Monthly Archives: August 2014

Is he clueless or wilfully destructive?

Posted on by
Reply

Is Obama clueless or is he wilfully destructive. My personal view is that he has set out to sabotage the US but he may just be dumb and ignorant. Sometimes, though, he puts his finger right on the problem even though he doesn’t know what problem exactly that is. Here’s a quote from him in a story where he’s complaining about how the media is so against him that he can’t get anything done.

We need to rebuild our infrastructure. You go to the Singapore airport and then you come back to one of our airports and you say, huh? We’re not acting like a superpower.

He has so distorted the direction of expenditure and investment in the US (see Solyndra, GM etc) that resources have been poured into so many non-value-adding forms of expenditure that the US is buckling at the knees. It will soon be a poor country. It is running down its capital (and by this I means its capital stock, not money) with little being done to maintain what already exists, that in no time at all the real standard of living will cascade down. Singapore is not run by socialists, the United States is.

Sickened by 18c

Posted on by
Reply

We need to become a civil society in the precise meaning of the term. So we should stop specifically identifying people by their personal affiliations and use a code known to all but not personal. So, for example, the group that the following person is a member of, whatever it might be, would be called, let us say, 18c.

severed-head-18c

Then you could go around saying that you are disgusted by 18c and the kind of things they do and no one would be offended any more.

Facebook enemies

Posted on by
Reply

From Coming Out as Pro-Israel on Facebook by Danusha V. Goska:

Anti-Israel voices are exploiting and in a perverse way celebrating human suffering in Gaza, because publicly bemoaning that suffering gives them the opportunity to play at being humanitarian while not actually doing anything, and to say nasty things about Jews while dodging censure.

A long article well worth the read.

It’s the media that keep Obama’s presidency alive

Posted on by
Reply

It’s not as if everyone doesn’t know. It’s not the fear of speaking truth to power, it is the certain knowledge that pointing out the facts will have the media attack you as viciously as it can. Michele Bachmann tried to do what she could but who even amongst her own colleagues was willing to put their political future on the line. Still what Horowitz says is the truth, but saying it to us at National Review Online makes no difference of any kind to the way the world continues to evolve:

Barack Obama deliberately set out to lose the war in Iraq, and he did. He defied the advice of his joint chiefs of staff to secure America’s formidable military presence and keep 20,000 troops in country, and left Iraq to its own devices and the tender mercies of Iran. In doing so, he betrayed every American and Iraqi who gave his life to create a free Iraq and keep it out of the clutches of the terrorists.

Iraq is now a war zone dominated by the terrorist forces of the Islamic State, whose rise Obama’s policies fostered. Both his secretaries of state praised the animal Bashar Assad as a “reformer” and a man of “peace,” helping him to thwart his domestic opposition. The Islamic State was born out of the Syrian chaos that ensued.

Far worse was Obama’s open support for America’s mortal enemy, the Muslim Brotherhood, spawner of al-Qaeda and Hamas. During the “Arab Spring,” Obama essentially put America’s weight behind the legitimization of this murderous organization that had been outlawed for 40 years for its assassinations and conspiracies against the Egyptian regime. Secretary of State Clinton gave totally unfounded assurances to the world that the Brotherhood was ready to become part of the democratic process and give up its 90-year holy war against infidels, Jews in particular but also — and explicitly — America. During the Brotherhood’s brief tenure as the government in Egypt Obama gave these genocidal zealots more than a billion dollars in American aid and F-16 fighter-bombers that could easily reach Israel’s major population centers, which for 60 years the Brotherhood had sworn to destroy.

The word Horowitz then uses to describe Obama is “feckless”. Spare me. What a pathetic useless word. How weak and insipid! The right word is traitorous. Obama’s sympathies are with those who would wish to tear down Western civilisation. But unsayable and therefore unsaid even by David Horowitz.

Judaism and England

Posted on by
Reply

Daniel Hannan has an exceptionally interesting article on the English and the Jews. I liked the whole article but this was nicely put as well.

I’ve written this blog as a lengthy reply to those of my fellow-countrymen – by no means only Muslim Britons – who ask why Britain so often seems to give Israel the benefit of the doubt. If we’re honest, we do sometimes apply a double standard. It’s true, for example, as anti-Israel campaigners like to point out, that we are agitated about Iran acquiring nuclear technology while making no fuss about Israel doing so. But there is a pretty obvious reason for such inconsistency: we can’t imagine that Israel would ever aim its missiles at us.

When we look at Israel, we see a free-market, law-based, individualist democracy which has retained many Anglosphere characteristics – parliamentary rule, the common law and, at least when it comes to intellectual and commercial life, the English language. These things are bound to create, in the literal sense, sympathy: fellow-feeling rooted in common experience.

The evolving nature of the history of economic thought

Posted on by
Reply

An email to a colleague in Europe who is going off to the Congress on J.-B. Say and the entrepreneur at the end of August.

I am very pleased to hear from you and to find you are heading off to this Congress. It seems exceptionally interesting and the focus on the entrepreneur has been for too long ignored within economic theory and policy. There was some interest expressed to me about my going there as well but it has unfortunately come to nothing. It would have been a quite long journey and as I also have a conference in Hong Kong just after may have been too much of an excursion. But whatever might have been the original interest in my attendance, nothing has come of it so I am off to Hong Kong which will be a bit easier than the 20,000 mile round trip going to France would have required. Still, I would have liked to have gone but that’s life.

The seriously interesting part for me, but probably of little interest to anyone looking at what Say was writing in 1803, is that I have written what amounts to Say’s Treatise for the 21st century. I will attach a blog post I did on the book, but it is about nothing less than the crucial role of the entrepreneur combined with an understanding of Say’s Law as expressed by Say, Ricardo, James Mill and John Stuart Mill. I am the living embodiment of those values but probably 150 years behind the times, but in my view, also about 15-20 years before my time. The fact of this conference is a sign of the subterranean changes going on. But it is hard for anyone who has grown up on aggregate demand and math ec to understand what’s required if you remove AD from within macro and start treating the future as genuinely uncertain. What happens then is you end up with the classical theory of the cycle which no one any longer understands. You should be able to read the back cover of the text in the blog post attached which explains all this in more detail.

I should also mention one other reason I was pleased to hear from you. Had you not written, I would not have known that my post to the SHOE website had actually been posted since it drew not a single response and google mail doesn’t post returned emails that one has sent out oneself. My campaign to save HET from the historians and philosophers of science seems to fall on deaf ears, but the more I engage in this debate, the most astonished I am at how misconceived their ideas are. Sure certain aspects of HET are HaPoS but that is not anywhere near HET’s core significance. I really do believe that HET has been overrun by philosophers and sociologists who have almost no interest in economic issues other than as a peripheral matter upon which they can contemplate everything else under the sun aside from the way an economy works. I think that because HET in Australia retains its original essence almost entirely, that the shifts that are going on elsewhere were almost invisible to us when they came to try to remove HET from economics which is why we all rose up as one. Now with conferences such as this in Boulogne-sur-Mer, where the central interest is mainly in understanding how economies function but using past economists as a vehicle, there may be a shift back coming into play. My intervention to preserve HET, however much it seems to have been resented by some of our American and European colleagues, was just in time. Had HET gone to HaPoS, it would have died within the decade within departments of economics. It would have become as relevant to economics as the history of physics is to physicists.

Finally, I am going to copy into this email my young colleague from Auchy so he can know what’s going on. I hope you enjoy the conference which I hope will be a great success and please do keep me informed.

Kind regards

And what if the planet is cooling?

Posted on by
Reply

There is so much evidence of global cooling at the moment so that given the preoccupation with AGW, the consequences could be more catastrophic than anything anyone is remotely contemplating precisely because no one is thinking about this at all. Here’s how the article starts:

We may be witnessing the sun’s last dying gasps before entering into a long slumber. The impact of that slumber on Earth’s climate remains the subject of growing scientific speculation.

In 2008 William Livingston and Matthew Penn of the National Solar Observatory in Tucson, in a controversial paper that contradicted conventional wisdom and upset global warming theorists, predicted that sunspots could more or less disappear after 2015, possibly indicating the onset of another Little Ice Age. They stated, “The occurrence of prolonged periods with no sunspots is important to climate studies, since the Maunder Minimum was shown to correspond with the reduced average global temperatures on the Earth.” The Maunder Minimum lasted for approximately 70 years from about 1645 to 1715, and was marked by bitter cold, widespread crop failures, and severe human privation.

And this is how the article ends:

The upshot for scientists and world leaders should be clear, particularly since other scientists in recent years have published analyses that also indicate that global cooling could be on its way. Climate can and does change toward colder periods as well as warmer ones. Over the last 20 years, some $80 billion has been spent on research dominated by the assumption that global temperatures will rise. Very little research has investigated the consequences of the very live possibility that temperatures will plummet. Research into global cooling and its implications for the globe is long overdue.

Make hay while the sun shines is a concept a bit out of fashion. But there may come a time not that far off that we will deeply regret our attempts to keep the planet from warming by killing off our carbon-based energy production. If the planet is about to cool we will find what “severe human privation” really means in practice.

Unfit to lead

Posted on by
Reply

This is what the most clueless and unfit President in American history said today:

“I know that many of you are rightly concerned about any American military action in Iraq, even limited strikes like these,” he said. “I understand that. I ran for this office in part to end our war in Iraq and welcome our troops home, and that’s what we’ve done. As commander in chief, I will not allow the United States to be dragged into fighting another war in Iraq.”

If he doesn’t want to fight it in Iraq, he or someone else will have to fight it somewhere else. This is from Diane Feinstein, for goodness sake, Democrat Senator from California:

The head of the Senate Intelligence Committee on Friday said the extremist group the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS or ISIL) must be confronted forcefully by the U.S., though she stopped short of calling for boots on the ground.

“It takes an army to defeat an army, and I believe that we either confront ISIL now or we will be forced to deal with an even stronger enemy in the future,” Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) said in a statement.

The group is “operating with military expertise, advancing across Iraq and rapidly consolidating its position,” she added.

“Inaction is no longer an option,” according to Feinstein.

The senior lawmaker also said it had “become clear” that the group is recruiting and training fighters from Western countries and possibly sending them back to cities in the U.S. and Europe in order to “attack us in our backyard.”

“We simply cannot allow this to happen,” Feinstein warned.

Marking the start of World War I

Posted on by
Reply

World War I was the most momentous historical event of the past century, having consequences that continue to haunt us still. The collapse of the Ottoman Empire, to take only one example, continues to reverberate through the Middle East with no end in sight. I have tried to engage with what is being written but so much of it feels remote. It might just as well be about the Napoleonic Wars. Not that I have written anything that will change any of that, but I did post a piece at Quadrant Online only because I could not let the moment go by without at least saying something. And what I have written about is my favourite book on the war, which is Frank Furedi’s First World War: Still No End in Sight which at least sees the war as the momentous event it is. The article is about the succession of wars we have fought since 1924, each one to defend entirely different countries even though those countries did manage to keep their names.

That WWI broke up ancient empires and created new ones is not in doubt. That we would be as different as different could be had WWI been somehow prevented I also have no doubt. But such is the way of the world. Major events happen, as they will continue to do. What Furedi does is remind you that things change and nothing stays as it is. There is no permanence, and that everything you think really matters, down to the core values by which you set your moral compass, is but windblown ephemera whose existence a century from now cannot be even remotely guaranteed.

We live in our own time in a particular place and can be lucky or unlucky in how it turns out. A hundred years from now is as unimaginable to us as we would have been to the lads who joined up at the start of the war a century ago.

FME2 cover

Posted on by
Reply

fme2 cover_Page_1

fme2 cover_Page_2

The cover of the second edition. I’d forgotten about the first of the cover endorsements. It was provided by a reviewer at Choice which is the magazine subscribed to by libraries to help them choose which books to buy.

Free Market Economics is virtually a must read for serious economists…. Highly recommended.

The second edition should be available in about a month.