Author: Brandon Christensen

Scotland and Secession

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

From the New York Times:

Scotland would have to renegotiate membership in the European Union and other international organizations if it votes for independence in a referendum next year, according to legal advice expected to be published Monday by the British government.

Read the whole thing.

A couple of thoughts:

  1. Wow, the British government published a report on the possibility of secession. Can you imagine Washington ever doing something so outside the box?
  2. The rest of the analysis falls in line nicely with my own arguments (if I do say so myself!) that secession/devolution will only succeed in Europe (or elsewhere) if the new states are allowed into the EU (or other regional and international bodies not named the UN).

The Labor Theory of Value

Brandon Christensen Economics, History, Religion ,

From Stanford’s Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on Karl Marx:

Suppose that such commodities take four hours to produce. Thus the first four hours of the working day is spent on producing value equivalent to the value of the wages the worker will be paid. This is known as necessary labour. Any work the worker does above this is known as surplus labour, producing surplus value for the capitalist. Surplus value, according to Marx, is the source of all profit. In Marx’s analysis labour power is the only commodity which can produce more value than it is worth, and for this reason it is known as variable capital. Other commodities simply pass their value on to the finished commodities, but do not create any extra value. They are known as constant capital. Profit, then, is the result of the labour performed by the worker beyond that necessary to create the value of his or her wages. This is the surplus value theory of profit.

Read how Marx got this wrong here.

There is more:

Although Marx’s economic analysis is based on the discredited labour theory of value, there are elements of his theory that remain of worth. The Cambridge economist Joan Robinson, in An Essay on Marxian Economics, picked out two aspects of particular note. First, Marx’s refusal to accept that capitalism involves a harmony of interests between worker and capitalist, replacing this with a class based analysis of the worker’s struggle for better wages and conditions of work, versus the capitalist’s drive for ever greater profits. Second, Marx’s denial that there is any long-run tendency to equilibrium in the market, and his descriptions of mechanisms which underlie the trade-cycle of boom and bust. Both provide a salutary corrective to aspects of orthodox economic theory.

Your thoughts please.

Around the Web

Brandon Christensen Current Events, Links

Hey all, I’ve been busy lately. I’ve got four more months of college left so I’m trying to take advantage of every last bit of it.

  1. Healthcare Isn’t a Free Market, It’s a Giant Economic Scam
  2. The United States that Could’ve Been
  3. It’s official: Marxism is a religion
  4. Property Rights: the Key to Economic Development
  5. The Evolution of Irregular War. I’ll have more on this later (I hope!).

Around the Web

Brandon Christensen Current Events, Links
  1. Rand Paul’s foreign policy speech. A realist gives his thoughts.
  2. Free Soviet-era films online! I have a weird thing for Soviet art and literature. I’m always fascinated by what the censors would promote. Indulging in Soviet arts and letters forces me to ask why such art and literature was promoted by the state in the first place. What was it about the art that championed socialist man? (h/t Tyler Cowen)
  3. Why didn’t we know that the Russian meteor was coming?
  4. D-7 (original version)
  5. Did somebody say “tribal clashes”? (from 2008). Kenya is voting again. Let’s hope this piece proves to be a flash in the pan.
  6. Federalism for the 21st century.

North Korea’s “Artificial Earthquake”: What is to be Done?

Brandon Christensen Current Events, Politics , , , ,

Foreign policy has been awfully quiet these days. President Obama has been murdering people left and right on a whim, and nobody in Washington seems to care. You can imagine what the reaction would be in Washington if a Republican had been the one flaunting the rule of law. The Economist has a good article on this development if anyone is interested.

One newsworthy item that concerns American foreign policy has been centered on the Korean peninsula, a place that the United States first became involved militarily during the 1950’s. Given that our government is currently mired in two foreign occupations at the peripheries of the Islamic world (Afghanistan and the Balkans) as well as being embroiled in conflicts along the Sahel (thanks to President Obama’s attacks on the Libyan state), one should naturally be curious as to why the current affairs of the Korean peninsula are of interest to the United States government.

To make a long story short, the US government currently has some 50,000 troops stationed along the border of the North-South divide (drawn up in the 1950’s after a devastating war was fought between communist and conservative factions within Korea, China, and the United States), and has an alliance with the South that guarantees military help in case of a war with the communist North. The later state is actively attempting to build a nuclear weapon.

As a rule, I think it is appropriate that when citizens of a republic hear about other nations and events, the subject matter ought to revolve around how beautiful the geography of a said nation is, or how beautiful the women are, or how bad the food is, or which team won the national championship, and in which sport. That American citizens are hearing about a possible escalation of military tension in the region is, by itself, not a bad thing nor a surprising thing, but when our military and our tax dollars are suddenly involved in the escalation itself, then American citizens have ample cause to be worried, angry, and tense. These are not qualities that are often sought out by individuals on a daily basis, and when a government that claims to be republican in nature begins to cause these said psychological factors within it’s borders, then citizens ought to question the supposed republicanism of their government. Continue reading →

Around the Web

Brandon Christensen Current Events, Links
  1. North Korea: the new capitalists
  2. The rise and fall of Market Monetarism
  3. Listen to the fascists sing: a sublime parody
  4. The Caucasus: Another Regional War in the Wings. Don’t forget who is playing here: Russia, Turkey, Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Iran.

 

Religion and Liberty

Brandon Christensen Current Events, Liberty , , ,

I’m not a religious person. I have an unconventional Mormon background but rejected the faith of my parents for a large number of reasons. I’m not hostile to religion, either. At least, I try not to be (it’s hard sometimes!). I’ve seen first-hand what religious organizations can do for humanity. When I was living in a Ghanaian village of no more than 300 people, I had access to no more than two hospitals in the village. One was run by the Seventh-Day Adventists, and the other I cannot remember (the SDA hospital was closer). It was most likely a Catholic one. Religious organizations representing Islam, Judaism, Christianity and even Buddhism were ever-present in Ghana, and they all provided much-needed skills and supplies to that magnificently socialist state.

I attribute my atheism and my libertarianism to my skeptical nature. If you can prove to me that God does indeed exist, or that paternalism is good for me and my fellow man, then I will turn on a dime. I don’t know very much about anything, after all.

Anyway, religion has been under attack in the West since the Enlightenment. There are both good and bad reasons for this. One of the best reasons is that religious authorities often burned dissidents at the stake for opposing their claims to authority. In much of the world today, especially in some Muslim regions, non-believers are subjected to stonings, beheadings, and torture when the authority of the ecclesiastical class is challenged. However, in today’s Western world, the war on religion is a rather petty affair. Most skeptics don’t want to argue about the existence of God, they simply want to denigrate believers at best, and persecute them at worst. Continue reading →

Around the Web

Brandon Christensen Current Events, Links
  1. Forget Asia: Time to Pivot to Europe
  2. Islam and Constitutionalism
  3. Ever heard of the Serer religion?
  4. India: The Neverending Saga

“How China Became Capitalist”

Brandon Christensen Current Events, Economics, History, Liberty , ,

That’s the title to this short piece by Nobel laureate Ronald Coase and his co-author Ning Wang published by the Cato Institute. Among the gems:

The presence of two reforms was a defining feature of China’s economic transition. The failure to separate the two is a main source of confusion in understanding China’s reform. The Chinese government has understandably promulgated a state-centered account of reform, projecting itself as an omniscient designer and instigator of reform. The fact that the Chinese Communist Party has survived market reform, still monopolizes political power, and remains active in the economy has helped to sell the statist account of reform. But it was marginal revolutions that brought entrepreneurship and market forces back to China during the first decade of reform when the Chinese government was busy saving the state sector.

Do read the whole thing. The Cato Institute ranks third on my list list of trustworthy think tanks. Hoover and Brookings are two that I think produce university-caliber research. Cato ranks far below Hoover and Brookings in my estimation, but it occupies a lonely third place, as none of the other think tanks out there are even close to Cato’s stature, either.

You can check out Cato’s website here.

The Future of Liberty: Reason or Superstition, Abortion Edition

Brandon Christensen Current Events, Liberty

I have been having an ongoing back-and-forth with co-blogger Hank on abortion. You can find the latest volley here.

Among the gems:

The answer to my question is obviously ‘no.’ It has been the answer for 100,000 years. Not 10,000 years. Not 1,000 years. Not 100 years, but 100,000 years. At least. And, of course, this will continue to be the case in the foreseeable future as well. The last thing we need is to replace a fetish of the past with a fetish of the future when it comes to reproductive rights.

Libertarians use reason and facts to guide their thoughts, not appeals to an unforeseeable future or an omnipotent being (see my original post).

The liberty movement will continue to suffer as long as we have people who appeal to superstition and ignorance to make their points. Underlying this debate is a far bigger one: do libertarians really represent a different kind of politics, or are we, as some on the Left and the Right charge, merely Republicans who think smoking weed is not a crime?

The Beltway Consensus: Iraq Edition

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

The illegal invasion and occupation of Iraq undertaken by the Bush administration is one of the American republic’s darkest moments. I rank it as the fourth-worst policy in our history, just after slavery, the extermination of the Indians, and the invasion and occupation of the Philippines and just before Jim Crow and the New Deal. Invading and occupying Iraq rejected the American notions of liberty and justice, individualism, republican government, and free trade. It also further damaged American credibility in the eyes of the world.

For the most part, populations have been okay with Washington’s antics since the end of World War 2. There are certain expectations that everybody has of a world hegemon, and the Cold War atrocities that Washington committed were largely understandable. But attacking a third world despot in the middle of the Islamic world – for no apparent reason except to “bring democracy” to the region – not only undermined the US’s claim to be defender of the peace, but it exposed the extent of the republic’s intellectual decay that has been going since the New Deal. Not only does nobody believe our claims when we attack a helpless state, but they don’t think we have the intellectual capacity to do the job, either.

My own perspective on the crimes against humanity that Bush and his cronies committed are much more superficial, of course (I live in LA, after all!): we have basically copied the British imperial model. Not only are my taxes being spent on killing innocent people abroad, but Washington is not even doing it creatively! The following article in Foreign Affairs illustrates my point perfectly. Continue reading →

Adamson’s Book Signing

Brandon Christensen Books, Current Events, History

Dr. Adamson’s new book just came out two weeks ago, and he has passed along a couple of photos from his book signing event. More below the fold. Continue reading →

Abortion, the Conception of Life, and Liberty

Brandon Christensen Current Events, Law, Liberty , , ,

Ridicule is the only weapon which can be used against unintelligible propositions. Ideas must be distinct before reason can act upon them; and no man ever had a distinct idea of the trinity. It is the mere Abracadabra of the mountebanks calling themselves the priests of Jesus. – Thomas Jefferson, 1816

My blog post on freedom and feminism prompted a number of short but informative dialogues in the comments section, and I thought it would be a good idea to draw some of these arguments out a little more and really delve into the implications of what it means to be free.

My original post was meant to serve as a general outline of the major rift within libertarianism (and, by implication, the American Right) today: the cultural one. I think that the rift between libertarians on cultural issues is actually much less serious than the one between libertarians and conservatives, and the comments section highlighted this important disagreement. Instead of a mutual mistrust based upon suspicion of authoritarian tendencies hiding in plain sight, libertarians actively fight conservatives when it comes to the struggle between liberty and power.

Two key arguments will be exploited on this blog for the sake of showing Ron Paul Republicans and other, newer members of the libertarian movement just how nakedly aggressive and barbaric anti-abortion laws really are. Continue reading →

Around the Web

Brandon Christensen Current Events, Links
  1. Gun control: change we don’t believe in
  2. A photo essay of Antarctica. I’m weird (news flash!) and I’ve always had an obsession with Antarctica
  3. On the ethics of voting. Grab a cup of coffee or tea
  4. Canada’s First Nations: Time we stopped meeting like this
  5. What is driving growth in government? This weekend’s must-read

Fresh Blood!

Brandon Christensen Current Events

We’ve got a couple of new changes coming your way: younger bloggers!

Stay tuned, and enjoy the ‘comments’ thread on my recent post in the meantime (don’t forget to have your say as well).