Year: 2014

George Keenan’s racism *AND* affinity for the Democratic Party confuses Left-wing journalist

Brandon Christensen Current Events, History , , , ,

From the New Republic‘s David Greenberg:

Normally a supporter of Democrats—in the diaries, he voices support for the presidential bids of Adlai Stevenson, John F. Kennedy, Eugene McCarthy, Frank Church (“promptly regretted it deeply”), and Bill Clinton (“without enthusiasm”)—Kennan was nonetheless profoundly conservative in his worldview.

How on earth could a Democrat be a conservative? The logic of Progressives continues to astound me. Kennan, in addition to being an ardent supporter of Democratic Party candidates, also expresses adulation for ugly racist stuff like eugenics and even goes so far as to express sympathy for Apartheid in South Africa.

Libertarians and honest conservatives have long known about the intricate links between institutional and scientific racism and Left-wing political causes. The logical outgrowth of this subtle racism can be found in many of the Left’s pet political causes, such as Affirmative Action or government housing projects. These are inherently racist policies and if you read the justifications for such policies you can see why they are a natural  outgrowth of Progressivism.

The New Republic‘s David Greenberg is unable to put two and two together, however. To him, the fact that Kennan was a racist and an imperialist and a Democrat does nothing to show him why the Democratic Party is the party of reaction, of conservatism writ large in the United States.

By the way: Just because I think Affirmative Action and government housing projects are racist does not mean I do not support reparations for the US government’s theft of labor from slaves and theft of land from Native Americans. I just think there are better ways of atoning for our government’s sins than engaging in even more fruitless, racist policies.

Physics in Human Action

Fred Foldvary Liberty , ,

Some Austrian-school economists dislike analogies from physics in economics, because they don’t regard economics as mechanical. But since human action is physical, we can understand economics better if we understand the basics of physics.

We begin with space. For human action, space encompasses distance in three dimensions. For economics, space constitutes the sites in which activity takes place. The economics of space includes three-dimensional volume as well as a location. For human purposes, spacial land is fixed relative to the earth. Space is not altered by use, but it is consumed by using its value, as reflected by its rent, over time. There is also another type of economic space in the electromagnetic spectrum, made up of frequencies that travel through three-dimensional space.

The second rudiment of the universe is time, which has two meanings, a moment and a duration. Time is not an input into production, but a dimension of all activity. An analysis that examines a phenomenon over a duration is called “dynamic,” in contrast to the static analysis of a moment.

The third universal rudiment is mass, or its synonym, matter. Mass is what takes up space and has inertia. Economics categorizes mass as land (natural resources), human beings, capital goods, and trash.

A fundamental law of physics is that of conservation, that matter (and its sibling energy) cannot be created or destroyed, but only changed in form. But there is no conservation of value. In economics, production is the creation of economic value, processing inputs to make them more desirable. Consumption is the using up of economic value. Capital goods are items that have been produced but not yet consumed.

Linear velocity is the rate of the motion of a mass object in some direction. In economics, activity has a velocity as a mass of inputs gets processed into outputs, or objects get transported. There is also angular velocity in the speed of rotation, including the velocity of money as its turnover as measured during a year. Momentum equals mass times velocity, including a velocity of zero. Human action has momentum when activity proceeds at a constant speed and direction.

However, economic dynamics involves changes in speed or direction, which is acceleration (including negative acceleration or deceleration). A fundamental equation in physics is F=MA, force equals mass times its acceleration, Newton’s second law of motion. Newton’s first law of motion is that of inertia, that a body will retain its momentum unless an external force is applied. Force makes mass objects accelerate. On earth, mass has a weight due to the force applied by gravity

In human action, force can mean either a physical action, as inputs are moved and combined, or else a coercive action by either criminals or governments. The initiation of coercive force alters what people would otherwise voluntarily do. Such forceful intervention imposes a net loss of value on society by accelerating the mass of human action into directions or speeds that reduce its net utility. The economy and society maximize well being with rules that prevent coercive force.

Newton’s third law of motion is that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. When one body exerts force on another body, the other body exerts an opposite force on the first body. This law is what propels a rocket, as the force of the ejected fuel makes the rocket go in the opposite direction. Economic action encounters resistance to motion, or friction, which is good if we want to walk (as without friction we would slide around), but is bad if the friction consists of obstacles imposed by coercive force.

In economics, energy is the generation of heat, light, and movement. There are many forms of energy. In physics, potential energy is mass that can be accelerated into motion, such as an object that can fall down, or molecules that can be combined to create heat and light. There is kinetic energy of motion, with the equation: e = ½ mv2. Einstein’s equation reflecting the convertibility of mass and energy is e = mc2, but that has no relevance in the human scale of action.

In physics, work is force times displacement. Applied to human action, work is done when a person applies force (human exertion and tools) to a mass to change its location or composition, even if the change is only of bits in a computer memory. Work can also be a change in the kinetic energy of a system.

Another physics concept that has been applied to economics is equilibrium, a state of constant momentum, including zero velocity, where there is no incentive or force for acceleration. In economics, equilibrium is the exhaustion of gains from trade. At the moment you pay for goods at a store, you are in equilibrium, as you do not wish to trade any more money for goods. But a moment later, you are in disequilibrium, as some goods now have more value than the money you exchange for them. Market prices and quantities move towards equilibrium to remove a shortage or surplus or to gain from extra production, consumption, and trade.

We can see that the application of physics to human action is not mechanistic, as people act on their subjective values and beliefs and psychological inclinations, but their physical action is necessarily subject to the laws and concepts of physics. F=MA applies to human action as it does to physical particles.

Delacroix’s Autobiography is now out on Kindle

Brandon Christensen Books, Current Events , , ,

After fat far too long, Dr Delacroix’s memoirs I Used to Be French: an Immature Autobiography are finally out. You can find it on amazon.com for $7. The print version should be available shortly.

You can find a short excerpt of his memoirs here.

Congrats Dr J!

PS: Dr J is turning 72 sometime this week. Be sure to wish the young man a happy birthday.

Thoughts on the Tom Woods Show

Dave Liberty

Most of you are probably already aware of Tom Woods, so this may not apply to you, but I wanted to throw a quick plug for him.

Many of my friends are aware of my extreme distaste for talk radio. I heard about Tom Woods podcast from some friends in my local Young Americans for Liberty chapter and also heard him speak at the YAL Idaho convention and decided to give his show a try. It is amazing.

I strongly recommend subscribing to his show if youre interested. It is highly educational and likely fascinating to even the totally uninterested. I believe part of the merit of the show is its appeal to both the intellectual libertarian and the newcomer to political thought. The quality of guests he brings on daily is outstanding. I listen to it at work and learn so much every day. Check it out at his homepage.

Failure and learning

Rick Weber Liberty , , , ,

The last few months I’ve been thinking about the relationship between failure and entrepreneurship. Just now I’m listening to a podcast and that old point came up: going to prison teaches you how to be a better criminal. You’d think that failed criminals would be the last sort of people to learn from, but really it’s just about the perfect sort of school. The general assumption is that people in prison have high discount rates, so they probably came into prison with one thing on their mind: what the hell went wrong with that last scheme?! So you’ve got dozens of people who all screwed up and that’s all their thinking about. That’s a whole lot better than you would get at a university; nobody at a school is thinking about how they screwed up, they’re thinking about how stupid other people are!

So the question is: how could you set up a system where the incentives of K-grad school teachers are constantly thinking about mistakes they’ve made and are able to pass those lessons on to their students? Sounds like science fiction to me.

Voter Fraud; Women as People

Jacques Delacroix Politics , , , , , , , ,

The Democratic Party is strongly opposed to voter identification. It would only mean that people would have to do the same thing to vote  that they have to do to catch a plane, obtain a driver’s license or open a bank account. In the past, they pointed to cases of hardship such as invalids, very old people etc  for whom it would be arduous or impossible to perform the simple tasks associated  with getting an ID. Point well taken. No citizen should be deprived of his right to vote because of ill health and such.

When a  proposal is made to pick up such hardship cases and to take them to be registered free of charge at a time of their convenience, the Democratic Party is still opposed, just  as a opposed. When I vote in my 90% Democrat town (just a guess, maybe it’s only 85%), I always make it a point to show my ID. The poll officials react to my gesture with frank horror. Why?

Nothing stops the Democratic Party from declaring that it would accept voter ID if such and such precautions were taken to ensure that no one is disenfranchised. It does not. Why?

Inescapable conclusion, it seems to me:

1 The Democratic Party benefits more from voting fraud than does the Republican Party;

or, 2 The Republican Party is more respectful of the fundamental constitutional  process of voting than is the Democratic Party.

Am I missing something?

Separate topic:

A youngish woman parks her car in front of my house frequently. I have good reasons to think she is a social worker. There is a window sticker on the car  that says “Mills Alumna.”

Mills College used to be a college for rich girls in the East Bay of San Francisco. Some years ago, it started admitting males. Digression: What kind of guys seek admission to a women’s college? My guess is that the lot would be evenly divided between cold hearted predators and closeted gays.

Anyway, the car also sports a bumper sticker that proclaims: “Feminism is the radical notion that women are human beings.”

Good point but, frankly, what’s the point? Is there any segment of opinion in America that denies this self-evidence? Who is this young woman trying to persuade? Or is it just another shotgut guilt tripping: I am a man; I think women are people; I have always thought so. (After all, I was reared by a mother.) But maybe, there are bad, ignorant men somewhere, maybe even in my neighborhood, who really believe that women are not human beings. Bang, guilty by association! Again!

If at least the bumper sticker were in Arabic, or in Farsi.

What’s the One Big Change?

Rick Weber Liberty , , ,

I enjoy idle speculation, and like many libertarians I like to speculate on the following question: If you could make one big change, what would it be? In other words, what’s the real big issue.

I’m increasingly convinced that the one big issue is immigration. If we opened borders internationally, world GDP would increase by an estimated 50-150%. World income would double! That’s incredible. All those people living on $2 per day would suddenly by doing significantly better if they could only be allowed to work for you!

And the benefits don’t stop there! Gains from trade! By now we all should understand that if I work for you it’s because I value my wages more than my time and you value my time more than the wages (and payroll taxes, and administrative costs) that you pay in order to hire me. So by letting poor people into America they gain by making their employers better off. Their employers are made better off by making their customers better off. You and I are those customers.

So why isn’t this already happenings. There are three basic oppositions.

  1. They’ll use public services without paying taxes.
  2. They’ll depress wages and steal jobs
  3. They might be dangerous. Either because they’ll commit crimes, or they’ll vote for stupid things (like restricting immigration).

I’m not including a more traditional reason for opposing liberalized immigration: xenophobia and racism. Xenophobia makes sense from the perspective of evolutionary psychology, but it’s not a legitimate reason, and it’s one we can choose to be bigger than.

Okay, so point one, simple solution: give anyone who wants one a work visa. Problem solved. Anyone can come here, but nobody is automatically eligible for public services. They’re above board, on the grid, we can see them, and if they commit crimes they’re out. But they’re obliged to pay into a system that they can’t exploit.

Point two: empirical evidence is that the only group in America genuinely negatively affected are high school dropouts. Want to increase high school graduation rates? Increase the cost of dropping out by letting in immigrants. Everyone else is made more productive because immigrants have different skills than natives, creating opportunities for gains from trade. They are complementary to us, and so make us better off by working along side us. Imagine a lone man on an island. He’s a baker. If he meets another marooned baker, it’s nice, but not as nice as if he meets a marooned butcher.

Point three: first off, getting rid of illegal immigration will make it easier to keep people safe from the foreign menace. Second, immigrants currently have lower incarceration rates than natives. Besides, it’s cheaper to punish them: just deport criminals. No feeding, sheltering, and clothing them; just ship them off. For voting: again, just give them a worker’s visa that doesn’t let them vote.

So what’s the takeaway? A simple policy of letting people come into the U.S. to live and work will make nearly everyone better off, especially the world’s desperately poor. America’s poorest (high school drop outs) may suffer, but there are fairly simple ways to address that. Here’s one: use a slice of the tax revenue from the new immigrants to pay for GED’s, and a stipend to give these folks time to study and pass the test. If they aren’t willing to do that, then that’s on them. If they have some disability that prevents it (maybe they dropped out because of undiagnosed learning disorders), then address those problems, because with that increased tax revenue we can afford to. And anyone born after 1999 is responsible for graduating high school and will be told the costs of failing to do so.

What do we get out of it? International poverty reduction, local wealth increase, a more cosmopolitan society, and a better, more humane world.

The subsidies a…

Rick Weber Economics , , , , ,

The subsidies and protections that New Zealand governments once doled out so generously to both agricultural and manufacturing interests had consequences. The economic way of thinking enables one to discern these consequences more clearly and to predict the consequences of alternative policies. Doing so will often clarify the origin of the subsidies and protections, at least for anyone who believes that democratic legislators pay attention to the interests that are paying attention to them.

From Paul Heyne’s Are Economists Basically Immoral.

Fantastic phrasing of the issue of rent seeking. I think skeptics like to think the public choice theorists are cynical for assuming that political actors act in their self interest; this quote turns that view on its head.

La France et Apple

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

Les réserves financières

de la France: 30 milliards de dollars
de la Russie: 400 milliards de dollars
d’Apple: 159 milliards de dollars.

J’ai enseigné pendant vingt-cinq ans au beau milieu de Silicon Valley. J’y ai gardé des copains, bien sur. De plus, j’habite à Santa Cruz, Silicon Valley-Plage pour ainsi dire.

Il y a de plus en plus de jeune Français bien diplômés à Silicon Valley. Je n’en n’ai pas fait le rescencement. J’en entend parler et je les reconcontre par hasard. Il me semble qu’
on pense beaucoup de bien d’eux ici, de leur niveau de compétence, de leurs habitudes de travail.

On est bien obligé de se demander pourquoi ils ne sont pas en France ou la charcuterie est très supérieure et les vacances beaucoup plus longues qu’aux Etats-Unis.

Vu d’ici, on dirait que c’est la débandade de la formidable et radieuse colonie de vacances que se sont octroée les Français vers 1970. Je suis ce que je peux depuis ici de l’actualité politique française. J’ai l’impression qu on n’aborde jamais le grand problème de fond: l’état nounou n’est pas viable. On ne discute que telle ou telle reformette, telle ou telle diminution des telle out telle prestation sociale.

Le président de la grande banque d’investissement Lazare frères présentait l’autre jour son livre sur les réformes à l’émission que j’estime assez, “On n’est pas couché.” Une de premières choses qu’il dit c’ est qu’il est  “de gauche”. Qu’est-ce que cela veut dire?

On se croirait en 1946, comme si personne n’avait rien appris en soixante-huit ans. Misère!

Le capitalisme marche très bien quand on le laisse. C’est une vraie machine à fabriquer des emplois. Quand on l’empêche de faire son boulot, les gens fuient, à commencer par les meilleurs, comme on pourrait s’y attendre si on s’autorisait à y penser.

Fighting Obama!

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

We discovered something important a few days ago about the federal Bureau of Land Management. (Many Americans also discovered the existence of the Bureau of Land Management on the same occasion.) Anyway, the BLM, as it is fondly known in the American West, has snipers in its ranks. For some of our overseas friends: a sniper is a specially trained rifleman or woman with a super-powerful weapon who can kill someone at long distance, often with a single shot. The discovery took place on the occasion of a confrontation about a few hundred cattle between the BLM and the cattle’s owners.

That A.. H… Putin had better not try anything illegal or immoral to American cows. The dictator of Russia is now reconsidering his aggressiveness. The Obama administration wins another one!

Courting Campaign Money

Fred Foldvary Liberty , ,

The Supreme Court has overruled 5 to 4 the previous limit on total campaign contributions in the US. In the McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission case, The Court eliminated the limits on the total campaign contributions an individual could make to candidates and committees per election. Previously, in the Citizens United case, the Court struck down the limits on campaign funding and electioneering by corporations, labor unions, and nonprofit organizations.

Critics of these rulings say that they transform our democracy into a plutocracy, the rule by the rich, but the United States has always been a plutocracy, and the voters have used democracy to keep the system plutocratic. Wealthy donors could already finance Super PACs – political action committees. The amount of money spent in US elections had been escalating each election for decades.

American political culture has had a mixture of two ideals. The first is democracy, the rule by the people as equals rather than by a king or an aristocracy. The second ideal is liberty, especially freedom of speech. When the rich can influence candidates and elections by spending huge amounts of money, the ideal of liberty clashes with the egalitarian ideal of democracy.

Political speech is the most important of all, and the speech that most needs to be free of restrictions. Just as the government should not limit how many times one may give a speech, or how many editorials one may write on a topic, the government should not limit how much one spends to propagate speech.

Proposals to have the government finance campaigns also clash with free speech, if private financing is again limited. Governmental funding entrenches the established parties, and it forces the taxpayers to finance political ads which they may well detest.

Unfortunately, along with democracy and liberty there has been a third political idea in the USA. Economists call it “rent seeking.” In classical political economy, “rent” meant the yield of land. The classical economists knew that landowners receive rent in exchange for nothing, since the title holders did not create the land. They broadened the term to “economic rent,” which means any gains beyond what is needed to put resources to their most productive use.

Then economists in the branch called “public choice,,” which applies economics to voting and politics, recognized that the subsidies and privileges that special interests receive from government are economic rent, since it is loot taken from the public in exchange for less than nothing. Hence, when special interests seek favors from government, they are rent seekers.

The modern use of “rent” has become so far removed from its landed origin, and the land factor so much subsumed under capital, that economists no longer appreciate that the biggest rent seekers are the landed interests who obtain the implicit subsidy as the land rent generated by public goods paid for by taxes on labor.

Because superficial appearances trump the understanding of implicit reality, the reflexive reaction to the corruption of rent seeking is to limit campaign money. That then clashes with free speech. But the reason there is a clash between free speech and democracy is that we have inherited an antiquated 19th-century model of voting that is no longer appropriate to the 21st century world of mass democracy combined with great state power.

Public-choice economists such as Mancur Olson have recognized that the way to limit the rent seeking disease of democracy is to vote in small groups rather than in large groups. In a large country, the small groups should federate rather than become a large single group.

The demand for campaign money dissolves when people vote in tiny local districts. The district councils send representatives to a higher-level (or broader-level) council. With such a bottom-up small-group voting system, we would have much fewer political ads in the mass media.

The mass-democracy model has been grafted world-wide, and it has not brought social peace, as we have witnessed in place such as Egypt and Ukraine. But one day, mass democracy will be regarded as a relic like we today regard the former power of monarchs and aristocrats.

(Note: this article is also at http://www.progress.org)

Princeton Concludes What Kind of Government America Really Has, and It’s Not a Democracy

Rick Weber Current Events, Economics, Law, Liberty

Princeton Concludes What Kind of Government America Really Has, and It’s Not a Democracy

A new scientific study from Princeton researchers… found that in fact, America is basically an oligarchy.

“Princeton” concludes?! “A new scientific study…”?! This is some sloppy journalism that you should immediately ignore. But it gets worse…

“Perhaps economic elites and interest group leaders enjoy greater policy expertise than the average citizen does,” Gilens and Page write. “Perhaps they know better which policies will benefit everyone, and perhaps they seek the common good, rather than selfish ends, when deciding which policies to support.

“But we tend to doubt it.”

That’s the close of the article; these “scientists” are about as unsophisticated as the journalist reporting it. They repeat the same old adages about inequality that don’t really mean much: The rich are getting richer, the poor are getting less richer, and (we wrongly assume) membership in these groups is stable over time. Their conclusion is basically “rich, powerful interests promote their own interests… if only the middle class was in charge to promote the public good instead of their own interests!”

And yet, I think there’s something worth reading here. I think the conclusion that the U.S. is an oligarchy is roughly correct. The importance of politically connected individuals and lobbying groups affects wealth creation and distribution. This is an example of where the Left and Right should agree with libertarians: centralization of political power is leading to wasteful rent seeking that weakens the economy (Right/libertarian) and the outcome is that politically powerful groups are given an unfair advantage (Left/libertarian).

We know that Democrats are libertarian on social issues (and this is one of them!) and Republicans are libertarian on economic issues (ditto), but we hit a snag. Each group tends to see the faults of the other party’s pet projects and miss the root causes. Republicans see Democrats centralizing power and weakening property rights and step in to save the victim: businesses. The result is pro-business policy recommendations that also centralize power. The Democrats see this and step in to save the victim: the little guy (poor people and consumers). The result is centralization of power that creates rent seeking opportunities for big business!

Встреча в Женеве по украинскому вопросу

Evgenii Grigorev Current Events ,

Друзья,  думаю что для вас не секрет, что вчера состоялась многосторонняя встреча между представителями Украины, России, ООН и кого-то еще в Женеве. По итогам встречи были приняты некоторые договоренности. В частности, стороны пришли к соглашению, что украинский кризис должны решать сами украинцы своими силами без помощи России и Запада. И дураку понятно, что сейчас идет противостояние между Россией и Западом через Украину, у кого яйца крепче (BALLS, not EGGS!). Противоположные взгляды на кризис пока что не дают нам придти к компромиссу. Во многом этому способствует и информационная война в СМИ, которая сталкивает лбами братские народы на потеху сетевых троллей и всяких маргинальных элементов общества.

В ближайшее время Украина должна наладить многонациональный диалог между регионами страны и разработать новый план конституции, который дал бы расширенные полномочия автономиям, утвердил статус русского языка. Неспокойный юго-восток Украины, который длительное время был территорией России, и лишь в 19-каких-то годах стал частью Украины нужно успокаивать не силой, а через диалог.

Я уверен, что только через диалог можно добиться прогрессивных результатов.

Around the Web

Brandon Christensen Current Events, Links , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
  1. The Globalization of Apartheid from anthropologist Keith Hart. I have a critique (as well as lots of praise) in process.
  2. Kapital for the Twenty-First Century: A review of Thomas Piketty’s new book by James K Galbraith.
  3. The Many Problems with “Equal Pay”: Legal scholar Richard Epstein brings his usually clarity to the table
  4. Taxes Are Much Higher Than You Think: A great op-ed from Nobel Prize winner Edward Prescott and UCLA economist Lee Ohanian in the Wall Street Journal
  5. An open letter to President Obama from a prominent center-Left economist (and Democratic Party member): Give Us Back Our Statistical Data
  6. Scratching the Surface: Some proposals for campaign finance reform from a law professor guest blogging at the Volokh Conspiracy

 

Are GMOs Bad For Me?

Jacques Delacroix Current Events , , , , , , ,

I am vaguely perceiving that there is a battle brewing someplace about labeling food containing genetically modified organisms (GMOs). It happened in California before. The initiative lost by referendum.

Of course, I am almost always in favor of more information for the public (even when it’s likely to be used for mischief). However, I can’t avoid wondering why sellers of food products don’t just do it on their own to gain a marketing advantage over their competitors. Not getting an answer to this question, I am wondering whether this is not just another case of a minority using the power of the state to impose its views (by force) on the indifferent majority. Keep in mind that this is what the word “law” means: If you break it, you expose yourself to official violence.

I honestly don’t know what’s wrong with GMOs. I only know that they (one?) allowed for a reduced use of pesticides. This has to be a good thing because exposure to large amounts of pesticides is bad for the health of producers and handlers. (I doubt today’s pesticides cause much harm to consumers but I always wash fruits and salad components.) I invited a local libertarian who addressed the topic on Facebook to write an essay for this blog explaining the answer. That was only a couple of days ago. He has not responded. I repeat the invite, to anyone.

What am I supposed to do, I, simple citizen and consumer not especially well equipped to ascertain if GMOs are a threat or not to my beloved? As I keep telling you, fortunately, I don’t necessarily have to go to graduate school yet three or four more years to get an idea. Instead, I look at the proponents I know.

In my area, the people who fight GMOs are mostly (but not only) foofoo heads who overlap a great deal, I think, with those who cancel erotically promising dates on the basis of astrology. They are largely the same people who advocate policy which, taken together, would take us back to what Karl Marx called, “the idiocy of village life,” with a life expectancy hovering around thirty five and a 30% infant mortality They, themselves, wouldn’t survive there more five weeks or less, by the way, because they are too coddled, too self-indulgent, and not alert enough. The wolves about which they keep crying now and here really lived then on the outskirts of such villages. They would gobble up anti-GMOist for a snack.

All the same, I keep an open mind. Anyone who wants to post a comment on GMOs can be sure it will not be censored or modified in any way. I will also consider with great interest any essay on this topic for this blog. Anyone can also send me reading assignments. I will post them but I will not read them unless the sender explains clearly why I should, beginning with the source. (See the standards I apply here)