History

“Happyism”

Brandon Christensen Current Events, Economics, History, Links , ,

If a man tormented by starvation and civil war in South Sudan declares that he is “happy, no, very happy, a regular three, mind you,” we have learned something about the human spirit and its sometimes stirring, sometimes discouraging, oddity. But we inch toward madness if we go beyond people’s lips and claim to read objectively, or subjectively, their hearts in a 1-2-3 way that is comparable with their neighbors or comparable with the very same South Sudanese man when he wins an immigration lottery and gets to Albany.

From Deirdre McCloskey in the New Republic. It’s about the mismeasurement of happiness. Read the whole thing, but don’t you dare smile!

The Trees, the Bramble, and the Forest

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

I apologize for not blogging much lately. I have finished summer school and have been enjoying my week off from rigorous studies. Back to the grindstone!

In China, protesters have been surrounding the Japanese embassy in Beijing and recently begun hurling debris at both policemen protecting the embassy and the embassy itself. In other parts of China (but not in the “special economic” [free trade] zones) Chinese citizens have been burning Japanese flags and calling on their government to take a harder line on a territory dispute and in trading policies with Japan.

The violence is not limited to the embassy or Japanese flags, of course. Japanese businesses have also been vandalized, threatened, and shut down due to the violence currently raging throughout the Chinese state. Continue reading →

Islam and Free Speech

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

Dr Gibson and Dr. Delacroix have both staked out their positions on the matter, and Dr. Delacroix has promised more, but I thought I’d add my own two cents to the matter.

I’ve already shared my thoughts here before, and nothing that I see in the Middle East or elsewhere changes my argument.

Among observers of all political stripes, there have been two broad categories into which they have gravitated. One of these has been the Islamic societies are still in the middle ages argument. This is a legitimate point, too. As Dr. Gibson points out: Continue reading →

“The Young British Soldier”

Brandon Christensen Current Events, History , ,

When you’re wounded and left on Afghanistan’s plains
And the women come out to cut up what remains
Jest roll to your rifle and blow out your brains
An’ go to your Gawd like a soldier.

– Rudyard Kipling, “The Young British Soldier,” 1892

The Blonde Queen of the Lower Andes: A Story

Jacques Delacroix History , , ,

Thinking all the time about this country’s situation puts me in a blue funk. Here is a story to cheer me and you up. It’s one of my best.

I reached that mid-size Bolivian city in the lower Andes, on a research trip, the day before Bastille Day. I was an old undergraduate at Stanford at the time and still a French citizen. I reported my presence to the French consul, as required by law, as technically a member of the French Navy reserve. The consul was a Bolivian doctor who had studied in France and subsequently married, and then, divorced, a French woman. Bolivia being a landlocked country (bitterly so), the consul was not overwhelmed with naval business. He was glad to see me nevertheless and very cordial. He pressed me to attend the party he would give the next day on the occasion of the French national day.

It was a pleasant but schizoid event, starting with good French Champagne and ending with chicha, the soupy, local artisan corn beer. (Bolivians say that the fermentation of really good chicha starts with the spit of virgins. Just to make sure, they ask tiny girls to spit in the brew.) There was the usual mix of French expatriates and of Francophiles, most of the latter, probably silly unconditional Francophiles, plus some smart freeloaders.

The French expatriates often land in a particular town of a particular country at a particular time for no particular reason. They may have been heading somewhere else and gotten stuck along the way. They always include wives and former wives of natives who may have divorced them, or died. Coming from different epochs (such as before and after WWII), they form historical strata, each remembering a different France, and they entertain disparate and often incompatible visions of the fatherland. They have developed new habits in the country where they live and, without knowing it, they have drifted far from their culture of origin. That culture of origin, meanwhile, is itself changing, but in a different direction. Many expatriates disseminate more or less innocently patently false notions about the country where they were raised. Their French self is forever a young person, or even a child. Their own children are simply natives of their land of residence with a smattering of the French language and no real curiosity, forever strangers to their parents. Continue reading →

Class Warfare, Then and Now

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

These recent developments in labor relations show how changed market conditions offer welcome correctives to the New Deal approach. It is just these changes that are at risk under an Obama administration whose main agenda tracks Roosevelt’s early one: Vilify the rich as unproductive ciphers of society and work toward a progressive tax rate structure; be hostile toward the growth of international trade by denouncing firms that outsource jobs as the enemies of domestic labor; continue to work in favor of extensive agricultural subsidies for ethanol and other farm crops, no matter how great of a disruption these impose on domestic and foreign food markets; and insist upon a rich set of unsustainable healthcare benefits through Medicare and Medicaid.

This is from Richard Epstein. Okay, so Obama is a demagogue, a thief and a murderer. Is Mitt Romney really any better? Really?

I’m voting for Gary Johnson (if I vote at all).

Quick Question

Brandon Christensen Books, History , ,

I was hoping somebody out there could answer for me. Why is Ludwig von Mises such a bad ass? From the foreign policy section of Liberalism:

The right of self-determination works to the advantage only of those who comprise the majority. In order to protect minorities as well, domestic measures are required, of which we shall first consider those involving the national policy in regard to education.

In most countries today school attendance, or at least private instruction, is compulsory. Parents are obliged to send their children to school for a certain number of years or, in lieu of this public instruction at school, to have them given equivalent instruction at home. It is pointless to go into the reasons that were advanced for and against compulsory education when the matter was still a live issue. They do not have the slightest relevance to the problem as it exists today. There is only one argument that has any bearing at all on this question, viz., that continued adherence to a policy of compulsory education is utterly incompatible with efforts to establish lasting peace.

The inhabitants of London, Paris, and Berlin will no doubt find such a statement completely incredible. What in the world does compulsory education have to do with war and peace? One must not, however, judge this question, as one does so many others, exclusively from the point of view of the peoples of Western Europe. In London, Paris, and Berlin, the problem of compulsory education is, to be sure, easily solved. In these cities no doubt can arise as to which language is to be used in giving instruction. The population that lives in these cities and sends its children to school may be considered, by and large, of homogeneous nationality. But even the non-English-speaking people who live in London find it in the obvious interest of their children that instruction is given in English and in no other language, and things are not different in Paris and Berlin.

However, the problem of compulsory education has an entirely different significance in those extensive areas in which peoples speaking different languages live together side by side and intermingled in polyglot confusion. Here the question of which language is to be made the basis of instruction assumes crucial importance. A decision one way or the other can, over the years, determine the nationality of a whole area. The school can alienate children from the nationality to which their parents belong and can be used as a means of oppressing whole nationalities. Whoever controls the schools has the power to injure other nationalities and to benefit his own.

I’m going to keep reading (you should too) and hopefully write up a little sum-sum about what I’ve learned soon.

Dr D. on Sex, Homosexuality, Language Usage

Jacques Delacroix Comments, Current Events, History , , , , , , , ,

A reader, MM, sent a comment criticizing an off-hand, snide remark I had made in my micro-essay, “Sex Advice.” I welcome the opportunity MM gives me to take him into the alley and beat him to a pulp. His full comment:

Though usually considered much of a stick-in-the-mud regarding language, and especially neologisms, I must offer a cordial disagreement regarding the word “gender” when used instead of “sex.”

Ordinarily I despise changing the language (you should see, for example, my battles with the ignorami who say “healthy” when they mean “healthful”), but when a change improves and clarifies, then I can not only accept but embrace it.

You are right that “gender” was originally intended for language references — more important in French and other furrin tongues — but since “sex” has become such an important, or at least such an ever-present, part of everyday life, having a separate word, such as “gender,” keeps the meaning clear.

I mean, I have compromised my formerly inviolate principles so that now I even use the word “gay” rather than “homosexual,” after swearing I would never degrade the language in that fashion.

But, after all, “gay” is the polite term, the one preferred by the people to whom it applies.

So, if I can change, linguistically, so can you.

MM’s justification for the widespread substitution of “gender” for “sex”makes sense. I agree that it clarifies. However, it ignores the fact that such a change rarely occurs as a result of a technical-rational process. Such changes, this one in particular, are loaded with sociological and, with political importance. To ignore them is to assent. Winning the substitution of one word for another is like winning an election forever, an election in which the winning party never even ran and the opposition never campaigned. What I am going to say about “gender” applies even better to “gay.” Continue reading →

Capital Day?

Brandon Christensen History , ,

Co-blogger Warren Gibson e-mailed me a great quickmeme earlier this afternoon. The details are beneath the fold. Continue reading →

Native American Property Rights and European Contact

Brandon Christensen History, Law, Liberty , , , ,

Despite the claim to rights based on discovery, British colonists often acquired land by contract. For example, almost all of Massachusetts was acquired by purchase from local tribes. The primary exceptions there, Salem and Boston, were uninhabited areas, having been depopulated earlier by the diseases the colonists unwittingly brought with them. Although the British crown claimed the sole right to negotiate transfer of land rights from the Native Americans, many colonists thought otherwise and regularly made individual arrangements with various tribes to secure land.

This is from Europe Meets America, a heavy post in the Freeman.

Property Rights: A Human Universal

Brandon Christensen History , ,

I have been reading a lot about property rights among the San (“Bushman”) in southern Africa for a little research project I am doing, so bear with me as most of my posts over the next little while will deal with property rights in the non-European world.

From the Freeman come this article by co-blogger Michael Adamson:

By any criterion, the economic and social standards of living are lower among Native Americans than among the balance of the U.S. population. Unemployment on or adjacent to reservations fluctuates around 40 per cent. Of some 750,000 Native Americans on reservations, 75 per cent earn less than the national average. Leading causes of death among Native Americans are accidents, heart disease, malignant neoplasms, and cirrhosis of the liver, all far above national averages and a significant proportion of these related to alcohol abuse. Drug abuse, mental illness, and obesity are major health problems. Tuberculosis cases are 4.5 times the national average and deaths from the illness are 9.5 times as frequent. Suicide is more than twice as likely among Native Americans. Their life expectancy is about five years below the average American’s and infant mortality rates are 25 per cent higher.

While such facts may illustrate the plight of the Native American, they do not explain why such conditions exist […]

The mission of the Bureau of Indian Affairs is to act as the principal agent in carrying out (1) the government-to-government relationship between the United States and Federally-recognized Indian tribes and (2) the responsibilities of the United States as trustee for the property it holds for tribal units.

Oops. You can probably guess where this is going. Do read the whole thing.

Bureaucracy: Yet Another View

Brandon Christensen History, Links ,

When I write now about my naval period, I feel almost forced to apply a bit of organizational analysis to my memories. It’s a slightly disturbing experience because being a small cog in a bureaucratic organization, a state organization at that, unexpectedly fails to evoke bad feelings.

It’s disturbing because life and work within a bureaucracy is at the antipodes of libertarian utopian imagery. It’s disturbing, additionally, because government routinely acts as the principal agent of routine state oppression in societies with a constitutional government such as the US. This malaise is also an opportunity. I believe that people who think of themselves as libertarians, even those with a mere libertarian bent, don’t spend enough time thinking about disconfirming evidence, about experiences that run counter to their main existential choices. Here is a brief analysis, one that may speak a little to the issue of why some people are attached to bureaucracies in spite of their libertarian leanings.

Thus write Jacques Delacroix in Liberty magazine. Do read the whole thing. Liberty, by the way, is where I first came across Dr. Delacroix’s writings. I was living in Santa Cruz and I have always had a weird obsession with foreign-sounding libertarians, so when I stumbled across Liberty‘s pages, Dr. Delacroix’s writings were some of the first that I read.

You can find more of Dr. Delacroix’s writings in Liberty‘s publication by checking out the newly-renovated ‘recommendations’ section here on the blog!

Life Under Fatwa

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

I did once visit Iran when I was 21 years old, during the time of the shah. It was wonderful. I had just graduated from university, and such was the world at that time, 1968, that I was able to drive with a friend from London to South Asia across the world. I mean, try driving across Iran and Afghanistan now! I remember it being a very cosmopolitan, very cultured society. And it always seemed to me that the arrival of Islamic radicalism in that country, of all countries, was particularly tragic because it was so sophisticated a culture — which is not to defend the shah’s regime, which was appalling. But it was one of the tragedies of history that an appalling regime was replaced by a worse one.

From Salman Rushdie.

At first I found his praise for the Obama administration to be typical of Left-wing establishment figures, but then I remembered that Rushdie is an Indian and had probably had to deal with racist legislation in one form or another while growing up. While the period of colonialism (roughly coinciding with the end of the Napoleonic Wars and the beginning of World War I) did indeed open up more places to markets, the Jim Crow-like legal barriers that European states erected no doubt helped to foster part of the suspicious climate that now pervades most globalization skeptics worldwide.

This is a shame for two reasons: Continue reading →

One Sure Thing About Globalization – The American Motion Pictures Industry World Hegemony Part 3

Jacques Delacroix Economics, History , , , , ,

[Editor’s note: this lecture was delivered to the Leavey Institute of Santa Clara University in 2003. You can find it reproduced in whole here]

Broken Promises

Harm to the poor on a considerable scale occurs when rich countries suddenly violate the principles of free trade they publicly support, on the main. The US government and those of other post-industrial countries will periodically make a show of vaunting the merits of free trade on stages (such as the World Trade Organization) that guarantee worldwide publicity. These actions must encourage at least some of the most enterprising poor in poor countries to produce for distant markets they are not in a position to understand.

When the governments of rich and large entities, such as the US, Japan and the European Union, suddenly inhibit the free movement of products, those enterprising poor people in poor countries suffer, and suffer disproportionately. Thus, the recent passing of new American farm subsidies legislation (in 2002) makes it difficult or impossible for small farmers in the Sahel area of Africa to compete on the world ‘s cotton markets with American growers (Thurow and Kilman, 2002)(6). The steel tariffs erected by the Bush administration – with the full complicity of Congress – must have similar effect on steelworkers in some of the Third World and Eastern European steel-producing countries.

Neither of these policies nor the broken promises they imply, can be easily defended on moral or rational grounds. Directly, it can probably be shown that the economic actors of poor countries who embraced free trade end up worse off than they would be if they had toed to a more parochial (“autarkic”) line. Indirectly, such breaches of faith by powerful rich countries contribute to the stagnation of the Third World by seeming to prove wrong those who adopted a stance leading most surely to economic development: embracers of production for worldwide markets. (In my experience, well-educated defenders of national economic ”self-sufficiency” rarely care to argue against free trade in principle; instead, they rely on evidence that there is no real free trade but a poisonous international game where the dice are loaded against the poor in poor countries. Sometimes, they have a point.)

The American Motion Pictures Industry’s Hegemony Continue reading →

Glass-Steagall and Deregulation: What Went Wrong?

Brandon Christensen History, Law , , , , ,

Nothing, really. Consortium members Warren Gibson and Jeffrey Rogers Hummel write in the Freeman on Glass-Steagall and what its repeal in the 1990’s meant for the economic crisis that began in 2008:

The timing of the repeal of Glass-Steagall makes this deregulatory move a convenient scapegoat for the financial crisis. But the crisis began with the housing collapse, a result of government encouragement of unsound lending practices. Financial firms took too much risk with mortgage-backed securities, in part because of moral hazard engendered by government guarantees and partly because bond rating firms were not as independent as was once thought. The limited liability that the investment banks gained when they became corporations may also have amplified moral hazard. There is no good reason to believe that Glass-Steagall, had it remained in effect, would have prevented any of these problems.

I highly recommend this piece. Lots of good history behind the law as well as a very clear explanation of the different types of banking services, what they do, and how they are created.