Politics

The Fat Women and Bill O’Reilly

Jacques Delacroix Politics , ,

I was going to leave behind that storm in the tea-cup but it won’t go away. It’s there, on the TV, in front of me every time I go to the gym. Besides, it may have a cultural meaning, or several meanings, after all. So, here it goes:

Last week, the television host Bill O’Reilly got into a tangle on “The View.” It’s a morning show for women. (More below.) What happened is that two of the three fat women show hosts walked out on him because of something he said. They walked off their own show, like that!

First, O’Reilly. He has an evening television program that’s very popular, one of the most popular in the nation, and his simple-minded books are bestsellers. He is a blow-hard, not very well-informed, a little obtuse, and stubborn. His English is uncertain although he obviously spends his morning coffee time reading the dictionary. He is also clearly an Irish-Catholic prude of the worst kind. With all this, O’Reilly is very effective when he decides to right a scandalous situation nation-wide. Several times, he has put the fear of God in lazy, or malevolent, or dishonest state legislatures and forced them to do the obvious or the obviously needed. He used forthright terror in each case and named names.

Now, “The View.” As I said, it’s a women’s show. It comes on a ten on the Pacific Coast. (That’s why I catch it a the gym and only there and then.) It’s designed by women for women. The hostesses are five women. One is Barbara Walter, an old journalist who has been over-rated all her life. Yet, she is a reasonable women although lacking in general culture. She has had the immense good sense to invest her large media earnings into her continued good appearance. She looks nearly as good as she did twenty years ago. I respect that. Barbara is a classical moderate DC liberal. The second hostess is a fairly foxy blonde who plays the token conservative very well although her lack of bulk is probably a handicap. The three other hostesses, one white, two black, are fat. They are not “somewhat overweight” like most of us, they are frankly fat. None of the three could buy her clothes in a department story if she had to. One is a brassy New-York-sounding woman whose name escapes me, and it does not matter. She wears maternity clothes year-around. The other is a black woman with a pretty and sweet face and a sweet disposition most of the time. She often displays common sense. The last member is Whoopi Goldberg, a very large black woman who used to be a good actress. She became a media person years ago by making shocking statements no one expected from a black person. She learned to be an African-American white upper-middle-class oral radical with little ghetto on her. Continue reading →

Whining Instead of Sex and the Better Use of Health Insurance: A Testimony

Jacques Delacroix Liberty, Politics , , ,

I know how detestable it is for older men to speak about their health. First, the odds that they are going to come out alive are not good. Second, it’s true that many old geezers replace sexual pleasure with the joys of whining. I am not one of those. I have a legitimate, didactic reason to speak about my health, at least, briefly. It has to do indirectly with the underpinning of the on-going debate on and disgust with health care reform.

About five months ago, I started suffering from carpal tunnel syndrome. In a way, CTS is a happy illness. It’s the illness of writers who actually write. It come from spending too much time intensively using the keyboard. Yet, the pain was intense enough to wake me up at night. The neurologist prescribed Aleve. Then, at my insistence, he described the appropriate surgical intervention. It’s a routine operation; it does not require anesthesia; it works almost all the time. Having little patience, in my mind, I was immediately sold on the procedure.

Then, I started looking at cost. I am on one of the Bush-era, smart versions of Medicare. It’s designed to give me all that I need but not much more. I knew this in an abstract way but I had not thought it through because, frankly, who does not have something more exciting to do than reading insurance companies fine print and wooden language? So, I was shocked that my share of the cost for this simple, small operation would come to almost $2,000. I put off the decision because putting off the decision rather than making lemonade, is often the most rational thing you can do when life serves you lemons. Continue reading →

Pushing Back Against the State

Warren Gibson Liberty, Politics , , , , ,

A friend recently brought my attention to the Orwellian American Community Survey (ACS), a 48-question survey that is sent by the Census Bureau to a random sample of households and asks whether you have difficulty concentrating, how much you paid to heat your home last year, how many times you’ve been married, whether you have a toilet, and on and on.

In 2010 (and in the previous three decades) I sent in my regular census form with the first two questions filled in, those that respond to the Census Bureau’s Constitutional authority to conduct an enumeration every ten years.  I left the rest blank.  I got one visit from a census-taker and told her to get lost.  That was the end of it.  My friend, who is less interested in matters of constitutionality, tells me he simply threw his away and ignored the people who came knocking on his door until they gave up.  I think that’s what I would do with the ACS if I ever got one.

I got my driver’s license renewed last week and they took my thumb print.  I thought of resisting, but to what end?  The DMV drones would simply deny my license, and then what?  Mount some kind of campaign?  I have no time for such a thing, and a driver’s license is a necessity.

Last fall I was summoned for jury duty.  I called the specified phone number the night before and heard that I needn’t report.  But for some reason they decided I was a no-show.  The consequence?  I got a post card scolding me, no more.  (I was prepared to quote the 13th Amendment to the judge, the one that outlaws involuntary servitude.  I was also prepared to go ahead and serve, if the case were an interesting one where I might apply jury nullification.)  My friend just ignores jury summons.

I am about to begin remodeling work on my house, including re-doing a couple of bathrooms.  The building code has gotten quite a bit more intrusive since I built my house in 1978.  My neighbors are laughing at me since both did their bathrooms without permits.  But for various reasons I am going the permit route.  And in truth, some of the provisions that I bristled at first turned out, upon reflection, to be beneficial to me.

And to round out my list of sins, I never mounted the front license plate on my Thunderbird convertible.  I just thought that would spoil its looks, but it occurred to me that I probably can’t be caught by red-light cameras.  I’m amazed that I haven’t been stopped in eight years.

So the question I ask myself (and you) is: where to draw the line — when to push back and when to go along.  The aforementioned examples suggest that the consequences of resistance are likely to be far less than what we fear.  For that we can thank bureaucratic ineptitude.  Random citizens are almost as likely to fall prey to some bureaucratic outrage as are resistors.

I guess the answer is that each of us should do our own cost-benefit analysis.  How good will I feel about resisting and what is it likely to cost me?  Of course that’s often difficult to estimate, but I know one thing: I don’t want to be just a bystander to the slide into fascist dictatorship, if that’s where we’re headed.

While freedom of speech survives we should make the best of it, as in blogs like this.  But almost all the tools are in place for government agents to persecute people for their expressed opinions.  For example, the NSA is developing a capability to intercept and decrypt almost any sort of electronic communication such as emails, phone calls or Google searches. They may well be trolling the entire internet for posts like this.

What are your thoughts?  How are you pushing back?

National Economic Systems: an Introduction for Intelligent Beginners

Jacques Delacroix Economics, Politics , , , , , , , , , ,

Part One: Stimulation.

This essay does not require any specialized or advanced knowledge of economics. It does require an open mind and moderate alertness.

It’s must be difficult for the average working stiff with a job or school attendance, or both, a mortgage, and a family, to make sense of the daily economic news. It’s not because you are ill-informed, it’s because the media gives economic news in bits and pieces without tying them together, and usually without context. I suspect few of the big media commentators understand the context or try to link the fragments, anyway. Those who do understand tend to assume that everyone is aboard the same train they are riding. They don’t have much to say to those who are still at the station.

Major exceptions are the Financial Times, which has a strong pro-Obama bias, and the Wall Street Journal, which does not. Even with those, you have to read them every other day to get the big picture. So here, is the straight dope. (If you are concerned about my qualifications, a valid point, you will find a link to a fairly up-to-date version of my vita on the front of this blog.)

We are not facing one economic crisis but two. One is more or less routine, the other is almost unprecedented. The mildly re-assuring noises the media are currently making are about the first crisis, the almost-routine crisis only.

The first crisis is a conventional recession. Recessions are historically a normal part of capitalism. Healthy capitalist economies are on a growth path most of the time. There are several measures of economic growth and contraction. The easiest to understand is Gross Domestic Product, “GDP.” There are criticisms of this measure but we don’t care right now, for our narrow purpose.

GDPs grow at varying rate at different times and in different countries. A US GDP growth of 3.5 % per year makes nearly everyone happy. Countries that are at an early stage of development, such as India, and have a long way to go, often experience annual growth of 6% or 7%. China’s GDP growth has often topped 10% .Western European countries have been pleased with annual rates of growth of 2% for many years. There is a lesson here; don’t lose track of it.

National economies don’t always expand, sometimes, they contract. That’s a lot like the income of someone on an hourly wage instead of a straight salary. The prodigious economic growth of western countries under capitalism in the past 150 years is made up of series of expansions followed by contractions. We had overall growth because the contractions were both less in magnitude and shorter in duration than the periods of expansion.

The word “recession” means either two consecutive quarters of contraction of the national economy or it means any damn thing you want. Serious people only use the term in connection with the definition above. That’s what I do because I try to be a serious person.

Recessions are tricky because you only know about them after the fact, when the national statistics come out. Anyone who says, “We are in a recession” is either speculating or making propaganda. Economic commentators try to read the existence of a recession, and the waning of a recession, by studying other economic events. Those are events believed to be associated with recessions and to which numbers are attached that are collected frequently.

Here are two main ones: Unemployment figures and stock market indexes. There are others you can learn about if you become interested. When national unemployment goes down and the main stock market indexes go up for a while, commentators tend to announce the end of a recession. I think that liberal commentators give those a lot of weight under Democrat administrations, and conservative commentators under Republican administrations.

The reading of these signals is not an exact science, by a long shot. I just believe those readings are better than nothing if you take care to follow several. That’s a big “if,” of course.

Incidentally, there are very good scholarly, academic studies regarding the connections between various indicators and economic growth/contraction. I suspect few commentators keep abreast of those. I wouldn’t be surprised if it were none. I would be pleasantly surprised if some did.

Now, on to the current situation. When President Obama took office, it’s pretty clear the US was in a recession, or entering one. The President had nothing to do with it. There was much discussion everywhere about whether his buddies in Congress caused it. Fact is that there have been recessions with Republican as well as with Democratic administrations, and with Congressional domination of one or of the other major party.

The political elites of most countries, including many American Republicans believe in something called “Keynesian economics.” You don’t need to read Keynes to know as much as they do. Here is the gist: In modern developed societies, the government is such a large economic actor that it can influence decisively the path of the national economy. Thus, Keynesians believe that government has the power to stop or to improve on recessions. Governments may do this by engaging in spending, public spending, spending tax money, or borrowed money. (Keep I mind that, with the interesting exception of a few oil rich countries, governments have no money except what they can take in taxes and what they can borrow.)

Real conservatives, and libertarians who are not especially conservative, think that Keynesian economics is a dangerous hoax. They argue that government spending aggravated and deepened past recessions including the one associated with the Great Depression of the nineteen thirties. Fortunately, we don’t have to consider here who is right. (Full disclosure: I am one of them.)

A point that’s not in dispute is that government spending usually entails bigger government debt. More on this later.

Keynesian public spending is forthrightly intended to stem the spread of unemployment. The reasoning is simple: When people lose their job, or fear losing their job, they, and often, their neighbors, spend less. This lowered spending in turn slows down the national economy. This induces more unemployment: If I stop buying my daily latte because I am unemployed, or I fear I might soon be, and if others do the same, the barrista at my local coffee shop will lose her job. And so forth.

The fewer people earn a living, the smaller the national economy. If I merely forgo buying a car for the time being, the indirect effects on the national economy are even worse.

Hence, good Keynesian government spending should have very quick effects. It should stem the spread of unemployment rapidly and durably. It used to be the case that government had the ability to spend money quickly through public works. Hitler, for example, reduced quickly very high German unemployment by hiring the unemployed, and many underemployed, essentially to dig holes: Go to work in the morning; get a government check in the evening; spend the next day.

This approach has become difficult to employ for a variety of reasons, including permitting processes related to safety and to environmentalist zeal. Thus, if my city of Santa Cruz decides to build another breakwater for its harbor today, it’s unlikely anyone will get a paycheck for handling a tool for eighteen months, or more. Most past recessions lasted less than eighteen months.

As I write, only 10% or 15 % of the stimulus package money decreed by the President has been spent. Either, that’s not enough to stem the spread of unemployment, or, it’s not really a spending spree intended to stimulate. If the latter, what’s the purpose?

There is a beginning of an answer if you look at parts of the package that have a well-known name attached. One such is financing for a train from Disneyland to Las Vegas. It was put in by Harry Reid, the Senate Democratic Leader. There is no way the bulk of the corresponding money will be spent until five or even six years from now, except for studies employing a handful of specialists. Those specialists are not suffering from high unemployment, by the way. This part of the package does nothing to put to work Tom, Dick and Harry. The money won’t be spent for a long time because such a project needs a lot of planning, including for permitting to satisfy environmentalists.

What is the real purpose of this part of the stimulus package, then? At least, it makes Harry Reid look good with his voters. At worst, Harry Reed is using his muscle in Congress to satisfy special interests. I don’t know if the latter is true. I have not researched it. It’s plausible.

My conclusion: Even if you subscribe to Keynesian views on how to jump-start a national economy in recession, the measures taken by the administration six months ago do not work and cannot work.

Those who say, “Give it time” don’t know what they are talking about. The essence of government spending for stimulus purposes is speed. If you don’t stop and reverse unemployment quickly, the recessionary spiral worsens. If you did nothing at all, it would stop on its own, in good time, anyway.

Why do I care about the stimulus package’s lack of effectiveness?

Two reasons. First its part of a mass of unprecedented government spending. I mean unprecedented in the absence of a major war, like WWII. It increases public, government indebtedness to a worrying extent. Public debt has consequences, in the long run and in the not- so-long-run. More on this in the next episode of this posting.

The second reason, I care is that I detect a social and political project markedly different from the one announced by the administration in the current oversize government spending. I have not become a conspiracy theorist. I am relying on public information, including the President’s own past statements, those of his close advisers and, above all, my knowledge of what went on in Western Europe between about 1980 and 2000. I will address this alternative project in a subsequent posting also.

You have been good but there will be a quiz!

Current events update:

The Wall Street Journal has a good discussion of the Maine public health plan in today’s issue. It’s on p. A12, in the editorial section. It’s a fiasco. We care because it has important features in common with what we know of Obamacare.

Cool people tend to dismiss Rush Limbaugh, even conservatives. Limbaugh is bombastic and he exaggerates. That’s vulgar. However, he must have an army of good researchers because he comes up within a short time with hard evidence of allegations against his political adversaries. One of the wildest allegations from the right is that Obamacare entails “death boards.” Well, what do you know: Today, on-air, he reads excerpts from a Veterans Administration practitioner guidebook that sounds for all the world to me like a “death book.”

The convicted mass murderer of 270 people  in the air over Lockerbie, Scotland receives a hero’s welcome in his home-country of Libya. He had been freed on compassionate grounds by the gutless Scottish Minister of Justice. (Yes, there is such a thing.) I saw it on television. This is not hearsay.

I think the enthusiasm greeting him in Libya should be written in the accounts book. It should enter into any calculus, side-by-side with collateral damage, next time this country has reason to consider bombing anything in Libya. It should not be long.

It’s unreasonable to treat in exactly the same way those who hate us and those who harbor sheer evil in their hearts, and our old friends. The stupid  Scots should get a pass. The evil  Libyans shouldn’t. There is no ethical system in the world that requires that this country do otherwise, not even Christianity. You are supposed to forgive your enemies after they have stopped harming you, not while they are cutting your throat, not even when they are impotently clamoring  their wish to do it.

By the way, I am told by those who should know that Arabs respect this kind of thinking.

French Elections: Redux

Brandon Christensen Economics, Politics , , , , ,

French elections are ongoing.  Here is Dr. Delacroix one more time:

The first thing to know is that France is a country where common conservative and libertarian ideas about market efficacy are rare. A conservative stance is absent from the public discourse.

I think Hollande is going to be elected. He is the worst the French Socialist Party has to offer. He has never done anything in his life, like our current president, or worse. He does not even have the merit of being a member of an interesting minority. He is the pale consort of a former big loser in a French presidential election (Segolene Royal). How much lower can you get?

All this because Sarkozy annoyed too many people, swing voters, with his bad manners and because Strauss-Khan couldn’t keep his second thinking tool where it belongs long enough. Yes, Strauss-Khan was going to be the Socialist candidate. He understands money, unlike Hollande who knows nothing about money except that the “rich” have too much of it and that it’s the root of all evil.

Hollande is the worst of a Socialist Party that has had few new ideas, has not updated itself, in the past thirty years. However, his colorlessness, the fact that he barely exists may be a blessing. It’s possible that economic technocrats in his Continue reading →

Chocolate for Thought

Jacques Delacroix Politics , , , ,

There is a pervasive feeling among thinking people that this country is not just facing a severe economic crisis but that we are losing something exceptional. That something is American exceptionalism precisely. Lech Walesa, the blue-collar hero of Polish freedom from communism put it well in a recent piece in the Wall Street Journal. There is only one of America and if it ceases being itself, the world is left in the dark, goes the thinking. It’s not reasonable to count on the debt-ridden government pension-sucking Europeans to hold up the flashlight. The fact is that several European countries are disappearing because they don’t make enough babies to replenish themselves. That’s the ultimate form of pessimism. (And no, this is not a racist statement, I am completely pleased with the fact that brown-skinned Mexicans and their children are keeping the American population growing. They make good immigrants. See my article on Mexican immigration, with Nikiforov, in the Summer 2009 issue of the Independent Review.)

Unfortunately, there is an innate humility among Americans which makes it difficult for them to think aloud about American exceptionalism. If there were not, twenty years of cultural relativism in the schools would make the very thought difficult to formulate: “Everybody is equal. We are not any better than those who suck their grandmothers’ brain – but only after they die, or than those who practice horrendous sexual mutilation on little girls, or than those who still practice slavery. Only American slavery was atrocious. Slavery in exotic locales is kind of nice, actually, if you look at it in its proper cultural context.”

One way to overcome this shyness and diffuse sense of equality in order better to grasp what we are losing is to consider Swiss exceptionalism about which no one gives a damn, not even the Swiss. It turns out that in the main respects, there is not one America, there are several. Switzerland is one. Continue reading →

Coyotes: How Government Bureaucrats Think

Jacques Delacroix Current Events, Liberty, Politics , ,

In my area of central California coyotes recently attacked two small dogs that were romping around. Both dogs survived. The attack took part in a public park of some sort. The reaction of the rangers (How I hate this semi-heroic designation for cops in green uniforms!) :

We are going to enforce leash laws more strictly. The attack would not have happened if the dogs had been on leash.

Why not regulate coyote behavior while you are it? You might add to the list of forbidden things on the signs posted everywhere:

Coyote attacks on dogs not allowed.

Somewhere in the depths of the bloated California bureaucracy there might even be a subsidized artist to design a cute symbol signifying the same thing, for coyotes who can’t read. While we are at it, why not a sign in Spanish also?

There is another approach to all this: Dogs like to run around. In fact, most of them need to run around to be healthy. Dogs who run are happier than dogs who don’t.

Coyotes will eat anything, small dogs when they get a chance. It makes them happy. Dog owners know this. They are morally responsible for their dogs. They are the ones to decide what’s the greatest risk for their pet: unhappiness and a constricted life vs the risk of a very rare wild animal attack. Continue reading →

Let’s Celebrate Loopholes

Warren Gibson Economics, Politics , , ,

I’ve just finished my income tax return. (Have you finished yours?) Silly me, I do it myself using TurboTax – all 59 pages of my federal return plus 80 for California. I’ve got investment income, including partnerships and foreign stock dividends, two small businesses, social security and a pittance of wage income from San Jose State University. And a bunch of deductions and credits.

The whole process puts me in a foul mood, and my wife and even the cats know to steer clear till it’s done. One reason is obvious: the mind-numbing complexity, even with TurboTax. Even more galling is the humiliation and gross indecency of dropping my pants financially. This is the land of the free?

The New York Times had an interesting article in last Sunday’s Magazine, “What’s the Easiest Way to Cheat on Your Taxes?.” The article led off with the assertion: “If economists ran the tax system, there would be virtually no exemptions or loopholes.” To which I say, just a cotton-pickin’ minute! If I ran the tax system, and assuming I couldn’t set the rate at zero, exemptions and loopholes would stay and maybe even multiply.

How can I say this after belly-aching about the complexity of my return? Simple – the complexities provide me enough tax-cutting opportunities to outweigh the damage to myself, my wife and the cats. I’ll leave the details out just in case the gentle folk at the IRS read this humble blog.

Why do I do it myself? Partly because I don’t want to spend hundreds or maybe thousands on a professional preparer, but also because his interests would not align exactly with mine. His primary goal would be to cover his rear, especially with the IRS cracking down on professional preparers. My goal is to achieve the right mix of boldness and caution in claiming deductions and credits.

A good bit of ink has been spilled (and electrons) about “fair taxes” lately. It’s unfair, says the Community Organizer in the White House, that Warren Buffett’s average tax rate (or was it his marginal rate?) is lower than his secretary’s. Conveniently overlooked is the fact that his dividend income has already been taxed at the corporate level. As Gene Epstein showed recently in Barron’s, when you add in that corporate tax you get a much different story. The rich pay a substantially higher percentage of their income than most of us on this basis.

So what is a fair tax anyway? The same percentage for everyone? No exemptions, no deductions? Why is that any fairer than a head tax – a levy of so much per person? How about a regressive head tax, since poor people tend to use more government services than rich people?

What of two people earning the exact same income? Surely fairness demands that they pay the same tax – equality before the law and all that. But suppose Mr. A is a struggling young man with lots of debt, trying to start a family while Mr. B has inherited millions. Both earn the same income but is it fair that they pay the same tax? I leave it to you.

When you get right down to it, there just isn’t any such thing as a fair tax, simply because taxes are coercive exactions – theft, if you will.

Still why wouldn’t a flat tax with no deductions be at least a small improvement, as Steve Forbes and other conservatives advocate? The late Murray Rothbard demolished that idea in The Case Against the Flat Tax. Here’s his comment:

“The closing of ‘loopholes’ under a flat tax will mean a merciless and continuing search-and-destroy mission by which the government will root out and obliterate every little hideyhole in which many of us have been able to squirrel away a bit of our own earnings and are own property, and keep them safe from the ever-expanding maw of the federal government.”

I concur. Let’s celebrate all the loopholes, not just those that protect some of our own income, but any break for anybody at all.

Ethnography of Liberalism: I

Jacques Delacroix Politics , , , , ,

There used to be an academic discipline called “Ethnography.” It was an inherently humble endeavor, the description of others, of usually exotic, far away, little-known groups. I mean head-hunters of Borneo, and Pygmies from central Africa. Ethnography had little pretension to “explain” as does modern Anthropology for example. I am engaged in a continuous study of the Left. I am doing daily, indefatigable ethnography of that quaint but interesting tribe.

In spite of my public identity as a conservative, I am proud to say I have good entries into the liberal world of my small ultra-liberal and “progressive” town. I don’t know the liberal establishment and I think it does not know me, or it ignores me. I am in daily touch with the rank-and-file though. (I will not blow my cover by telling you how. You will have to take my word for it.) Because of my previous life in academia, I also know liberals. and even progressives, outside of my immediate area. I am talking of people with whom I have personal contacts at will, not National Public Radio.

Old-fashioned ethnographers used to exploit “native informants.” Those were local indigenous people who were willing to talk, trustworthy and who, the ethnographer had reasons to believe, were well-informed. Lately, I have been having short and long-distance conversations with a younger man, a very moderate liberal, a liberal-leaning centrist, you might say. I have known the man for a long time. He is intelligent, very hard-working and resourceful. He has even demonstrated an entrepreneurial bent. More importantly, I know him well enough to be sure that he prizes his personal credibility. My liberal friend is a valid native informant. I am not building a straw-man to burn later in triumph. Continue reading →

How ’bout Communism?

Jacques Delacroix History, Liberty, Politics , , , , , ,

Note: Most of my adult life and all of my childhood were dominated by the threat of Communism. People of my generation who wanted to know understood well the horrors of Communist societies. We knew of the slave-labor camps, of the mass executions, of the constant spying on ordinary citizens by the secret police, of the betrayals of friend by friend that were everyday life in Communist countries. We were well aware also of the grinding poverty in those countries.

I am concerned that thinking individuals who are in their twenties and even in their thirties now might know little about the reality of Communism as it was practiced. It seems to me that no one asked them to study the matter. A Russian friend of mine is going back to Russia this summer for a couple of months. If a few readers ask, I will request of my friend that he contribute to this blog from there, drawing on the memories of older friends and relatives who survived the Soviet period.

There was once a “Communist” movement whose followers were often motivated by generous impulses and by economic ignorance, in more or less equal parts. There has never been a Communist state, whatever that would be. Historically several Communist parties did achieve political power. None did so through democratic means, although the Czechoslovak Communists may have come close, in 1948. We will never know because the presence of a large contingent of the Soviet Red Army in the country forever mars the analysis. Continue reading →

Mali: Let It Collapse, Duh! Part 2

Brandon Christensen Current Events, Liberty, Links, Politics , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

I just came across an article in the New York Times via Bill Easterly, and it is very discouraging. The article is, of course, about the aspirations of Azawad, the breakaway region of Mali that just declared its independence. The article outlines the slim-to-none chances Azawad has of breaking free from the shackles of colonial legacy and African despotism:

“[…] there is little likelihood that anyone will defeat the Tuaregs on the battlefield anytime soon.

Still, they face slim odds of establishing a nation. Just ask Ahmed Abdi Habsade, a government minister in Africa’s other unrecognized state, Somaliland. ‘We have many problems,’ Mr. Habsade said in a telephone interview from Somaliland’s capital, Hargeysa. ‘The country cannot get donations from the U.N. or other governments. We are not having a budget to develop our country.’

Somaliland, which sits in the northwestern corner of Somalia, has been a de-facto independent nation for the better part of two decades, and an oasis of calm in the chaos that has swept up Somalia. Its claims to independence date from the colonial era, when it was a British protectorate while Somalia was controlled by Italy. The two states merged after independence, but the Somalilanders had almost immediate regrets, and have been trying to break free ever since.

Somaliland has had successes, including holding peaceful elections, yet it has struggled without an international stamp of Continue reading →

Karl Marx Was Right (Pretty Much)

Jacques Delacroix History, Politics , , , , ,

Karl Marx spent a lifetime arguing that the motor of history, what caused social change, was the “class struggle.” (Marx said other, more complicated things in relation to the class struggle. I don’t care to talk about them right now because they are obscure and there is little agreement among Marxists about what they mean.) Marx also did not assign enough importance to technological progress, it’s true. That would happen largely as a result of ever greater densities of population, irrespective of any political system. Many people in close contact in cities are more likely to come up with better ways to get things done than few people who barely ever meet anyone outside their small group. Literacy also helped of course by helping preserve accumulated knowledge. With these major lacunas, I think Marx was mostly right.

Marx had an elaborated conceptualization of social class that he never really completed. First, what “class” is not, according to Marx (also according to Delacroix). Class explicitly does not refer to “the rich and the poor” as many think. That would have been of limited usefulness when Marx was writing and it would be utterly useless now. The fact is that the distribution of wealth in modern, capitalist societies (the ones Marx had in mind) is continuous, that is, there is not break-up point. Next to the person, or family who owns $1,000, 000 there is one that owns $999,000, and next to that one, there is another that owns $998,999. Likewise, next to the person or family who owns $50, there is one that has $51 in wealth. And so forth. Moreover, who owns what is not fixed except at the lowest end. I was poor when I was thirty, I am not anymore. People who own vast wealth are liable to lose large portions of it in a day or two, thanks to the normal operation of the stock market, for example. Thus, there is frequent re-shuffling and rich and poor are pseudo-categories and therefore, useless.

Marx explained at length that what social class one belongs to is determined by one’s “relation to the means of production.” This is a bad translation of the bad German that prevailed at the time Marx was writing. Generations of Marxists everywhere have striven to conserve this opaque language because it made them sound profound, not least in their own eyes, and because it made them look like possessors of higher, “scientific” knowledge. Let me dispose of the scientific claim right away. It’s pure propaganda, deliberate bullshit, one of Marx’s public relations achievements. He made his claims seem more serious than they otherwise would have seemed by calling them “scientific” at a time when the word conveyed much intellectual prestige. Again, it’s bullshit. What makes anything scientific is that it can be refuted by comparison with reality. Another way to say nearly the same thing is to say that scientific claims can be tested. (Don’t worry about the “nearly” in the previous sentence; the statement is good enough for our purpose.) Marx’s claims cannot be tested in a rigorous, logical manner. All Marxists can do is to cry, “See, Marx said so,” after the fact, whenever something develops more or less according to one of Marx’s many unclear predictions. One issue about which Marx was clear was the class struggle. More on this below.

The world in which Marx lived was different from ours in important respects two of which are crucial for understanding the idea of social class in the 21st century.

1 When Marx was observing and writing, in the second half of the 19th century, land was losing much of its age-old importance as a source of income, in comparison with manufacturing and mining, and later, railroads. While agricultural productivity was making steady gains in the richest countries, manufacturing and, in its wake, mining, were growing explosively thanks to the Industrial Revolution. (Note what I am not saying: Income from agriculture was not shrinking in absolute terms, it was expanding.) It was clear to most observers then that the quick way to riches was to capture the fast rising income generated by those industries. The best spigot was thus the material industries of manufacturing, mining and later, railroads.

The claimants to this income were uncommonly well-defined. On the one side were a small number of mostly family-based companies like the Krupp in Germany, the Schneider in France, the Rockefeller in America, and so on. These highly visible companies owned the manufacturing plants, the mines, and later the railroads. Here is a useful digression: Marx seemed not to have understood the importance of publicly owned companies in which small people and other groups could invest their small savings. He probably thought big corporations would remain in a tiny number of hands forever. Correspondingly, he did not understand well the role of stock exchanges either. He was wrong on this, wrong by large omission.

The other claimants to manufacturing, mining and railroad income were also highly visible. They were the masses of workers flocking to the cities and mining centers from the countryside. Those people were visible because of where they lived, near the centers of cities. Originally, they were also poorly paid and overworked. Marx observed that they were in a favorable situation to organize along labor union lines and also politically to an extend unimaginable by their peasant forebears. This, because of their geographic concentration and because of their ability to realize that they shared a certain type of misery.

From these accurate observations, it was fairly natural to predict that there would eventually be a clash between the super-rich owners of the means of production, manufacturing plants, mines and railroads, and those who toiled for them. It looked like there was at any time, a zero-plus sum game being played: Whatever the owner took, the workers did not get, and vice-versa: capitalists (owners) vs proletariat (industrial workers, broadly defined).

But everyone who was not a worker was not a capitalist in that sense, and everyone who was not a capitalist was not necessarily an industrial worker. The lawyers who serviced the capitalists could be expected to join with them. The tavern owners whose own income came from workers’ drinking would side with the workers, and so forth. This scheme makes it clear that a starving lawyer could be in the capitalist camp and a prosperous pub owner in that of the workers. Hence the idea that people would line up politically according to their “relationship to the mean of production.” This is a more sophisticated idea and also one much more applicable than the “rich vs poor” of the popular imagery of social class.

2. The second big difference between Marx’s time and ours is the size of government. Throughout the 19th century, governments everywhere were small and poor. There was no income tax; they derived revenue largely from customs (border taxes) and from excise taxes. Governments then were a fiscal burden on everyone if not equally, then commonly, but a fairly light burden most of the time.

Today, governments in the developed world are large to huge. They consume anywhere between 40% approximately and 70% of Gross Domestic Product. They are also everywhere by far the largest accessible source of income.

Superficially, the amorphous, ill-defined “service sector” seems even larger since it accounts regularly for more than 70% of GDP (in rich countries including the US). However, it’s fragmented, heterogeneous, controlled (to the extent that is is controlled) by a myriad of owners. Much of it is not very profitable, as opposed to 19th century manufacturing, for example. The services workforce is also extremely fragmented and it tends to be transient. It would be difficult for that workforce, or for anyone else to get together to capture anything of value. There is not much to take from the service sector and it would be hard to get.

By contrast, the large to very large chunk of money that is in governments’ hands at any one time is easy to capture. It does not take much more than a well-engineered vote to get one’s own hands on it. Furthermore, unlike the private sector’s funds that depend on the vagaries of the market and on management’s competence, government grants in various forms tend to have a long shelf life. The WWII subsidy to chinchilla farmers was only repealed about ten years ago, fifty years late! Civil service pension funds are another case in point. Obtaining money from government entities is well worth the effort. The government is both a big spigot and an easy one to turn on.

I know I promised to tell you that Marx was almost right. Well, what we see in America today is a classical Marxian class struggle. The classes in conflict are not those Marx described because he was writing almost 150 years ago and he had not foreseen the monstrous growth of government. (No one else had.) The Obamanian/Obamist faction of the Democratic Party has engineered and is engineering an alliance between the main social class of today, government workers, on the one hand and a few other, opportunistically selected groups, on the other hand.

First among the government workers class allies are the small minority of workers in labor unions (maybe 7 or 8% of all employed and unemployed people). Labor unions have always used government to grab what their own muscle failed to achieve. Second, are the majorities of racial minorities. Many – but not most – are poor for reasons that ceased a long time ago to be related to racism. The largest racial minority, so-called “Latinos,” is heterogeneous and many of its members are immigrants or one generation removed from immigration. The Obamists are trying to grab them before they meld into the traditional American dream.

The second largest minority is “blacks.” Only about half of so-called “African-Americans” are descendants of slaves with a historical grievance that is supposed to be addressed by affirmative action. Many in that half, of southern church background, are addicted to resounding speeches about injustice and to the idea that the remedy to their ills can only come from government. They will vote for the best “injustice speech” giver irrespective of what they gain afterwards. (Usually nothing. The Democratic Party had been using and abusing blacks for thirty years.) The other half of Americans with African blood are immigrants and their children. Like Obama himself, in my book, they have no historical claim on the nation. That second half of the second minority might surprise us soon, politically. They are experiencing normal American social mobility, like general Colin Powell for example, the son of Jamaican immigrants. They are at best temporary members of the Obamian recruits, I think. He, and his Left-Democrat conspirators cannot count on them for the long haul.

A flat and slow-growing economy is always especially hard on immigrants. That’s the main reason western Europe has always – until now – had worse immigrant problems than we have. Immigrants in America open a small business and their kids go to college and they become the doctors and lawyers and engineers our normally expanding economy requires. Immigrants in France, for example, go to college and then remain underemployed forever because the French escalator is hardly moving at all.

There are no other racial minorities in America today that want to be considered minorities. They are all doing well without recourse to government favor. Many may have voted for Obama without understanding what they were doing. If I were an American communist trying to take over by legal means, I would not count on them further. In the same breath, I would refer to the scarce but disproportionately influential American Jews. I think more than 75% voted for Obama. That was a downright perverse and obstinate vote. I don’t think many are communists. I suspect many more are coming to their senses right now. (I may be placing too much confidence in an unsystematic sample here. All the Jews I know are conservatives. Ten years ago, I did not even know of Jewish conservatives.)

Finally, the Obamists exercise control over a large under-class that they are trying to enlarge yet: All those who are not working but who exist temporarily or permanently thanks to government payments. Marx had described something like this when he spoke of the politically unstable lumpenproletariat, the sub-working class “dressed in rags.”

So, here we are: On the one side, the large and growing class of government employees and the small allied class of union members. Both classes earn considerably more in wages and benefits than the employed in the private sector, nearly twice as much on the average. One bus driver in my small town belongs to both classes, as a government employee and as a union member. Last year, he earned $160,000 (that’s with overtime, let’s be frank). The job requires a high-school education. (I hope he is the one bus driver in this town who is not habitually gruff.) This is the same town where coffee shop baristas with a college degree earn $9/ hour if they are lucky, with no benefits. (I am speaking of Liberal Arts and Environmental Studies majors. Again, let’s be frank!)

To summarize: Government employees and union members owe their superior earnings to their relationship to the means of re-distributing income forcibly, government. They seek to extend and consolidate their hold on government with the help of precariously allied ethnic minorities and of unstable recipients of welfare under various names. On the other side is everyone else, everyone who does not work for government and who pays the taxes that feed the others. They too are defined by their relationship not to the “mode of production,” (see above) but to the spigot of government.

Here is a key figure: Almost 50% of Americans paid no federal income tax last year. That’s a lot of people who are not against the government confiscating legitimate income though legal means.

Once you start looking at the events and policies of the past 18 months as elements of a normal class-struggle, you gain much clarity. And, incidentally, this thesis does not contradict my repeated statements that the Obama administration and the President himself, are not very bright. They are relying on an old play-book that tells them pretty much what to do and that does not require much inventiveness.

I am astounded – if I say so myself – by the predictive power of my historical explanation. We even have the third highest elected official in the land ( third in order of succession to the President) engaging overtly in fascist intimidation: Speaker Pelosi threatened around August 16th “to investigate” those who oppose a mosque near Ground Zero! (See my column on this: “The ‘Ground Zero’ Mosque Issue Clarified”)

And, by the way, for those of you who got Cs in public school, or Bs in private school because the school needed the tuition, no, I am not confused. The Obamians are a species of communists and, communism is just one brand of fascism. See my two essays on the topic on this blog:“Fascism Explained,” and “How About Communism?”

Ron Paul Visits UCLA: the Recap

Brandon Christensen Current Events, Politics

It was great.  We had the largest crowd yet for a Ron Paul rally.  The applause and the loudness made Ron Paul’s wife and granddaughter, who were sitting just off to the side of Ron Paul, giggle a lot.  Los Angeles is wild!

He kept it short and simple.  He talked about the decline of the dollar, the need for reform in the area of currency, and the threat to our economic freedom that the Federal Reserve poses.

He stuck it to both parties when it came to civil liberties, and excoriated the PATRIOT Act and NDAA.  He bashed on the TSA and explained to the crowd of mostly college students the dire necessity of legalizing drugs.  He explained that pharmaceutical drugs are much more dangerous than marijuana, and that they get subsidies from the federal government and are behind prohibition.

He denounced the military-industrial complex.  He talked about the need to bring our troops home from around the world.  From Japan.  From South Korea.  From Germany.  From Uganda.  And from the Middle East.  He talked about engaging the world through free trade and the need to treat other nations as we would like to be treated.  Unlike South Carolina, Los Angeles went wild with applause for his calm argument in favor of a rational and humble foreign policy.

He talked about the freedom to choose, the importance of tolerance, and about the need to abolish – outright – the 16th Amendment.

While waiting around for Ron Paul to speak, the crowd did the wave for a while, and chanted on and off again ‘President Paul’, ‘Ron Paul’, and of course ‘End the Fed’.  While I am loosely associated with the libertarian groups on campus (I have to work if I am not studying; I am paying my own way through college), it was great to see their hard work pay off.  These guys spent months working to get enough signatures from around LA County to bring Ron Paul to UCLA.

It was a night to remember, that’s for sure.  I can’t believe the Republican Party had repudiated this man (I can totally believe that an intellectually bankrupt Left could do such a thing, though).  The times are a’changin’ though, and change is in the air.  The younger generation of Americans are fiscally conservative and socially liberal, and this is the libertarian fountain of progress.

Best of all, hearing Ron Paul speak replenished my thirst for individual liberty and justice for all.

Some Musings on China: Why We Need Not Fear Beijing

Brandon Christensen History, Politics , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

The recent ouster of Bo Xilai from the Communist Party can provide an interesting glimpse into the political mechanisms of the Chinese state. The fact that Mr. Bo was dismissed for “corruption” charges means that he was probably doing something right, or that he was too sloppy with his privileges and embarrassed the wrong people. We all know that socialism, in all its forms, leads to benefits for the few at the expense of the many (remember the bailouts of Western financial institutions?), but Mr. Bo’s ouster deserves a closer look, because he was a fairly prominent politician, and was actually slated as a possible successor to Hu Jintao, the Communist party’s current boss.

What I want to focus on is the fact that Mr. Bo was ousted at all. This move means that Beijing is becoming increasingly responsive to the demands of its citizens. Indeed, as China continues to liberalize its markets, democratic initiatives, whether real or appeasing, will continue to bubble up throughout the fascist state. This is because democracy is the natural political order that arises out of market-based institutions (private property, international trade, etc.). The world will have to be careful with China’s democratic transition though. Democracy is not a good thing in itself, especially democracy that is based upon an allegiance to a state. I am thinking of France in the 19th century and Germany in the 20th, although the democracies that sprung up during the post-colonial revolutions can also be good examples.

The main ideas behind the post-colonial revolutions were state sovereignty and democracy – not liberty – and the results, I think, speak for themselves. Continue reading →

Immigrants – A Story Pregnant with Deep Meaning

Jacques Delacroix Politics , , , , ,

They are a pretty young couple. He is a thin, blond Dutchman in his early thirties. Yasmina, his younger wife, is a honey-skinned beauty, and all curves. The day I met them, she was wearing a short, tight silky dress over a black push-up bra that was doing its job quite well, indeed. She is Pakistani by way of Toronto. They have come to seek their fortune in California.

Peter, the Dutchman, is working for a local software company. He is a language specialist in a generic sense, if there is such a thing. He began an advanced degree in Sanskrit, at Oxford. He did not finish because he could not “raise” the 35,000 pounds ($50,000) required. He spent a couple of years in India studying Sanskrit with a guru. When I asked him why he had not sought admission to an American doctoral program that would have supported him, one way or another, as is the custom, he gave me an answer I did not quite understand. It was something about changing priorities and about the infernal American demand for scholarly publications. Peter and Yasmina met at Oxford, where she completed an undergraduate degree. Or maybe not.

A Muslim by birth, Yasmina drinks wine with gusto, a sure sign of aristocratic upbringing. She speaks English perfectly and very fast. Peter discusses wines with much competence. His parents own a winery and vineyard in the heart of Continue reading →