Category Archives: Books and movies

The Green Prince

Posted on by
Reply

I meet people all the time who tell me what a great film The Green Prince is, but until someone tells me something to still my conviction that Moab is anything other than a double agent working for Hamas, I will think it made perfect sense for the Israelis to have let him, and his Mossad handler, go their own way. And among the various issues that keep me sceptical to the hilt is that Moab lives free, travels back and forth, and makes a great show of everything, except support for the Israeli state. Here is the reality of a Palestinian youth who comes out in support of Israel.

Palestinian threats against Mohammad Zoabi and why there is no peace

He’s hiding in the U.S., while his anti-Israel Knesset member cousin is lionized in Western media.

The contrast in the story is between him and his cousin, Haneen, who is an actual member of the Israeli Parliament.

A few weeks ago Haneen Zoabi enjoyed a mostly sympathetic portrayal in The Washington Post. According to the Post, “To her supporters, Zoabi, 45, is a Palestinian lioness speaking truth to the Israeli establishment by asserting the rights of the 20 percent of Israel’s population who are Arab Muslims and Christians.” Because that, of course, is what an Israeli Arab is supposed to do. But the politician Zoabi has legal channels to fight her fight. So maybe she’s an underdog, but she’s a pretty well-protected one.

The teen Zoabi, on the other hand, had to run away because he had no effective protections against those who hate Israel like his cousin. The lack of attention to his plight means that the media only favors certain underdogs – the underdogs who espouse their own approved views. The irony is that Haneen’s career would not be possible if Israel wasn’t the beacon of freedom Mohammad praises. Mohammad Zoabi has displayed real courage in fighting his lonely fight in an intolerant society; he’s not a phony like Haneen, who gets her hateful screeds excused as “speaking truth.” When will his courage get the attention it deserves?

When I hear “The Green Prince” say the same as this young boy, then I will trust him, but not until.

[Via Legal Insurrection]

Atheism is the greatest delusion of all

Posted on by
Reply

Last night, Christmas eve, I came home and read my freshly bought copies of Standpoint and The Spectator, both of which had the same ad for a book by one John Marsh titled, The Liberal Delusion: The Roots of our Current Moral Crisis. The title of the ad was: “Did Einstein Believe in God?” And after reading the text of the ad, I’m afraid I will have to get the book. This is from an article by Marsh, that I have chopped through to remove passages where other arguments are interwoven, to leave only what is found in the title, which was the same title as the ad: Did Einstein Believe in God?.

Is there clear unequivocal evidence that Einstein did believe in God? . . . The following quotations from Einstein are all in Jammer’s book:

“Behind all the discernible concatenations, there remains something subtle, intangible and inexplicable. Veneration for this force is my religion. To that extent, I am in point of fact, religious.”

“Every scientist becomes convinced that the laws of nature manifest the existence of a spirit vastly superior to that of men.”

“Everyone who is seriously involved in the pursuit of science becomes convinced that a spirit is manifest in the laws of the universe – a spirit vastly superior to that of man.”

“The divine reveals itself in the physical world.”

“My God created laws… His universe is not ruled by wishful thinking but by immutable laws.”

“I want to know how God created this world. I want to know his thoughts.”

“What I am really interested in knowing is whether God could have created the world in a different way.”

“This firm belief in a superior mind that reveals itself in the world of experience, represents my conception of God.”

“My religiosity consists of a humble admiration of the infinitely superior spirit, …That superior reasoning power forms my idea of God.”

Further confirmation that Einstein believed in a transcendent God comes from his conversations with his friends. David Ben-Gurion, the former Prime Minister of Israel, records Einstein saying “There must be something behind the energy.” And the distinguished physicist Max Born commented, “He did not think religious belief a sign of stupidity, nor unbelief a sign of intelligence.” Einstein did not believe in a personal God, who answers prayers and interferes in the universe. But he did believe in an intelligent mind or spirit, which created the universe with its immutable laws. What Einstein actually said is:

“I am not an atheist, and I don’t think I can call myself a pantheist.”

“Then there are the fanatical atheists whose intolerance is of the same kind as the intolerance of the religious fanatics and comes from the same source.”

“There is harmony in the cosmos which I, with my limited human mind, am able to recognise, yet there are people who say there is no God. But what really makes me angry is that they quote me to support such views.”

Einstein takes the opposite point of view: “A legitimate conflict between science and religion cannot exist. Science without religion is lame; religion without science is blind.”

Max Jammer was a personal friend of Einstein and Professor of Physics at Bar-Ilan University in Israel. His book is a comprehensive survey of Einstein’s writing, conversations and speeches on God and religion. In his book, Jammer wrote, “Einstein was neither an atheist nor an agnostic” and he added, “Einstein renounced atheism because he never considered his denial of a personal God as a denial of God. This subtle but decisive distinction has long been ignored.” His conclusion is that Einstein believed in God, albeit not a God who answers prayers. Eduard Büsching sent a copy of his book Es gibt keinen Gott (There is no God) to Einstein, who suggested a different title: Es gibt keinen persönlichen Gott (There is no personal God). However in his letter to Büsching, Einstein commented, “A belief in a personal God is preferable to the lack of any transcendental outlook.” According to Jammer, “Not only was Einstein not an atheist, but his writings have turned many away from atheism, although he did not set out to convert anyone”. Einstein was very religious; he wrote, “Thus I came – despite the fact that I was the son of entirely irreligious (Jewish) parents – to a deep religiosity.”

On Spinoza, Einstein said, “I believe in Spinoza’s God, who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists, not in a God who concerns himself with the fates and actions of human beings.” Spinoza wrote, “The view of certain people that I identify God with nature is quite mistaken.” The French philosopher Martial Guéroult suggested the term panentheism, rather than pantheism, to describe Spinoza’s view of the relation between God and the universe. The Oxford English Dictionary defines ‘panentheism’ as the theory or belief that God encompasses and interpenetrates the universe, but at the same time is greater than, and independent of it. So panentheism is similar to pantheism, but crucially in addition believes that God exists as a mind or a spirit. The idea that God is both transcendent and immanent is also a major tenet of both Christianity and Judaism.

To sum up: Einstein was – like Newton before him – deeply religious and a firm believer in a transcendent God. However Einstein rejected anthropomorphic and personal understandings of the word ‘God’. His beliefs may be seen as a form of Deism: “the belief in the existence of a Supreme Being as the source of finite existence, with rejection of revelation and the supernatural doctrines of Christianity” (The Oxford English Dictionary).

I am no Spinoza or Einstein, but of all possibilities, the absence of some creator presence in the universe seems the least likely possibility of all.

FURTHER THOUGHTS: Not that it can influence anyone either one way or the other, but this is just something to note: RELIGIOUS PEOPLE MUCH HAPPIER THAN OTHERS, NEW STUDY SHOWS. As it says in the first line:

A strong correlation exists between religiosity and personal happiness, according to a new study by the Austin Institute for the Study of Family and Culture.

Who knows the cause and effect, and which way it runs, nor is happiness the reason to feel the existence of a transcendent presence in the universe. Atheism just seems an unnatural act, where the incredible impossibility of our existence must be denied, and one’s face set against all the evidence to the contrary.

In unity there is treason

Posted on by
Reply

Hal Colebatch takes the domestic shame of half the population and exposes the Australian left to ridicule on the American Spectator website. WINNING THE PM’S HISTORY PRIZE AND UPSETTING THE LEFTY LUVVIES is the heading, but the sub-head is more to the point:

A study of labor union treachery during World War II.

The part that was always something of a mystery is why our communist unions would subvert our war effort while the Japanese forces were on the march in our direction. Here’s the answer:

It does not take a very profound knowledge of World War II to know Stalin was not at war with Japan until the very end, and had nothing to lose by Australian Communists damaging the Pacific War effort. An important and scholarly U.S. book, Stalin’s Secret Agents, by M. Stanton Evans and Herbert Romerstein, reminds us that Stalinist Russia was not at war with Japan until the very last few days of the war (after Hiroshima). Japanese ships were still coming and going out of Vladivostok through nearly all the war. Most importantly, the authors point out that Stalin did not want a quick and overwhelming allied victory in the Pacific until he had moved troops from Europe and was positioned to take a share of the spoils.

The left are a menace at all times and in all places. There is a kind of insanity that pervades everything they do. It is impossible to understand their actions then, but you would think they would be at least somewhat ashamed of what they did, and I suppose their denial of the facts does show that they are unwilling to accept the reality of the kinds of things they once stood for. But how different are they now if this is the kind of thing that comes out of their keyboards. Colebatch again:

There was some applause at the end of my speech but it did not take long to discover that, with a conservative author winning a major national literary prize, probably, as blogger and wag Tim Blair said, for the first time ever, the leftie luvvies were furious (Tim telephoned Perth to tell my daughter). Twitter was going berserk even before the ceremony finished. Leading the charge was one Mike Carlton, whose own entry, a rehashing of a naval engagement in World War I, had not won a prize. (I had previously written critically of another book by him and received a delightful note from him replete with four-letter words, a practice that is said to have got him sacked from the Sydney Morning Herald.)

He claimed my book was both “badly researched” and “fiction,” though how it could be both I am not sure. It could only be untrue if I or the ex-soldiers, sailors, and airmen who contacted me with first-person accounts, the various memoirs, unit histories, and official documents that I quoted from, were lying. I believe the man who risked their lives to defend our country were telling the truth. Where possible I quoted service numbers to help ensure accuracy.

Carlton also claimed that one of my informants, W.S. Monks — who said a strike at the end of the war prevented him and other men returning from Japanese prison-camps from being disembarked from HMS Speaker — did not exist, despite the fact an hour-long interview with him exists on YouTube.

They have no shame, these people, only their delusions.

Mr. Joseph Mallord William Turner RA

Posted on by
Reply

turner the slave ship

This is not a movie for everyone, which I only know because the people I went with thought it was about an hour too long. I, on the other hand, could have gone on another hour or so, and that was after two and a half hours already. If you are looking for car chases, or romantic liaisons between young persons with movie star looks, this is not for you. But if you are interested in the life story of a great artist that begins with more than half his life already past, that is, when he is an old man, and full of the tics that come with having lived a life, then this is a film you should see. It is 98% for critics and 90% for audiences at Rotten Tomatoes; the more plebeian IMDb gives it 7.0.

The film is Mr. Turner and is about the great early nineteenth century artist William Turner. On the day I was told I had passed my PhD I went out and bought a copy of “The ‘Fighting Temeraire’ tugged to her Last berth to be broken up”, which I had long admired, but needed a serious reason to spend the money. It hung in my office for years, and I have never been to London without going to the National Gallery to see it.

But about Turner, I knew very little, astonishingly little. I know his paintings, a touch of his philosophy and hardly a thing about his life. If nothing else, you end up knowing more than you otherwise would have, and all of it is of interest. And to the extent that Wikipedia is to be counted on, the film follows his life more or less in the way it was. The scenes at the RA, or with his fellow artist Benjamin Haydon, are haunting.

There are two parts to the film that particularly appealed to me. First, it is the cinematography. Serious effort was made to recreate the world that Turner lived in as seen through his eyes. You see the seascapes he had seen, and if you know his paintings, you see a recreation of what he saw himself. “The Fighting Temeraire” makes a brilliant and unexpected entrance. Obviously to others as well, this is the Turner painting that matters.

But what truly got to me was its philosophy, which was Turner’s philosophical thinking, at least so far as I understand it. “The Fighting Temeraire” is not some conservative lament on the disappearance of the old, but a depiction of the coming of the new. It is the tugboat that is, in its own way, the star, as a representation of the different world emerging out of the past. I don’t think this is a spoiler, but the scene near the very end where Turner sees the first of the Pre-Raphaelite paintings being hung at the RA, and which brings an enigmatic smile to his face which is not explained, is part of that approach to his life that is brought out. I think here, too, he may have also admired the new world of artistic expression that was about to descend. There are many more touches like it in the film, but I will say no more, other than to suggest you go see it for yourself.

Kaiser Bill and history

Posted on by
Reply

When my son did history in his final year of high school, his major school project for the year was a paper on the origins of World War I, which he attributed to the German Kaiser. His teacher, reminding me again of why no one should stake their school career on subjects that are affected by the personal opinions of the marker, didn’t agree and gave him a relatively poor mark. Since university entrances in years of grade inflation are a precarious issue, it was always something that has remained a live issue with me, since I thought my son was actually right, and certainly right enough to have done better in a high school paper. Which brings me to this article by Joh Derbyshire on The Legacy of the Mad Kaiser.

According to Derbyshire, the most villainous person of the twentieth century was Lenin, a most worthy choice. But who then was second?

As a candidate for runner-up in the 20th-century villain pageant, I would nominate Kaiser Wilhelm II, the monarch of Germany from 1888 to 1918. This comes from reading John Röhl’s concise biography of the Kaiser, published this summer.

There is not much in the way of evidence in the article, so I may have to get the book, but there is this:

There is ample documentation in Röhl’s book of the Kaiser’s eagerness for war, for victory over France and Russia. He was sure that Britain, the third member of the Triple Entente, would not intervene. His ambassadors in London, and British government ministers, and his royal British relatives, kept trying to set him straight; but what was their knowledge of Britain compared with his?

And, of course, it was his government that sent Lenin to Moscow in a sealed train in 1917. We are all overrun by history. Sweet and seemly it is to live in uninteresting times.

Samuelson v Tarshis – a battle of the books

Posted on by
Reply

On the discussion on the HET website over introductory texts in economics, there is quite a bit on how the first Keynesian text in the US, Lorie Tarshis’s, The Elements of Economics, was killed off by an attack by William F. Buckley, which cleared the way for Samuelson to take the field in his own more cautiously written Keynesian tract. This story about Buckley and Tashis is an old established myth within the left of the economics community (which means most of it). This is the start of Buckley’s assessment, which has quite a bit to say for it, and is very prescient:

“Marx himself, in the course of his lifetime, envisaged two broad lines of action that could be adopted to destroy the bourgeoisie: one was violent revolution; the other, a slow increase of state power, through extended social services, taxation, and regulation, to a point where a smooth transition could be effected from an individualist to a collectivist society. The Communists have come to scorn the latter method, but it is nevertheless evident that the prescience of their most systematic and inspiring philosopher has not been thereby vitiated.

It is a revolution of the second type, one that advocates a slow but relentless transfer of power from the individual to the state, that has roots in the Department of Economics at Yale, and unquestionably in similar departments in many colleges throughout the country. The documentation that follows should paint a vivid picture.” — William F. Buckley, Jr. God and Man at Yale: The Superstitions of Academic Freedom, Henry Regery, 1951, p. 46-47.

And I might also mention Buckley’s attitude to Keynes, also from the same source:

The individualist insists that drastic depressions are the result of credit inflation; (not excessive savings, as the Keynesians would have it) which at all times in history has been caused by direct government action or by government influence. As for aggravated unemployment, the individualist insists that it is exclusively the result of government intervention through inflation, wage rigidities, burdensome taxes, and restrictions on trade and production such as price controls and tariffs. The inflation that comes inevitably with government pump-priming soon catches up with the laborer, wipes away any real increase in his wages, discourages private investment, and sets off a new deflationary spiral which can in turn only be counteracted by more coercive and paternalistic government policies. And so it is that the “long run” is very soon a-coming, and the harmful effects of government intervention are far more durable than those that are sustained by encouraging the unhampered free market to work out its own destiny.

The true reason that Samuelson won out is because it is a far better book, much more accessible. The macroeconomic side, with its C+I+G diagrams and others of a similar kind is a fantastic improvement in the underlying power of explanation. I have first editions of both Samuelson and Tarshis, and there is no comparison. Even the 1948 version is an order of magnitude better, both to teach and to learn from. There are virtually no diagrams in the macro half of Tarshis’s text while Samuelson has a number which bring out the underlying message in a way that the hundreds of pages of diagramless text in Tarshis does not.

I might add, but only just for fun, that in my Defending the History of Economic Thought (Elgar 2013) I discuss the ways in which diagrams have dumbed down economic thought, so that we now move lines in a two-dimensional space instead of trying to think through the actual economic adjustments that are supposedly going on. But that’s just by the way.

Clay’s Economics

Posted on by
1

This was the query at the history of economics website, which I might note, has had quite an interesting response:

I’m working on an analysis of introductory economics textbooks published in the United States between about 1890 and 1950 (the period between Marshall and Samuelson, roughly). I’ve accumulated an ad hoc collection of texts based on the holdings of my library and scattered references in the secondary literature (Elzinga 1992, Walstad et al 1998, and Giraud 2013 in particular), but I was hoping that there might be some more systematic way to generate a universe of texts from which to sample. Does anyone have a recommendation for a good source that discusses principles texts in this period, perhaps with information on relative influence (number of editions, course adoptions, or sales)? Does such a source exist?

This was my own contribution:

In a reply to a recent request for any centenary celebrations coming up in economics in 2016 which was put out by the editors of the History of Economics Review, our HET journal here in Australasia, I wrote:

“2016 is the hundredth anniversary of the publication of what I think of as the best single introductory text on economics published in the twentieth century, Henry Clay’s Economics: an Introduction for the General Reader. I would very happily provide you with a shortish note on this great text – you have to see just its publication history from 1916 to 1942 when the second edition was published to appreciate just how extraordinary it was. Used everywhere, including Oxford and Cambridge, and not just mechanics institutes. Also the best summary of pre-Keynesian theory available, in my view, from any source.”

I realise that the request in this instance is for “introductory economics textbooks published in the United States” and Clay was published by Macmillan in the UK. But looking here at my lovely first edition, the second listing of the publisher’s location reads in a way which does suggest that it would have had a publication history within the US:

“The Macmillan Company
“New York . Boston . Chicago
“Dallas . San Francisco”

And as in indication of its presence in the United States, I also have this: Problems and Exercises to Accompany Clay’s Economics for the General Reader and Ely’s Outlines of Economics, which was published in 1921, whose author was:

“H. Gordon Hayes
“Professor of Economics in Ohio State University”

I might point out that in this set of questions – which you might for fun test your graduate students on for their understanding of economics – it is Clay who is mentioned before Ely.

I will finally mention that in The Great Gatsby, a text as American as it gets, we have this passage in reference to Gatsby himself as he stands waiting in the library for Daisy to arrive:

“[He] looked with vacant eyes through a copy of Clay’s Economics.”

If even Gatsby was reading Clay, who wasn’t?

What I didn’t mention was that I titled my own text to follow Clay’s: Free Market Economics: an Introduction for the General Reader. The number of out and out Keynesian falsehoods that are revealed by going through Clay is astonishing, starting with acceptance of Say’s Law means classical economists always assumed full employment. It’s not a short book, and its lack of diagrams makes it hard for someone of the present generation of economists to bother with, but it very efficiently gets the job done. And naturally, what I like best about it, is that it is the economics of John Stuart Mill, brought up to date for the first half of the twentieth century, just as my own text is Mill for the 21st century. Did I ever mention, by the way, that the cover of my book shows a Mill made of Clay?

The consequences of having no English word for entrepreneur

Posted on by
Reply

I have just finished a paper that will be published next year in a book that no one will read and so this will disappear. And to tell the truth, I cannot even tell how much this is even true, although it looks true enough to me. This is the conclusion to the paper, which seems to me to say all of this. But the point of the paper is that, because English did not originally have a word for “entrepreneur” our economic theories have been not just mis-shapen, but have led to such major distortions in our understanding of how economies work we ended up fostering the economic illiteracies of Marxism. Read the conclusion for yourself and see what you think.

Jean-Baptiste Say is properly recognised as the first economist to separate out the often entwined threads of the entrepreneur on the one hand and the owners of capital on the other. He did have, as John Stuart Mill noted, the advantage of having a separate word in French for this function, which allowed him a degree of conceptual clarity that was not available to those who wrote in English. But as noted, it was not until the fourth edition of his Treatise that even Say was able to see this distinction clearly, and even then placed his discussion within a footnote rather that make it a feature part of his text.

This distinction, as crucial as it is for clear thinking on economic issues, remained buried since the role of the capitalist at the time almost fully overlapped the role of the entrepreneur and therefore the term “capitalist” was used as an exact substitute. Marx in all his own works on economics, focused on the capitalist. There is not a single use by Marx of the term “entrepreneur” in the whole of the translated text of Volume 1 of Capital. But it is not due to any deficiencies on the part of the translator. The term “entrepreneur” does show up in Capital, but only once, in a footnote, and only because of a translation of a passage written originally by Molinari in French. This is the footnote:

“Even the mild, free-trade, vulgar economist, Molinari, says: “Dans les colonies l’esclavage a été aboli sans que le travail forcé se trouvait remplacé par une quantité équivalente de travail libre, on a vu s’opérer la contre-partie du fait qui se réalise tous les jours sous nos yeux. On a vu les simples travailleurs exploiter à leur tour les entrepreneurs d’industrie, exiger d’eux des salaires hors de toute proportion avec la part légitime qui leur revenait dans le produit. Les planteurs, ne pouvant obtenir de leurs sucres un prix suffisant pour couvrir la hausse de salaire, ont été obligés de fournir l’excédant, d’abord sur leurs profits, ensuite sur leurs capitaux mêmes. Une foule de planteurs ont été ruinés de la sorte, d’autres ont fermé leurs ateliers pour échapper à une ruine imminente…. Sans doute, il vaut mieux voir périr des accumulations de capitaux que des générations d’hommes [how generous of Mr. Molinaril]: mais ne vaudrait-il pas mieux que ni les uns ni les autres périssent?” (Molinari l. c. pp. 51, 52.) Mr. Molinari, Mr. Molinari! What then becomes of the ten commandments, of Moses and the prophets, of the law of supply and demand, if in Europe the “entrepreneur” can cut down the labourer’s legitimate part, and in the West Indies, the labourer can cut down the entrepreneur’s? And what, if you please, is this “legitimate part,” which on your own showing the capitalist in Europe daily neglects to pay? Over yonder, in the colonies where the labourers are so “simple” as to “exploit” the capitalist, Mr. Molinari feels a strong itching to set the law of supply and demand, that works elsewhere automatically, on the right road by means of the police.” (Marx [1867] 1906: 844)

In the wake of this tradition, even where the factors of production are discussed, they are usually summarised as land, labour and capital. It is only a rare exception in which there is any mention, let alone discussion, of the fourth possible factor which is the entrepreneur. Yet without the entrepreneur, the other three factors would lack direction and purpose.

There is, that is to say, the return on real capital, which is the return for ownership of various humanly produced tools and structures that are used in productive activity. There is then the return that comes from employing and directing each and every input as part of the production process in just such a way that a positive return over costs is earned. It is this second function that is the role of the entrepreneur. And it is this that is almost totally ignored in the economics of the English-speaking world, and as a result of the major influence of English-language economics on the world, with immense loss to our global understanding of the actual processes of a market economy, and indeed, of any economy beyond the primitive.

John Stuart Mill – Principles of Political Economy

Posted on by
Reply

John Stuart Mill’s Principles of Political Economy is the greatest text on economic theory ever written. It was put together over the period from 1845 till 1848 when he had come to the conclusion that it was impossible to write a book on sociology that could address all of the contradictions that exist within human life. There were no principles of human life that could be summarised in the way that could be contained within a single set of covers. He turned therefore to economics instead.

The book is, however, unreadable today, partly because of the density of his writing and partly because of the presuppositions he brings along with him. I am therefore about to write an edited version of Mill’s Principles in which I will keep Mill’s words but edit the text down to its essentials. That is still around 300 words, but even then there will be the need to include introductory passages to underline the points Mill is trying to make. And the main reason I think I can do this is because I share most of Mill’s presuppositions myself, which I had originally learned from reading his Principles at the very moment I had discovered Say’s Law for myself.

So you don’t think it can get any worse, do you?

Posted on by
Reply

Do you want to be afraid, really afraid? Tucked away at the very end of an article today on political reading lists for the beach this summer was this on behalf of Bill Shorten:

. . . and US senator Elizabeth Warren’s A Fighting Chance.

As with the election in 2008, the only way that Hillary Clinton won’t be the next President is if the Democrats come up with someone worse. And they have.

Members of her party’s anti-bank, anti-capitalist wing have found somebody to stir them as she never did. And Warren erases Clinton’s gender advantage.

Most telling, the left’s intensity is growing since the GOP midterm rout. Instead of being chastised, the populist wing absurdly claims that Democrats have been too willing to compromise.

No more of those Obama half measures for Warren, the fake Cherokee oddball far-left nutty professor now Senator from the great state of Massachusetts. She and Bill will make quite a pair. For those who think it can’t get any worse, oh yes it can.