Author: Redactor

Categories
general freedom ideological culture

Harappan Puzzles

Civilization first emerged around rivers: In Egypt, the Nile; in the Near East, the Tigris and Euphrates; in China, the Yellow River; and in the India-Pakistan-Afghanistan region, the Indus River Valley. We know the least about the Indus, or Harappan civilization. Its written language is the only one of these major civilizations’ forms of writing that remains uncracked, there being no “Rosetta Stone” for the curious ancient script.Examples of Indus Valley artifacts

Harappan culture sported elaborate plumbing, but no great monuments. This leads experts to suspect that the culture was “more democratic” than in the other cradles of civilization.

Truth is, we know next to nothing about Harappan governance or politics. By “democratic,” they probably mean “decentralized.” Or at least not heavily militaristic.

And, if that is borne out in further research, that’s huge. The hand of political governance lay quite heavily upon early city folks, and is generally associated with conquest. Could it be that Harappan civilization was freer, more voluntaristic and individualistic than Egyptian, Mesopotamian, and Xia and Shang Dynasty societies?

We can only guess. But on a different Harappan puzzle, there’s a new theory out, purporting to explain what happened to this largest of ancient “empires”: climate change.

The weather got warmer, their riverways dried up, and the people scattered, mainly heading east.

Too bad for the civilization. But note two things:

  1. The climate change was natural, and
  2. People reacted naturally, by moving.

If we are experiencing, today, the beginnings of a global climate change, it may very well be natural, and (natural or not) people freely moving about may be the best response to the worst of it.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
Thought

Ludwig von Mises, Profit and Loss

In the capitalist system of society’s economic organization the entrepreneurs determine the course of production. In the performance of this function they are unconditionally and totally subject to the sovereignty of the buying public, the consumers. If they fail to produce in the cheapest and best possible way those commodities which the consumers are asking for most urgently, they suffer losses and are finally eliminated from their entrepreneurial position. Other men who know better how to serve the consumers replace them.

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Today

June 1, General Motors files for bankruptcy

On June 1, 2009, General Motors files for bankruptcy. The natural course of this fourth largest official business failure was forestalled by the auto maker bailout, which progressives would later ballyhoo as a complete success in that investors and businesses would jump on the rescued company – which is what would have happened in an unbailed-out bankruptcy, anyway.

June 1 births include musical geniuses Mikhail Glinka (1804) and Alanis Morissette (1974).

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Today

May 31, Emperor Petronius Maximus

On May 31, 455, the Roman Emperor Flavius Petronius Maximus dies, soon followed by the Vandal sack of Rome. In a system without terms or term limits for rulers, his 78 days at the top of the Western Roman Empire ended as so many did, in violence – in this case by being stoned by an angry mob while fleeing the capital. His body was flung into the Tiber.

Also on this day, Genghis Khan was born in 1162 AD. On a more positive note, other May 31 births include less violent folks such as composer Marin Marais (1656), poet Walt Whitman (1814), philosopher and economist Henry Sidgwick (1838), clergyman Norman Vincent Peale, and actors Don Ameche (1908), Alida Valli (1921), Denholm Elliott (1922), Clint Eastwood (1930), and Brooke Shields (1965).

Categories
Thought

Epicurus

Those animals which are incapable of making binding agreements with one another not to inflict nor suffer harm are without either justice or injustice; and likewise for those peoples who either could not or would not form binding agreements not to inflict nor suffer harm.

Categories
folly national politics & policies

Digital Divide 2.0

Remember the worrying over “the digital divide”?

During the “concern’s” heyday, I was more than a tad skeptical, as were many others. There’s only so much hand-wringing that a balanced, working person can stand.Newton Message Pad, by Apple

Now we learn that all the yammering “inspired many efforts to get the latest computing tools into the hands of all Americans, particularly low-income families.” I’m not aware of any government programs to accomplish this, but then I don’t follow the handouts economy as closely as I could. But I do know that some charities got involved, putting computers into rural libraries and computer centers, for instance. (The Bill and Melissa Gates Foundation did a lot of this, years ago. Funny, though: I notice they didn’t supply any Macintosh computers.) And recylcing centers and garage sales made used computers — often hampered only by slightly out-of-date tech — available for pennies on the dollar.

If you want a computer in America, you can find one.

The New York Times tells us about an “unintended side effect” of all this computing power in the hands of the poor. The miserable masses, yearning to breathe free, are misusing the technology!

As access to devices has spread, children in poorer families are spending considerably more time than children from more well-off families using their television and gadgets to watch shows and videos, play games and connect on social networking sites, studies show.

This is called a “growing time-wasting gap.”

Reason’s Jacob Sullum neatly mocked this: “Silly lower classes! Don’t they realize this wonderful new technology is for self-improvement, not for pleasure?”

Maybe it’s time to stop taking politicians — and the “experts” who plead with politicians (to gain access to tax monies) — seriously.

Seriously.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
national politics & policies too much government

Withdrawal, with Enduring Presence

President Barack Obama recently signed a much ballyhooed Strategic Partnership Declaration with Afghan President Harmid Karzai, ostensibly to remove all U.S. combat troops from Afghanistan by the end of 2014. He trumpeted the withdrawal in pursuing a second term, aware that most Americans want out. A late March New York Times poll found 69 percent of the public against our continued presence.

Yet when Mr. Obama’s Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta was questioned, last Sunday, on ABC’s “This Week,” about the Taliban gaining strength awaiting a U.S. pullout, he replied, “Well, the most important point is that we’re not going anyplace. We’re gonna, we have an enduring presence that will be in Afghanistan.”Afghanistan

So, our forces can somehow both leave the country and remain there . . . simultaneously?

Yes, they can!

Well, no. The administration is being duplicitous. Our leaders plan to leave a “residual force” in country for the next ten years. Americans will train (and pay for) the Afghan army. When our state-fed media report that U.S. combat troops are all leaving, tens of thousands of U.S. and NATO soldiers will almost certainly remain.

If you ask me, our original goals in going to war in Afghanistan have been achieved — it is long past time to bring all troops home. But whatever one’s view, we can surely agree that our leaders ought to talk honestly about issues of war and peace. Not trick us.

President Obama should admit that just like his likely Republican challenger, Mitt Romney, he has no plan to actually remove the United States military from Afghanistan within the next decade . . . or ever.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
Thought

Voltaire, “Rights,” 1771

It is forbidden to kill; therefore all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets.

Categories
Thought

Roger Pilon, May 14, 2012

We’ll know soon enough whether foes of [Gov] Scott Walker made a bad bet on the recall, but either way, Wisconsin made a bad bet years ago in initiating America’s public-sector union movement.

The incentives thus established — with concentrated benefits for state employees and dispersed costs for taxpayers — have made it all too easy for politicians to cave in to union demands, resulting over time in government workers with benefits far exceeding anything a rational market would afford – or those who pay for the benefits (taxpayers) can afford. Not surprisingly, therefore, states with strong public-sector unions — California, Illinois, New York — are today in economic disarray.

Categories
free trade & free markets ideological culture media and media people national politics & policies

Learning from Krugman

We often have much to learn from our intellectual opponents. But some opponents we must deal with only because they are there . . . in some inescapable way.

Paul Krugman, for instance, is a Nobel Laureate economist. We deal with him not because his technical work is more relevant than the work of a hundred other economists, or because he wrote a really fine essay on the law of comparative advantage. Or because some Swedes thought enough of him to give him a big award and cut him a huge check.

We deal with him because he has a column and a blog at the New York Times.Paul Krugman, economist of a different color

And for the Times he’ll commit almost any sort of fallacy or public foolishness. Thanks to the New York Post, you can read a grand demolition of Krugman’s modus argumenti. “Krugman is a most unusual economist,” Kyle Smith writes:

Others may measure their words, issue caveats, acknowledge that the research isn’t conclusive, admit that their biases influence their reading of facts. Not Krugman. . . . He changes the subject, ignores inconvenient evidence and plays playground bully to people he sees as ideological enemies (a list longer than Nixon’s). He blasts away at others’ work without even providing the basic courtesy of a link to what he’s talking about. . . .

And Smith goes on, in part to review Krugman’s new book, End This Depression Now! (turnabout being fair play, no link from me). Not surprisingly, Krugman’s advice is a Democratic politician’s delight: spend more. Lots more.

Smith’s destruction is funny, and devastating. My complaint with Krugman has long been his relentless partisanship. But Smith reminds me that we have something to learn from Krugman, too: How not to promote a cause we regard as good.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.