First the fast

And then the reality

This business with Trump’s press conference yesterday, which I discussed here, is a political Rorschach Test of the most extraordinary kind. If you saw a perfectly reasonable presidential outline of policies and then a response to questions asked, you are part of the world of the sane. On the other hand, if you saw anything else, you have lost your grip on reality, as discussed by Scott Adams under the heading, Imaginary News. And the reason for this cognitive dissonance is that those who saw a rant are those who had expected Trump to lose which has led to the following consequence.

When reality violates your ego that rudely, you either have to rewrite the movie in your head to recast yourself as an idiot, or you rewrite the movie to make yourself the hero who could see what others missed. Apparently the Huffington Post [the example of those who had seen Trump ranting] chose to rewrite their movie so Trump is a deranged monster, just like they warned us. That’s what they see. This isn’t an example of so-called “fake” news as we generally understand it. This is literally imaginary news. I believe the Huffington Post’s description of the press conference is literally what they saw. If you gave them lie detector tests, they would swear they saw a meltdown, and the lie detector would say they were telling the truth.

There are two clues that the Huffington Post is hallucinating and I’m not. The first clue is that they have a trigger and I don’t. Reality violated their egos, whereas I was predicting a Trump win all along. My world has been consistent with my ego. No trigger. All I have is a warm feeling of rightness.

The second clue is that the Huffington Post is seeing something that half the country doesn’t see. As a general rule, the person who sees the elephant in the room is the one hallucinating, not the one who can’t see the elephant. The Huffington Post is literally seeing something that is invisible to me and other observers. We see a President Trump talking the way he normally talks. They see a 77-minute meltdown.

In other words, these people have gone mad. And they are the ones who write the news.

If you don’t know the work of Michael Novak, let me recommend his writings to you, especially his Spirit of Democratic Capitalism which had a big influence on me. This is a memoriam titled The Soul of Democratic Capitalism which begins:

Michael Novak died February 17, at the age of 83, after a battle with cancer. It’s hard to imagine the Catholic Church—or the world—without him.

Novak is perhaps best known for his comprehensive examinations of the practical realities and ideals of “democratic capitalism,” first advanced in his 1982 masterpiece The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism and developed in a series of subsequent books, including The Catholic Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1993), Business as a Calling (1996), and, most recently, Social Justice Isn’t What You Think It Is (2015), co-authored with Paul Adams.

Novak’s writings on democratic capitalism fought socialism not just on the level of economic efficiency, but on moral terrain, too. Socialists have long attacked market-based economies for their inequalities and consumerist frenzies, but, as Novak argued, their arguments invariably compared luminous socialist ideals with the often prosaic realities of capitalist societies. Had socialists looked instead at the socialist world as it actually existed, they would have found truncheon-enforced political conformity, economic ruin, and spiritual decay.

Requiem in pacem.

And I might add that had Tony Abbott better understood the economy as a moral issue he might have been a better Prime Minister.

I don’t often find myself in almost total agreement with Robert Skidelsky but this is one of those times. This is from an article titled, Economists versus the Economy.

What unites the great economists, and many other good ones, is a broad education and outlook. This gives them access to many different ways of understanding the economy. The giants of earlier generations knew a lot of things besides economics. Keynes graduated in mathematics, but was steeped in the classics (and studied economics for less than a year before starting to teach it). Schumpeter got his PhD in law; Hayek’s were in law and political science, and he also studied philosophy, psychology, and brain anatomy.

Today’s professional economists, by contrast, have studied almost nothing but economics. They don’t even read the classics of their own discipline. Economic history comes, if at all, from data sets. Philosophy, which could teach them about the limits of the economic method, is a closed book. Mathematics, demanding and seductive, has monopolized their mental horizons. The economists are the idiots savants of our time.

Let me also give you his opening para:

Policymakers don’t know what to do. They press the usual (and unusual) levers and nothing happens. Quantitative easing was supposed to bring inflation “back to target.” It didn’t. Fiscal contraction was supposed to restore confidence. It didn’t. Earlier this month, Mark Carney, Governor of the Bank of England, delivered a speech called “The Specter of Monetarism.” Of course, monetarism was supposed to save us from the specter of Keynesianism!

With virtually no usable macroeconomic tools, the default position is “structural reform.” But no one agrees on what it entails. Meanwhile, crackpot leaders are stirring discontented voters. Economies, it seems, have escaped from the grasp of those supposed to manage them, with politics in hot pursuit.

The above article was sent to me by a friend in Canada. This next quote is from a presentation of another colleague, this one given last week to the House of Commons in the UK. I’m afraid there’s no link, but you will get the drift. He is the only other self-identified “classical economist” I know of.

HOW DID PROFESSIONAL ECONOMISTS GET IT IN TO THEIR HEADS THAT THEY COULD PREDICT THE FUTURE?

Very simply, because that is what they have been taught in universities for the past fifty years. Of course Adam Smith would have laughed at the idea. Marx didn’t believe it either, nor did Keynes. But, starting around one hundred years ago, the university economics curriculum throughout the Western world was hi-jacked by a particular way of looking at economic activity that came to be known as ‘neoclassical’ economics . So successful was this takeover that by 1970 it had driven out every other method of analysis, like a cuckoo in a nest. Academic papers that did not adopt this particular method were rejected by the leading scholarly journals, thus ensuring uniformity of thought throughout the profession.

And while I am at it, I have been sent a third paper by another colleague which I hope he won’t mind my pre-empting his own publication since he is in the US and we are very unlikely to have overlapping readers. This is what he wrote:

Why hasn’t this recovery been stronger? The predominant explanation blames inadequate stimulus spending. It holds that more “demand” is needed to boost the economy. But this inverts the nature of the relationship between demand and economic performance. Demand is the result—not the cause—of economic activity. Therefore production, not demand, determines growth. At best, trying to stimulate demand while ignoring production is like trying to grow a flower by watering its petals instead of its roots.

But it’s often worse than that. The state can spend only what the private sector produces, which means government must first remove a dollar from the economy to spend it into the economy. Because doing so misallocate resources, the net effect is worse than zero: Rather than merely neglecting the flower’s roots, it’s like sucking water out of the soil and pouring it over the flower’s petals. Small wonder the economy has failed to break even three percent growth rates.

What to do seems economically clear enough, but how do we get the politics to line up? This is the question of our times, with every party of the left only wishing to do what would make things worse while preventing, as best they can, the parties of the right from fixing things up.

And it only gets better: 57-43

The Rasmussen Reports daily Presidential Tracking Poll for Tuesday shows that 57% of Likely U.S. Voters approve of President Trump’s job performance. Forty-three percent (43%) disapprove.

This statement is from an exhibit in the Arts Museum in Aarhus and captures the values of the enlightenment in a way that spells them out so that they can be understood in the times in which we live.

It’s been something of a problem to decide which newspaper to read each morning while in Europe, and after quite a bit of trial and error, I have locked onto The New York Times. It is American politics that is the most important at the moment, and it does turn out that it does not seem to matter which of the British papers I choose, none of them are any better. They are all filled with the same kind of deceit, trying to ease the pain among the left, and looking to find whatever vulnerabilities there are in Trump as president.

The NYT has ended up the least painful to read since it is so consistent in its idiocies. Nothing in it ever does anything but fill me with disgust at what seems to be some kind of competition to find the most ridiculous means to discredit the election, but after a while you get used to it. What they are doing is, of course, not just dangerous but downright evil since the very processes of a democratic system depend on the general acceptance of the processes in which our political leaders are chosen. The left has no uses for such established processes except to the extent that they are able to place their people into positions of power. One article after another has been about how the electoral system is broken, written by one cretin after another.

So imagine my surprise when I opened the editorial page for Friday’s paper (on the continent the papers are always a day late) and in the feature position was an article on “Voting should be mandatory” written by none other than Waleed Aly, “columnist and broadcaster and a politics lecturer at Monash University”. Bottoms of barrels don’t get scraped any more thoroughly than this. He starts:

When you survey the wreckage of 2016, it’s easy to forget that the most seismic democratic events were brought about by minorities.

Only 37 percent of eligible Britons voted to leave the European Union. The case is even clearer in the American election, which Donald J. Trump won despite having persuaded only a quarter of the American electorate to support him. Mr. Trump triumphed in a low-turnout election.

The probability that the US will adopt compulsory voting is zero to the hundredth decimal point. What is important is that NYT readers can now sagely nod their heads and agree that, on the evidence of the 2016 election, the system has “handed power to someone whose plan was to keep turnout low, hoping to appeal to an impassioned minority rather than a nation at large”.

But you do wonder whether Aly volunteered to write this article, or whether the editorial board sought out someone who could write these inanities for them and lit on the most reliable person on the left in a country with compulsory voting. They therefore chose Waleed as the bunny to put this article together, helping to convince his fellow political fools on the left in the US that the American voting system is broken and that DJT is not really their legitimate president after all.

Wile E Coyote must have eaten quite a lot of roadrunners in his time, even if not that roadrunner. Sylvester has to have eaten his fair share of birds, even if he never quite gets to Tweety. The big bad wolf may not have eaten those three little pigs, the ones with the clever oldest brother who built his house of brick, but he has certainly eaten his fair share of others. These are all extremely robust animals, whose fame rests on their role in never actually finally despatching their movie co-stars before the camera. But each looks very well fed and each is strictly a carnivore.

But these are just cartoons, right? Unfortunately it is a mentality that goes far wider that has helped to infantise the American public. The rest of this is about the movie Passengers (R/T: critics 31% – audiences 68%; iMDB 7.1) which you are advised not to read if you are thinking of going along. No spoilers here, since the film is pretty rancid already, but there will be fewer surprises left in the plot if you continue below.
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But this is not a movie review; this is a discussion of the American left as represented by its insistence that all film endings be Hollywood endings. In a Hollywood ending, whatever might be the set up, everything works out fine. Probabilities and reality have nothing to do with plot lines. Audiences must have endings that do not upset them. Reality must never intrude. No lamb is ever torn to bits by wolves. No bird is ever devoured by cats. No chicken is ever eaten by a fox. No one is ever harmed by members of protected minority groups.

You might say that movies are movies and the real world is real. Everyone knows the difference and movies are just for escapism. Except that politics as presented by the media has now become a form of escapism as well, and the editors of our media organisations understand perfectly what must never be reported that might in any way upset the delicate fake news narratives of which are the victims and who are villains. Some groups are Wile E. Coyote and others are roadrunners, and if you are the first, everything you do is bad, and if you part of the second, then you are presented in only a positive way.

It may well be that humankind cannot bear very much reality, but the left cannot, it seems to me, bear any at all. The left, in their delusion that they are making this a better world, are the creators of a large measure of the political evil we find, but even so, demand that they are never presented with an accounting for the horrors they have helped to create through their passive acquiescence. They are determined never to have to confront the evidence and consequences of their misjudgements, and the mainstream media fully intend to conspire with them in ensuring the problems they cause are never brought to their attention.

It is a world where everything works out and in which no evil is found.