Monthly Archives: April 2019

And here as well

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Via Instapundit.

MAY THE SAME THING HAPPEN HERE: There Is No Left Left In Israel. “The most far-reaching consequence of the 2019 Israeli election may well be that it verified, beyond any reasonable doubt, that there is functionally no left left in Israel. It has become a country with a center, a right, and a far right, but no electorally viable left to speak of.”

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It’s not as if there is no welfare state. There is. Everyone seeks to find ways to make life easier for everyone, while the left are a bunch of socialist freaks, who also are even lax beyond sense about border protection. The left is filled with screwballs with a constituency who have no obvious understanding of the damage they inflict. And in this, I am not just referring to Israel.

Keynes’s 1933 letter to Harlan McCracken

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The letter you see I uncovered in 2008 in the Harlan Linneus McCracken Archive at Louisiana State University, which has now been published in the March 2019 issue of the Journal of the History of Economic Thought. It has already been published by me, but only in black and white. Here we see the letter as it actually is. If you would like to read more fully of the letter’s significance, you can go to:

Kates, Steven. 2008. “A Letter from Keynes to Harlan McCracken Dated 31st August 1933: Why the Standard Story on the Origins of the General Theory Needs to Be Rewritten.” History of Economics Review 47: 20–38.

The letter would be momentous were it not for the fact that it reveals that Keynes with certainty was reading other sources than those he had previously owned up to in writing The General Theory which he commenced writing in 1932 and which was finally published in 1936. The letter substantiates virtually beyond argument – there is always an argument – that Keynes took up the notion of demand deficiency because he had been reading Malthus at the time. Malthus had been the single most important economist to have argued for the importance of demand deficiency as a cause of recession and unemployment during the nineteenth century. Virtually every other economist at the time and through to 1936 thought Malthus was completely wrong. It was unanimously agreed among mainstream economists that the notion of demand deficiency was totally false.

Going further, it was from McCracken that Keynes took his definition of Say’s Law: “supply creates its own demand”. These words are found for the first time ever as a definition of Say’s Law in the very book Keynes is thanking McCracken for having sent to him and which he had “now read”.

The article the letter is attached to, and now published in the Journal of the History of Economic Thought, was written to demonstrates that “Say’s” Law not was invented by J.B. Say. No understanding of the classical meaning of Say’s Law can be found other than by going through the literature that followed the publication of Malthus’s Principles in 1820, not by reading Say’s Treatise, whose first edition was published in 1803. Moreover, “Say’s Law” was the name applied to this concept for the first time by Fred Taylor in the twentieth century. It was not a classical term. Keynes took the phrase “Say’s Law” from Taylor or from one of Taylor’s contemporaries. I am near enough the only person from whom this can be found out. Virtually no one else will even repeat it, and certainly no one is capable of refuting it since the term never shows up anywhere until it was coined by Taylor. Beyond that, no one ever said “supply creates its own demand” in relation to Say’s Law until it was said by McCracken.

You would not think there would be such a cover-up in something as esoteric as the History of Economic Thought, but the implications are explosive, the more so to the extent that others might begin to appreciate there is more in pre-Keynesian economic theory than anyone since 1936 has given it credit for.

In Trump’s America: Mr 53%

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Following the Mueller saga has been quite a diversion from politics as it normally is, but this had occurred to me as well: Rod Rosenstein may have appointed Mueller to save Trump from Obama’s FBI and DOJ.

At this point I do think it’s very possible that Rosenstein recognized the democrat-led conspiracy and had enough.  He realized that there was no chance Trump was going to receive fair treatment because of the wide spread corruption. He then appointed Robert Mueller- to take the Russian accusations out of the hands of the FBI and the corrupt Obama Intelligence Community. The last honest man at the top of the IC was Admiral Mike Rogers. Rosenstein released the letter describing the Mueller appointment, but in August Mueller gave Mueller an additional directive allegedly to specifically investigate Paul Manafort.

Mueller then packed his team with the most virulent and rabid anti-Trump people possible. This turned out to be fortuitous. The worst possible jury found no evidence of collusion or conspiracy, a conclusion from which democrats have yet to recover.

And the President does like to to accumulate enemies of the finest kind: Trump Climate Panel Could Expose Huge Fraud, Hence the Hysteria. Would Trump approve the Adani mine? What a question!

The collective freak out over President Donald Trump’s proposed Presidential Committee on Climate Science (PCCS) highlights the fact that the hysteria surrounding the man-made global-warming hypothesis is unscientific — and that it must be re-examined by competent, credible experts. According to scientists and experts, if the science on “climate change” were truly settled, Democrats, tax-funded climate alarmists, and the establishment media would all be celebrating another committee to confirm that “conclusion.” Instead, the unhinged shrieking over Trump’s plan to investigate the matter strongly suggests something very fishy is going on, critics argued. Indeed, there is a good chance that even more fraud could be revealed.

He also accumulates some of the best people as friends as well. WATCH: Candace Owens DESTROYS Democrat in congressional hearing after getting unfairly smeared. You may want to go back and read the story to see just why she was so angry.

Affirmative dissent

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This is a comment on a post with a self-explanatory title, The Looming Danger for Dissident Professors. It’s essentially why sites like this are necessary just to remind ourselves that it isn’t us who are nuts.

Friedrich Nietzsche once wrote “All sheep and no shepherd, everyone is the same, everyone wants to be the same — anyone who is different goes voluntarily to the Madhouse.”

Notwithstanding all of the purported liberal views, what exists today in academia is nothing but textbook fascism. Everyone is the same. Everyone wants to be the same. And anyone who differs from the mob is inherently “crazy & dangerous.” “Dangerous” because they believe that anyone engaging in “cognitive aggression” (i.e. expressing & defending a dissident viewpoint) will inevitably progress from the use of words to the use of automatic weapons — unless stopped. Hence the overwhelming effort to silence dissent and the repeated references to “safety.”

This is why I keep coming back to the Behavioral Intervention Teams and the increasing influence of the Psychologists in Education. This is where this stuff is coming from and the more I study it, the more truly terrifying it becomes — and I say this as someone who does not frighten easily, someone who comes from a commercial fishing background.

In order to brainwash someone, you must first isolate the person from all other support networks and anything that confirms the legitimacy of the views/values which you wish to eliminate. “Gaslighting” ceases to work when the subject of it is able to obtain independent confirmation that he/she/it isn’t imagining things. In the play, the gas lights really were dimming because the husband was using the gaslights upstairs (which dropped the pressure in the lines) — it took the police detective confirming that he also saw the lights dimming for her to believe what she saw happening with her own eyes. Likewise, psychological “gaslighting” falls apart when the subject is able to obtain independent confirmation of what he/she/it believes to be true.

Professor Abrams is thus dangerous because he essentially confirmed that the gaslights are dimming. People can’t be told that they’re imagining things anymore because they now have an academic citation defending their perception of reality.

And his willingness to persist in the defense of his views notwithstanding the overwhelming gauntlet of opposition he is enduring — well, there is a reason why I consider Behavioral Intervention Teams to be both scary and dangerous.

The article itself is worth the read. We are not as far gone here in Australia, but things always happen here after a delay.

Responses to The General Theory

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From The HET Website. A typical revolution from below, led by the young who knew nothing but wished to make the presence felt. A conceptual disaster, along the lines of Aristotle’s arguments on the charging of interest.

The response to the publication of John Maynard Keynes‘s General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (1936) was immediate and controversial – and a cleavage between young economists and their older counterparts was immediately carved.

From Cambridge, Keynes’s students rushed to publication to further explain his ideas: Joan Robinson (1937) and James E. Meade (1936, 1937), two of the members of Keynes’s “Circus”, produced particularly able “restatements” of the General Theory. The exposition of a third member of the Circus, Austin Robinson (1936, The Economist), reached a wider audience. Two of Keynes’s tutorial students also rushed to publish reviews:  W.B. Reddaway (1936, Economic Record) and D.G. Champernowne (1936, RES), with the latter being slightly more critical.

However, among the Cambridge professors, the consequences were grievously divisive (for an account, see Kahn, 1984; Skidelsky, 1992). J.M. Keynes almost completely ruptured his relationships with his old Cantabrigian colleagues – Arthur C. Pigou, Hubert D. Henderson, Dennis H. Robertson and Ralph G. Hawtrey. Although the strife was confined largely to personal exchanges within the Cambridge halls, some anger found its way into the printing presses. A.C. Pigou (1936, Economica), portrayed as the “villain” by the General Theory, tried to go immediately on the counterattack but his counterblast was feeble. H.D. Henderson (1936, Spectator) fired off an even more personally vindictive fusillade. In contrast, Dennis Robertson‘s (1936, QJE) reply had a bit more of substance and engendered a short journal debate with Keynes.

The generational differences in reception were also evident outside of Cambridge. Elsewhere in Britain, the youthful Abba Lerner (1936, Int Lab Rev),  John Hicks (1936, EJ) and Roy Harrod (1937, Econometrica) produced quite sympathetic reviews.

Surprisingly, neither of Keynes’s old rivals at the London School of Economics, Friedrich A. von Hayek and Lionel Robbins, reviewed or even responded to Keynes’s new book. But the damage was permanent: the enthusiasm for the General Theory by their most promising students – particularly  Lerner, Hicks and, eventually, Kaldor – was the beginning of the end of the L.S.E.’s attempt to steal the crown of English economics from Cambridge.

From America, the initial response was cold: the main reviews by Jacob Viner (1936, QJE), Alvin Hansen (1936, JPE), Joseph Schumpeter (1936, JASA), Frank Taussig (1936, QJE), Wassily Leontief (1936, QJE), C.O. Hardy (1936, AER) and Frank Knight (1937, Canadian JE) were almost uniformly negative. Of all his reviewers, Keynes only deigned to respond to Viner’s in his now-famous article, “The General Theory of Employment” (Keynes, 1937, QJE).

With the unfortunate exception of Nazi Germany (where a translation was published “on paper rather better than usual and the price not much higher than usual”, as Keynes put it), Keynes’s General Theory was largely ignored on the European continent. The few reviews that emerged from there, particularly those by Gustav Cassel (1937, Int Lab Rev) from Sweden and Gottfried Haberler (1936, ZfN) from Austria, were quite hostile.  In France, the professional (and personal) hostility of influential conservative economists such as Jacques Rueff guaranteed that the book would not even be translated until 1948.

Further evidence of The Rise of Anti-Christian Sentiment in the West

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Received today from Professor Augusto Zimmermann in WA.

Dear Friend,

I would like to call your attention to a very serious matter.

As you know, I am organising in Perth a major conference on religious freedom entitled ‘Religious Freedom at the Crossroads – The Rise of Anti-Christian Sentiment in the West’

To be held at Sheridan College between 14-15 June 2019, our list of speakers/moderators includes some our finest legal minds in Australia – Neville Rochow QC, Christopher Brohier, John Gilmour QC, Martyn Isles, and many otherms.

Our keynote speaker is none other than a leading American constitutional lawyer, the Distinguished Emeritus Professor William Wagner of Western Michigan University, Thomas Cooley Law School.

And yet, our historical legal-academic conference on religious freedom has been arbitrarily CENSORED by Facebook.

As seen attached, Facebook arbitrarily refuses to allow us to post any information about the forthcoming religious freedom conference.

Facebook simply claims that our religious freedom conference has VIOLATED COMMUNITY STANDARDS.

This is absolutely appalling and it objectively constitutes an egregious instance of censorship of ideas on social media.

Perhaps the PM’s idea of combating ‘right-wing extremism’ on social media has already started to produce its unintended consequences…

Religious freedom is most definitely at the crossroads and Facebook has just proven the point.

I guess this only reveals a DESPERATE NEED to hold a legal conference of this nature in Australia.

May I please ask you a favour?

Religious freedom is DEFINITELY at stake in Australia. Please consider heavily PROMOTING THIS EVENT and AS MUCH AS POSSIBLE.

Below are the relevant details about this important conference that has been ARBITRARILY CENSORED BY FACEBOOK.

I am proud to have gathered a ‘dream team’ of leading lawyers and legal academics in the field.

Thank you very much in anticipation for you kind attention.

Warm regards,

Prof Augusto Zimmermann

An absence of love recession

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To accompany my post on The Lie of the Century there is now this complementary post: The Happiness Recession which has this sub-head:

Today’s young adults are replacing church and marriage with friendships. But there’s one thing for which they have no substitute.

Here’s the core of the story.

The United States is in the middle of a “sex recession.” Nowhere has this sex recession proved more consequential than among young adults, especially young men. Some academics and journalists have now begun grumbling about what they are calling a “moral panic” about the decline in young-adult sex. Before the 2018 data came out, the Daily suggested that the decline in sex was modest, and the sociologist Daniel Carlson claimed that the amount of sex one has “is a weak predictor of how satisfied you are with your sex life.” More important than frequency, the argument went, is the quality of your sexual relationship.

Being from a time before the Sexual Revolution I can see plain as day what has gone wrong. Once, a date, every date, even at 13 or 14, was an interview towards a lifetime together in a single monogamous marriage that included children of one’s own. At 13-14 it was just a trial run, but never involved actual sexual activity. Sexual relations in virtually all instances only came with real genuine commitment on both sides.

And then, after the pill became common, and with the publication of the Just Do It Playboy Philosophy, everyone just did it, so why, exactly get married. And then feminist philosophy that filled women with resentment because boys treated girls like, pardon the expression, but like girls and not boys. So here we are, and as the video below shows, there is not the slightest clue what has gone wrong, because the issue is not a “sex” recession, but an “absence of love” recession.

How to fix it is an unknown, but stories like this take us farther away while The Lie of the Century explains the problem but does not tell us what to do.

The lie of the century

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The Secret to Lasting Love Is Sexual Inequality.

Countless women today face the exact same problem [ie finding a man to marry and have children with]: They’re successful in life but not in love. And their quandary is bigger than they realize, for if and when these women do find a husband, it will not be the end of their struggle. Finding a man to marry today is only half the battle.

The other half is keeping him.

Although “keeping him” isn’t really the right phrase since men aren’t the ones leaving their marriages in droves. Women are: 70 percent of divorces are initiated by wives. Ergo, even when women do marry, they have no idea how to stay married.

There is more than one culprit for the sad state of gender relations, but feminism is at the top of the list. It was feminism that taught women that they can, and should, have sex like a man: with no strings attached. It was feminism that told women to “never depend on a man” and to resent husbands and children for holding women back. It was feminism that encouraged women to make work, not family, the center of their universe. It was feminism that belittled all things feminine.

Most importantly, it was feminism that taught Americans to believe the sexes are “equal.” Not equal in value—equal as in the same. If parents and society would get out of the way, feminists claim, the sexes would become interchangeable: Women and girls would make the same choices boys and men do, and men and boys would make the same choices women and girls do. After all, all those differences you see between the sexes are purely a result of social conditioning. Biology has nothing to do with it.

It was the lie of the century.

Now read the rest to the end. As for the author:

Suzanne Venker is an author, columnist, and relationship coach known as The Feminist “Fixer.” A wife of 20 years and mother of two, she liberates women from the equality narrative and inspires them to feel secure in their femininity and courageous about finding lasting love. Her most recent book, “The Alpha Female’s Guide to Men & Marriage,” helps bossy women learn how to become better wives. You can find Suzanne at TheFeministFixer.com