Open borders are not everyone’s cup of tea. They don’t know that.
Apparently this fake front page is supposed to make you vote for someone else
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You can’t break the law of markets without being punished
Consider this a joint post by myself and Spartacus. He came across the article but for obvious reasons passed it on to me. And the article is Another Volcker Moment? Guessing The Future Without Say’s Law which was posted at Zero Hedge in March. What I find so interesting is not that the phrase “Say’s Law” comes up, which it often has in the past as an anti-Keynesian meme, but this is actually an accurate use of the concept (even though they call it “laws of the markets”). So what did they write?
The explanation for most of the failures behind modern macroeconomic thinking is the substitution of market-based economics by economic planning.
The fact that today’s macroeconomics dismisses the laws of the markets, commonly referred to by economists as Say’s law, explains all. Subsequent errors confirm. The many errors are a vast subject, but they boil down to that one fateful step, and that is denying the universal truth of Say’s law.
Say’s law is about the division of labour. People earn money and make profits from deploying their individual skills in the production of goods and services for the benefit of others. Despite the best attempts of Marxism and Keynesianism along with all the other isms, attempts to override this reality have always failed. The failure is not adequately reflected in government statistics, which have evolved to the point where they actually conceal it. So when an economist talks of economic growth being above or below trend, he is talking about a measure that has no place in sound economic reasoning, and that is gross domestic product.
You would almost think they had been reading my text, since in it you will find not only quite a bit on the vandalism behind low interest rates which is what the article is about, but also quite a bit on the nonsense intrinsic to using the national accounts. More realistically, once people start to wonder what went wrong with the stimulus, they wander back into the economic archives to see if there are any clues to the present that are available from the past – which is why economics remains the only science in which its own history is an important part of the subject itself.
FURTHER NEWS ALONG THE SAME LINES: This, too, has been forwarded to me which fits into the same story. ECB will do ‘whatever is needed’ to raise inflation. These central planners who will make their mates very rich but put the rest of us into serious bother are not about to stop. Really, there is no “theory” for any of this; they just make it up as they go along.
Pushing back against critics who argue he has backed too much stimulus, European Central Bank head Mario Draghi says the top monetary authority for the eurozone will do “whatever is needed” to lift dangerously low inflation.
Draghi’s remark Thursday underlines the bank’s willingness to step up its stimulus efforts — even though they were increased as recently as its last meeting on March 10.
His speech indicated a readiness to rebut criticism from some media and politicians in Germany, the eurozone’s biggest member, who say the ECB’s stimulus is excessive, hurts savers and risks destabilizing the financial system.
Draghi coupled that statement with a call for national governments to take steps to make their economies grow faster, producing more demand for goods and services and raising inflation and employment.
Other than that everything along these lines has already massively failed, what’s the problem?
Possibly the world’s last sane psychiatrist
This is from the incomparable Theodore Dalrymple, the only man on the planet to rival Mark Steyn for saying the most important things in the most readable way. Interestingly, I discovered them both at the same time when they were writing for The Spectator while I was living in England multitudinous years ago, Mark reviewing movies and Dr Dalrymple writing a weekly diary on the travails of life as a prison doctor. Here is a sample of the sort of things Dr Dalrymple (whose real name is Anthony Daniels) writes:
I am no respecter of persons, particularly politicians, but even politicians are human — more or less — and are therefore deserving of some kind of elementary courtesy.
When, shortly after my arrival in Australia to spend April at CIS, I read a Guardian article reporting the Treasurer’s remarks on state taxation, I read with mild dismay, but not surprise, the readers’ on-line responses; for example the following:
… thanks Scott you f***ing two faced jumped up lying mendacious piece of crap. (asterisk insertion mine)
Since the Guardian sometimes excludes contributions as not being in accordance with its ‘community standards,’ one is forced to wonder what those standards actually are. Are contributions excluded for being too polite or too well-reasoned? The community standards do seem to include the use of the language cited above, for the following comment approved of what had been said:
Pretty well spot on with that lot.
It seems, then, that at least a proportion of the population’s minds — not necessarily the least educated proportion of the population, for the Guardian’s readership (I assume) is better educated than average — runs like a sewer, in which insult is not only an argument, but also the only argument. The medium really is the message.
However, for a moment he managed a short burst of lucidity, writing:
… now i know who to blame when i can’t… find a decent public school for the kids…
Certainly, his difficulty is not beyond the bounds of possibility. But if Australia is anything like my native England, the state spends $150,000 per head on a pupil’s education, and still 20 per cent of pupils can’t read properly when they leave school. This is a miracle that makes the parting of the Red Sea seem like an everyday event.
He is in Australia on a speaking tour organised by the CIS and if you can you should go to see him. Here is where you can sign on.
Viva Che, accountant
I went to an Economic Society presentation last night about the role of statistical measurement in creating economic reality given by one of the stellar scholars of our time. That was the first slide of the night. This is the text below the picture:
Che Guevara, as Minister for Economy in Cuba, used American accounting systems (left behind by fleeing American corporations) to deliver, and increase, output in a socialist economy after the revolution.
You would think the presenter would be embarrassed to say any such thing, or if one cared to give the benefit of the doubt, is perhaps oblivious to the offence that might be caused or has no idea how this might be judged given how badly the Cuban economy has been managed. None of it. Understood it all and dared anyone to say a word. No one, of course, did.
Lasched to the massed
The article starts with the obligatory anti-Trump statement but once you get past the opening the text is not anti-Trump at all. Christopher Lasch is one of my favourite writers of all time and the article is Donald Trump and the Ghost of Christopher Lasch. So get past the opening with its “Trump would be the end of the world as we know it” to read this:
In The Revolt of the Elites Lasch foresaw the disconnect between the nation’s political classes and the governed, as UCLA law professor Stephen Bainbridge has recently observed. America’s elites have devoted so much energy to building their collective moral system that they expect ideological obedience. When Trumpists say strong families in the 1950s were a positive, the cognoscenti respond: “So what. It was a terrible time for minorities and gays.”
Trump’s armies feel the sting of comfortable, upscale, post-industrial winners who can barely conceal their contempt for those they dismiss as Wal-Mart people. The disdain for yeoman America—which is overwhelmingly white—is visceral, longstanding, and profound.
“Middle Americans, as they appear to the makers of educated opinion, are hopelessly shabby, unfashionable, and provincial, ill informed about changes in taste or intellectual trends, addicted to trashy novels of romance and adventure, and stupefied by prolonged exposure to television,” Lasch wrote in 1995, not yesterday. “They are at once absurd and vaguely menacing.”
And why does this matter?
As Lasch anticipated, the nation’s ruling classes style themselves to be citizens of the world, living in “a global bazaar” to be savored indiscriminately, “with no questions asked and no commitments required.” From Pacific Palisades to Cambridge, far from the madding crowd, well-heeled transnational citizens of the world may hold assets in Singapore or the Cayman Islands. Their identities are post-national. Amid the affluence, obsequious Third World helpers work at minimum wage or off the books, doing the scut work and producing an exotic, multicultural vibe as a bonus.
Abandoning the left’s original intent to protect the common man, Lasch observed, progressives chose instead to pursue diversity, secularism, and cultural revolution. Families, schools, and churches were left behind. For thought leaders, family values, mindless patriotism, religious fundamentalism, white racism, homophobia, and retrograde views of women stood in the way of progress.
Progress should, of course, be written as “progress”. And so how do those elites think, and remember this is Lasch who was writing this two decades ago:
For progressive elites, delicate moral confections and debatable ethical positions became acts of faith. “It is no longer necessary to argue with opponents on intellectual grounds or to enter into their point of view,” Lasch pointed out. “It is enough to dismiss them as Eurocentric, racist, sexist, homophobic – in other words, as politically suspect.” When these novel moral systems are challenged, Lasch added, progressives react with “venomous hatred,” the toxic ill feeling that seems abundant in the 2016 election year.
Go to the link and read it all right through to the end, which is not an attempt to dissuade anyone from voting for Trump.
A Trump victory of course is “impossible.” It would require a massive, almost unimaginable white, yeoman flight from the Democratic Party. It is quite likely that we are even now experiencing Peak Trump. But “impossible” now stands in quotes.
And my congratulations to the author, Gilbert Sewall, for putting this together in just such a way that it has been featured at Instapundit, by Ed Driscoll who would have understood it perfectly, but also at Powerline which perhaps was uploaded by Steve Hayward, but I doubt any of the others. Our elites are ruining the world and the only thing that might save them and us is this revolt from below.
A great day for Western civilisation, was it?
I realise if you are part of the Murdoch press, these independent columnists, these frank speakers of truth to power, are ever so often under instruction to take a particular line. So who do you suppose Greg Sheridan was speaking of when he wrote this:
The best day for Western civilisation since the beginning of the primary season.
Was it Hillary Clinton’s loss? Was it Bernie Sander’s win? Don’t be silly. No, it was the defeat in a non-Romney-winning state primary of Donald Trump by Ted Cruz. What a great day that was! More to the point though, is why doesn’t this really make him worry and worry a lot more?
Insurgent Vermont senator Bernie Sanders, who describes himself as a democratic socialist, won his sixth straight primary, beating former secretary of state Hillary Clinton 56 per cent to 43 per cent.
Is Sanders really less of a worry than Trump? Is the American equivalent of Hugo Chavez not something that really really worries him? What a pitiful joke. And speaking of pitiful jokes, we also have another of the Murdoch shills, this time Niki Savva, lamenting the fact that people who preferred Abbott to Turnbull continue to say so. Well, there is at least this concession:
Turnbull has made his mistakes in the job — and which prime minister has not, certainly in the early stages.
Pathetic, just pathetic. It’s not just that he’s made mistakes, it is that he has not achieved a single thing. Here, on the other hand, is a list put together by someone pointing out Tony’s contrasting record:
His government stopped a ruthless people smuggling trade that had resulted in more than 1000 people perishing in the seas between Indonesia and Australia. They got rid of the carbon and mining taxes. They pushed through three FTAs. He, personally, pushed to stop government subsidies to the car industry, he said no to taxpayer funding for Qantas and IXL. He called a Royal Commission into Trade Union corruption. He reduced subsidies to the renewable energy sector. He tried to push through a one-stop shop on environmental approvals for new mining projects.
And all this with the Leader of the Opposition a member of his own cabinet.
I can certainly live with a Ted Cruz as president, better than either of the Democrats. But not to understand the virtues that Donald Trump would bring with him to the White House along with his negatives makes everything his critics at The Australian say just empty rhetoric demanded of them by their boss, in exactly the same way they had all ganged up on Tony.
Were the Classical Economists Right After All?
This is the first draft of an abstract I have put together which relates to my previous post on production versus consumption. I would be interested in any thoughts you might have.
Political Economy in Crisis:
Were the Classical Economists Right After All?
There are, generally speaking, five streams of macroeconomic thought that compete for allegiance in the modern world.
• Keynesian which comes in many varieties all of which argue recessions are due to failure of aggregate demand and which deny the validity of Say’s Law
• New Classical based on rational expectations but with no embedded theory of recession
• Austrian which typically ignores aggregations, where activity is driven by marginal utility and which builds a theory of recession based on structural imbalances caused by financial dislocation
• Marxist and other forms of socialist theory whose aim is to centralise economic decisions and whose main focus of analysis are exploitation of the working class and concern with inequality
• Classical which emphasises the supply-side of the economy, focuses on the role of the entrepreneur and sees recessions as due to structural imbalances which may come from a variety of causes.
The aim of the paper is to argue that economic theory reached its deepest and most profound level in the writings of the late classical economists which flourished over the period from the publication of John Stuart Mill’s Principles in 1848 through until the publication of John Maynard Keynes’s General Theory in 1936. The paper will discuss the classical framework and contrast this approach with the alternatives that today compete for the allegiance of economists.
Fields of dreams and hallucinations
It’s like all those folk back then who looked through their telescopes and saw the canals on Mars. In this case, it is the battery inflicted on Michelle Fields by Donald Trump’s campaign manager. Here is a description from the formerly reliable Jeff Jacoby in an anti-Trump article titled, Authoritarian in Chief:
Authoritarian abuse of power in a Trump administration isn’t just a theoretical possibility. Should the New York businessman win the presidency, it’s a certainty. Trump’s campaign, with its torrent of insults, threats of revenge, and undercurrent of political violence, is the first in American history to raise the prospect of a ruthless strongman in the White House, unencumbered by constitutional norms and democratic civilities.
When Trump’s campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, was arrested last week on misdemeanor charges of battery against reporter Michelle Fields, the candidate’s reaction was typical. Though Fields’s account was never in doubt — it was corroborated at once by an eyewitness (Washington Post reporter Ben Terris), by an audio recording, and then by security-camera video footage — Trump offered no apology and didn’t rebuke his staffer. Instead he went on the attack: He claimed that Fields had “made the story up,” he went out of his way to praise Lewandowski, and he gleefully trashed the journalists covering him as “disgusting” and “horrible people.” Trump even hinted that he might sue Fields.
A campaign manager is not the candidate himself, and even the most abusive principal will fire subordinates if they cause trouble. But Trump did not and in fact told Lewandowski that under no circumstances was he to apologise or concede anything at all. So let me bring Gavin McInnes to put the other side of the case in an article he titles, Michelle Fields Is Not Black and Blue.
There is plenty of photographic and video evidence of the exchange, but it doesn’t seem to affect people’s perception of what happened. Once again, the more we are confronted with evidence that contradicts our beliefs, the more steadfast we are in those beliefs. The initial videos show a close-up of Fields touching Trump, and an aerial view was released by police this week that shows more details. What is irrefutable is that on March 8, after a press conference in Jupiter, Fla., Breitbart reporter Michelle Fields approached Donald Trump and was moved out of the way by Trump’s campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski. There is audio of Fields acting like it was a big deal to The Washington Post’s Ben Terris, but I was happy to get on with my day a few seconds after seeing the first video.
So here is the story on video.
You have to be hallucinating to see an assault in any of this, or perhaps just hoping with all your might for any old lie to get the job done. Here it is one more time.
Are people really telling the truth when they say they saw an assault in that picture? There is no insanity quite like it.
AND JUST A BIT MORE: I thought I would look up the distinction between “assault” and “battery” Here is what I found on the net:
Any reasonable threat to a person is assault while battery is defined as use of force against another with intent of causing physical harm without his consent. In other words, assault is the attempt to commit battery.
Unless there was an intention to cause physical harm, there is no case to answer. You can look at the legal definitions here.
“What a country wants to make it richer, is never consumption, but production”
I have an aversion to virtually every form of modern economic theory. Whether it is based on aggregate demand or marginal utility, they all seem to think economies are driven from the demand side. And no level of failure built on such policies ever gets the profession to recognise that an economy is driven by value adding production and nothing else. If you want to understand how things work, you must return to classical economic theory. It is what drove Reagan’s revolution which was described as supply-side economics but was explicitly based on a return to classical economic theory and Say’s Law. Which brings me to this, an article Mill Power, which has as its sub-head, “‘Trumponomics’ from a classical perspective”. This is by Stephen MacLean writing in the Quarterly Review of Canada’s Disraeli-Macdonald Institute.
Foregoing the legitimate question about the efficacy of U.S. fiscal dictates that induce home industries to take advantage of tax structures in foreign lands — and penalise them when they try to patriate capital — what policy should a possible Trump administration advocate for congressional legislation?
The answer lies in entrepreneurship and innovation. As Mill explained, ‘What a country wants to make it richer, is never consumption, but production.’
What can you find in all of your modern texts that makes as much sense as that? And oddly, just today, this showed up: What has Trump Wrought by Pat Buchanan. And there, right in the middle, we find exactly the same argument:
Economists who swoon over figures on consumption forget what America’s 19th-century meteoric rise to self-sufficiency teaches, and what all four presidents on Mount Rushmore understood.
Production comes before consumption. Who owns the orchard is more essential than who eats the apples. We have exported the economic independence Hamilton taught was indispensable to our political independence. We have forgotten what made us great.
In dwelling on all this, you might contemplate which side of this issue those crony capitalists are lining up on, the ones who would find their massive lashings of government money shorn away as a more economically literate business-like administration took over.
And just in case you are wondering where you can find a modern version of Mill’s Principles, might I suggest this, now in its second edition.
Hillary Clinton and the rights of the unborn
Can you see why everyone was upset with this from Hillary Clinton? More particularly, why did it upset so many of those on the left?
Democratic primary front-runner Hillary Clinton ran afoul of both the pro-life and pro-choice sides of the abortion debate Sunday when she said constitutional rights do not apply to an “unborn person” or “child.” . . .
Mrs. Clinton also said “there is room for reasonable kinds of restrictions” on abortion during the third trimester of pregnancy.
Here’s the reason they were upset.
Describing the fetus as a “person” or “child” has long been anathema to the pro-choice movement, which argues the terms misleadingly imply a sense of humanity.
In addition, the specific term “person” is a legal concept that includes rights and statuses that the law protects, including protection of a person’s life under the laws against homicide. Pro-choice intellectuals have long said that even if an unborn child is a “life,” it is not yet a “person.”
See the distinction? You may think this is sick and depraved, but what do you know? You have to be a constitutional scholar or an intellectual to understand these things.
Even an old pro like Hillary can’t get it right even after all these years, although you may be sure this is nothing but a passing moment on her way to the White House. I only mention it as a reminder of the extent to which the media makes everything into a sensation when it want to get you. But with those it supports you hardly hear a sound. I point this out just so you know which side you are on when you buy into American politics. Because if these eight months old “fetuses” are actually persons with constitutional rights – you know, actual real people – then perhaps some of you were just a tad harsh the other day in your judgements of what nameless others had been saying on this very issue. Not that he was necessarily right, but only that you are picking up your cues from George Soros and The New York Times.
Law of Markets 