Monthly Archives: October 2013

Right questions wrong answers

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Thomas Sowell and I have many things in common most importantly of which was that we both did our PhDs on Say’s Law and for both of us this was the subject of our first books: here’s his and this is mine. And once you understand Say’s Law, you will never again think of economics in the same way. Rather than Keynes having disproved this law, he made it unfashionable, and thus it has remained for the past three-quarters of a century. But unfashionable or not, it is the indispensable core of economic reasoning which is why its original name was the law of markets. If you want to understand how a market economy works, you must understand Say’s Law.

Anyway. Sowell has put together a column on the nomination of Janet Yellen as the next Chairman of the Federal Reserve (found here) and structures his comments around her incorrigible Keynesian approach to matters economic in much the same way I did myself the other day. This is from Sowell.

The Keynesian economists have staged a political comeback during the Obama administration. Janet Yellen’s nomination to head the Federal Reserve is the crowning example of that comeback.

Ms. Yellen asks: ‘Do policy-makers have the knowledge and ability to improve macroeconomic outcomes rather than making matters worse?’ And she answers: ‘Yes.’

The former economics professor is certainly asking the right questions — and giving the wrong answers.

The amazing part of the way Thomas Sowell writes is how much he can pack into a few hundred words. If you can read what he writes and still not at least start to think that maybe, just maybe, there is something to that classical economic theory after all then you are as incorrigible as Janet Yellen and about as clueless on how to manage an economy as well.

The rulers we elect are losing patience with us

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This is from an article by Ken Minogue published in the New Criterion in 2010. Its title is Morals & the Servile Mind.

My concern with democracy is highly specific. It begins in observing the remarkable fact that, while democracy means a government accountable to the electorate, our rulers now make us accountable to them. Most Western governments hate me smoking, or eating the wrong kind of food, or hunting foxes, or drinking too much, and these are merely the surface disapprovals, the ones that provoke legislation or public campaigns. We also borrow too much money for our personal pleasures, and many of us are very bad parents. Ministers of state have been known to instruct us in elementary matters, such as the importance of reading stories to our children. Again, many of us have unsound views about people of other races, cultures, or religions, and the distribution of our friends does not always correspond, as governments think that it ought, to the cultural diversity of our society. We must face up to the grim fact that the rulers we elect are losing patience with us.

It’s, of course, our fellow citizens who are losing patience. The ones we elect really couldn’t care less as long as we keep putting them back into power.

Will the US default? What will happen if it does?

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I don’t know if these continuing episodes of the Perils of Pauline are just there to sell newspapers or whether there is more to it and the US might really default on its debt but this is where we are right now. From The Washington Post:

A campaign to persuade House Republicans to lift the federal debt limit collapsed in humiliating failure Tuesday, leaving Washington careering toward a critical deadline just two days away, with no clear plan for avoiding a government default.

Senate leaders quickly moved to pick up the pieces, saying they were “optimistic” that they could reach agreement to advance an alternative proposal that would raise the debt limit through Feb. 7 and end a government shutdown, now in its third week.

But it was unclear whether a deal struck by Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) and Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) could pass the Senate before the Treasury Department exhausts its borrowing power Thursday.

So far as principle goes, the imperative of getting the US budget under control seems straightforward enough. But the politics for the President and the Democrats, looking forward to the elections 12 months from now, are much less certain. And with the possibility that the President – being a Bill Ayres protege and all – would actually prefer to harm the US than help it to prosper, what will happen and how it will unfold remains a mystery.

But at some stage either spending is going to start tapering off or the debt limit will not be increased is a certainty. Whether this is the moment is the question, and with the President adament about maintaining the level of spending – and therefore allowing debt to keep on rising – who knows? This may be the moment we find out what happens if the US is even technically able to default on its debt and then what happens if it does. Stay tuned.

Quadrant and the never ending threats to our freedoms

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There’s a new web page at Quadrant Online to celebrate the 500th issue of the magazine. What an extraordinary achievement. Congratulations to Quadrant and Keith Windschuttle, the latest in a long line of great editors, who have help keep our liberties alive. And congratulations to Roger Franklin, the online editor, who has made the site a daily requirement. The dangers never cease and Quadrant remains one of the most important of our own institutions in trying to hold back the many threats to our freedoms. If you come here you should also go there.

And as it happens, I have an article on the Quadrant website today dealing with these very threats to our freedoms which is basically an alert to an article by David Horowitz. This is the quote from David which I have cited but there is much more:

Today the Obama juggernaut is systematically bankrupting our country, and undoing our constitutional arrangements. Its contempt for consultative and representative government is relentlessly on display. This week Senate Majority leader Harry Reid defended his refusal to negotiate with Republicans over Obamacare and the debt in these words: ‘We are here to support the federal government. That’s our job.’ End quote. Forget about representing the people whom our Founders made sovereign. Forget what America is about.

The fact that I had a radical past allowed me to see much of this coming. But even I never thought we would be looking so soon at the prospect of a one-party state. Those words may sound hyperbolic, but take a moment to think about it. If you have transformed the taxing agency of the state into a political weapon – and Obama has; if you are setting up a massive government program to gather the financial and health information of every citizen, and control their access to care; and if you have a spy agency that can read the mail and listen to the communications of every individual in the country, you don’t really need a secret police to destroy your political opponents. Once you have silenced them, you can proceed with your plans to remake the world in your image.

I cannot tell whether the complacency comes from a deeper understanding that it can’t happen here or just from a belief that it can’t happen here even though it can. The article has been much linked to on websites such as this in the US but the likelihood that it will become discussed by the public in general is of course nigh on zero, mostly because the public in general has zero chance of even knowing such discussion is even taking place.

It’s not your country any more

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voting by sex and race 2012 us election

All the World War II vets out on the mall at the memorial or trying to keep Mt Rushmore open or visit a national park. Listen, it’s not your country any more so just shut up, keep working and pay your taxes.

Why should the ABC have a view about anything?

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An alert to this from Tim Blair who is now back and posting. It’s about whether we want a free (market) press or one overshadowed by a publicly funded media organisation who, not surprisingly, are muchly in favour of public funding for everything, including themselves. The article Tim has linked to is from The Telegraph in England and titled, “The BBC foists on us a skewed version of reality“. I’m not all that sure that even a press dependent on the market will be much an improvement given what we see in the United States but we can but try. From Janet Daley (the perfect name for someone commenting on the press), we find this observation amongst many others in an article worth reading in full:

Under the most serious peace-time threat to open and uncensored expression in centuries, the news media are plunged into a bloody bout of gratuitous self-harm. But what they are actually engaged in is a political argument about whether the purpose of journalism is to report the world as it is and to reflect the perceptions of people as they are – even if the results are sometimes ugly or unfair – or to purvey an idealised view of what life might be like if everyone felt and behaved differently.

You see, the ABC like the BBC is out to save us from ourselves and from the opinions we find in the media which provide discussions of the kinds of things most people agree with and are prepared to pay money to read.

So this is where the bigger question comes in: what is the dissemination of news for? For the BBC – by which I mean, for those who decide these things at the corporation – there is little doubt that the function of news broadcasting is to enlighten the public. I use that word advisedly, in its specialised sense, meaning not simply to inform but to ‘free from prejudice and superstition’.

BBC news output is specifically designed to counter what it sees as ignorance and popular prejudices. Its coverage of issues in which it believes such prejudices to be rife – immigration, for example – is intended to be instructional and, specifically corrective of what its managers think of, and describe openly in conversation, as the influence of the ‘Right-wing press’. . . .

The BBC approach to news is aimed precisely at those people who read the papers that are hated by its staff. It is intended to offer an alternative vision of reality in which immigration is not a threat to anyone, patriotism is a joke, religious belief (as opposed to ethnic identity) is not taken seriously, conflicting cultural values never create social problems and government spending is inherently virtuous.

At the ABC and not just there, the news is manipulated not by a sense of what’s newsworthy and important but by what those who edit believe will mould our opinions in the direction they would like them to be. If you are happy with the ABC wishlist view of the world shaping the kind of news you read, let us continue as we are. But if not, then an ABC 100% self-funded ought now to be high on the government agenda.

Cash registers and the modern economy

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Many years ago, around 1978, I did an article that I titled, “The Cash Register Revolution” about the soon-to-disappear mechanical cash registers which were to be replaced by the now ubiquitous electronic “point of sale” devices. The invention of the cash register, as I discovered, was an essential on the way to allowing modern business to exist. The inventor, a chap named Ritty (?), was being robbed blind by his employees in a one-for-you-and-one-for-me approach to putting money received into the till. So he invented his little apparatus which caught on, was bought up by the National Cash Register Company and there is now not a cash business possibly anywhere in the world that does not have its cash register into which all moneys taken in are to be placed.

cash register

Why mention it? Because I just came across an article, “Why Do Stores Give Receipts?” which comes with a nice photo of the receipt-giving machine. She (Megan McArdle) writes as I once did myself although that’s not how I remember the story exactly but you get the drift:

The history of the cash register is, by and large, the history of theft prevention. Oh, they were originally created as tallying machines for very high-volume businesses. But it was hard to convince businesses that they needed to spend $150 or $200 on a machine to hold cash, at a time when a good workman might earn a dollar or two a day.

And why do they give you are receipt?

They give you a receipt every time, annoying as it is, because they know you’ll glance at the total and notice if it’s very different from what you just paid. And maybe ask the clerk why, in the hearing of their manager.

Without the register and the receipts it issues, commerce and retail to the scale we now have would be impossible.

Hold the line

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Well it’s not a lot but it is something. Obama has knocked back the Republican proposals for ending the supposed government shut down which at least shows there actually had been some proposals. This is from Politico:

There is no agreement, Boehner said in a room in the Capitol Saturday, and there are no negotiations between House Republicans and the White House, since Obama rejected the speaker’s effort to lift the debt ceiling for six weeks and reopen government while setting up a budget negotiating process.

The Obama position is that there is nothing to negotiate. There is nothing to negotiate about debt, deficits, spending, the abusive use of the IRS, the domestic spying program, the stonewalling on Benghazi, the Obama-initiated wars and drone attacks, and on it goes. There is nothing that needs to be said to the Republicans because there is no need for compromise of any kind on any issue.

So now a crisis has been reached and it is not just who’s going to blink as if it’s nothing but a test of wills but how will the US be governed and its economy managed. Obama at best is a gross incompetent, and that’s the best alternative. I can only hope the Republicans hold the line and do not relent.

The prospect of a one-party state in the US

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I am like David Horowitz in having had communist parents and having grown up in a household in which plotting against the state with other subversives was second nature. In many ways it provides for us who have turned against the left a form of understanding that gives clarity for what to others are arguable perspectives. In this article Horowitz is trying to say something that should frighten you about the totalitarian world that is forming right before our eyes at a speed that is totally beyond any expectation.

His article is titled “The Threat We Face” and this is the central point about the direction in which the US is right now, right this minute, heading and taking us with it.

Today the Obama juggernaut is systematically bankrupting our country, and undoing our constitutional arrangements. Its contempt for consultative and representative government is relentlessly on display. This week Senate Majority leader Harry Reid defended his refusal to negotiate with Republicans over Obamacare and the debt in these words: ‘We are here to support the federal government. That’s our job.’ End quote. Forget about representing the people whom our Founders made sovereign. Forget what America is about.

The fact that I had a radical past allowed me to see much of this coming. But even I never thought we would be looking so soon at the prospect of a one-party state. Those words may sound hyperbolic, but take a moment to think about it. If you have transformed the taxing agency of the state into a political weapon – and Obama has; if you are setting up a massive government program to gather the financial and health information of every citizen, and control their access to care; and if you have a spy agency that can read the mail and listen to the communications of every individual in the country, you don’t really need a secret police to destroy your political opponents. Once you have silenced them, you can proceed with your plans to remake the world in your image.

I have written much the same recently myself over here. This was my final para in that post:

The full resources of the American government are being used in a punitive way against individuals and groups, against American citizens who disagree with the President. In reading not just the American media but even the right side blogs, the most astonishing part is the absence of expressions of genuine outrage. Maybe with the American media as latently totalitarian as it is there is nothing that can be done, and maybe no one writing a blog wants to be done over by the tax office, but if it doesn’t make you seriously angry, and not just a little frightened, I don’t know what would.

What can be done about anything I cannot at this stage imagine. The media in the United States are corrupted by their own grossly superficial and far left-oriented understanding of every issue of importance, from foreign policy through economics and down to the Constitutional protections of individual rights. That the use of the IRS to persecute individuals is not seen as an absolute abuse of power intolerable in anyone’s hands and is not portrayed loudly and regularly in this way by the media is the final proof that the notion of the fourth estate as a guarantor and protector of our freedoms is hollow. They are a major part of the problem for which solutions evade me.

Recognition of Obama for who he is and what he wants is the first place to start but how will the alarm be sent? How will anyone beyond a handful find out? Who will actually be the Paul Revere who will bring the message that the red press is perverting your freedoms? Where are the constituencies that can turn that concern into a policy of action? It’s not even all that obvious to most on this side of politics. To the other side, they are more than content because they are winning on the politics because they have virtually every means of communication in their hands. The national socialists are in charge in the US and if you don’t like it and try to say or do anything about it, they will soon see how much you like being done over by the IRS and that’s just for a start.