I am currently studying the Arab-Israeli conflict under the tutelage of this professor, a world-renowned scholar on the subject. We are reading a very good text, A History of the Arab-Israeli Conflict, by Bickerton and Klausner, and I am just curious as to what readers have to say on this subject. I am all in favor of a two state solution myself, but am open to other options if the case is well presented.
What are your thoughts on this conflict?
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?”
Santa Monica Community College caused a stir recently when it proposed offering “self-funded classes.” These would be extra sessions offered at $180 per unit, or $540 for a three-unit class, versus the normal $43 per unit.
Like most California Community Colleges, SMCC has drastically cut class sections. Students are frustrated and angry. The new proposal was met with widespread criticism. There were student demonstrations and even a whiff of pepper spray. Why?
If you asked any of the student demonstrators why, their answer would surely be, “it’s not fair!” It’s not fair that rich kids get in while others are left out.
Sad to say, gut reactions based on crude emotions are the best many college students can muster these days. No wonder, when so many of their professors bar nuanced analysis from their classrooms in favor of rants about “activism” or “social justice.”
So let’s apply a little analysis here. How would the proposed new offering affect lower-income students? Assuming the new classes do not divert resources away from the low-priced offerings – instructors, classrooms and such – these students should notice only one difference: less competition for scarce low-priced seats. The very problem they complain about most – lack of access to the classes they need to finish up their degree – would be lessened.
It’s the same old story – jealousy trumps reason. Studies have shown that people would prefer to earn $50,000 in a situation where their peers earn $25,000 over earning $75,000 when most people earn $100,000. (But it could be that the subjects of these studies are smart enough to realize that the premise of equal living costs in both situations is unrealistic because with more income, prices will be bid up.)
Critical thinking. Analytical thinking. These are the skills that a good economics department emphasizes – skills that are so valuable and so sadly lacking these days.
This is the last installment of a series of nine short essays in which I attempted to explain a topic that is both important and misunderstood by many intelligent people: protectionism and its obverse, free trade.
[…]
When economic actors, people and organizations, switch from doing what they don’t do very well to what they do better, production increases everywhere, the pie gets bigger. There is no injustice involved, just a general rise in the standard of living.
For such virtuous change to achieve maximum effect, there must be economies of scope and scale. It’s not always obvious in big countries such as the US which has a large internal market (many people most of whom are rich by world standards.) It’s pretty clear when you think of small prosperous countries such as Switzerland. How efficient would Nestlé be if it made chocolate only for eight million Swiss rather than for hundreds of millions of consumers worldwide? And would the smelters of Luxembourg do a good job making steel only for the half-million Luxembourgers?
So, it stands to reason that any barrier to import limits severely the benefits of switching from mediocre to good or from good to excellent. But, the basic rule of international trade is reciprocity. (It’s a little more complicated than this in everyday life but the complications do not affect the basic soundness of my reasoning.) Countries’ governments say to each other: “ If you impede the entry on your territory of stuff made by my economic actors, I will impede access of my territory of stuff made by yours.” This is no bluff. So-called “trade wars” erupt frequently, involving different kinds of tit-for-tat. The most notable thing about every round of tit-for-tat is that it impoverishes everyone. See above.
Trade barriers, different ways of impeding access, come and go. Although it’s difficult to find a coherent argument in favor of any trade barrier, governments will often yield to interest groups and provide “protection” from imports for this or that good. They do so usually not because of some abstraction such as the “national interest,” but because of political necessity or to distribute political favors. Two interesting remarks about this poisonous practice. First, more democratic governments should be expected to be more likely to yield such favors. Second, by “protecting” domestic producers, they also lower the standard of living of domestic consumers. Naturally, the two categories of consumers and domestic producers overlap somewhat which only underscores the absurdity of protectionism. Incidentally, developing and enforcing trade barriers requires a large technical and inspection apparatus. The more trade barriers, the larger the government relative to the national economy.
All this being said, it’s clear that the removal of trade barriers will cause job losses in the affected sectors of the economy. It’s also obvious that some of those who lose their jobs will not find equivalent or better jobs. Here, individual fates diverge in small but humanly significant ways from collective well-being.
Let’s take the case of Canadian vintners. Yes, they exist. Would I make up anything so absurd? Do I have sufficient imagination? As you might imagine, Canadian wine-producing firms exist inside a network of government protectionist measures. If they were left to their own devices, most would soon be swept away by the wines of thousands of producers from twenty different places, from California to South Africa. Now, imagine that the Canadian vintners lose their muscle with the Canadian federal government and that all the protective measures are withdrawn within one year.
Under such a scenario, two things would happen. First, as I have explained step by step, many Canadian resources, including labor would eventually be switched to more productive endeavors. Because of this switch, Canadians in general but also the whole world would be a tad richer. But no one would expect the switch to be instantaneous. There would be some social dislocation, for sure.
The second consequences would be, starkly, that some people working in wineries and in wine-related businesses would lose their jobs. The fifty-five year old wine-maker of a small British Columbia winery with thirty years experience in the same winery would almost certainly have to retire. It’s extremely unlikely that he would qualify for one of the many advanced jobs open in the new, and now marginally more productive Canadian economy. An old wine-maker will not become say, a software writer, under almost any imaginable circumstance. Instead, the middle-aged wine maker will either become unemployed or he will have to take one of the lower-end jobs freed by the escalators described before.
Free trade, and opposition to protectionism have acquired a bad name, I think in part because of economists’ reluctance to face squarely this particular human implication of such policies.
I defend free trade while recognizing the wine-maker’s painful problem by pointing to the overall, collective consequences of protectionism: It’s always an economic disaster. We know this from two different sets of observations, First, other things being equal, countries that follow national policies of free trade grow faster than those that don’t. That’s true equally for poor countries and for rich countries. Similarly, when countries that have implemented protectionist policies open up even a little, they experience a quick surge in their GDP. Second, there is no part of the world where unemployment figures track free trade’s ups and downs. As an example, the sudden upsurge of unemployment in the US 2007-2009 had nothing to do with any increase in imports. This tells me that the sad middle-aged Canadian vintner’s case does not account for much of unemployment.
Other things being equal, I think it’s better to be unemployed in a relatively more prosperous country that in a poor one. The benefits are more generous, and the next job opportunities richer and more varied. Training programs are also more common and more accessible in richer than in poorer countries. And capital to start one’s own business is normally cheaper and more accessible, the more prosperous the country. I will go further: Economically, it’s better to be unemployed in a rich country than employed in a poor country. (I understand there are non-economic downsides to unemployment. This is another topic I can’t deal with here. A single thread, the economic thread, is difficult enough to follow.)
In conclusion to this whole series on free trade and protectionism in nine small steps: protectionism remains the royal road to collective poverty and it does not do much for anyone, not even for those who stand to lose their jobs when national borders open.
[Editor’s note: Part 8 can be found here]
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.
To all you Angelinos, Ron Paul will be in Westwood tonight at 8:30 pm.
Here is the link to free registration. Hope to see you all there!
Ninth and probably last installment soon: Do people lose their jobs because of free trade?
In the story in seven episodes some of you had the patience to read, I kept pushing aside the question of what happens to the work done by those who move upward. If you will recall, I abandoned half of my dish-washing work, Luis stopped blowing leaves and carting away garden leavings, and Hans quit his sandwich-making job. Of course, those are bottom jobs garnering the lowest pay. So, the easiest and most general answer is that people and organizations move upward is they are allowed to do so. Both individuals and organizations become more productive. Under even moderately competitive conditions, this means that they earn more money.
The question arises toward the bottom of the pyramid of productivity, as in my story. I mentioned briefly that the answer has to do with escalators. There are four answers to this question that are not mutually exclusive. I mean by this that you can witness all four solutions being implemented in the same national society at the same time. I take them up in turn.
1 Some of the lowly jobs remain undone. This is so rare that it’s difficult to come up with examples that are not so exotic as to be distracting.
2 Within almost all national societies, a combination of unemployment and of under-employment is the rule. In poor societies, many people don’t work much because there is no work for them. (That’s one of the main sources of underdevelopment: people don’t work much.) In rich societies, there is a reliable rate of unemployment in the potential labor force. some of which is voluntary. In such societies, there is also massive under-employment of young people, of older people and of women. When dishwashers are leaf-blowers are hard to come by, wages rise and some of the unemployed and some of the under-unemployed become motivated to do them. That’s true in both rich and poor societies.
3 If the shortage of dishwashers and of leaf-blowers becomes severe enough, history tells us, the miracle of mechanization revs up. Within a short time of a labor shortage of olive pickers in the northern Mediterranean countries, someone invented and effective olive-tree shaking machine. It is driven by a single person and replaces the work of about half a dozen hand pickers. Here is another telling anecdote. Everyone knows that the French love dogs better than they love children, with the kind of results for the sidewalks you might expect. I have seen with my own eyes, within a few years, small armies of low-skill African immigrants armed with twig brooms disappear from the streets of Paris. They were replaced by extraordinary, powerful motorcycles with booms extending ten feet on each side. The booms support both powerful jets and rotary brushes. The uniformed city employees who drive them on the sidewalks have the serious mien and they show the pride of sea-captains. Incidentally, workers who control machinery usually earn more money that those who rely on primitive hand-tools.
4 There are huge reserves of able-bodied men and women in the less developed countries ready to jump at the opportunity to wash dishes in my stead and to take over Luis’ leaf blowing. (That’s how Luis came to California in the first place.) Of course, immigration is often controversial, for a variety of reasons, but in pure economic terms, the case for the free movement of labor is bullet-proof. And, yes, ideally, the reserve of third world labor is ultimately finite but I am not going to worry about this for the next hundred years.
All in all, the answer to the question of who will do the work of those who move upward, is that there are several escalators that take care of almost all of this problem.
[Editor’s note: Part 7 can be found here. Part 9 can be found here]
Co-editor Fred Foldvary on the destruction of the Libertarian Party.
Newest member of the consortium, Warren Gibson, writes in the Freeman about GDP.
Ninos Malek on associating in peace.
Jacques Delacroix questions Ron Paul’s credibility.
And writing over in the Atlantic, Conor Friedersdorf celebrates the failed boycott attempts of Rush Limbaugh’s show.
I just started school today, so if you don’t hear from me for a while, you now know why. Have a great spring!
Because I have decided to go one little step at a time, there are six previous installments of this series. All comprise the word “protectionism” somewhere in their titles.
Because, we are all richer, Luis, I , the Quebec farmer and Pierre are in a better position to buy German manufactured goods than we were before. In Pierre’s case, that could be a Mercedes (although what he really wants is a specific Japanese car). In the Canadian farmer’s case, it could also be a Mercedes, or a BMW motorcycle. In Luis’s case and in mine, it would be a small piece of either a Mercedes or a BMW motorcycle. All the same, it’s a start.
I, and Luis, and Hans, and Pierre are all more likely to buy a basket or two of organic raspberries than we were before.
If Pierre follows through with his intention to send his son to a pricey MBA program in the US, it could be in my area. The son will go to restaurants once in a while, on his newly rich father’s dime, of course. More dishes for Luis to wash.
It’s not obvious that my main occupation, selling at the flea market will improve at all, except through Luis, of course. Remember he earns more money. He might spend some of it buying a ten-dollar used bike from me at the flea market. Pierre’s son, studying for an American MBA, might buy a used desk from me at the flea market, making me richer.
Now, we need to make a small, very modest technical switch. Here is a generalization that is more often valid than not: The more you make or sell of something the lower the cost of making it or of selling it. A lower cost of something is equivalent to a pay raise for the consumer, or for the producer, or for both. The technical terms here are “economy of scale “ (production) and “economy of scope” (marketing defined broadly). Continue reading
Two more days to sign up for the Independent Institute’s summer seminar scholarship offer.
I first became interested in libertarianism during the 2008 presidential campaign, when Ron Paul gained national prominence for his tangle with Rudy Giuliani on foreign policy. In the summer of 2009, just after the presidential primaries wrapped up, I embarked on a nationwide journey to learn more about the concept of liberty.
My first stop was the Independent Institute’s summer seminar, an from that experience I not only learned a lot about how markets work (I just spent the afternoon going over my notes from the seminar), but I was also able to make some great connections as well. Indeed, the co-editor of this blog, Fred Foldvary, was a lecturer at the seminar, and Brian Gothberg, who is incredibly good at teaching basic economic subjects, are just some of the fantastic people that I have been able to count over the past three years for intellectual support.
If you want to spend a week in one of the San Francisco Bay Area’s most beautiful locales, learning about liberty, history, civil society, and the market process, then I highly suggest checking out their seminar. It is absolutely fantastic.
Luis, I, the Canadian farmer, Hans, and Pierre have all improved our productivity. We all earn more. We have increased our ability to buy anything at all, stuff, leisure, occupational training, or anything we want. We did this without working more than we used to. We have helped the world become richer. None of us, except maybe Pierre, has achieved any stupendous success. Even Pierre’s bold killing on the Chinese wine market ranks far below other successes we read about in the newspaper everyday. His success barely rates the local newspaper. It’s not Google, or Apple, or Craig’s List or even Fred’s List. It’s pretty conventional stuff.
We have all done this without cheating, without despoiling anyone, without doing any damage to anybody. Now think of what we have not done: I have not improved my technical ability; it’s doubtful whether Luis has done anything of the sort. In fact, it would not be absurd to argue that blowing leaves is more skillful than washing dishes. Same for the Quebec farmer. Hans may have augmented his training; he did it on the job if he did it at all, at the expense of his manufacturing employer. Pierre knows more than he did when he was still at his hum-drum government job. He learned what he learned under his own power, on his own dime, at no perceptible cost to anyone else. Here is the main factor that accounts for our joint improved production: Continue reading
John Locke in his Second Treatise of Government had two premises for natural moral law: independence and equality. Independence means that we think and feel individually. Equality is about moral worth. There is no inherent master/slave status in human nature. There is no inherent superiority or inferiority among the races, sexes, or other categories of human beings. The moral default is therefore equality.
This is the concept recognized by Thomas Jefferson, when he wrote that all persons are created equal. This is the concept of equality before the law. Human equality is a premise for natural moral law, or the universal ethic.
When one person imposes coercive harm on another, he makes himself master, and the other is a slave. This is inconsistent with equality. The universal ethic begins with our subjective values, and then provides a moral production function resulting in moral rules for the universal ethic. One’s personal ethic or subjective value that being coercively harmed is evil gets passed as a universal ethic moral rule that coercive harm to others is evil. But mere offense becomes transformed as morally neutral, since one has not been invaded.
For the full treatment, see my book The Soul of Liberty.
A fascinating blog post on Indian domestic politics and foreign policy by a Ph.D. student living in New Delhi and studying at Jawaharlal Nehru University.
Alex Warren, a journalist with extensive experience in the Middle East, writes about Libya’s decentralization.
“The Current Models Have Nothing to Say.” That is economist Robert Higgs’s analysis of modern, orthodox economics.
Might regionalism help solve Central America’s woes? Be sure to check out the rest of the blog, by Seth Kaplan, too.
Conor Friedersdorf of the Atlantic has a penetrating look at the logic of a drug warrior (h/t Brian Aitken)
Co-editor Fred Foldvary, writing in the Progress Report, explains that value is subjective. This is an important concept when it comes to understanding economics.
A couple of very thoughtful comments have been posted in regards to property rights over the past couple of weeks, and I want to single them out for their thought-provoking content. JuanBP writes:
Libertarian socialists (no, my dear American friends, that is not an oxymoron) believe in freedom of speech, association,religion and all other liberties cherished by Libertarians. Where we differ profoundly is in our understanding of what constitutes economic liberty – for we tend to consider that property, the very foundation of capitalism, is theft.
And from Benjamin David Steele:
There is one general difference I see between the left and the right which also would refer to the general difference between left-libertarians and right-libertarians. Those on the left tend to see human rights as prior to property rights. And those on the right tend to see property rights as prior to human rights. It is a difference of emphasis, but a very big difference in terms of practical application. As a left-winger with libertarian tendencies, I see no evidence that defending property rights inevitably leads to defending human rights.
Both of these comments provide great insights into one of the many myths espoused in political discourse throughout the world: that property rights are somehow different from any other human right. Continue reading
Some of you have probably already seen Roger Lowenstein’s overly laudatory, but still useful and interesting, article on Ben Bernanke in the March 2012 Atlantic. As a good antidote, you should check out George Selgin’s thorough and informed critique of Bernanke’s first of four lectures on the Federal Reserve. Bernake seemingly unreflectively repeats many gross myths about the history of banking. Although these myths are widely believed by mainstream economists who who are abysmally ignorant of history, Bernanke has specialized in monetary history and should really know better.
Jeffrey Rogers Hummel
Notes On Liberty 