From the famous lost series of short sound films of banjo whiz Hezekiah Urastus Anderton. I guess the sound was added later.
Banjo picking in 1897
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Category Archives: Books and movies
Bernard Natan
One of the most spooky and unexpected documentaries I have ever come across. Natan was the Sam Goldwyn of French cinema but as forgotten today as it is possible to be.
It is easy to see how the French might wish to see his story left untold. But you will have to see the film to understand why since it unfolds in a series of revelations that fill in the details as Natan’s life one by one. I was hooked by the opening sequence and narration more completely than I can think of any such film having previously succeeded in doing, with the opening sequence used as the trailer shown above. The makers of the film also understood what a mystery they have constructed and neither they nor I would wish to give you a single hint about what you will discover if you get to see it for yourself.
Justice delayed is justice denied, and then there’s Mark Steyn
I can only assume that whatever powers that be that might exist within the American legal system, there would be at least some effort being made to expedite the case of one of the most media savvy people in the universe. Not the case at all, or if it is the case, just how fantastically slow must that system be in normal times. Here Mark catches us up on how things are going in the trial of the century against not-the-Nobel-Prize winning climate change liar, Michael Mann:
This case is no nearer a trial date than it was two years ago, but even someone such as myself, who has long argued that the process is the punishment, has to doff his cap to the playful lads at the DC Court of Appeals, who after sitting on the case lo these many months decide to schedule oral arguments on a case in which almost all parties live way out of jurisdiction for the Tuesday before Thanksgiving. I suppose I should be grateful they didn’t make it Wednesday, and well and truly stuff my turkey.
This is seriously insane. Is there not one branch of the American system of governance that is up to the mark? Watching this inaction has been a cosmic experience, but how must it be for people without money or access to the media?
You can help with the defence in a kind of twofer; you can as I have done, provide funds to the Mark Steyn defence and also get a copy of The [Un]documented Mark Steyn written by the single greatest satirist in the world today.
Debating Keynes
The single most timely piece of economic writing I ever managed to put together was for Quadrant which was published online in February 2009 just as the various stimulus packages were being rolled out across the world. The title it was given, much more aggressive than I might have chosen myself, was The Dangerous Return to Keynesian Economics. And while the whole thing could have been written today without the need for a single change to bring it up to date, the passage I have quoted time and again is this:
What is potentially catastrophic would be to try to spend our way to recovery. The recession that will follow will be deep, prolonged and potentially take years to overcome.
Keynesian economics is, was and always will be a disaster wherever it is applied. That virtually no one understands why that is after three generations of economists have gone through their economics education with standard Keynesian macro at its core is to be expected. What is far less expected is that there has been no serious effort to examine more closely what went wrong after the failures of the stimulus.
As it happens I am at the start of an online debate with Louis-Philippe Rochon, Associate Professor of economics at Laurentian University, the founding co-editor of Review of Keynesian Economics and co-editor of New Directions in Post-Keynesian Economics which is an Edward Elgar book series. One presumes that if anyone can defend Keynesian economics he is the one to do it.
I, however, have been the one to open the batting. Keynesian economics has so many different disguises that unless I could narrow the lines of the debate to within some kind of practical dimensions there would have been no hope of limiting the range of where such a conversation might end up. Elgar has now published the first of these exchanges, How to Promote a Global Economic Recovery? The Keynesian vs. Free Market Approach. Crucially, the delimiting of the debate was the first essential. I therefore began with this:
There are about as many versions of Keynesian theory as there are Keynesians but all versions have two things in common. The first is that economies are driven by aggregate demand. The second is that an economy’s rate of growth and level of employment can be increased by increasing aggregate demand, either through higher public spending or lowering rates of interest. Both are wrong and the destructive consequences of these beliefs are everywhere to be seen.
What I can tell you from personal experience is that the notion of aggregate demand as a driver of economic activity is now so universally believed that it is nearly impossible to get anyone even to see that it might possibly be wrong, that there is another way of thinking about things. But before Keynes came on the scene, no economist, other than a handful of cranks, ever thought that economies were driven from the demand side. What they believed instead was this:
Certainly a government can itself employ, or can buy from others causing those others to employ. And those additional employees can use their incomes to buy things from others still. And so, for a brief period of time, we can say there has been an increase in employment relative to how many might otherwise have been employed.
But unless whatever has been produced is value adding, as time goes by these additional employees merely drain away the productive capacity of the economy. Savings are indeed absorbed but the value left behind is lower than the value used up during production. The economy not only remains stagnant, it winds even further down as its resource base is diverted into wasteful forms of expenditure.
This is the classical pre-Keynesian view of how an economy works and why a stimulus never will. That the classical theory so perfectly captures the economics world we see around us should at least make someone stop and think about the macroeconomics we teach. There should therefore have been at least some consideration that giving politicians and public servants the power to direct such large proportions of our economic resources could not possibly have improved economic outcomes but would only make conditions worse. These are people who, except in the rarest of circumstances, have absolutely no ability to direct a productive enterprise in a value adding way, as they have shown at every turn. It has therefore been astonishing to see that thus far there has been virtually no re-consideration of Keynesian theory and the policies it underwrites, given the evident failures of the stimulus everywhere it has been introduced.
In a week’s time, Louis-Philippe will provide his reply to what I have written. I will naturally post what he writes since I am extremely curious to find out whether there is something I have missed, some bone-crunching reply to the issues I have raised. Although I have looked everywhere for some such reply, thus far I have found nothing, but we shall see.
Obviously, my arguments cannot be properly explained in a brief note of a thousand words. If you are interested in understanding not only why Keynesian economics provides no solutions to our economic problems, but also what should be done instead, read the second edition of my Free Market Economics: an Introduction for the General Reader. There is literally nothing else like it anywhere, which is itself a large part of the problem we have.
Just say no
A sound principle of government and much else.
I just might mention that you can find me Zelig-like in the shot from about the very start till around 7 seconds in and then again from around 0:15 till 0:33. I’m the one on the upper right corner in the second tier of academics, at the top of the frame to Goucho’s left.
A Carr bomb in Israel
I went into a second hand book shop at lunch and saw a copy of Australia’s Most Deadly Snakes and I immediately thought of Bob Carr. I then opened the book and the page I turned to showed a Red-Bellied Black Snake and again thought of Bob Carr. This particular snake can apparently be found in the swamplands of Eastern New South Wales, about which it said that when cornered behaves in a way that is mostly bluff, and I again for some reason thought of Bob Carr.
Why I kept thinking about Bob Carr I am not too sure, but perhaps it is because he has decided he no longer wishes to support Israel in its existential fight against its relentless and well-funded enemies and instead now supports Hamas. And perhaps it is also because on Sunday I went to see a documentary at the Jewish Film Festival – which I recommend to no one if they would like their peace of mind left undisturbed – that dealt with the efforts made to create a film record of the Nazi concentration camps just after they were overrun by the allies in 1945. I thought I had seen it all, but I hadn’t seen anything. I could only barely get through a documentary about the recording of the victims. An hour and a half of an actual film record could be watched by no one, at least no one with a human soul. No film was released at the time anyway because the British government preferred not to encourage anyone to support the Jews trying to get to Palestine, their entry being at the time blocked by the British. The thousands of feet of film was therefore simply left in storage until now. Must have been an early incarnation of Bob Carr who made the decision.
Meanwhile, Israel is filled with people who either were in those camps or are descendants of people who were in those camps. No one has persecuted Muslims for a thousand years, other than other Muslims. Jews have not been so lucky. Their memories are very real of just what might happen if they let their guard down even for a moment. Carr is worried that the Israelis have been building housing in Jerusalem in which people can live, both Arab and Jew. What a tragedy that must be. No modern atrocity can stand comparison with such actions. Good to see Bob Carr again on the side of the angels.
But here is part of the back story. The UN gave the Jews a bit of land in a decision in 1947. Not a lot. If left in peace in their own designated area, it might have come to not much more than the size of Singapore and Hong Kong in total together, most of it desert. But Arab armies attacked from the south, north and east in 1948 with the specific intent of killing every Jew they could while driving into exile those who survived. Nevertheless, the Jews were not overrun and when all the dust had settled, ended up with a larger piece of territory than they had originally been allocated. And this they defended when they were attacked in 1967, also by armies that had they prevailed, would have murdered every Jew they could. But again, the Jews prevailed and again they ended up with more territory than they originally had held, including the old city of Jerusalem.
Although Bob Carr is too stupid to understand this, there are reasons for the Israelis not to trust their Arab neighbours. Carr also does not seem to understand that the Israelis are intending to stay right where they are until some kind of settlement is reached to divide the area up into permanent borders. In the meantime, since the only policy Hamas seems to have is to drive the Israelis into the sea and kill every single Jew they can, we will have to wait until there is a more accommodating negotiating partner. In the meantime, whatever lack of progress there seems to be towards a final settlement, if one were to apportion blame, would be around 95% on the Arab side and 5% on the Israeli.
Now I can agree that the Jews who settled in this land – a land in which Jews have lived continuously without interruption for the past three thousand years – might have chosen somewhere else to go after the war. There are so many places that undoubtedly would have welcomed the millions of impoverished Jewish refugees who were desperate to find a place to settle in quiet and peace. Perhaps they could have found just such a place in one of the old and civilised states of Europe, perhaps the birthplace of Beethoven and Wagner (no doubt amongst your favourites, Bob), and would have found a home amongst people who would have welcomed them and taken them in and who the Jews knew they could trust and with whom they could live in perfect security. Why did the Jews not seek such a place of refuge, do you think, you big stupid ignorant fool? Sounds pretty good to you, I suppose, you dimwitted jerk of a supposed student of history as you are. Why didn’t the Jews do that?
So look Bob, we can all sympathise with the Palestinian people whose misfortune is to be cursed with such stupid and obtuse leaders – people similar to yourself, no doubt – who are unwilling to allow peace in their land. I was not a great sympathiser with Julia Gillard as Prime Minister, but I warmed to her unwavering personal support for Israel that was only overridden by you and that fellow dimwit Tanya and no doubt others who travel under Labor Party colours. I have followed your career and you have not made a single correct judgement in your entire political career on anything significant, not as Premier, not as foreign minister nor in your new role as an envoy of the Middle East. Your consistency in stupidity is astonishing, but at least it is consistent.
And how many things does the CIA get wrong?
Andrew Bolt, Making Up History, has a link to a story, CIA reveals what Argo got wrong. If you want evidence of just how rotten from the inside American security agencies have become, you really ought to look at this idiot list.
Here’s what the movie Argo got right. The Iranian Revolution of 1979 installed a totalitarian government that was evil from Day One, a government that has ruined the lives of the Iranian people. It is a regime that is now doing everything it can, with virtually open connivance of the Obama Administration, to develop nuclear weapons that, should it succeed, will destabilise the Middle East and put more than just Israel at supreme risk. Here is the first of the 19 bits that the movie “got wrong”:
When the US Embassy is overtaken the 6 US diplomats go right to the Canadian ambassador’s residence to live for the 3 months.
All of these “errors” are of the same order of magnitude. They spice the film up just a tad, creating a bit of tension since it is a movie. But as these things go, this is near-on documentary coverage of events that are now 35 years old. You’d have to be around 50 to remember any of it. And where will you see anything, anywhere to give you a genuine picture of the kind of society Iran has become? Here’s the trailer. You know they’re going to get away, the facts are pretty well accurate and the films stands out as an actually pro-American piece of filming which has been almost unheard of since the 1970s. And it is an amazing story.
There is a final 20th point in the list of “errors” which must have been inserted by someone who retains at least an element of the CIA of old, you know, the CIA when it was still trying to defend the West:
Real #Argo: All involved in the operation were innovative, brave, & creative. Thank you @BenAffleck for making a film that reflects this.
The Kronies
John Papola on the Michael Loftus show in the US. An amazing piece of TV and there, on episode 7, was John discussing some of his creations with The Kronies amongst his latest. His first rise to fame was with the Keynes-Hayek Rap, the single most watched video on an economic matter ever produced, and one which sadly remains still relevant and important. I show it to my four classes each semester, along with the brilliant Deck the Halls with Macro Follies, and no matter how often I watch them, I never find it has been one time too many. Students get the point.
More on Big G and the Kronies:
Seinfeld comes to Canberra
Amazing.
Via Tim Blair. And two more from Andrew Bolt.
And then this.
Apparently the work of Huw Parkinson a true genius with his politics just about right (so far anyway). And now this:
John Stuart Mill’s Principles of Political Economy
I have long had a view that John Stuart Mill’s Principles of Political Economy is the best economics book ever written. But I have now also come to the view that no one is ever going to contradict me because virtually no one can any longer read the book. I have just been back over the book on a project on Mill I am just beginning and turned to Book I Chapter II which is “On Labour”. I say to you in all honesty that it is a fascinating chapter from which there is much to learn, including how little there is that is truly new that is not in Mill. But here is the opening para of the chapter from which the one thing I guarantee you will learn is how hard the book must be to read.
§ 1. The labour which terminates in the production of an article fitted for some human use, is either employed directly about the thing, or in previous operations destined to facilitate, perhaps essential to the possibility of, the subsequent ones. In making bread, for example, the labour employed about the thing itself is that of the baker; but the labour of the miller, though employed directly in the production not of bread but of flour, is equally part of the aggregate sum of labour by which the bread is produced; as is also the labour of the sower and of the reaper. Some may think that all these persons ought to be considered as employing their labour directly about the thing; the corn, the flour, and the bread being one substance in three different states. Without disputing about this question of mere language, there is still the ploughman, who prepared the ground for the seed, and whose labour never came in contact with the substance in any of its states; and the plough-maker, whose share in the result was still more remote. All these persons ultimately derive the remuneration of their labour from the bread, or its price: the plough-maker as much as the rest; for since ploughs are of no use except for tilling the soil, no one would make or use ploughs for any other reason than because the increased returns, thereby obtained from the ground, afforded a source from which an adequate equivalent could be assigned for the labour of the plough-maker. If the produce is to be used or consumed in the form of bread, it is from the bread that this equivalent must come. The bread must suffice to remunerate all these labourers, and several others; such as the carpenters and bricklayers who erected the farm-buildings; the hedgers and ditchers who made the fences necessary for the protection of the crop; the miners and smelters who extracted or prepared the iron of which the plough and other implements [30] were made. These, however, and the plough-maker, do not depend for their remuneration upon the bread made from the produce of a single harvest, but upon that made from the produce of all the harvests which are successively gathered until the plough, or the buildings and fences, are worn out. We must add yet another kind of labour; that of transporting the produce from the place of its production to the place of its destined use: the labour of carrying the corn to market, and from market to the miller’s, the flour from the miller’s to the baker’s, and the bread from the baker’s to the place of its final consumption. This labour is sometimes very considerable: flour is [1848] transported to England from beyond the Atlantic, corn from the heart of Russia; and in addition to the labourers immediately employed, the waggoners and sailors, there are also costly instruments, such as ships, in the construction of which much labour has been expended: that labour, however, not depending for its whole remuneration upon the bread, but for a part only; ships being usually, during the course of their existence, employed in the transport of many different kinds of commodities.
He does wear you out. I have visions of Mill, who wrote this thousand page book in about eighteen months while holding a full-time job in the East India Company, sitting there in his free moments with his pen, ink and paper, scratching out the text as he tried to distill his thoughts into something coherent. The man with the highest IQ in the nineteenth century, his book was the byword for economic theory for the following fifty years and then some. My copy is a discarded text from the 1920s that was still being used at the University of Melbourne. If you would like to see Mill up to date, you can read the 2nd ed of my Free Market Economics and when you see the book (unless you read it electronically) you will understand why the cover shows a water mill as its main motif.
To which from further comments I must add this:
John Stuart Mill,
By a mighty effort of will,
Overcame his natural bonhomie
And wrote “Principles of Political Economy.”
Law of Markets 