- Danny Huizinga riffs off of Dr Gibson’s article on mathematical models in economics
- Longtime reader –Rick shares some eye candy of another kind
- Shang Jun and Wu Xia, advocates for free trade in China, take EU protectionists to task
- French philosopher and economist Guy Sorman asks What is the West?
- Economist Scott Sumner on Swedish liberaltarianism
Author: Brandon Christensen
Around the Web
- A Brief History of IRS Political Targeting.
- Listen to the fascists sing.
- Philosopher Kevin Vallier’s response to a hatchet job on FA Hayek in a stale (and apparently desperate) Left-wing publishing outlet.
- Political scientist Samuel Goldman’s response to the same hatchet job.
- The aforementioned hatchet job (in The Nation).
- Monkey Gone to Heaven.
Another Fascinating reddit Thread
This time one of my pieces has been the subject of debate.
What fascinates me most is simply how often people get their facts totally, utterly and completely wrong. If everybody were operating under the same set of facts, I think there would be much more room for libertarian policies to be implemented. Unfortunately, I think the enemies of freedom know this, so they spew lies that lead to assumptions like those being debunked in the linked-to thread above…
Eye Candy
Just below the fold.
The Triumph of Liberalism Over Socialism
The Economist has a great piece on France’s current socialist government and the scandal of wealth that has recently erupted there. From the report:
Now the Socialist president’s new disclosure rules reveal that seven of his ministers, including his prime minister, Jean-Marc Ayrault, are millionaires.
The French are discreet about money and flinch at ostentatious displays of wealth. So the new rules have prompted much discomfort, with ministers given only a week to declare their wealth. On April 15th Laurent Fabius, the foreign minister, who comes from a family of art dealers, duly declared over €6m ($7.9m) of assets, including a flat in Paris worth €2.7m and two country houses. Michèle Delaunay, minister for the elderly, reported €5.2m of assets, including two properties in Bordeaux and two houses in different south-west resorts. Michel Sapin, the labour minister, declared three country houses, some large tracts of farmland and a flat in Paris, for a total of over €2m. Even Mr Ayrault, a former schoolteacher, is a millionaire, with two properties to his name.
Other details raised eyebrows. Cécile Duflot, the Green housing minister who makes much of taking public transport, owns two cars, neither of them electric. Mr Fabius, despite his millions, has a €30,000 overdraft. Arnaud Montebourg, the left-wing industry minister, owns three properties and a Charles Eames armchair worth €4,300. French Socialist ministers turn out to be keen property investors; almost none holds shares.
Mr Hollande hastily devised the new rules after his former budget minister, Jérôme Cahuzac, had confessed to lying about a secret foreign bank account. Until now, only the president had to publish his wealth. Mr Hollande’s 2012 declaration included two flats in Cannes and a villa nearby, valued in all at nearly €1.2m, just under the threshold at which France’s annual wealth tax kicks in.
Now the president wants to extend the disclosure rules to all of France’s deputies. This will be tough. Even Claude Bartolone, the Socialist parliamentary speaker, denounced the exercise as “voyeurism” and expressed fears of the advent of “paparazzi democracy”. And Jean-Luc Mélenchon, a fiery hard-left European deputy not bound by the rules, mocked them by revealing on his blog his height and weight, and stating that he owned no paintings, cars, yachts or horses—and did not dye his hair.
Be sure to check out the graphic, too. The reality of the world today is that socialism is truly dead and done. Something else – equally reactionary – will arise in its place to challenge the liberal order’s peace and prosperity, but for the next few decades the world will know nothing but relative calm as it enjoys the benefits brought about by individualism and world trade.
When a new collectivism arrives to challenge liberalism, you can be sure that it will look very much like the collectivisms of old. Do you know what collectivism looks like?
Around the Web
Hope y’all like the new layout of the blog. Take a few minutes to get comfortable. Take off your coat, your shoes and your troubles. Now have a glass of red wine and a look around.
- IRS specifically targets conservative Tea Party groups; So the Washington Post‘s Ezra Klein naturally defends the IRS for not doing more: Listen to the fascists sing
- Ken White has an update on the man who made the anti-Islamic film “The Innocence of Muslims”
- Dear life (gun control and gun violence). Again and again: gun violence has been declining for about two decades now.
- The Crushing of Middle Eastern Christianity
- A Brutal Peace: the Postwar Expulsion of the Germans
- Barack the buck-passer. A laudatory account of Obama’s foreign policy that I largely agree with.
Petitioning for a Redress of Grievances: Chinese Style
Has Beijing suddenly begun hearing the demands and complaints of its citizens? Not quite. From the Economist:
In recent days Chinese internet users have begun to petition the White House on other issues; for instance, asking President Obama to “remonstrate” with China over a proposed paraxylene chemical plant in the south-western city of Kunming, where thousands of people staged a protest on May 4th. Others are more frivolous, asking America to send troops to liberate Hong Kong, or that the official flavour of tofu be designated as sweet rather than salty.
The petitions obviously have no legal force, but they reflect a popular lack of faith in Chinese justice and the seductive soft power of America. China has a petitioning system of its own, but those who use it are often threatened or detained.
This is quite interesting for a few reasons:
- I think it helps lend credence to arguments that claim a functioning democracy is a byproduct of capitalism.
- I think it just goes to show you that no matter how hard Beijing tries to initiate a nationalism compatible with its aims, the reality of American prestige and liberty – despite all its many faults – is simply too high a hurdle for Chinese statebuilders.
- Let it be duly noted that many collectivists on both the Left and the Right here in the US have pointed to China as a great model for the future (unlike the reactionary federal system currently in place).
I mean, just imagine if Americans began writing to Mexico City or Ottawa rather than Washington to air out their grievances. What kind of signal would that send to others around the globe? It wouldn’t necessarily mean that the US is bad so much as it would signal that Mexico and Canada set the standard for excellence in governance (not an oxymoron, by the way; see Dr Foldvary’s piece for details).
Another fact the article takes care to point out is that authorities in Beijing have been quick to clamp down on internet usage. Check out this map of worldwide internet connected devices. It’s a little bit more honest than the maps showing China to be a giant “dark spot” of internet usage that I’ve seen displayed around the web.
Lastly, the article in question shows, once again, that the US has nothing to fear from Beijing.
Eye Candy
Just beneath the fold. Continue reading
“Europe’s Job Seekers Flock to Germany”
That’s the title of a recent piece on immigration in Europe, as told through a Greek family settling down in Germany, by the Wall Street Journal. Among the gems:
Despite the enmity often directed at Berlin for its insistence on painful austerity as the cure for Europe’s sovereign-debt crisis, Germany has become a new land of opportunity for tens of thousands of people fleeing their recession-racked homelands.
Data released Tuesday by the German statistics agency showed immigration hit a 17-year high last year, with the increase from Europe’s crisis-riddled nations “particularly evident.”
And this:
Germany has long had an uneasy relationship with migrants. Previous generations have often integrated poorly, facing high hurdles to gain citizenship—if they even try. Many Germans also believe that migrants come to live off welfare benefits or criminal activity [but] experts say today’s renewed influx of migrants is good for Germany. As its population declines and ages, the nation badly needs qualified workers to fuel economic growth and support its pension and health-care systems […]
The youngest, Nikos, at 15 years old, told his parents he missed his friends. Don’t worry, Mr. Karoustas replied. He’d see them again.
“I don’t hope for it,” the father told his son, “but all of them will come to Germany too.”
Read the whole thing. You can get around the WSJ‘s subscriber firewall by copying-and-pasting the title of piece and Googling it. Once you do that, just click on the article.
See our past notes on the EU here.
Welcome to the New Bohemia
[Editor’s note: I first came across this article while living in Santa Cruz. It was in one of those trashy “arts and events” weeklys that you find littering every city in America. I have tried to locate the author of the piece but he appears to have written it under a pseudonym, and the weekly is now defunct. So, I figured I’d reprint the whole damn thing here. You can find an archived copy here]
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We are the modern equivalent of the ancient city-states of Athens and Sparta. California has the ideas of Athens and the power of Sparta. —Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger
California is like an artificial limb the rest of the country doesn’t really need. You can quote me on that. —Saul Bellow
Perhaps Schwarzenegger and Bellow divined what’s now painfully clear to everyone: Arnie’s California is Humpty-Dumpty, the Hindenburg and some kind of sociopolitical Holocaust all rolled up into one overstuffed exploding burrito. It’s an ungovernable, near criminally impotent and outdated mess. Remedying California’s woes requires draconian cutbacks to essential services and infrastructure. Anyway, that’s what we are told, grand allusions to Athens and Sparta notwithstanding. Others insist the fix lies with the Feds, that the U.S. Treasury need to bail California out at the begrudging consent of Congress. But another still largely muted scenario is slowly gaining traction. Continue reading
Words of Wisdom
From Tyler Cowen:
This is a post about Jamaica and also about macroeconomic inference. If you are tempted to write a post in response, criticizing me on the grounds that I am postulating a historical equivalence between the United States and Jamaica, or if you try to cover your tracks with semantics, by suggesting that I am “implying” such an equivalence, or implying some other mistake, or if you are committing any number of other fallacies or equivocations in response to this post, put on the dunce cap and go to the back of the class. Please consider this a general warning to be attached to everything written by me on this site.
I just liked this because Dr Cowen is usually very polite, and if there is one thing I enjoy in this world, it is watching polite people dish out some wholesome snark casserole for the masses to devour. Read the whole thing.
Around the Web
Hey all, I’m entering into a tough stretch at school, so my posting will be minimal for the next little while. Before I get to the cool links I’ve been reading, I thought I’d highlight Evgeniy’s recent piece on the chemical warfare taking place in Syria. If I am not mistaken, it is the rebels – al-Qaeda and Hizbollah – who are responsible for using chemical weapons. These are the same rebels that Dr Delacroix advocates the United States not only support morally, but militarily as well.
You can spot weak reasoning – morally as well as logically – when a person starts to hurl epithets like ‘isolationist’ or ‘pacifist’ around even after the other side insists that their position is anything but.
- Gun Homicide Rate Down 49% Since 1993 Peak; Public Unaware.
- China: Year Zero. 1979 and the Birth of an Economic Miracle.
- “Of the vast increase in the well-being of hundreds of millions of people that has occurred in the 200-year course of the industrial revolution to date, virtually none of it can be attributed to the direct redistribution of resources from rich to poor.”
- GMO Opponents are the Climate Skeptics of the Left. Not quite. Climate skepticism is rooted in scientific inquiry and politics, whereas the anti-GMO backlash is rooted in superstition. Nevertheless, a good read.
Y’all have a great week!
Interesting Thread on Reddit Between True Believers and the Devil
You can find it here. As always with reddit, pay attention to the dates and times.
Kareem, UCLA and Time Travel
I can’t believe I’ll be done with school in another five weeks. Time really flies by. I recently came across an interview of Kareem Abdul-Jabbar in Esquire and thought I’d pass it along to readers here. It’s kind of a wimpy interview, actually (as an alumni, I have access to much higher quality interviews with famous Bruins). Abdul-Jabbar lists twenty things he would’ve done differently if he could step into a time machine and become a young man again.
Two of them were interesting, and one of them not so much. First, the two interesting choices:
11. Cook more. After I got divorced I missed home cooked meals and the only person I had to rely on was the guy in the mirror. Plus, I found it impressed women if you could cook a good meal. Once, very shortly after I started cooking for myself, I had a first date with a woman I really wanted to make a good impression on.
And this:
16. Don’t be so quick to judge. It’s human nature to instantly judge others. It goes back to our ancient life-or-death need to decide whether to fight or flee. But in their haste to size others up, people are often wrong—especially a thirty-year-old sports star with hordes of folks coming at him every day. We miss out on knowing some exceptional people by doing that, as I’m sure I did. I think the biggest irony of this advice is that it’s coming from someone who’s black, stratospherically tall, and an athlete: the trifecta of being pre-judged.
These are both things I’ll be working on as I figure out how to live a proper middle class life post-graduation. One thing I can’t help but to disagree with Him (pay attention to capitalization, and bow down) on:
10. Being right is not always the right thing to be. Kareem, my man, learn to step away. You think being honest immunizes you from the consequences of what you say. Remember Paul Simon’s lyrics, “There’s no tenderness beneath your honesty.” So maybe it’s not that important to win an argument, even if you “know” you’re right. Sometimes it’s more important to try a little tenderness.
Nonsense! Every libertarian knows that it’s far more important to be right than to be popular!
Cool PDF on the Dishonesty of Debate
From one of the concluding paragraphs:
We have therefore hypothesized that most disagreement is due to most people not being meta-rational, i.e., honest truth-seekers who understand disagreement theory and abide by the rationality standards that most people uphold. We have suggested that this is at root due to people fundamentally not being truth-seeking. This in turn suggests that most disagreement is dishonest.
This reminds me, mostly, of debates about the illogicality of more federal gun control laws or using American military power to intervene in a foreign conflict that has nothing to do with national security (see, on this last point, my recent post “Imperialism: The Illogical Nature of Humanitarian Wars“).
Why, just the other day I was deleted by a female FB acquaintance for pointing out to her that her facts were wrong on gun control and that the numerous, hastily Googled studies that she threw at my feet contained either errors in statistical reasoning (“saying that ‘more guns equals more crime’ is like saying ‘the black cat is a cat because it is black'”) or simply wanted to inflame passions rather than discern truth from tall tale.
On this second point, I even went so far as to suggest that since the piece did not contain any quantitative reasoning whatsoever, it would be safe to agree with me that it was merely an attempt to inflame passions rather than educate. The female (a UC Santa Cruz alumni, in her defense) did just the opposite: after acknowledging that the piece contained no intellectual argument whatsoever, she stated – matter-of-factly – that the piece was an attempt to document all 62 mass shootings over a 30 year period with visuals (posting the killers’ faces to a timeline) and explain that most of the guns used were obtained legally. Therefore, it was quantifying the evidence and proving that mass murders were on the rise, federal gun control is proven to work, and that bans on certain types of guns have been proven to work.
Indeed. This is the face of the enemy of freedom, and it’s not Satan. It’s the bimbo next door.
Read the whole PDF. Grab a cup of coffee or hot tea first.
A couple of tips for figuring out if you are on the right side of the facts or not:
- If you are defending somebody else’s words – especially the words of a politician, a religious leader or even an intellectual, there is a good chance you are on the wrong side of truth.
- If you attempt to justify the horrible crimes committed in the past by looking at the virtuous deeds that were accomplished because of the crimes, then you are most likely on the wrong side of the facts. For example Franklin Roosevelt’s policies did absolutely nothing to get the US out of the Great Depression. All economists are in agreement on this. Where they disagree is on whether or not his policies exacerbated the Great Depression – as most libertarian economists argue – or simply that the New Deal did absolutely nothing (Left-wing economists generally see World War 2 as the economy’s savior). Yet many people give Roosevelt credit where credit is not due. They even go so far as to overlook his ruthless campaign to rid the West Coast of citizens with Japanese and German ancestry (locking them up in concentration camps), copying Hitler’s policies of cartelizing the economy, banning Jewish refugees from entering our shores, and raising taxes to unjustified levels in order to carry out his worthless policies. Fidel Castro is another good example of this.
- If you take the argument personally, then you are on the wrong side of the facts. If you have a tendency to delete people on social media sites because they failed to acknowledge your genius, then you are on the wrong side of the facts.
Hope this helps!
Notes On Liberty 