Monthly Archives: February 2013

With ideas, demand creates its own supply

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Russ Roberts at Cafe Hayek discusses the possibility that we get the economics we demand.

I suggested that we get the economics we deserve, the economics that most everyday people want to hear. I’ve often wondered why my viewpoint (or Don’s or Pete’s or Adam Smith’s or Milton Friedman’s) has such limited traction in the marketplace for ideas. We have to concede that we are not the market leaders. Interventionism, market failure, Keynesianism–they are all doing ‘better’ in the marketplace in that they dominate the best universities and much of political discourse.

There is quite a bit to that. It is also part of an ethos that says we can fix this problem so solutions that make you believe you are actually doing something useful and positive have a value. It is the action itself that is valued, not the result.

And while within the economy itself, there is an error adjustment mechanism that weeds out the unproductive and unprofitable, with ideas there is the reverse in action, where demand (for certain ideas) creates its own supply (of these ideas). The will to believe invades our texts. Eventually, maybe, reality takes command but there is no reason to think it is any kind of certainty. People die for the most metaphysical of ideas. That they won’t cling to their economic theories even though they don’t work requires an ability to change not just what we think but who we are.

Incompetence, extravagance and an inability to properly plan

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If ever there has been an example of the incompetence, extravagance and an inability to properly plan by the Gillard Government, this is it. They promised every high school student in Australia a computer and now find they cannot even remotely afford it. And this is today’s front page story in The Age!

THE federal government’s scheme providing high school students with laptop computers is on the brink of collapse, leaving parents with hefty bills and educators with a chaotic start to the school year.

Schools are already telling parents they must lease approved laptops for pupils this year, at a cost of hundreds of dollars. Some are telling students to bring their own computers, raising a raft of problems around internet capacity, security and provision of software, as well as placing pressure on low-income families.

They make a commitment to some sounds-good proposition, find they cannot afford it and leave behind a mess for someone else to fix. It is their pattern. Their promises are worse than worthless; their promises will cost you big time when reality finally hits. That the NBN went down early in the midst of the floods in Queensland is another example how this government is leading us backwards at every turn.

The greatest spy novelist of them all

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This may be the one time I have really regretted not being able to read French. A story from The New York Times Magazine about the greatest spy novelist of them all, a man by name of Gérard de Villiers. This is the first para and if it doesn’t get you in then don’t bother with the rest:

Last June, a pulp-fiction thriller was published in Paris under the title Le Chemin de Damas. Its lurid green-and-black cover featured a busty woman clutching a pistol, and its plot included the requisite car chases, explosions and sexual conquests. Unlike most paperbacks, though, this one attracted the attention of intelligence officers and diplomats on three continents. Set in the midst of Syria’s civil war, the book offered vivid character sketches of that country’s embattled ruler, Bashar al-Assad, and his brother Maher, along with several little-known lieutenants and allies. It detailed a botched coup attempt secretly supported by the American and Israeli intelligence agencies. And most striking of all, it described an attack on one of the Syrian regime’s command centers, near the presidential palace in Damascus, a month before an attack in the same place killed several of the regime’s top figures. ‘It was prophetic,’ I was told by one veteran Middle East analyst who knows Syria well and preferred to remain nameless. ‘It really gave you a sense of the atmosphere inside the regime, of the way these people operate, in a way I hadn’t seen before.’

Sixties nostalgia

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Scott Johnson at Powerline has a quite gripping column today based on coming across a copy of Marcuse’s One Dimensional Man. He asks whether anyone reads it any more but as a coincidence perhaps, I was looking at my own copy just yesterday and thought I might give it a read for old time’s sake. A very powerful book in its time but today would hardly cause a ripple since its ideas are now absorbed into the thought processes of Presidents and Prime Ministers all across the Western world. But Scott also goes through a list of books each one of which was an important part of my own education, except for The Strawberry Statement for which I have no memory. How could I have let that one go by, but I can recall others he left out? Here is Scott’s full list:

Paul Goodman, Growing Up Absurd (published in 1960, restored to print in the NYRB Classics series, in which we learned how corporation deadened our souls).

Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (gone but not forgotten, Fanon makes a cameo appearance in Dreams From My Father, but of course).

R.D. Laing, The Politics of Experience (mental illness is good).

Carlos Castenada, The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge (the first in Castenada’s endless series of fictional sociological studies of an Indian shaman working wonders with psychedelic drugs…heavy!).

Norman O. Brown, Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History (hey, it inspired Jim Morrison…the book has an interesting chapter on Jonathan Swift).

James Simon Kunen, The Strawberry Statement: Notes of a College Revolutionary (turned into a lousy movie, now a collector’s item…damn, what did I do with my copy?).

Eldridge Cleaver, Soul on Ice (sick, sick, sick, and still in print…I recall that Eric Hoffer nailed it as ‘soul on horse manure’).

There are two sorts of people on the right today, those who were once on the left and those who weren’t. It is those of us who once were who are the ones more terrified about the left because we were there and know just how much there is to fear about the kinds of people we were but thankfully no longer are. I only wish there were a lot more like us and a lot less of the others who stayed as they were then. I used to think that the world would be a better place once we were finally gone from positions of power and influence but the startling reality is that our miseducation of the generation that followed has created a monster even more awful than we were ourselves. Gillard is infinitely worse than Hawke while Obama makes me wish we had Bill Clinton back again.

And when you finish Scott Johnson’s column, you really should go onto the column by Dan Henninger that inspired it. It’s short but here is the para that matters:

The original argument for the Obama presidency was that this was a new, open-minded and liberal man intent on elevating the common good. No one believes that now. This will be a second term of imposition. As he said in the inaugural: ‘Preserving our individual freedoms ultimately requires collective action.’ That is Marcusian.

Don’t know what Marcusian means? Then I worry you may not know just what you are up against.