween afternoon I was downtown Santa Cruz on a candy expedition, escorting my grand-daughter the delightful M., five. M., a brown-skinned child, was Rapunzel. She was wearing a purple sequined dress with a petty-coat showing its pale blue border beneath, white gloves, and a blond wig to her ankles. She would have easily won the contest if there had been one. All afternoon women voiced their appreciation of her look.

My perspicacious observations on that occasion:

All little girls still want to be princesses or fairies. None wants to be a fire man, or a firegirl, or a fireperson. None wants to dress in neutral colors. If it’s not pink, it’s purple.

Nearly all little boys want to be dressed as anything with a gun, or a sword, or anything with a truck. Those I saw who are dressed as anything else were obviously forced by their politically correct or social climbing Moms. The way you know is that they sulk in spite of the large amounts of candy in their loot bags. A small number of little boys do want to dress as fairies but that’s nothing new. And it has nothing to do with feminism.

Fat women take Halloween as just another opportunity to wear a push-up bra and to hang out (or to almost hang out).

Almost no straight man wants to wear a costume. Those few men who do wear one have been blackmailed by their wives. You know it because they are costumed to represent the minor part of a pair or of a trio of which Mrs is the principal, the Tin Man of Wizard of Oz, for example. Costumed straight men are thus merely fashion accessories, as well they should be.

Forty years later: Feminism: 0; Mother Nature: 1.

I am not making this up. Open your eyes for the Goddess’s Sake!

And I know it’s completely different in San Francisco but it has nothing to do with feminism, one way or the other, or the other.

American Foreign Policy: Predictions, Assumptions and Falsehoods

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

On November 1st 2011 I got into an argument with Dr Delacroix about US foreign policy. During that time, if you’ll recall, a debate on the merits and demerits of bombing Libya was raging across the blogosphere and in the halls of power. Here is what I wrote in the heat of the moment two years ago today:

Time will tell, of course, which one of our predictions comes true. In two years time, Tunisia, which did not get any help from the West, will be a functioning democracy with a ruling coalition of moderate Islamists in power.

The Egyptian military will be promising the public that elections are just around the corner, and Libya will be in worse shape than it is today. Two years from today, Dr. J, you will be issuing an apology to me and making a donation to the charity of my choice.

Since you are very good at avoiding the facts on the ground in the name of democratic progress, I think we should establish a measurement rubric by which to measure the progress of Libya. How about GDP (PPP) per capita as measured by the IMF?

Not too shabby, eh? In case you haven’t been staying up to date on current events in the Middle East, Tunisia is a functioning democracy with a ruling coalition of moderate Islamists in power. It is not Switzerland or Iceland, but it is doing much better than the two states who were on the receiving end of US “help” during the Arab Spring.

Egypt, for example, is currently being run by the (US-funded) military, and the military is promising Egyptians that elections are just around the corner.

In Libya, GDP (PPP) per capita for 2013 started off the year at $11,936 (in international dollars). In 2011, prior to the uprisings and subsequent US bombing campaign, Libya’s GDP (PPP) per capita clocked in at $14,913 (you’d have to look at 2010 to see where Libya started off). That’s a nearly $3,000 drop in purchasing power parity. Here is the relevant IMF data (it starts off in 2010 and you can go from there).

Perfectly predicting the current mess in the Middle East has less to do with my genius than it does with applying a general libertarian framework to the situation. For example, I know that government is very bad at doing nearly everything. Government is a name we have given to an organization that has a monopoly on force. This monopoly on force is usually consented to because it is expected that it will provide an honest court system and a way to interact with other polities (“diplomacy”). When this monopoly on force is applied to anything other than these two functions, peace and prosperity give way to war and impoverishment. The trajectory that war and impoverishment take in a society depends on any number of variables, but the general libertarian framework I just outlined never fails to impress.

Now, my perfect prediction was made in the heat of the moment during an argument. If my argument was right, what did the other side of the debate have to say? Is it at all possible that Dr Delacroix had an argument that somewhat conformed to reality as well? Decide for yourself, and remember, this was written near the end of 2011:

There are several benefits to the Libyan/NATO victory for this country […] First, rogues and political murderers everywhere are given a chance to suppose that if you kill Americans, we will get you afterwards, even if it takes twenty years […] Two, Arabs and oppressed people everywhere are figuring that we mean it when we say we like democracy for everyone […] Three, this Obama international victory will cost him dearly in the next election. A fraction – I don’t know how large – of the people who voted for him the first time around oppose all American military interventions.

I don’t know about you, but it looks as if Dr Delacroix got Libya, the rest of the Arab world and American domestic politics horribly wrong, and on every level possible. If I am being disingenuous or unfair to Dr Delacroix’s argument, please point out to me where I go wrong in the ‘comments’ section.

Let’s take a second to reflect on something here. I was factually correct in my assessment of what would happen in the Middle East if the US intervened militarily. Dr Delacroix was factually incorrect. I think the drastic difference in outcomes occurred because our assumptions about how the Middle East works are informed by different history books. This is odd because we agree on nearly everything else.

Were I proved to be wrong, and shown how devastating the effects of my assumptions on societies could be,  I know I would do some deep questioning about my prior assumptions of how the world works.

There are four assumptions Dr Delacroix makes, in recent blog posts, that I believe are unfounded. When these unfounded assumptions have gained traction policy-wise, the consequences have been devastating. When these unfounded assumptions have been defeated in open debate, the consequences have been minute. By pointing out these assumptions, and ruthlessly criticizing them, I hope to provide a framework for those who read this blog to use when thinking about foreign affairs.

  • False Assumption #1: “Bullies will try to pull off worse and worse brutalities until they become intimidated. The unopposed brutalities of one bully encourage others to go further. Some who had the potential but never acted on it will be encouraged by the impunity of others to become bullies themselves.”

Comparing leaders of authoritarian states to schoolyard bullies is a bad way to go about understanding international relations. I think this is done on purpose, of course, in order to obfuscate the reality of a given situation. Dictators in authoritarian states often enjoy broad coalitions of support from the populaces over which they rule. In Iraq, for example, Saddam Hussein enjoyed support from Sunni Muslims, Christians, secularists, socialists, trade unions, domestic corporations, women’s rights groups and the poor. Dictators often enjoy broad support from their populaces because of the fact that they bully, to use Dr Delacroix’s term, the bullies (see False Assumption #2 for more on this).

Here is another example: Bashar al-Assad has broad support in Syria because he protects religious and ethnic minorities from the passions of the vulgar mob. Dictators rarely care about the actions of dictators in other countries, unless it serves their own domestic purposes, and slaughtering people randomly is something I have never heard of a dictatorship doing. A dictator’s attacks are calculated, quite coldly I admit, so as to bolster support from the factions they are allied with. Dr Delacroix would like nothing more than to have the Middle East actually be a place where dictators take comfort in the actions of other dictators. Were this to be true, his argument would be right. His predictions would come to pass. Alas.

  • False Assumption #2: “By the way, as little as four years ago and even less, Western liberals and misguided libertarians were still blaming the American military for Iraqi on Iraqi violence. The US military is gone; the violence is rather worse.”

Attempting to sweep the violence and high death count associated with the US invasion of Iraq under the rug does nothing to inspire confidence in Dr Delacroix’s framework. The Iraqi-on-Iraqi violence occurred after the US military illegally removed the bully’s bully from his position of power. Prior to the US military’s illegal invasion, the Iraqi-on-Iraqi violence Dr Delacroix points to was kept in check by Saddam Hussein’s heavy-handed tactics. When Hussein gassed Kurds, for example, he did not do so simply because the Kurds “revolted” against his rule. He did so because the Kurds had been murdering Arabs and engaging in terrorist activities that targeted Iraqi infrastructure. The intrastate warfare in Iraq was quite negligible until the United States decided to break its own laws and illegally invade and occupy Iraq.

Of course, you can always choose to believe Dr Delacroix’s theory of events, but I think the results of our predictive power speak for themselves (on the inevitability of intrastate warfare in post-colonial states, see the discussions about “post-colonialism,” “secession” and “decentralization” here at NOL).

  • False Assumption #3: “In World War Two, we could have stopped the genocide of the Jews or slowed it to a crawl. We did not because there was a strong but vague reluctance to ‘get involved.’”

In 1939 France and the United Kingdom had worldwide empires. The Soviet Union was 25 years old. So were the small, independent states of Turkey, Hungary and Austria. Germany, despite its defeat in World War 1, was an industrial power. The was no such thing as cruise missiles. There was no such thing as jet airplanes. There was no such thing as satellites. Or the internet. The Jews that were slaughtered in Europe lived in places that could not be reached by the American military of 1939. Indeed, they lived in places in Europe that could not be reached by the American military of 1945. The Eastern Front in World War 2 was many things, but certainly I think you can see why it wasn’t a “reluctance to get involved” on the part of the American people that is partly responsible for the Holocaust. To assume that the American military could have marched into Eastern Europe during World War 2 and stopped, or even slowed, the Holocaust is delusional.

  • False Assumption #4: “Today, I am ashamed to be an American because of our passivity with respect to the slaughter of Syrian seekers for freedom.”

Since the end of World War 2, when the US assumed its place as the world’s most prominent polity, Washington has continually opted to support the socialists (Ba’athists, Nasserists, Ghaddafi, etc.) over the Islamists in the Arab world (liberal Arabs simply, and unfortunately, emigrate to the West). The most obvious reason for this support is that the socialists do not send their agents to fly planes filled with people into commercial buildings filled with people. Pretending that the US is putting its head in the sand is disingenuous. Washington is well-aware of the consequences of letting Assad fight it out with the Islamists. We have made our decision after weighing the costs and benefits of every option available. We did this through open debate. Socialists make better enemies (and allies) than Islamists.

Now, these are just some small examples of jingoism and delusions of grandeur I have picked out. There are many more examples, especially in the national press, but Dr Delacroix’s are much, much better reasoned than any of those. If you are reading the op-eds in the national press rather than Dr Delacroix you are going to be woefully misinformed about the nature of the world. Your brain will be slightly more malnourished than it otherwise would be (this is one of the reasons why I like blogging with him). His arguments are informed by a lifetime of prestigious scholarship; they are informed by somebody who has the benefit of understanding two distinct cultures in an intimate way.

And look how incredibly wrong he has been proven to be. Assumptions matter. So, too, does truth and falsehood.

Liberty Movement Cannot Just Rely on the Right

Wood Liberty

In order for the liberty movement to make things work, they need to do a little bit of the left and right at both times. For every “liberal” government program they cut, they have to cut a “conservative” government program. For every right-wing cause they champion, they must champion a left-wing one. The severity of this problem really sunk in when I noticed how much the Koch brothers had co-opted the Liberty Movement. If libertarians do not stress their common ground with liberals, they are going to be screwed. Sure, it is important to take over the Republican Party, but at the same time, they have to appeal to a significant portion of liberals and Democrats.

I’ve been to many events that I suspect were likely funded by the Kochs, to one degree or another. Although I support the economic ideas promoted, they speak half-truths and promote half-ideas. They use silence to omit half of the core libertarian message. They use the word “liberty” over and over again, until the word loses meaning. They are obsessed with “taking over the Republican Party”, and marginalize all those who support the Libertarian third party. They talk about repealing Obamacare, cutting taxes, loosening regulations, and cutting welfare, but that is about it. Koch-sponsored events barely scratch the surface on the following topics: the drug war, the police state, the neoconservative Middle Eastern foreign policy, the growth of the defense department, corporate bailouts, corporate subsidies, private prisons, CIA-backed dictatorships overseas, or any of the social issues linked to the Christian Right.

I have become incredibly jaded and exhausted with the talk about “appeasing to the Republican base”. There is no longer any reason to care what pro-lifers and evangelicals say, or cater to their opinions. No one need care what some old, chubby, white haired, closet racist, small town gladhanders have to say. They are old, and will be dead or retired by the end of the decade. Their opinion should be irrelevant. It is time to pick the battles. The old Republicans are stupid, senile, and reactionary, and are completely incapable of challenging political enemies on a modern stage. Meanwhile, liberal Democrats have brainwashed the whole younger generation, and are on the verge of causing us economic collapse (not entirely their fault – ie. Bush). And all the Republicans can come up with is to scream the same reactionary, obstructionist things instead of coming up with new ideas. Here is a link to an article discussing the demographic reality.

Hosting forums on fighting Obamacare, heavy-handed regulations, gun control, and high taxes is all well and good. When taken out of context from the rest of the libertarian message though, it makes libertarianism repulsive to the left. It looks like a bunch of straight white males wearing bowties, complaining about welfare and taxes. We all know what reaction this triggers from liberals. The paragraphs below contain are the message that libertarians actually say. The highlighted bracketed sections are what liberals hear them say, at least when Koch Industries controls the message.

“Poor people are arrested for drugs and other embellished charges because of the police state, and are sent to private prisons, and leave their families behind, and when they get off they have no choice but welfare. We need to stop the police state that ruins the lives of the poor, and then {cut the welfare that the poor have become dependent on} as they no longer will need it.”

or

“{We need to loosen regulations on American companies and remove mandatory union laws}, because corporate robber barons will go overseas to countries with CIA-backed dictatorships and exploit poor people in the third world, causing blue-collar Americans to lose their jobs and get on welfare. When the jobs return to America, {we should cut welfare}.”

Taken out of context, the libertarian looks exactly like the stereotype that statist liberals want to play up. The statist liberals are viciously dedicated to ruining the libertarian image in front of anti-war, pro-civil liberties liberals who should join the cause. And with their four-fifths of the media, Obama’s Hollywood friends, and poorly informed immature university students trying to rage out against their parents’ corny world, they have far more campaign power than any conservative or libertarian.

That brings us to Rand Paul, and his modus operandi for 2016. The word on the street is that Rand is a libertarian like his father, pretending his best to be an “establishment Republican”. As a result, he is incredibly careful about the libertarian things he says. Or is he? Despite the fact that Roe vs. Wade is upheld by the Supreme Court, that no one will ever overturn, he’s still wasting his time trying to appeal to the pro-life evangelical crowd. Supporting pro-life legislation does more harm than good in today’s climate, especially with the venomous reaction it causes from four-fifths of the media and the young activists. It is not a battle worth fighting.

Here is what Rand Paul has going for him.

  • He opposed the Syrian War

  • He’s opposing mandatory minimums for drugs

  • He’s opposed NSA espionage

  • He said GOP needs to “agree to disagree” on gay marriage

  • He filibustered drones

  • He supported an end to foreign aid (specifically to countries who persecute Christians)

  • He has pledged to filibuster Janet Yellen’s taking office of the Fed until it is audited. (Of course, given that most people know nothing about the Fed, the media outlets will likely portray this as Rand “being sexist and opposing a woman taking an key position”)

Of course, many Obama supporters will stick their head in the send and ignore all of these things. In terms of Syria, NSA, and drones, all liberal Democrats have to say is, “OF COURSE HE’S OPPOSING THE WAR BECAUSE HE’S JUST OBSTRUCTING OBAMA!!!!! IF BUSH WAS PRESIDENT, ALL THOSE STUPID FUCKING REPUBLICANS LOVE WAR AND WOULD BE SUPPORTING IT!!!!!!” Statements like the above were floating all over the media and internet during Rand’s filibuster.

Rand Paul is obviously not afraid of stating his opinion on the Civil Rights Act, which is that although he believes any discrimination enforced by law is utmost unconstitutional, and should be overturned, he believes that a privately-owned establishment has the right to refuse service to whomever for whatever reason. (To put this in context, private establishments in Southern states before 1964 had to comply with Jim Crow regulations enforced by the state government. The greater blame falls on state politicians, as opposed to private business owners.) Like Barry Goldwater in 1964, Rand Paul believes that the free market would end private discrimination.

If Rand Paul is willing to come out and state this rigid extreme libertarian opinion, then why the hell is he so afraid of promoting libertarian ideas about drug wars, foreign policy, the military-industrial complex, and the prison-industrial complex. Let everyone be warned, if Rand runs in 2016, his Goldwaterite opinion on the Civil Rights Act is the only thing Democrats will talk about it. They will repeat this over and over again, making it the headline every time Rand’s name is mentioned on the news.

I just trust that with every move Rand Paul makes, he is listening to his father on how to go about it. It is just time for Rand to come out as a libertarian on more issues than the typical Tea Party ideas. I am not sure why so many libertarians want to kiss the tushes of “establishment Republicans”, as Republicans are statistically and numerically doomed, by demographics and age. There are characters all over the media who will do whatever it takes to see Rand destroyed. The time to think ahead is now.  It is equally important to garner the support of common ground liberals and progressives as it is to take over the Republican Party. Anyone who does not see this is a fool.

Investment & Prudence

Tibor Machan Philosophy , , , , , ,

To be prudent amounts to making sure that one takes good care of oneself in all important areas of one’s life. Health, wealth, family, friendship, understanding, etc. are all in need of good care so that one will achieve and sustain one’s development as a human individual. It all begins with following the edict: “Know thyself!”

All those folks who make an effort to keep fit and to eat properly are embarking on elements of a prudent life. Unfortunately, the virtue of prudence has been undermined by the idea that everyone automatically or instinctively pursues his or her self-interest.

We all know the rhetorical question, “Isn’t everyone selfish?” Because of certain philosophical and related doctrines, the answer has been mainly that everyone is. In the discipline of economics, especially, scholars nearly uniformly hold the view that we all do whatever we do so as to please ourselves, to feel good. No room exists there for pure generosity or charity, for altruism, because in the final analysis everyone is driven to act to further his or her own wellbeing, or for carelessness, recklessness. If people do not achieve the goal of self-enhancement, it is primarily out of ignorance – they just don’t know what is in their best interest but they all intend to achieve it and even when they appear to be acting generously, charitably, helpfully and so on, in the end they do so because it gives them satisfaction, fulfills their own desires and serves their idea of what is best for them.

This is not prudence but what some have dubbed animal spirit. People are simply driven or motivated to be this way, instinctively, if you will. The virtue of prudence would operate quite differently.

One who practices it would be expected to make a choice to pursue what is in one’s best interest and one could fail also to do so. Practicing prudence is optional, not innately produced. Like other moral virtues, prudence requires choice. It is not automatic by any means. The reason it is thought to be so, however, has to do with the intellectual-philosophical belief that human conduct is exactly like the behavior of non-human beings, driven by the laws of motion!

Once this idea assumes prominence, there is no concern about people having to be prudent. They will always be, as a matter of their innate nature. What may indeed be needed is the opposite, social and peer pressure to be benevolent or kind, to adhere to the dictates of altruism, something that requires discipline and education and does not come naturally to people.

It would seem, however, that this idea that we are automatically selfish or self-interested or prudent doesn’t square with experience. Consider just how much self-destructiveness there is in the human world, how many projects end up hurting the very people who embark upon them. Can all that be explained by ignorance and error?

Or could it be, rather, that many, many human beings do not set out to benefit themselves, to pursue their self-interest? Could it be that human beings need to learn that they ought to serve their own wellbeing and that their conduct is often haphazard, unfocused, even outright self-destructive (as, for example, in the case of hard drug consumers, gamblers, romantic dreamers, fantasizers and the lazy)?

It seems that this latter is a distinct possibility if not outright probability. It is a matter of choice whether one is or is not going to be prudent, in other words. And once again, ordinary observation confirms this.

One can witness numerous human beings across the ages and the globe choosing to work to benefit themselves, as when they watch their diets or work out or obtain an education, and many others who do not and, instead, neglect their own best interest. Or, alternatively, they often act mindlessly, thoughtlessly, recklessly, etc.

The contention that they are really trying to advance their self-interest, to benefit themselves, seems to be one that stems from generalizing a prior conviction that everything in nature moves so as to advance forward. This is the idea that came from the philosopher Thomas Hobbes, who learned it from Galileo who took it from classical physics.

Accordingly, acting prudently, in order to advance one’s wellbeing, could be a virtue just as the ancient philosopher Aristotle believed it to be. And when one deals with financial matters, careful investing would qualify as prudence, just as is working out at a gym, watching one’s diet, driving carefully, etc.

Around the Web

Brandon Christensen Current Events, Links , , , , , , , , , , ,
  1. A university in Malaysia has awarded an economics doctorate to North Korea’s communist dictator
  2. Ian Bremmer asks, in the pages of the National Interest, if China is in the middle of a big bubble
  3. The Diffusion of Responsibility: a short piece on government employees, the rest of us, and some implications of the drug war
  4. How laissez-faire made Sweden rich by Johan Norberg
  5. Why do banks keep going bankrupt? Kirby Cundiff answers this question in the pages of the Freeman
  6. Mud People and Super Farmers: Creatively adapting to the lack of land rights in Africa

Civilization: A Praxeology

L. A. Repucci Liberty , , , , , , , , , ,
…and they say praxeology is flawed…

A thought-game by L.A. Repucci

Okay; suppose civilization collapses.  Positing the end of our current human paradigm — the sum of our economic, governmental and technological works subtracted — is a non-partisan exercise.  Both ends the ideological spectrum are ever doomsday prophets, decrying an immanent collapse, undone either by means of our State or our Liberty.

‘Resources are held in Common!’ cries the socialist.  ‘Property is product of my Life and Liberty’ cries the anarchist…both claim we are robbing ourselves blind.  Let’s skip  the part of the process where the libertarians and collectivists argue about roads and markets, and just imagine the ‘end’ is behind us all, and we (any two or more parties) survived, and are left to re-establish civilization.  This proposition is essentially a ‘dropped on a deserted island’ scenario — an exercise in pure a priori, inductive inquiry.

We are left to our own devices; a natural state with no default preset values, no existing law or paper contracts, no social institution, normative or common tradition.

It’s just you, me, and the pile of radioactive rubble that previously was a long-defunct post office.

How to proceed?  What rules shall we make for ourselves, and how should we best go about the process of survival?

Please, feel free to take your turn by leaving a comment — this is an open-ended invitation to engage in the process of civilization. In the interest of intellectual honesty, I would offer that it is entirely my intention to pursue a libertarian outcome, to our mutual benefit.

Game On. =)

Related articles

“Could we build a bridge between Austrian Economics and New Institutional Economics? – A Pre-History of Soft Budget Constraint”

Brandon Christensen Economics , , , ,

This is the title of a paper by Claudio Shikida. Here’s the abstract:

The concept of soft budget constraint is recent in economic analysis. It has become increasingly important in economic theory, for its role as a system of incentives. However, soft budget constraint plays also an important role in the history of economic thought, where it can be traced back until Mises’s writings on economic calculation and property rights, both derived from the debate of the economic calculation in socialist regimes. In this sense, soft budget constraint can be viewed as a bridge between Austrian Economics and New Institutional Economics. Since Mises, like other Austrian economists, is virtually ignored in Brazilian courses of Economic Thought, this article intends to show his importance as a forerunner of the concept of soft budget constraint, and will try to link these two theoretical views of economic systems.

You can read the whole thing here. Any thoughts?

What is Reality?

Fred Foldvary Philosophy ,

by Fred Foldvary

Reality is what actually exists. The philosophical question is how can we know reality. Idealists say that all we can do is perceive, and we cannot prove that objects exist in the way we perceive them, and so there is no objective reality. Some idealists go further and claim that all knowledge is based on language. In contrast, realists claim that there is indeed an objective reality apart from our perceptions.

In my judgment, the two methods that best justify a view of reality are foundationalism and coherentism. In foundationalism, truth is founded on a foundation of premises from which a structure of proposition is constructed or derived using on logic and evidence. In coherentism, truth is based on the logical consistency of observations. Coherentism has to have a foundation in order to judge consistency, so the two methods are perfect and necessary complements.

The outcome of coherent foundationalism is what philosopher Edward Pols calls “radical realism.” As I analyze it, the proposition of radical realism is that there is an objective reality apart from any perceptions. However, all that human and other living beings can know is logical propositions and observations. The problem with observations is that they can be false, and that facts are necessarily interpreted.

Reality is derived from observations that are filtered by logical consistency. A person can judge the consistency of objects over time. If I wake up and see a picture, and it is also there the next day, and every day, then this consistency leads me to believe that the picture is actually there. Consistency also involves agreement by a group of persons that their observations are the same. If I see a cat, maybe I imagined it, but if you see it also, and so do many others, then the conclusion that the cat is there is warranted by consistency across persons.

An idealist will reply that even if many people agree about some object, and it is observed consistently over time, it could be a continuing mass illusion. It is still no more than an observation. Radical realism does not deny that what is observed – seen, heard, touched, tasted, smelled – are sensations in the brain. What makes this realism radical, going to the roots of the issue, is the proposition that this is what reality is. Radical realism is the proposition that empirical reality consists of consistent observations and their logical deductions.

Radical realism differs from merely empirical realism in claiming that the observed objects actually exist, so that perceptions are not merely accepted as being useful. Idealists say that when an ordinary person accepts observations as real, this, what is called “direct knowing,” is “native realism” or “vulgar realism” because one cannot logically derive from observations the objective reality of the objects. But radical realism does not blindly accept the reality of observations. It sieves the observations through a filter of logic. It then proclaims that the results of consistent observation is reality, because reality cannot be anything better. We could call it “coherent reality.”

Radical realism also recognizes that facts are always interpretive. Facts are theory-laden. If I see a man wearing blue clothing and a badge, I interpret this as not just a man, but a police officer. But interpretations are also subject to logical consistency. The man might be going to a costume party. But if the actions of the man are consistent with that of a police officer, such as citing people for infractions, we can conclude that the interpretation is reality. Contrary to idealism, reality is not created by thoughts, but rather, reality consists of conclusions from consistent mind observations filtered through logic.

Radical reality recognizes that what we perceive as solid objects are actually made up of molecules, atoms, and other particles we cannot directly observe. But the existence of atoms derived from the observed tracking of the their effects, hence from consistent observation.

The foundation of radical realism is the acceptance of cause and effect, of inductive and deductive reasoning, and the criterion of consistency. If all human beings are somehow fooled into thinking that water exists even when it does not, the consistent perception of water and conclusions from its consequences become the coherent reality.

Radical realism is radical in going to the roots of how we can know reality. This grounding saves it from being merely vulgar or naive. There is much more that we can analyze regarding idealism and realism. Two good books on this topic are The Slightest Philosophy by Quee Nelson, available at Google Books, and Radical Realism by Edward Pols. Most folks handle their daily activities with naive realism, but they fall victim to perverse ideologies ultimately derived from idealism. Thus is it good philosophy to question your beliefs with the Socratic questions, “What do you mean?” and “How do you know?”

Freedom of Speech? No Such Thing!

Warren Gibson Culture, Current Events, Liberty , , , , , , ,

I get lots of solicitations for libertarian groups and I’m very pleased that there are so many of them these days. I can’t possibly support them all but I recently ponied up for an organization called F.I.R.E. (Freedom for Individual Rights in Education). Their focus is on fighting suppression of free speech on college campuses. Thus, for example, FIRE announces its Speech Code of the Month for October 2013:

Salem State University in Massachusetts prohibits “cultural intolerance” in its residence halls—a broad ban that threatens debate on controversial issues in a place where students often speak the most freely. Making matters worse, the policy applies not only to “actions” but also to “omissions,” broadening its scope to include not only speech but also a student’s personal decision not to speak.

It burns me up to see self-appointed fascist administrators launching attacks on individuals who dare to speak their minds in unpopular ways. And yet, there is a problem, centered on the distinction between public and private institutions. Suppose a small Baptist college decided that students would not be allowed to mock Christianity or promote Islam on campus. Could there be any objection to such a policy? Now suppose that same college decided it would not admit black students. Any thoughtful libertarian would have to defend this policy, distasteful though it may be, on grounds of freedom of association. The bottom line is clear: owners of private colleges have every right to determine whom they will admit as students or hire as faculty and how they are required to act on campus.

Now what about state colleges such as Salem State? Such institutions are “public property,” an oxymoron if we think about it. “Property” denotes the right to use or dispose of some valuable asset, implying an exclusion of non-owners or others who have not been invited to use the property. On the other hand “public” means, if anything, that anybody is allowed to use the asset and nobody is excluded. Who owns San Jose State University where I teach? The California State University Board of Trustees is the most likely candidate, but the faculty has a lot of control through the faculty unions and faculty senates. The Governor and the legislators wield a lot of influence too. The citizens own the place in theory but the connection between SJSU and the citizenry is so remote that it might as well be non-existent. The lack of clarity about who owns the place is the source of most of the idiotic, wasteful, and sometimes downright offensive policies that we see at SJSU and all other government agencies.

So what sort of speech is to be allowed at SJSU? I would say anything goes except shouting down lecturers. Objectionable behavior such as name-calling should be met with ostracism and boycotting or perhaps tit-for-tat. No need for prohibitions. But the people who have power over these matters no doubt see it differently.

Thinking about it more, there really isn’t any such thing as freedom of speech. Speech is not carried out in a vacuum (literally: there can be no sound waves!). If you’re speaking you are standing on someone’s property; if writing you’re using pen and paper or a computer. Land, pen, paper and computers are all resources whose owners have the right to determine who uses them and how. I have no right to invade your house and deliver a speech in your living room nor to grab your computer and compose a blog. Freedom of speech can only mean freedom to use one’s property, or the property of another who has given consent, for speaking purposes. (This, by the way, solves the fire-in-a-crowded-theater conundrum. Prohibitions on yelling “fire” are not a diminution of freedom of speech but rather a recognition of a theater owner’s right to control behavior on his property. See Rothbard’s excellent Ethics of Liberty p. 114.)

In the end, as Rothbard points out, there is no dichotomy between property rights and “civil” rights. There are only property rights, recognizing one’s own body as one’s primary form of property.

Shopping in communism versus capitalism

Tibor Machan Books, History, Liberty , , , , ,

In a narrative portion of his latest (and characteristically riveting) novel the author has written the following sentence that prompts me to wag my finger at him a bit. “Now it was a Western-style shopping mall stuffed with all the useless trinkets capitalism had to offer…” Daniel Silva, The English Girl (2013). The sentence reveals something very important about capitalism as well as Silva’s apparent failure to understand it.

Silva was contrasting the Soviet style, drab, grey shopping center with the more recent type that have been springing up in Russia and the former Soviet bloc. Yet instead of showing appreciation for the mall with its great variety of trinkets, which include both what he can consider useless and the useful kind, he appears to show disdain for it.

It is precisely the fact that such malls include thousands of trinkets, some useful to some, some not, that makes capitalism so benevolent. Unlike the Soviet Union and its satellites, where only what the leadership deemed to be useful got featured in shopping malls (such as they were), in Western-style malls millions of different individual and family preferences are on display and for sale, aiming to satisfy the huge variety of tastes and preferences.

I recall many moons ago there was a fuss about the popularity of the Pet Rock! It was — may still be — a trinket sold as a novelty item. I remember defending it from its disdainful, snooty critics, arguing that there may well be a few people for whom it would be suitable gift.

Say your grandfather worked in a mine or quarry and now on his 80th birthday you want to get him something not quite useful but meaningful! He has everything useful already, so you pick the Pet Rock for him. It would make a nifty memento! Might even bring tears to his eyes.

For millions of others it would indeed be a “useless trinket” but not for old granddad. And for every other item that author Silva may consider useless, there will be someone who finds it touching!

That is precisely what individualism implies. Something Marxists cannot appreciate since for them only what advances the revolution counts as useful. Individuals as such, with their idiosyncrasies, do not count for anything! And capitalism rejects this misanthropic doctrine, which is why the enormous variety of goods and services is part of it while under socialism and communism only what is proper for the revolution makes sense to produce!

I wish Mr. Silva had indicated some of this as he derided those Western-style shopping malls. Even if he cannot find something useful for himself in them, he can at least appreciate them as contemporary museums of possibilities.