Progressive internationalism and open borders

I wrote a post on January 7 this year, Progressive Internationalism in the modern world, which more or less tells you where we are at. Our global elites, from whatever gated communities they may happen to reside in, have decided that a world of open borders is the best hope for mankind and have been doing as much as possible for a very long time to achieve this end. Wars are caused by the existence of the nation state, they assume, and there has therefore been every effort made to break down our national borders. The most remarkable part about Obama’s decision to open the US border to any and all who might wish to come is the absence of genuine outrage. From this distance, I hardly notice a thing. The nation state is now the enemy of our elites, and if you live in one, you may be sure the efforts will remain relentless to break those borders down. Given the horrendous results of open borders across the first world, yet with no apparent ability for citizens to resist, I am not hopeful but I am not also yet in complete despair. Here then is the post I wrote in January.

The communist international was succeeded by what has been called Progressive Internationalism, a quasi-one-world government ideology that is almost as dangerous as the communist ideology it has succeeded. Here is a definition of sorts found in a review of a book by someone by name of Alan Dawley. The book was titled, Changing the World: American Progressives in War and Revolution and this is from the review:

Despite their diverse interests and affiliations, he argues, progressives were fundamentally driven by a hope that the promotion of social justice and revitalization of public life in the United States would form the core of an international campaign. ‘In a world knit together by far-flung markets and the international state system,’ Dawley explains, ‘progressives confronted social problems that crossed national boundaries, and their solutions did the same’. . . .

Taking a strongly anti-militarist and anti-imperialist stance, they argued that social justice was a prerequisite for peace at home and abroad. In the aftermath of wartime violations, the resolute defense of civil liberties soon became the ‘shining light of progressive politics’. Returning to a hardheaded analysis of corporate power, progressives renewed their focus on the working class and defined imperialism as ‘a structural component of American political economy, not an aberrant policy’. Seen most clearly in the third party campaigns of Robert La Follette and Henry Wallace, progressivism moved toward the left of the political spectrum. Never able to recover the political power it once held, progressivism would nevertheless persist in movements seeking to ‘address the wrongs of the capitalist market and the failures of the international system’.

That’s the theory. And if you would like to hear these very thoughts put into print just this week, here is an article by Conrad Black in The National Post dated 4 January 2014. The title is, “Conrad Black: What would Woodrow Wilson say?” This is a sample of what he thinks Woodrow Wilson would say:

Wilson was the greatest prophet of the Twentieth Century, in many ways surpassing and even presaging Gandhi and Mandela: He was the first person to inspire the masses of the world with the vision of enduring peace, and of the acceptance and imposition of international law and of postcolonial institutions indicative of the equal rights of all nationalities and the common interest of all peoples.

How’s that for utopian moonshine! Gandhi and Mandela are about as far as possible from my mind as standards by which I would like the world to run. And it was FDR, according to Black, who continued this progressive internationalist agenda:

It devolved upon a junior member of Wilson’s administration, Franklin D. Roosevelt, when he was president during the world war that Wilson sought to avoid, to revive the idea of a world organization, involve the opposing domestic political party fully in its creation, and have it in place even before that war ended in 1945.

FDR took the best of Wilson and of his chief rival, distant cousin (and uncle-in-law) Theodore Roosevelt, and united the latter’s ‘big stick’ with the former’s ‘new freedom.’ FDR was determined that the UN would not be reduced to a mere talking shop. He intended that it would serve to disguise in collegiality the fact that the United States, with half the world’s economic product and a monopoly on atomic weapons, effectively ruled the world, and would reassure his fractious and long-isolationist countrymen that the world was now a much safer place than it had been.

How weirdly wrong FDR was and how strange to see this vision being given such a positive review today when we know just how dangerous the UN has become. Black of course recognises that the hopes that had been vested in the United Nations have come to nothing, but this does not seem to have shaken him from his belief in a policy agenda through which Western civilisation is again placed under intense threat and may well this time succumb. I would be in a let’s-circle-the-wagons mode if it were at all possible. The following passage present our present reality, but here expressed by Black:

In 2013, the United Nations General Assembly elected China, Cuba, Saudi Arabia, and Russia, countries that have no regard for human rights at all, as members of the UN Human Rights Council; selected Hezbollah (a designated terrorist organization) apologist Jean Ziegler as senior advisor to the Council; and elected Mauritania, a primitive country that tolerates slavery, as Council vice-chair. Meanwhile, Richard Falk, the UN special rapporteur on human rights in the Palestinian territories, blamed the Boston Marathon bombing on ‘the American global domination project’ and ‘Tel Aviv.’ Of the UN General Assembly’s 25 resolutions condemning individual countries in 2013, all but four were against the exemplary democracy, Israel, which only seeks recognition of the basis on which the United Nations founded it: as a Jewish state and homeland for the Jewish people. The United Nations also elected the racist, terrorist-infested charnel house and Iranian proxy of Syria to its Special Committee on Decolonization; appointed Zimbabwe (a regime so odious it has been expelled from the Commonwealth, failing to clear an almost subterranean hurdle) to host its world tourism summit; and elected Iran president of its 2013 Conference on Disarmament, even as that country strove to put the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty to the shredder.

In this world with these kinds of international agents playing such prominent roles, progressive internationalism is a form of self-destructive madness and cultural suicide. Who wouldn’t like to live in the kind of world these Progressive Internationalists imagine. But no one does because such a world is as utopian as your standard Marxist piece of rubbish, so why anyone would want to project this agenda knowing what we know is beyond me.

Things we always apparently knew but didn’t understand

I’ve just kept the economics related from the original list. I only wish it was this easy, I certainly don’t think some of these are true. But it an interesting list.

We’ve known for 4,000 years that debts need to be periodically written down, or the entire economy will collapse.

We’ve known for 1,900 years that runaway inequality destroys societies.

We’ve known for thousands of years that debasing currencies leads to economic collapse.

We’ve known for thousands of years that – when criminals are not punished – crime spreads.

We’ve known for hundreds of years that the failure to punish financial fraud destroys economies, as it destroys all trust in the financial system.

We’ve known for centuries that monopolies and the political influence which accompanies too much power in too few hands are dangerous for free markets.

We’ve known for hundreds of years that companies will try to pawn their debts off on governments, and that it is a huge mistake for governments to allow corporate debt to be backstopped by government.

We’ve known for centuries that powerful people – unless held to account – will get together and steal from everyone else.

We’ve known for 200 years that allowing private banks to control credit creation eventually destroys the nation’s prosperity.

We’ve known for two centuries that a fiat money system – where the money supply is not pegged to anything real – is harmful in the long-run.

We’ve known since the 1930s Great Depression that separating depository banking from speculative investment banking is key to economic stability.

We’ve known for 80 years that inflation is a hidden tax.

We’ve known since 1988 that quantitative easing doesn’t work to rescue an ailing economy.

We’ve known since 1993 that derivatives such as credit default swaps – if not reined in – could take down the economy.

We’ve known since 1998 that crony capitalism destroys even the strongest economies, and that economies that are capitalist in name only need major reforms to create accountability and competitive markets.

We’ve known since 2007 or earlier that lax oversight of hedge funds could blow up the economy.

And we knew before the 2008 financial crash and subsequent bailouts that:

The easy credit policy of the Fed and other central banks, the failure to regulate the shadow banking system, and “the use of gimmicks and palliatives” by central banks hurt the economy

Anything other than (1) letting asset prices fall to their true market value, (2) increasing savings rates, and (3) forcing companies to write off bad debts “will only make things worse”

Bailouts of big banks harm the economy

The Fed and other central banks were simply transferring risk from private banks to governments, which could lead to a sovereign debt crisis

Postscript: Those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it … and we’ve known that for a long time.

This is the most productive time of my life

It doesn’t have to be this way for everyone but this is far and away the most productive part of my life and I see no reason that this might not go on for a while yet. What brings this to mind is an article on early retirement in academia. It is written by a woman who made the choice to opt for early retirement five years ago and believes that people who remain at their post are harming the prospects for the next generation of academics.

The inconvenient truth is that faculty who delay retirement harm students, who in most cases would benefit from being taught by someone younger than 70, even younger than 65. The salient point is not that younger professors are better pedagogues (sometimes they are, sometimes they aren’t), but that they are more likely to be current in their fields and to bring that currency into their teaching.

Septuagenarian faculty members also cost colleges more than younger faculty—in the form of higher salaries, higher health-care costs, and higher employer-matched retirement contributions. Even if these costs pale in comparison to paying for bloated administrations, it’s wrong to pretend they don’t matter.

Worst of all, their presence stifles change. I’m not talking about mindless change for change’s sake, but the kind of change necessary to keep an institution thriving. A healthy university consists of departments with a balanced mix of new hires (full of energy, ambition, and fresh ideas), middle-aged faculty members at the height of their productivity, and older faculty with wisdom and a deep understanding of the evolving mission of their departments and universities. Disrupt that balance, and the foundation of an institution’s strength is undermined.

What she writes may be true in some cases but not in others. It is astonishing to me but I am amongst the leading anti-Keynesian economists in the world and am the world’s authority on Say’s Law. I also find myself, and this to my great surprise, amongst the leading scholars on the economics of John Stuart Mill, which has only taken place by accident. I still publish both books and articles and I run one of the most innovative classrooms you will find anywhere. Most importantly, I feel I am still in the conversation on the issues that matter to me, and that if I could not add my voice to the views of others, there would be something missing from out modern discussions on economic theory and policy. And it is precisely because so many disagree with what I have to say that makes my presence all the more valuable.

And being amongst economists, I am surrounded by people who are very good at mathematics but in my view have almost no idea how an economy works. The questions they ask and then answer in the articles many of them write seem trivial to me and the conclusions when they reach them of almost no value, as far as I can tell, for anyone who might need to make a decision about anything.

There may well be some faculty who hang on too long but the net result is that students are able to meet and learn from a range of people with different presuppositions about life and their own subject area. Once upon a time it was understood that scholars remained scholarly all their lives. Picking one example, that is only seen through her own eyes of someone who is past his use-by-date is just one more example of ageism, which as I get older I see more often for myself. Speaking personally, I hope to continue for a little while yet.

Magic thinking

We have all kinds of innovation and we have them all the time, but you cannot decide on what will be invented next. The magical thinking of the global warming crowd who believe that if you make fossil fuels really expensive that a cheaper alternative will simply materialise is so bordering on the insane that I actually don’t know what can be done about it. Making energy more expensive will certainly mean that some of us will use less of it, with the less well off the ones who will suffer the most. And those who live in genuinely poor communities will find their standard of living falling below where it now is. This is not a matter of theory but is an absolute arithmetical necessity. If you have less of something, some people who used to have a particular quantity will have less and some may even have none at all.

Tonight I went along to hear Sinclair Davidson on the great moral question of our time: is coal on its way out as a source of energy. The audience was what I suspect a Q&A audience must be like, all well meaning and quite comfortable, thank you very much, but oh so concerned about the future about a hundred years from now when the oceans have risen and our farmlands have all turned to desert. We must therefore get rid of fossil fuels, and coal in particular, immediately. The replacement technologies are already available; its only the lack of will that prevents us from taking the steps we need to take.

Bob Brown led the offence for the yeas, while Professor Davidson played anchor for the nays stressing the moral case for fossil fuels. Every one of the five speakers except one agreed that global warming and greenhouse gases was the greatest issue of our time. The sixth made the hilarious point that no one really cares about people who will be inhabiting the planet a hundred years from now, evidenced by the fact that they don’t seem to care all that much about people who are inhabiting the planet right at the moment. This brought a strong round of applause from at least one member of the audience, but if there was anyone else applauding at the same time, I think I may have missed it.

What’s the right word for people dumb enough to believe the planet is warming?

There is about as much evidence that the planet is warming because of human activity as there is that Yuri Geller can bend spoons with the power of his mind. This, too, has been validated by scientists and here is a not untypical example:

Professor Victor Weisskopf physicist who studied under Niels Bohr worked on the A bomb and over saw the development of European atom smashers.

“I was shocked and amazed how Mr Geller bent my office key at MIT while I was holding it. The sturdy key kept bending in my hand; I can not explain this phenomenon I can only assume that it could relate could relate to quantum chromo dynamics”.

The credulous stupidity of half the population on AGW is something that those of us who have not succumbed to this mania can merely observe but find almost impossible to explain. But like Professor Weisskopf, Professor Michael Mann, the notorious fraud and inventor of the hockey schtick, remains an authority to those with the will to believe.

What we therefore need is a term of abuse for those who help to perpetuate this fraud.

If people who refuse to accept the planet is warming are called “deniers” by those ill-informed enough to be certain about something that still seems very unlikely, then what should we call those who accept climate change in the face of all evidence to the contrary? I will open this for debate, but at the moment “gullibles” is the word I have come up with which I admit is not perfect. Nevertheless, the concept seems accurate even if the word does not. Here is the online definition of “gullible” which includes the synonyms found in bold below so there is something to the concept and it does seem to fit. The example of its usage, shown in italics, is also just as found on the net which also seems to be a perfect fit.

gullible
ˈɡʌlɪb(ə)l/
adjective
easily persuaded to believe something; credulous.
“an attempt to persuade a gullible public to spend their money”
synonyms: credulous, over-trusting, over-trustful, trustful, easily deceived/led, easily taken in, exploitable, dupable, deceivable, impressionable, unsuspecting, unsuspicious, unwary, unguarded, unsceptical, ingenuous, naive, innocent, simple, inexperienced, unworldly, green, as green as grass, childlike, ignorant

.

As it says here, by definition if you are gullible you are “easily deceived or cheated” and also “easily taken in or tricked”. That is therefore no doubt why such people persistently vote for the parties of the left.

On Tim Flannery – Australian though he may be still a loyal and faithful servant of his German masters

This is a blog about our very own Tim Flannery, Faulty Turbines Sending Siemen’s Wind Power Division Broke as Samsung Cuts & Runs from Europe. And what might this have to do with Tim? Here’s how it starts:

German fan maker, Siemens has been running a huge propaganda campaign in South Australia over the last couple of weeks, surrounding the opening of the extension of the Snowtown wind farm – wheeling in Australia’s 2011 Tour de France winner, Cadel Evans as their pet-pedal-powered mascot.

And its highly paid wind farm ambassador, Tim Flannery – Australia’s world-renowned (but self-appointed) long-range weather forecaster – has been on the front foot in the press in recent weeks screaming about imminent “global incineration”. Tim’s “solution”? Why more giant (Siemens) fans, of course!

Not that he makes much noise about it, but Tim sits on Siemen’s Sustainability Advisory Board and – true to the title – has been working flat-out to “sustain” Siemen’s ability to flog its fans in Australia – with a mix of hysterical hectoring and overweening political pressure – all built around the mystical ability of wind turbines to suck CO2 out of the sky and drop world temperatures on a made-to-measure basis. A bit like a heavenly thermostat, apparently.

Although, being a loyal and faithful servant of his German masters Tim hasn’t limited himself to just being Siemen’s top fan salesman. Oh no – Siemens is in the Carbon Capture & Storage business – so Tim took to spruiking the merits of CCS as only a recent “covert” could.

This little “switcheroo” required Tim to bury his hitherto well-publicised revulsion to coal.

It’s sad to see a fellow Australian being treated in such a disdainful way.

Found at SmallDeadAnimals.

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.

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.