Atheism is the greatest delusion of all

Posted on December 25, 2014 by lawofmarkets

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.

Kaiser Bill and history

Posted on December 22, 2014 by lawofmarkets

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.

Their ideology is key to understanding their actions

Posted on December 18, 2014 by lawofmarkets

This is from The Age. I will know that things are really turning when we can see the same in The New York Times. The article is by Julie Szego and is titled, Let’s not pussyfoot around definitions, Man Haron Monis was a terrorist and comes with the sub-heading, “‘Lone wolves’ may have no formal ties to terror groups, be criminals or mentally ill, but their ideology is key to understanding their actions”.

To categorise Monis’ actions as those of an ordinary criminal rather than a religious extremist we have to deprive him of the “benefit” of being an individual. Monis had proclaimed his disgust for Australia’s military intervention in Afghanistan. He sent abusive letters to families of deceased Australian soldiers who served there. He converted from Shia Islam to Sunni, pledging allegiance to Islamic State. During the siege he requested an IS flag, obviously troubled that his banner wasn’t the pure article. He demanded Tony Abbott refer to his actions as a terrorist attack. It was prudent tactics to deny his self-definition during the siege, but to do so now is to flinch from reality. . . .

Monis should be seen as a violent criminal and a terrorist. We must name his extremist ideology, accept that it is influential and pernicious and redouble our efforts to confront it as a calm, harmonious community.

Together, the “lone wolves” form a rabid pack. Monis doesn’t need a certificate of authenticity signed by Islamic State.

The entrepreneurial evolution of the phone

Posted on December 17, 2014 by lawofmarkets

This is a pictorial history of the evolution of the phone which comes with this article, Evolution of the phone: From the first call to the next frontier.

The phone is my favourite example of a technology that never stops changing. And if we were to go back and think in terms of communications, the pony express existed for about two years and was almost immediately replaced by the telegraph. And all of it has been entrepreneurially driven, with governments only becoming involved because for the longest time, the phone was a natural monopoly where competition was constrained by the capital requirements. Still somewhat true, but nothing like it was, which is why the private sector has been finally able to muscle governments out of the way.

The consequences of having no English word for entrepreneur

Posted on December 16, 2014 by lawofmarkets

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.

The centre cannot hold because the centre no longer exists

Posted on December 13, 2014 by lawofmarkets

The US is no longer a country, a unified coherent whole, the homeland of a people with a common history and a common purpose. Large parts of its landmass is instead being turned into a campsite, where the campers are given votes so that the productive can keep passing on a significant part of their incomes to the government to bribe the new campers with. Here’s the story: Obama opens fraud-ridden benefits programs to illegal immigrants:

President Obama’s unilateral executive action on immigration will make hundreds of thousands, perhaps more than a million, illegal immigrants eligible for federal transfer payments. That will be done primarily through two widely used programs — the Earned Income Tax Credit, or EITC, and the Additional Child Tax Credit, or ACTC.

As it turns out, those two programs are already among the most corrupt and fraud-ridden in the entire federal government. A newly-released report from the inspector general of the Internal Revenue Service confirms that the EITC is plagued by fraud (which was already well known) and also reveals for the first time that the ACTC is even worse.

The two programs, intended for low-income workers, are what is known as refundable tax credits. That means they give workers a tax refund that is larger than their tax liability. So a family with a tax bill of $1,000 might receive an EITC “refund” of $5,000, meaning the family doesn’t write a check to the government but rather receives a check from the government. The ACTC works similarly for low-income workers with children.

Supported by both political parties over the years, the programs were intended to encourage work and strengthen families. Their growth has been extraordinary in recent years — payments increased 40 percent from 2007 to 2012 alone. And now both are beset by staggering levels of fraud. . . .

In fact, the president obscured what is happening by telling the covered illegal immigrants that if “you’re willing to pay your fair share of taxes, you’ll be able to stay. …” In fact, for many of those affected, “willing to pay your fair share of taxes” actually means “willing to accept an assistance check from the government.”

If past practice is any guide, the Obama administration will likely start an aggressive, multilingual campaign to encourage illegal immigrants affected by the president’s action to apply for as many benefits as possible. And if not all of them are actually eligible to receive the taxpayers’ money? Well, no one will be checking that too closely.

You tell me where this ends? That the productive will forever remain content to share their wealth with millions of others who have not contributed a single dollar over and above what they have taken is not a longterm proposition. How and what circumstances will bring it to an end will remain the mystery for now, but I suspect not for long.

These Australians are so subtle

Posted on December 11, 2014 by lawofmarkets

That Julie Bishop is a political genius. At the moment, the third world is in pursuit of handouts from the first world to encourage these poorer nations along the road towards a greener, less carbonated future. So far as these third world countries are concerned, it is all upside with nothing to lose. Pretend there’s global warming, that they are in danger and then collect billions (trillions?) from the wealthier nations on the planet, at least the ones that are currently wealthier. So she has put the fox into the chicken coop so to speak:

AUSTRALIA has called on China and India to do more to combat climate change as it prepares to challenge the notion that developing countries should have less onerous obligations to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions.

During a meeting on the sidelines of the UN Climate Change Conference in the Peruvian capital, Lima, Foreign Minister Julie Bishop yesterday urged the vice-chair of China’s National Development and Reform Commission, Xie Zhenhua, to do more to tackle emissions reductions.

Ms Bishop plans to tell the conference today that the binary definition of developed and developing countries “is misleading and doesn’t lead to best outcomes’’ in combating climate change “because the divide is arbitrary”.

“It doesn’t matter where the emissions come from, they are global emissions,’’ she will say.

After her meeting with Mr Xie, Ms Bishop told The Australian: “I said I thought there would be more China could do to reduce its emissions and that it was not appropriate for China to be claiming to be a developing country.”

Genius. Pure Alinsky. Make them live up to their professed positions on global warming, which everyone knows is nudge, nudge, wink, wink, say no more. Press them on doing something positive this side of 2034. This is the shortcut to causing the whole system to break down while pretending to do all you can to limit carbon emissions. Very clever when you perfectly well understand that global warming is all nonsense, an academic scam that got out of hand.

All very clever, that is, unless you happen to believe it yourself which, surely, she does not.

Spooky

Posted on December 11, 2014 by lawofmarkets

You should ride with this one to the end. It is only 6:36.

The expiry date for all forecasts is the very moment they are released

Posted on December 10, 2014 by lawofmarkets

Her Majesty raised the issue herself. Why hadn’t the world’s economists predicted the global financial crisis? Had she asked me, my answer would have been that such things are beyond the abilities of anyone, and if someone tells you different, they are only kidding themselves. And I say this as the AFR Forecaster of the Year in 1988, which I received for being the only economist in Australia to say that Australia would, under virtually no circumstances I could think of, have a recession that year. Everyone else thought the probability was high, so I won by default.

The sad part is that economics has now in many ways been reduced to forecasting a narrow range of published national statistics, as if that were the true issue. What economists should be doing instead is working out the best way to achieve community goals, by putting institutional structures in place that create the wealth we can all then partake of, most helpfully by participating in the wealth creation process.

Why this has come to mind are the latest ructions in the market for oil, that no one – NO ONE – could have forecast a year or so ago. And certainly no one did. Here is the article that has brought this to mind: Bank of America sees $50 oil as Opec dies.

The Opec oil cartel no longer exists in any meaningful sense and crude prices will slump to $50 a barrel over coming months as market forces shake out the weakest producers, Bank of America has warned.

Revolutionary changes sweeping the world’s energy industry will drive down the price of liquefied natural gas (LNG), creating a “multi-year” glut and a mucher cheaper source of gas for Europe.

Francisco Blanch, the bank’s commodity chief, said Opec is “effectively dissolved” after it failed to stabilize prices at its last meeting. “The consequences are profound and long-lasting,“ he said.

The free market will now set the global cost of oil, leading to a new era of wild price swings and disorderly trading that benefits only the Mid-East petro-states with deepest pockets such as Saudi Arabia. If so, the weaker peripheral members such as Venezuela and Nigeria are being thrown to the wolves.

Of course, these are forecasts made in December 2014. And if you don’t like this one, come back tomorrow and I will give you another.

Why politics is driven towards the left side of the middle