Category: ideological culture

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ideological culture

Philosophic Anti-Fanaticism

Popular French philosopher Pascal Bruckner is in hot water with fellow left-leaning French intellectuals.

Bruckner doesn’t hate humanity and doesn’t want to unplug all the life-promoting conveniences of industrial civilization. He intimates as much in a controversial new book entitled The Fanaticism of the Apocalypse: Save the Earth, Punish Human Beings, available only in French for now, but soon in English translation as well.

The book assails ludicrous and nihilistic environmentalist pronouncements of the Left. As the title suggests, the author believes that these are based more in religious fervor than in carefully reasoned science. He stipulates that he does not object to ecology as such but rather to the “greenwashing” notions that the “planet is sick. Man is guilty of having destroyed it. He must pay.”

After all, what is the “carbon footprint that we all leave behind us [but] the gaseous equivalent of original sin, of the stain that we inflict on our Mother Gaia by the simple fact of being present and breathing?” A baleful implication of such views is that peoples in developing countries should forget about improving their economic and technological circumstances. The earth has suffered enough, n’est-ce pas?

Bruckner’s observations underscore how radical environmentalism is largely a convenient hook for anti-capitalism. Long before anybody fretted about our chronic exhaling of carbon dioxide, certain anti-capitalists urged the extinguishing of industrial civilization and a return to the blissful Tupperware-free, iPhone-free, hunting-and-gathering way of life.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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ideological culture media and media people Second Amendment rights

Caught in the Crossfire

There are some things people with different values just won’t “get” about their opponents. Folks who support gun bans and greater gun control just don’t “get” arguments for the Second Amendment and for “more guns” in peaceful citizens’ hands. And so, when confronted with a scholar and analyst of gun control like economist John Lott, they shy away from actually arguing with his points.

Their approach? Scattershot. Sniping. Crossfire.

Thus it was, this week, on Piers Morgan’s CNN interview show. Morgan grilled Lott in the wake of the Aurora, Colorado, movie theater atrocity. Lott ably started making his case numerous times, but Morgan refused to engage Lott’s points, instead unleashing a barrage of “isn’t your positions just ridiculous?” non-questions.

The lack of engagement with ideas is astounding.

When Alan Dershowitz joined the “debate,” it only got worse. Dershowitz repeated an accusation of “junk science” without really demonstrating how the science marshaled by Lott was unsound, and engaged (falsely) in the favorite ad hominem gambit of the age: “research funded by the NRA.”

The sad thing about this is not the inability of Morgan and Dershowitz to understand Lott. The sad thing is their unwillingness to even give it a good ol’ college try. It was downright uncivilized. Dershowitz is a lawyer, so his resorting to base rhetoric in a no-holds-barred attack is understandable. But Morgan is allegedly a journalist, on the advance guard of history, a seeker of truth.

But Morgan is not seeking truth; his mind is already made up. Facts be damned. That doesn’t lead to good interviews.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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free trade & free markets ideological culture too much government

Estonia’s Success

When I was coming of age, the economic ideology of Keynesianism was going bust. Keynesians couldn’t explain the stagflation of the 1970s. Monetarists triumphed and the Austrian School experienced a resurgence.

Now, monetarist disputes are hard to follow, and the Austrian Theory of the Business Cycle is not exactly a piece of cake. But Austrian economists’ preferred policies possess a kind of common sense: The thing to do is prevent false booms. Once you hit bust, it’s too late: we are going to experience the pain of readjustment, “recalculation,” as we find new prices and levels. I riffed on this theme last weekend, in my column “Dead Hobo in Trunk.”

Keynesians, now back in the limelight, have it easier, promising “less pain.” They offer drugs to make us feel better: Borrow, go further into debt, and spend, spend, spend!

So you can see why today’s Keynesians would hate Austrian wisdom. Not inflating the money supply, not engaging in deficit spending? Risible! And “austerity”? Keynesian shill Paul Krugman never tires of pillorying that program.

Which brings us to Estonia.

The little post-Soviet Baltic state was one of the few countries to actually restrain spending after the 2008 bust, freezing pensions and cutting public employee salaries by 10 percent. Krugman infamously blogged about it, noting that the country’s current recovery hasn’t yet reached the height of the pre-bust boom. He thinks this tells against “austerity.”

But to Estonian economists, the height of the boom was a false prosperity that couldn’t last. They’re glad their country’s rid of it, and note that their current recovery is above the pre-2005 levels.

In other words, Estonians not only understand their country and their situation better than does Paul Krugman, they understand economics better.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
free trade & free markets general freedom ideological culture individual achievement

Two Legacies

Two great economists died this month.

Anna Schwartz, co-author with Milton Friedman of the classic A Monetary History of the United States, 1867-1960, passed away last Thursday, at age 96. For reasons known only to a few Swedes, she did not receive the Nobel along with her more famous research partner.Anna Schwartz and Elinor Ostrom

Elinor Ostrom, on the other hand, who died about two weeks earlier, at age 78, did manage to nab a Nobel.

While Mrs. Schwartz may not have received the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, she had received the more popular honor of being dubbed “the high priestess of monetarism.” She knew more about the history of banking and finance than just about anyone. Tellingly, her intellectual odyssey didn’t stop when she reached retirement age.

In recent years, she attacked the politically popular notion that bailouts are a good idea during economic downturns. She also came out against the reappointment of Ben Bernanke as Fed chairman, and argued that government was the main instigator of the 2008 financial bust.

She knew how to make waves.

Elinor Ostrom focused her work not on finance but on the problems associated with managing common-use resources. She found that government regulations tended to mismanage resources, while individuals and communities better negotiated creative and effective solutions to problems that previous economists deemed insoluble without government.

Like Anna Schwartz, she was much more than an armchair theorist. She didn’t merely draw equations on a blackboard and pontificate on how necessary it is for “government” to “fix it.” The evidence — which they collected — is in, government most often is the problem that must itself be fixed.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
ideological culture insider corruption

Video: Greece Fire

When politicians fight on camera — literally slap each other around — you know something is pretty wrong in your country:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yVffMcFWj8Y

Categories
ideological culture too much government

Divided by Government

Politics used to be less socially divisive.

That’s the gist of a new study by the Pew Research Center, as explained by Dan Balz at the Washington Post. By “almost every measure,” Pew claims to have found that the gaps between Republicans and Democrats “have increased over the past 2 years, and in some cases now seem to represent almost unbridgeable divisions.”Divided America

Americans may bemoan partisan gridlock in Washington, but they need only look at the report to understand the root of the problem. Polarization in Washington is not just politicians behaving badly. It reflects what is happening around the country. Partisanship has grown dramatically and shows no sign of abating. . . .

Not exactly shocking news, eh? Over what are we divided? Balz states the obvious: “Some of the most significant differences . . . were on core issues of the 2012 campaign: the role and scope of government and the social safety net.”

Why more division now than in the past?

Because in the past government was smaller. As more and more people become sated with the level of government we have, they start objecting to increases in its size and scope. There have always been folks who want more government. Now their number effectively dwindles. In the “good old days,” there was a “consensus” — a larger percentage — for more government.

Well, we got that “more government.” And fewer and fewer folks like what they see.

Unlike when I was a kid, today the protest against government growth has the teeth of large numbers. So of course “mainstream” discourse has become divisive. It will remain so until the numbers of pro-government-growth-at-all-costs folks dwindle into insignificance.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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
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.

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free trade & free markets ideological culture

Competition in Currency

Monopoly control of money is at the root of all kinds of evil.

As the Euro faces collapse, and the dollar’s value becomes increasingly unsteady, central bankers the world over worry about what to do next.

But it doesn’t have to be this way.

Last Thursday I mentioned monetary experimentation, including Ron Paul’s support for F.A. Hayek’s idea of competing currencies. In my Townhall column this weekend, I noted that Rep. Paul has done more than promote the idea “that government policy should allow all currencies to float, favoring none. . . . Last year he introduced the Free Competition in Currency Act, as Hayekian a piece of legislation as you could imagine.”Monopoly Money

Paul’s proposal is not merely a sign of the times, it is a sign of intellectual seriousness — in a politician, no less. In the early 1980s he had introduced a measure to return the United States to the gold standard. But now he is willing to let “the market decide” which monies should circulate.

We may know a lot more about money than we used to, but one of the things we’ve learned is that no one knows for sure how to manage an entire monetary system, the whole kit and kaboodle.

So, just as we don’t need a grocery czar or an “industrial policy” to micromanage either technological production or R&D, centrally managed money is just too hard for any one set of persons . . . to manage.

Competition in money and banking (sans today’s progressivist doctrine of “too big to fail”) would not only work, it would keep politicians from the extremity of irresponsibility.

For yes, today’s politicians rely upon the Federal Reserve. They need to keep the “printing presses” running to supply that special, hidden tax that funds their deficits: inflation.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
general freedom ideological culture

Tea & Tyranny

We were not invited. Instead, the presence of 27 of the world’s “Sovereign Monarchs” was properly and politely requested for a lunch last week with one Liz Windsor, in celebration of her 50th year on England’s throne.

Apparently, the Queen didn’t want to spend her Diamond Jubilee hanging out with the 99 percent. Or even the 99 percent of the 1 percent. After all, it’s her party (albeit financed by the common man), and she’ll twist and shout with her fellow blue-blood royals if she wants to. But, while nice ol’ Liz was serving a sophisticated supper to kings, queens, sheiks, emirs, sultans, emperors and empresses, there were detractors.Menu for the big bash

“Inviting these blood-soaked dictators brings shame to the monarchy and tarnishes the Diamond Jubilee celebrations,” declared human rights campaigner Peter Tatchell, pointing to tyrants attending from Abu Dhabi, Bahrain, Brunei, Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Swaziland.

He missed a few. Why not add King Mohammed VI of Morocco, who still has the power to veto most government decisions, or Sultan Qaboos of Oman, who personally makes all the key decisions in his country?

What level of despotism is just too much? Thailand’s King Bhumibol Adulyadej’s role may be largely symbolic, but citizens remain subject to arrest for any insult to the king.

Granted, most of the remaining monarchs hold their positions of privilege and pomp with little circumstance. They are not the dictators of old, brutalizing the people at whim.

Progress, I guess.

But why continue even the trappings of monarchy? And why dine with the real thing?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.