I've Been Wondering

Peace
What percentage of the time, thoughout history, when given the choice between fighting or opting for peace while being confronted by an aggressor known for breaking his (or its) word, has choosing "peace" worked out well? From the playground bully to the genocidal dictator, how often has it worked out well to submit to their demands? From Philip of Macedon's story to the ancient Greeks of "don't worry, I'll never invade your lands," to Hitler's "don't worry, I'm just reuniting the German peoples," are there many (any?) examples of things turning out well for all (or at least most) of the parties when peace was chosen?

The "Give Peace a Chance" theme has been with us for a long time, but what is the empirical evidence that this is, on average, a good idea?

Civilians
When it comes to a long (intergenerational) war, why does the term civilian have any meaning at all? For illustration, consider me. I've never been in the military. Yet I consider myself a completely legitimate military target. I've worked on a number of sophisticated and highly deadly weapon systems during my career (which have been deployed with great effect). Right now I work on autonomous robots, and while none of them are for military purposes, the technology could easily be converted for intensely effective military applications. It would be effective, perhaps even more effective than killing a soldier, to kill someone like me, an enabler of soldiers.

Anyone with my skills could easily be redirected to work on military applications at any time, so as a preemptive strike, killing technical people seems fair enough to me. And killing the people who support such people seems justified to me as well. And if they weren't even born - all the better, so kill the mothers too, or at least get them when they're children. After all, in a long war, one day they'll grow up to try to kill you.

Especially in a democracy, such as the United States, or Israel, or Lebanon, I consider the entire populace to be supporting the military, and as a result, are fair game as military targets.

Clearly, Hezbollah agrees with me. What I'm wondering is why no one else does? It seems insane to me not to hit an enemy in a long war wherever, whenever, and however you can.

Antisemitic
Why do various intellectuals bristle when their comments and advocacy regarding Israeli policy, that if actually implemented will clearly lead to more dead jews, are called antisemitic? Even if their comments are well intentioned, or even fair and just, the comments are still antisemitic, aren't they?

Everybody's an Environmentalist...

... unless it costs them something.

Let's start with a simple assertion. If climate stability is a primary goal, rapidly injecting gazillions of tons of CO2 into the atmosphere isn't a great idea. I think most climate change scientists would probably more or less agree with that assertion. I think that most engineers would agree that significantly tweaking a variable can easily lead to instability. And I think it has a nice, intuitive feel to it. It might even be true.

But should climate stability be a primary goal? For instance, should it be more important than providing clean water, public health, primary education, and dietary improvements for the impoverished masses of the world? This is an important question. Here's one answer:

Two years ago, a group of the world's most respected economists, including Nobel Laureate and FREE's 2003 Summer Scholar Thomas Schelling, were posed with a question: Given significant but finite resources, what are the best investments for improving our world? They chose clean water, public health, primary education (especially of girls), and inexpensive dietary improvements.

Addressing global warming didn't make the cut. Why not? It could consume all the funds while producing uncertain rewards in the far distant future. Instead, these funds could be invested in developing economies. By attracting foreign capital, poor nations could gain economic resiliency, the surest route to a better future.

The experiment with economists was recently replicated by John Bolton, U.S. Ambassador to the UN. Not one to shrink from controversy, he empanelled UN diplomats from seven emerging nations, including India and China, to prioritize the issues. After hearing from experts in the problem areas, they ranked global crises ranging from climate change to migration. The top four were again health care, water and sanitation, education, and child nutrition. Climate change was, of course, dead last. No honest policy analyst would be surprised by these rankings.

While most agree that climate change is occurring, many proposed "solutions" are monumentally expensive, uncertain, and distant. They are, in sum, the sorriest of investments. Providing vitamin A, on the other hand, costs less than $1 per person per year, saves lives, and prevents childhood blindness. Encouraging breast feeding cheaply and effectively promotes infant health.

That's my view. The return on investment for combating climate change, especially when discounted for the uncertainty inherent in any ultra long term investment, is extremely poor. And let's face it. We're not going to spend the money to completely solve any of these other problems either.

Climate change needs to go to the back of the line and wait.

2007 Financial Crisis

I predict a major financial crisis and severe depression in 2007.

It's likely that JK Rowling plans to kill off Harry Potter in Book 7 (title still unknown):

Harry, others may die in the end, J.K. Rowling says

Author J.K. Rowling said two characters will die in the last installment of her boy wizard series, and hinted Harry Potter may not survive, either.

"I have never been tempted to kill him off before the final because I've always planned seven books, and I want to finish seven books," Rowling said Monday on London TV.
"I can completely understand, however, the mentality of an author who thinks, 'Well, I'm gonna kill them off because that means there can be no non-author-written sequels. So it will end with me, and after I'm dead and gone they won't be able to bring back the character.' "

Rowling declined to commit herself about Harry, saying she doesn't want to receive hate mail.

That will drive tens of millions of people in developed countries into deep depression. They won't buy anything, won't work nearly as hard, and the shock to the demand side will cause the global economic system to go unstable.

I've seen this effect in person with my nine (almost ten) year old daughter. In the very excellent Bartimaeus trilogy, a beloved character dies in the last paragraph. My daughter was significantly depressed for a long time. She kept reading the last chapter over and over again hoping it would turn out different.

The problem with Harry Potter is that ten to twenty million people will read it during the 72 hour period after it comes out. The overall depression of that large a group of people all at once will have a profound impact on the economy.

Reading tealeaves

I'm often amused when I hear people complain that there is too much information available or that it is hard to be informed or that they are being mislead. It simply doesn't occur to them that they need to try and develop an approach to sorting, sifting and analyzing what is abundantly available. In addition to refining their approach they can also pickup on subtle clues.

This article in the WSJ caught my attention, not because of the main thrust but because of this opening section:

It wasn't so long ago that insurers were pronouncing terrorism "uninsurable." But ask any insurer: Aon's Paul Bassett recently noted that the global war on terror had greatly reduced the threat of megaplots on the scale of Sept. 11, 2001.

Yes, suicide bombers and car bombs remain a threat, but not to the industry's capital base. Hurricanes are the new "uninsurable" now.

One reason for being on the offensive against Radical Islamists and their enablers is to reduce their effectiveness in supporting cells that might hatch a megaplot here at home. Critics who are sure that this policy is wrong exhibit thinking that is at odds with people who obsess about that risk for a living. Who's view would you lean towards: someone with an emotion laden approach (likely a sufferer of BDS) or a professional trying to take a clear eyed approach?

Spontaneous Order

I thought that this article by economist Daniel Klein was a nice followup to Bret's post about the superiority of self-organizing systems. Excerpts below:

At a roller rink you can see something that holds insights into great questions of politics and society.

"How are 100 people supposed to skate around the arena without guidance or direction? Each skater traces out a pattern, and the patterns must mesh so skaters avoid injury. That's a complex problem. It would require smart leadership. But it won't get solved! The arena will be a scene of collision, injury, and stagnation. Who will pay for that?!"

Intuition leads us to think that complex problems require complex, deliberate solutions. In a roller rink, the social good depends on getting the patterns to mesh. But no one is minding that good. As your friend describes the business idea, not even the owner intends to look after it. How can the social good be achieved if no one is looking after it?

Suppose you and I step into roller-skates and join the other skaters on the floor of the rink. In skating, I do not aim to solve the big problem of coordinating all the skaters. I do not try to get all 100 patterns to mesh. I show common courtesy, but basically I am out for myself. I want to have fun, and so certainly don't want to get hurt. Looking out for myself, I promote my interest in avoiding collision with you.

An important quality of collision is mutuality. If I collide with you, then you collide with me. And if I don't collide with you, you don't collide with me. In promoting my interest in avoiding collision with you, I also promote your interest in avoiding collision with me.

The key to social order at the roller rink is this coincidence of interest. I do not intend to promote your interest. I am not necessarily even aware of it. Still, by looking out for myself I am to that extent also looking out for you. My actions promote your interest.

Skating on the floor of the roller rink is an example of what Friedrich Hayek called spontaneous order. The process is beneficial and orderly, but also spontaneous. No one plans or directs the overall order. Decision making is left to the individual skater. It is decentralized.

The contrast is centralized decision making. Again, intuition tells us that the only way the complex social good can be achieved is by central planning. Yet Hayek tells us that sometimes another way it can work is "decentral" planning. He tells us, in fact, that, often, decentral planning is the only way it can work.

Suppose the social good on the floor of the roller rink were entrusted to central planning. The rink owner appoints a really smart, really nice guy to look out for the social good. He hires a man with the reputation of a saint, and with two PhDs from Yale, one in Civil Engineering and one in Ethics. This smart saint stands in the organ booth, holds a bullhorn up to his mouth, and calls out directions: "You in the blue jacket, speed up and veer to the left." "You in the black overalls, I want you to slow down and move toward the inside." And so on.

The results would be terrible. The smart saint could not come close to achieve the brisk dynamic order that spontaneous skating achieves. The main reason he could not is that he lacks knowledge of individual conditions. Using his Yale learning, he looks closely and does his best. But he has 100 skaters to watch, and the conditions of each are changing moment by moment. The planner's college knowledge is useless in informing him of the particular conditions of your situation. The planner tries to apply engineering principles, but each skater has principles of motion all his own: Do I feel like going faster? Am I losing my balance? Can I handle this turn? Do I have to go to the bathroom? Am I content to follow the planner's directions?

Your local conditions—your opportunities, constraints, and aspirations—are best known by you. No one else comes close. College knowledge is no substitute for what Hayek called local knowledge.

Moreover, even if somehow the smart saint from Yale has all the local knowledge of the individual skaters, what would he do with it? How would he interpret it? How would he integrate it? And if he came up with orders for how to direct our skating, how would he communicate those orders to 100 people simultaneously?

Being smart and saintly, the planner would recognize his limitations and just slow things down. To prevent collisions, he would have to impose regimentation. Skating would be slow and simple. Skaters would be bored. Moreover, they would not find the joy and dignity that come from making one's own course.

On the floor of the roller rink, the social good can only be achieved by spontaneous order. As Hayek explained, the case for leaving action spontaneous is stronger the more complex social affairs are, because greater complexity only exacerbates the planner's knowledge problems. When the situation is simple, central planning can succeed. If there were just four skaters on the floor of the rink, central planning might not be so bad. But with 100 skaters, it is preposterous.

If, besides being smart and saintly, the planner were also wise, he would beseech the rink owner to relieve him of his assigned task. He would renounce central planning. He would recommend spontaneous order.

The principles find direct application in economics. Just as we want to discourage collisions, we want to encourage voluntary exchange. In both cases, the key is mutuality. Gains from trade are mutual, giving rise to coincidence of interest: In promoting my interest in gaining in a voluntary exchange with you, I also promote your interest in gaining in a voluntary exchange with me. You would not enter into the exchange if you did not stand to gain.

Once again, actors buzz about spontaneously to advance their own interest, but in the process advancing the social good. As merchants, we garner the honest dollar by serving our customers—that is, by serving society. As consumers, we obtain stuff by rewarding suppliers for services rendered.

Again, if someone were to presume to plan the economy, the result would be disaster. The social patterns in an economy are fabulously complex, making decentral planning all the more necessary.

In economics, the substance of "spontaneous" is liberty. Liberty means freedom from others messing with your stuff, including yourself, your person. When the government tells you that you can't enter certain contracts, can't use your property in certain ways, and can't keep 35 percent of your earnings, it treads on your liberty. It is making affairs less spontaneous and more centrally directed or controlled.

It sounds self-centered—freedom from others messing with your stuff. But the principle would go for everyone, so it also requires you not to mess with others' stuff. Liberty implies not only security and freedom in ownership, but duties to respect ownership by others.

But more importantly, we live in a world of mutualities. I want others not to mess with my stuff so that I can use my stuff to best participate in mutual relationships. The point is not self-centeredness; it is to center control over stuff in the owner, so that action draws on local conditions and advances mutual betterment. The bonds of mutual relationships form the vast network of society, and when its members are individually empowered and motivated to advance those bonds, we have a society that is well cared for.

Spontaneous-order principles argue against full-fledged central planning, but do they condemn all incursions on liberty? The key is coincidence of interest. In some activities, such as polluting the air, maybe there isn't coincidence of interest. Maybe there is conflict of interest. In cases like that there is less of a case for spontaneous arrangements.

Likewise, in the roller rink, there are occasions for simple rules, such as signaling to skaters when the direction for skating is to be reversed, or when the floor is open only to ladies, or only to couples. These rules are largely self-enforcing.

But in the great roller rink of human society, many government restrictions are more like the central planner imposing foolish restrictions on ordinary skating. Spontaneous-order principles ought to have more purchase than they do.

The principle of spontaneity, of liberty, is not an all-or-nothing proposition. But the principles of local knowledge, coincidence of interest, and spontaneous adaptation have much more power than is generally recognized. People have a hard time understanding how spontaneous order works, or even that it exists. At a roller rink, spontaneous order happens before our very eyes. But in the great rink of society, each of us is immersed deep within the spontaneous order, focused on our own particular situation. Each has no window on the whole, not even a glimpse. Although economics cannot make the whole actually visible to us, it can help us see the principles at work.

Jonathan Swift said that vision is the art of seeing things invisible. In that sense, economics gives us vision.

Calling out Progressives

JUST SAY NO...
...to yet another class of victims. That's Heather Mac Donald's advice, anyway; and I think it very sound:... So says Dr. Sanity over at her terrific blog. She continues:

I especially like her idea of overthrowing the progressive pedagogy which is at the root of the attempt to feminize boys and eliminate any masculine "taint" to learning (e.g. competition).

...victimhood is still "in", having replaced personal responsibility and hard work as the means of getting ahead in the world. Try to change that and you will be accused by the progressive lot (see here) as being either Racist, Sexist, Homophobic, Islamophobic, Imperialist, Bigoted, or--worse of all --Intolerant or Insensitive.

That's what it has come down to. Either you do it the "progressive" way; or they will label you as vermin and attack you with all the firepower of their rhetorical armament. "Progressives" aren't really interested in what works to achieve the desired result in the real world; they are more interested in what makes them feel virtuous.

She goes on to list 10 commandment of multiculturalism and then concludes:

The only way we can rid ourselves of these toxic commandments; and free the millions held hostage in our own country by the virulent victimhood cult of the left; is to expose progressive pedagogy for what it is--totalitarian propaganda that disables free will; individuality and personal responsibiity; replacing them with "an oppressive tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its perpetual victims." (C.S. Lewis, again)

Once again the good Doctor is on fire! - see the archives too

Culture Matters

The title of this post covers so much ground that someone should write a book on the subject!
(re linked to book: This collection of essays addresses a difficult question: Are some cultures better than others at creating freedom, prosperity, and justice? Although Culture Matters offers varying responses to this politically incorrect question, its editors, Lawrence E. Harrison and Samuel P. Huntington, as well as the bulk of its contributors, answer in some form of the affirmative.)

Culture is our evolutionary hyperdrive. Even aside from the impact of our biology, culture shapes us and we shape our culture. It is a vessel containing intangible elements of what makes civilization.

In my usual style of intellectual parambulations, I stumbled upon this article by James Q. Wilson which touches upon many important ideas and demonstrates the richness one encounters when tracing lines of thought through the complexity of a cultural issue. Heavily excerpted here, the full article is worth a read.

WHY WE DON’T MARRY

Everyone knows that the rising proportion of women who bear and raise children out of wedlock has greatly weakened the American family system. This phenomenon, once thought limited to African Americans, now affects whites as well, so much so that the rate at which white children are born to an unmarried mother is now as high as the rate for black children in the mid-1960s, when Daniel Patrick Moynihan issued his famous report on the Negro family. For whites the rate is one-fifth; for blacks it is over one-half.

Almost everyone—a few retrograde scholars excepted—agrees that children in mother-only homes suffer harmful consequences: the best studies show that these youngsters are more likely than those in two-parent families to be suspended from school, have emotional problems, become delinquent, suffer from abuse, and take drugs. Some of these problems may arise from the economic circumstances of these one-parent families, but the best studies, such as those by Sara McLanahan and Gary Sandefur, show that low income can explain, at most, about half of the differences between single-parent and two-parent families. The rest of the difference is explained by a mother living without a husband.


And even the income explanation is a bit misleading, because single moms, by virtue of being single, are more likely to be poor than are married moms. Now that our social security and pension systems have dramatically reduced poverty among the elderly, growing up with only one parent has dramatically increased poverty among children. In this country we have managed to shift poverty from old folks to young folks. Former Clinton advisor William Galston sums up the matter this way: you need only do three things in this country to avoid poverty—finish high school, marry before having a child, and marry after the age of 20. Only 8 percent of the families who do this are poor; 79 percent of those who fail to do this are poor.


... comparing single-parent families and average spending levels neglects the real issue: how attractive is welfare to a low-income unmarried woman in a given locality? When economist Mark Rosenzweig asked this question of women who are part of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth—a panel study of people that has been going on since 1979—he found that a 10 percent increase in welfare benefits made the chances that a poor young woman would have a baby out of wedlock before the age of 22 go up by 12 percent. And this was true for whites as well as blacks. Soon other scholars were confirming Rosenzweig’s findings. Welfare made a difference.

But how big a difference? AFDC began in 1935, but by 1960 only 4 percent of the children getting welfare had a mother who had never been married; the rest had mothers who were widows or had been separated from their husbands. By 1996 that had changed dramatically: now approximately two-thirds of welfare children had an unmarried mom, and hardly any were the offspring of widows.

To explain the staggering increase in unmarried mothers, we must turn to culture. In this context, what I mean by culture is simply that being an unmarried mother and living on welfare has lost its stigma. At one time living on the dole was shameful; now it is much less so. As this may not be obvious to some people, let me add some facts that will support it.

Women in rural communities who go on welfare leave it much sooner than the same kind of women who take welfare in big cities, and this is true for both whites and blacks and regardless of the size of their families. The studies that show this outcome offer a simple explanation for it. In a small town, everyone knows who is on welfare, and welfare recipients do not have many friends in the same situation with whom they can associate. But in a big city, welfare recipients are not known to everyone, and each one can easily associate with other women living the same way. In the small town, welfare recipients tell interviewers the same story: “I always felt like I was being watched”; “they treat us like welfare cattle”; people “make nasty comments.” But in a big city, recipients had a different story: Everyone “is in the same boat I am”; people “don’t look down on you.”

How did stigma get weakened by practice and undercut by law, when Americans—no less than Brits, Canadians, and Australians—favor marriage and are skeptical of welfare?

Let me suggest that beneath the popular support for marriage there has slowly developed, almost unnoticed, a subversion of it, which can be summarized this way: whereas marriage was once thought to be about a social union, it is now about personal preferences. Formerly, law and opinion enforced the desirability of marriage without asking what went on in that union; today, law and opinion enforce the desirability of personal happiness without worrying much about maintaining a formal relationship. Marriage was once a sacrament, then it became a contract, and now it is an arrangement. Once religion provided the sacrament, then the law enforced the contract, and now personal preferences define the arrangement.

The cultural change that made this happen was the same one that gave us science, technology, freedom, and capitalism: the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment—that extraordinary intellectual development that began in eighteenth-century England, Scotland, Holland, and Germany—made human reason the measure of all things, throwing off ancient rules if they fell short. What the king once ordered, what bishops once enforced, what tradition once required was to be set aside in the name of scientific knowledge and personal self-discovery. The Enlightenment’s great spokesmen were David Hume, Adam Smith, and Immanuel Kant; its greatest accomplishment was the creation of the United States of America.

I am a great admirer of the Enlightenment. But it entailed costs. I take great pride in the vast expansion in human freedom that the Enlightenment conferred on so many people, but I also know that the Enlightenment spent little time worrying about those cultural habits that make freedom meaningful and constructive. The family was one of these.

But why did the Enlightenment have its greatest effect on the English-speaking world and on northwestern Europe? I think it was because life in those countries had for so long been arranged in ways that provided fertile ground in which human reason and personal freedom could take root and prosper. Alan Macfarlane, the great English anthropologist, has shown that land in England was individually owned as far back as the thirteenth century and possibly even earlier. There, and in similar countries in northwestern Europe, land ownership had established the basis for a slow assertion of human rights and legal defenses. If you own the land, you have a right to keep, sell, or bequeath it, and you have access to courts that will defend those rights and, in defending them, will slowly add more rights.

The Enlightenment did not change the family immediately, because everyone took family life for granted. The most important Enlightenment thinkers assumed marriage and denounced divorce. That assumption—and in time that denunciation—slowly lost force, as people gradually experienced the widening of human freedom.

The laws, until well into the twentieth century, made it crystal clear that, though a child might be conceived by an unmarried couple, once born it had to have two parents. There was no provision for the state to pay for a single-parent child, and public opinion strongly and unanimously endorsed that policy.

The sixties reinstated trends begun half a century earlier, but now without effective opposition. No-fault divorce laws were passed throughout most of the West, the pill and liberalized abortion laws dramatically reduced the chances of unwanted pregnancies, and popular entertainment focused on pleasing the young.

As a result, family law, in Carl Schneider’s term, lost its moral basis. It was easier to get out of a marriage than a mortgage. This change in culture was made crystal clear by court decisions. At the end of the nineteenth century, the Supreme Court referred to marriage as a “holy estate” and a “sacred obligation.” By 1965 the same court described marriage as “an association of two individuals.”

People still value marriage; but it is only that value—and very little social pressure or legal obligation—that sustains it.

But there remains at least one more puzzle to solve. Culture has shaped how we produce and raise children, but that culture surely had its greatest impact on how educated people think. Yet the problem of weak, single-parent families is greatest among the least educated people. Why should a culture that is so powerfully shaped by upper-middle-class beliefs have so profound an effect on poor people? If some intellectuals have devalued marriage, why should ordinary people do so? If white culture has weakened marriage, why should black culture follow suit?

I suspect that the answer may be found in Myron Magnet’s book The Dream and the Nightmare. When the haves remake a culture, the people who pay the price are the have-nots. Let me restate his argument with my own metaphor. Imagine a game of crack-the-whip, in which a line of children, holding hands, starts running in a circle. The first few children have no problem keeping up, but near the end of the line the last few must run so fast that many fall down. Those children who did not begin the turning suffer most from the turn.

There are countless examples of our cultural crack-the-whip. Heroin and cocaine use started among elites and then spread down the social scale. When the elites wanted to stop, they could hire doctors and therapists; when the poor wanted to stop, they could not hire anybody. The elites endorsed community-based centers to treat mental illness, and so mental hospitals were closed down. The elites hired psychiatrists; the poor slept on the streets. People who practiced contraception endorsed loose sexuality in writing and movies; the poor practiced loose sexuality without contraception. Divorce is more common among the affluent than the poor. The latter, who can’t afford divorce, deal with unhappy marriages by not getting married in the first place. My only trivial quarrel with Magnet is that I believe these changes began a century ago and even then built on more profound changes that date back centuries.

Now you probably expect me to tell you what we can do about this, but if you believe, as I do, in the power of culture, you will realize that there is very little one can do. As a University of Chicago professor once put it, if you succeed in explaining why something is so, you have probably succeeded in explaining why it must be so. He implied what is in fact often the case: change is very hard.

One could imagine an effort to change our culture, but one must recognize that there are many aspects of it that no one, least of all I, wants to change. We do not want fewer freedoms or less democracy. Most of us, myself included, do not want to change any of the gains women have made in establishing their moral and legal standing as independent actors with all the rights that men once enjoyed alone. We can talk about tighter divorce laws, but it is not easy to design one that both protects people from ending a marriage too quickly with an easy divorce and at the same time makes divorce for a good cause readily available.

The right and best way for a culture to restore itself is for it to be rebuilt, not from the top down by government policies, but from the bottom up by personal decisions. On the side of that effort, we can find churches—or at least many of them—and the common experience of adults that the essence of marriage is not sex, or money, or even children: it is commitment.

Idea Mill

The article excerpted below appeared in last week's WSJ.

May 20 sees the 200th anniversary of the birth of John Stuart Mill, the greatest exponent of 19th-century liberalism, whose philosophy still dominates jurisprudence in the English-speaking world.

Mill's rebellion against utilitarianism did not prevent him from writing a qualified defense of it, and his "Utilitarianism" is acknowledged today as one of the few readable accounts of a moral disorder that would have died out two centuries ago, had people not discovered that the utilitarian can excuse every crime. Lenin and Hitler were pious utilitarians, as were Stalin and Mao, as are most members of the Mafia. As Mill recognized, the "greatest happiness principle" must be qualified by some guarantee of individual rights, if it is not to excuse the tyrant. In response to his own wavering discipleship, therefore, he wrote "On Liberty," perhaps his most influential, though by no means his best, production.

According to Mill's argument, that way of thinking has everything upside down. The law does not exist to uphold majority morality against the individual, but to protect the individual against tyranny--including the "tyranny of the majority." Of course, if the exercise of individual freedom threatens harm to others, it is legitimate to curtail it--for in such circumstances one person's gain in freedom is another person's loss of it.

This principle has a profound significance: It is saying that the purpose of law is not to uphold the will of the majority, or to impose the will of the sovereign, but to protect the will of the individual. It is the legal expression of the "sovereignty of the individual."

Of course, liberty is maintained with effective but limited government. Individuals have rights but also responsibilities. License is a notion of "anything goes", liberty is not license. While Mill had much to offer in the area of jurisprudence, elsewhere he stumbled.

"On Liberty" sees individual freedom as the aim of government, whose business is to reconcile one person's freedom with his neighbor's. "The Principles of Political Economy" by contrast, while pretending to be a popular exposition of Adam Smith, accords extensive powers of social engineering to the state, and develops a socialist vision of the economy, with a constitutional role for trade unions, and extensive provisions for social security and welfare. The book is, in fact, a concealed socialist tract. While "On Liberty" belongs to the 18th-century tradition that we know as classical liberalism, "Principles" is an example of liberalism in its more modern sense.

Mill's hostility to privilege, to landed property, and to inheritance of property had implications which he seemed unwilling or unable to work out. His argument that all property should be confiscated by the state on death, and redistributed according to its own greater wisdom, has the implication that the state, rather than the family, is to be treated as the basic unit of society--the true arbiter of our destiny, and the thing to which everything is owed. The argument makes all property a temporary lease from the state, and also ensures that the state is the greatest spender, and the one least bound by the sense of responsibility to heirs and neighbors. It is, in short, a recipe for the disaster that we have seen in the communist and socialist systems, and it is a sign of Mill's failure of imagination that, unlike Smith, he did not foresee the likely results of his favored policies.


Mill famously referred to the Conservative Party as "the stupider party," he being, from 1865, a member of Parliament in the Liberal interest. And no doubt the average Tory MP was no match for the brain that had conceived the "System of Logic"--an enduring classic and Mill's greatest achievement. Yet Mill suffered from the same defect as his father. He never understood that wisdom is deeper and rarer than rational thought. He never understood that the intellect, which flies so easily to its conclusions, relies on something else for its premises. Those conservatives who upheld what Mill called "the despotism of custom" against the "experiments in living" advocated in "On Liberty" were not stupid simply because they recognized the limits of the human intellect. They were, on the contrary, aware that freedom and custom are mutually dependent, and that to free oneself from moral norms is to surrender to the state. For only the state can manage the ensuing disaster.

It was Hayek who in The Fatal Conceit blamed Mill for leading formerly classical liberals astray by asserting that we must merely handle the matter of distribution of goods to make society better. Production was mistaken to be a given without any understanding of the role of property or incentives in the exploration process that is wealth creation.

Oh how those false premises and abused reason bite mankind on the behind again and again. Very bright people, overly impressed with their own intellectual fire power, often have the hardest time grasping this.

Roger Scruton who is the author of the above referenced article presented some additional ideas of interest in this article which is excerpted below.

To be a conservative, I was told, was to be on the side of age against youth, the past against the future, authority against innovation, the “structures” against spontaneity and life. It was enough to understand this, to recognize that one had no choice, as a free-thinking intellectual, save to reject conservatism. The choice remaining was between reform and revolution. Do we improve society bit by bit, or do we rub it out and start again?



She replied with a book: Foucault’s Les mots et les choses, the bible of the soixante-huitards, the text which seemed to justify every form of transgression, by showing that obedience is merely defeat. It is an artful book, composed with a satanic mendacity, selectively appropriating facts in order to show that culture and knowledge are nothing but the “discourses” of power. The book is not a work of philosophy but an exercise in rhetoric. Its goal is subversion, not truth, and it is careful to argue—by the old nominalist sleight of hand that was surely invented by the Father of Lies—that “truth” requires inverted commas, that it changes from epoch to epoch, and is tied to the form of consciousness, the “episteme,” imposed by the class which profits from its propagation. The revolutionary spirit, which searches the world for things to hate, has found in Foucault a new literary formula. Look everywhere for power, he tells his readers, and you will find it. Where there is power there is oppression. And where there is oppression there is the right to destroy.

In 1970s Britain, conservative philosophy was the preoccupation of a few half-mad recluses. Searching the library of my college, I found Marx, Lenin, and Mao, but no Strauss, Voegelin, Hayek, or Friedman. I found every variety of socialist monthly, weekly, or quarterly, but not a single journal that confessed to being conservative.

In effect Burke was upholding the old view of man in society, as subject of a sovereign, against the new view of him, as citizen of a state. And what struck me vividly was that, in defending this old view, Burke demonstrated that it was a far more effective guarantee of the liberties of the individual than the new idea, which was founded in the promise of those very liberties, only abstractly, universally, and therefore unreally defined. Real freedom, concrete freedom, the freedom that can actually be defined, claimed, and granted, was not the opposite of obedience but its other side. The abstract, unreal freedom of the liberal intellect was really nothing more than childish disobedience, amplified into anarchy.

Perhaps the most fascinating and terrifying aspect of Communism was its ability to banish truth from human affairs, and to force whole populations to “live within the lie,” as President Havel put it. George Orwell wrote a prophetic and penetrating novel about this; but few Western readers of that novel knew the extent to which its prophecies had come true in Central Europe.

Briefly, I spent the next ten years in daily meditation on Communism, on the myths of equality and fraternity that underlay its oppressive routines, just as they had underlain the routines of the French Revolution. And I came to see that Burke’s account of the Revolution was not merely a piece of contemporary history. It was like Milton’s account of Paradise Lost—an exploration of a region of the human psyche: a region that lies always ready to be visited, but from which return is by way of a miracle, to a world whose beauty is thereafter tainted by the memories of Hell. To put it very simply, I had been granted a vision of Satan and his work—the very same vision that had shaken Burke to the depths of his being. And I at last recognized the positive aspect of Burke’s philosophy as a response to that vision, as a description of the best that human beings can hope for, and as the sole and sufficient vindication of our life on earth.

Indeed and it is ever thus!

No - we did not squander what we never had!

This recent WSJ article highlights some things which demonstrate attitudes regarding Islam and related matters:

America welcomed a victim of political and religious persecution this week. Ayaan Hirsi Ali has been living for years with death threats for her criticisms of radical Islam. But in the end it was not her former co-religionists who have caused her to seek refuge in the U.S. It was rather the native-born citizens of her adopted country, the Netherlands, that have driven her off. If the reader will forgive a little indulgence in the soft bigotry of low expectations, it is the role of her fellow Dutchmen and women that are most worthy of contempt in this tale.

Ms. Hirsi Ali first achieved international prominence when Dutch film maker Theo Van Gogh was stabbed to death on an Amsterdam street in 2004. The killer pinned a five-page manifesto to his victim's chest with the knife he'd used to kill him. The letter was titled "Open Letter to Hirsi Ali."

Ms. Hirsi Ali is a Somali-born Dutch immigrant, a female member of the Dutch parliament and an outspoken critic of Islam, particularly Islamic attitudes toward women. Ms. Hirsi Ali had scripted Van Gogh's film "Submission," on the mistreatment of Muslim women.

For making this film, Van Gogh was killed and, the letter from his killer explained, Ms. Hirsi Ali was condemned to "torture and agony." Holy War against the U.S. and Europe was also threatened. Already under police protection since 2002 for having renounced her faith, Ms. Hirsi Ali had to go into hiding. For the second time in her life she became a refugee, this time in her adopted homeland.

Now she is being put on the run again, this time by the Dutch who have grown tired of protecting such an outspoken critic of Islamic extremism. Last month a Dutch judge ordered her out of her apartment. Her fellow tenants had argued that her presence endangered them and lowered their property values, in violation of their "human rights." The judge agreed and ordered her evicted.

There are striking parallels between the way many in Europe view the U.S. and the way the Dutch and many Europeans view Ms. Hirsi Ali. Outrage over September 11 soon gave way to a reversal of cause and effect. The victim, the U.S., was held responsible for the destruction it supposedly brought upon itself through its policies and provocation of Muslims. Similarly, solidarity with Ms. Hirsi Ali quickly changed to attacking Ms. Hirsi Ali for being too provocative. Government adviser Jan Schoonenboom accused Ms. Hirsi Ali of "Islam bashing," a theme often repeated in the media.

Ms. Hirsi Ali might be the first, but won't be the last, post-9/11 dissident to seek refuge in the land of the brave and the free. And so, any recovery of property prices in Ms. Hirsi Ali's neighborhood will be short-lived. Where the defenders of democracy have to flee while the enemies of free society roam the streets, not only real estate is bound to become very cheap. So will be life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

This inability or lack of willingness for the tolerant and multicultural elements of the West, represented by the Dutch to come to terms with reality is at the heart of this correspondence from Claire Berlinski to Instapundit:

Changing the subject, I have been at times been tempted to respond to those who disagree with my assessment of the moral climate of the Netherlands, but if the invalidation of Ayaan Hirsi Ali's citizenship does not persuade them, they are not susceptible to persuasion, so I may as well save my time and breath. Still, I think the event should be noted, and I note it thus.

All of which brings me to the following point. When someone says that the U.S. squandered the goodwill of other nations after 9/11 it never really rang true to me. This blogger says it quite well:

This old yarn has been in circulation since 9/12/01: the USA squandered the world’s goodwill after 9/11. It irritated me then, and now it enrages me. Not because it’s untrue - that, at least, I could forgive with a little education. No, it angers me because it says something about our enemies that nobody is willing to say:

If it takes a terrorist attack to make countries feel beneficent toward the USA, those countries are not your friends. Why would a country feel “goodwill” after a terrorist attack? Because we were, for a moment, the Victim. And as everybody knows, there is leverage in victimhood.

But America doesn’t like being anybody’s victim. It’s just not who we are. Within a day or so we were picking ourselves up and looking around for the ones who momentarily knocked us on our ass. Then we picked ourselves up and went after them with everything we had.

We did not squander the goodwill of the country. The sympathy, maybe. But not the goodwill - because we never had any of that to begin with.

On the mark!

A good policy idea

The regular and guest financial columnists at National Review Online provide anyone interested a real service with the quality of their work. This column by Cesar Conda and Ernest Christian is yet another example:

The recipe for high GDP growth in the future is the same as it was in 2003-04, when the combination of lower tax rates and “bonus depreciation” caused a spurt in investment that helped lead the economy out of recession and toward its current strong standing.

Standard neoclassical econometric models confirm what common sense and experience suggest: Replacing old-fashioned tax depreciation with immediate first-year expensing would add more than $200 billion to GDP, boost wage incomes, and add upwards of 750,000 jobs. Because the static revenue cost of first-year expensing quickly phases out after four years, it is also in the long term the cheapest, most bang-for-the-buck, and most growth-oriented tax change the Congress could make. When you use dynamic scoring that takes into account induced economic growth, first-year expensing costs nothing.

The best and quickest way to promote high growth and better living standards is to accelerate investment in new and efficient capital stock. Even if there were no energy crisis, Congress would still be justified in immediately enacting first-year expensing. After all, it is their duty to help the economy grow and make the American people better off — and expensing will clearly do just that.

Some tax cuts are just lost revenue, some might provide a payback over long periods of time through increased economic activity and some provide rapid payback. Taxes on capital are amongst the most potent of these. This despite the howls of the collectivists and statists!

The ever amusing Tom Wolfe

This article is a reminder of how insightful and entertaining the author Tom Wolfe can be.

Wolfe lectures with the vigor of youth, animating his witty insights with eyes popping, a tongue darting across his lips, broad smiles, and dramatic hand gesticulations, especially when he comes upon one of his "aha" findings, to wit, some insight or story that explains Everything.

A favorite target of his is the "intellectual." As the prodigy put it the other night, the intellectual is "a person knowledgeable in one field who only speaks out in others."

One of the reasons Wolfe fastens on the intellectual so frequently is that a major interest of his is "status."

No group in society more earnestly appropriates the constituent elements of status to "exalt" themselves in society than the intellectuals, though adepts of the "hip hop" culture run a close second.

Turn to an interview Wolfe gave to the Wall Street Journal in March. There the brightest young man of American letters said this: "I really love this country. I just marvel at how good it is, and obviously it's the simple principle of freedom....Intellectually this is the system where people tend to experiment more and their experiments are indulged. Whatever we're doing I think we've done it extremely well....These are terrible things to be saying if you want to have any standing in the intellectual world."

All very amusing to my taste!

Superiority of Self Organizing Systems

Various aspects of life, society, and other complex systems can be, are, or are thought to be organized by Omniteleological¹ forces or alternatively along self organizing lines. In other words, those integrants can be controlled by a centralized entity or instead be open-ended processes, where creativity, enterprise, and/or random forces, operating under predictable rules, generate change and/or progress in unpredictable ways. Systems organized (or believed by some to be organized) according to Omniteleological principles include The Creation, Intelligent Design, many organized religions, and most forms of Statism including Socialism and Collectivism. Systems organized (or believed by some to be organized) according to self-organizing principles include Evolution, democracy, and free market economies.

In some cases, like economic organization, societies can choose between Omniteleological Statism and self-organization (or what Virginia Postrel calls Dynamism²). In other cases, humans aren't involved in setting up the systems. For example, the processes underlying the ecosystem are not a result of human activity. Then, instead of a choice, it's a debate about whether those processes are Teleological or self-organizing. The Creation is the teleological version. Evolution is the self-organizing version.

There is, of course, no reason the processes can't be based on a mixture of Omniteleological and self-organizing principles. For example, an economic system often has free-markets (self-organizing) with State interventions (e.g. taxation) and support (central banks and other institutions). Though, even in this case, the interventions and support organized themselves over time.

Whenever there is a choice, my personal preference tends towards assuming and/or using self-organizing principles. Thus, the big bang, Evolution, democracy, federalism, and free markets are all appealing to me. Each is based on decentralization and distribution of information and processes. I believe that such processes are inherently much more robust than centrally designed and carefully controlled processes. They are able to respond and adapt to a much wider range of stimuli.

An interesting conundrum (to me) is the use of Omniteleological methods (Statism) in order to support self-organizing principles. Examples include using the federal government to limit religious activities or to enforce teaching of subjects that include self-organizing principles (e.g., Evolution).

While I think that it is important to keep the State from suppressing self-organization or the teaching thereof, I think that strengthening the State for the purpose of weakening other centralized processes (religion, etc.) is counterproductive. In the end, there will be more entrenched Statism, and it just isn't worth it.

Because of the superiority of self-organizing systems, there's also no reason to use the levers of State power to protect them.

Notes:
(1) Thanks to Hey Skipper for his suggestion of the word teleological in the comments of another post. I feel that teleological is most commonly used to describe (divine) order in nature and doesn't necessarily refer to social systems. As a result, I decided to add the prefix "omni" (all) to it to refer to any centrally designed and/or controlled system. I realize it's a little rude to add a Latin prefix to a Greek root, but hey, I'm American, and we do things like that.
(2) From The Future and its Enemies.

I Need a Word

I'm trying to think of the word that fits the following definition:

The belief or intuition that all complex systems, natural or man-made (e.g., social systems), can, should, or ought to be or have been created and maintained by a centralized authority and/or power.

What's the word? What's its antonym?

The word (let's call it Xism for now) would be a superset of Statism and Creationism. It implies a need to impose order or to find order in already existing complex systems. That order needs to come from an supreme authority.

The closest I've come up with so far is "anti-dynamism" where dynamism is used per Virginia Postrel's definition in "The Future and its Enemies." But she uses the term dynamist solely when referring to social systems and stasist (the opposite) as opposing change, which is a bit different than what I'm looking for.

Children of the State

The rights and freedoms defined in the Constitution of United States don't really apply to children. They can't vote, own guns, etc. It's not surprising that the founders didn't consider the rights of children. After all women and slaves had no rights either and I think it was assumed that parents had the final authority and responsibility for raising a child. Of course, most of the parents back then belonged to a community and church, each of which absorbed part of the burden of raising children.

On the other hand, the Constitution doesn't define any rights for parents either. While I'm confident the founders expected parents to raise their own children, there's no inherent conflict between the Constitution and Jonathan Swift's Lilliputian style society (from Gulliver's Travels) where children are taken away from their parents at birth and raised by the State:

Their [the Lilliputians'] notions relating to the Duties of Parents and Children differ extremely from ours. For since the Conjunction of Male and Female is founded upon the great Law of Nature, in order to propagate and continue the Species, the Lilliputians will needs have it, that Men and Women are joined together like other Animals, by the Motives of Concupiscence; and that their Tenderness towards their Young proceeds from the like natural Principle: for which reason they will never allow, that a Child is under any Obligation to his Father for begetting him, or his Mother for bringing him into the World; which, considering the Miseries of human Life, was neither a Benefit in it self, or intended so by his Parents, whose Thoughts in their Love-Encounters were otherwise employ'd. Upon these, and the like Reasonings, their Opinion is, that Parents are the last of all others to be trusted with the Education of their own Children: and therefore they have in every Town publick Nurseries, where all Parents, except Cottagers and Labourers, are obliged to send their Infants of both Sexes to be reared and educated when they come to the Age of twenty Moons...

It sounds eminently reasonable. After all, I can't count the number of times I've been told that some/most/all parents are incompetent idiots/fanatics because they do one or more of the following:

1. Bring up their children to be religious;
2. Bring up their children to be non-religious;
3. Advocate for teaching Intelligent Design in high school;
4. Advocate for teaching Evolution in high school;
5. Teach their children to play a lame sport like soccer;
6. Teach their children to play a lame sport like baseball;
7. And so forth...

The reasons parents are bad are varied and contradictory. There's only one common denominator: that everybody else who doesn't raise their children the One Right Way is a bad parent. Bad for the child. Bad for society. So, if only the State would follow in the footsteps of the Lilliputians and take over the task of childrearing, both the children and society would be far better off.

Where have I heard an argument like that before? Ahhh, I Remember. It sounds much like what advocates for Socialism said: why let ignorant and loathsome merchants, businesses owners, and entrepreneurs, who are distributed throughout the country control the means of production? Clearly the government with centralized control and access to numerous experts can do a better job!

Well, that didn't work so well.

Same for the kids. Why let ignorant parents control the upbringing of the future citizens of our society? Clearly the government with centralized control and access to numerous experts can do a better job!

Well, that won't work so well either.

Centralized authorities can do okay at one-size-fits-all sorts of programs. However, children are individuals with large variations in their needs and abilities who live in communities that are each unique. Thus, the one-size-fits-all approach is likely to be far from optimal.

Some parents will be bad parents. However, overall, the individualized attention parents can give their children is a huge advantage relative to one-size-fits-all and will create more robust generations of citizens which will be able to deal with a wider set of challenges in the future.

Let parents do their jobs.

little things that make me smile

Just thought I would share some excerpts from this Stephen Moore column.

Meet Charles Koch. Philosopher, engineer, self-trained economist, libertarian activist, philanthropist--and the CEO of Koch Industries, a $60 billion, 80,000-employee empire, which just recently became the largest and most profitable privately held company in America.

"We couldn't have achieved the profitability we have," Mr. Koch insists, "if we had been a public company. No investor would have been patient enough to allow us to build a firm oriented toward long-term growth and profits." This is one of Mr. Koch's bugaboos regarding the deficiencies of modern corporate management. He notes, "The short-term infatuation with quarterly earnings on Wall Street restricts the earnings potential of Fortune 500 publicly traded firms. Public firms are also feeding grounds for lawyers and lawsuits."

He then confidently predicts: "Regulatory laws like Sarbanes-Oxley will only increase the earnings advantages of private firms. I would suspect that there will be more of these private company takeovers of publicly traded companies."

This creative forward-thinking should come as no surprise, because Mr. Koch is immersed in the ideas of liberty and free markets. Whereas the bookshelves of most of America's leading CEOs are stocked with pop corporate management and "how to succeed" books, Mr. Koch's office is a wall-to-wall shrine to writings in classical economics, or, as he calls it, "the science of liberty." The authors who have had the most profound influence on his own political philosophy include F.A. Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, Joseph Schumpeter, Julian Simon, Paul Johnson and Charles Murray. Mr. Koch says that he experienced an intellectual epiphany in the early 1960s, when he attended a conference on free-market capitalism hosted by the late, great Leonard Reed.

Mr. Koch is by training a scientist, with master's degrees from MIT in nuclear and chemical engineering. Despite his business success, he has no MBA or formal management training. Mr. Koch sees that as an advantage. "Being an engineer, I realized there's an objective reality that helps one understand the rules and conditions that improve the human condition," he says. "Laws and principles that facilitate the advancement of peace, prosperity and social progress are as immutable as the laws that work in science. . . . Politicians often come up with misguided policy solutions," he continues, "because they suffer from Hayek's 'fatal conceit' and believe they can violate basic laws of economics. They are just as misguided as the man who jumps out the 14th floor of a building convinced that he can repeal the law of gravity."

As we continue, Mr. Koch becomes increasingly animated. He discusses another seminal work in his collection, F.A. Harper's 1957 "Why Wages Rise." The book demonstrates "that wages rise not because of unions or government action, but because of marginal productivity gains--people get more money when they produce more value for other people." Then he confides, "I was so thrilled by this revelation that I had what Maslow called a 'peak experience.'"

"Long term success entails constantly discovering new ways to create value for customers and building new capabilities to capture new opportunities," he instructs. "In this sense, maintaining a business is, in reality, liquidating a business." Mr. Koch likens the cycle to Schumpeter's "creative destruction"--where the old and inefficient are ruthlessly swept away by the new.

What we have here are the theories of supply-side economics operating on the micro-level of the firm. Incentives matter; competition fosters innovation; property rights must be firmly established. Koch Industries gives big financial bonuses for entrepreneurial behavior by employees, whether it's a project head or a janitor. The idea is to reward all activities that add to the bottom-line profitability of the firm. "We want our employees to act like owners," Mr. Koch explains. Similarly, employees earn "decision rights" for past successes. "Just as central planning is a failure in running government, so it is at the level of the firm," he says, repeating one of his favorite operating tenets.

Good ideas can be so powerful! If they can be demonstrated in the form of an entertaining story, even better, as Bret reminds us. If you did not catch the above reference to Leonard Reed, let me point you to a terrific story - I, Pencil, which I believe is one of Bret's favorites. Everyone should read this at some point and I do mean everyone. Be sure to see Milton Friedman's introduction:

Leonard Read's delightful story, "I, Pencil," has become a classic, and deservedly so. I know of no other piece of literature that so succinctly, persuasively, and effectively illustrates the meaning of both Adam Smith's invisible hand—the possibility of cooperation without coercion—and Friedrich Hayek's emphasis on the importance of dispersed knowledge and the role of the price system in communicating information that "will make the individuals do the desirable things without anyone having to tell them what to do."

Crime and Punishment

Assume someone has been convicted of a crime. Let's say the punishment is 2,000 days of sitting still in a chair in a room for six hours a day listening to a corrections officer drone on about various topics. Every so often the corrections officer will interrogate the prisoner to ensure that he's been paying attention. If the prisoner isn't paying attention or gets up out of his chair too often, he's forced to take medications against his will. Also note that there's no chance for parole. If the prisoner tries to escape, he's put in a tighter security facility.

From the above description, you might assume that the prisoner committed a really serious crime and has probably been convicted several times. I would imagine it would be a crime at least as serious as grand larceny, maybe even nearly as serious as rape.

However, the punishment I'm talking about is compulsary education (the medication is Ritalin) and the crime is nothing more than managing to survive your first six years of life. For both adult crime and punishment and child survival and compulsary education we do it for the good of society and arguably for the good of the individual. But punishing it is.

For some it's worse than others. Typically boys have a harder time of it than girls. For me personally, sitting there day after day, year after year, alternately looking out of the window while daydreaming and staring at the clock watching the second hand go tick, tick, tick, moving slowly, painfully slowly, toward the dismissal bell, it was cruel punishment. And it was relatively easy for me. Even though I almost never payed attention, I was able to do pretty well on the tests. Even though it was torture to sit there, I was able to do it, so the teachers liked me well enough. For those that don't do well on the tests or just can't sit there, the level of misery is taken to a whole new level. Ritalin is probably a welcome relief.

It always amazes me that this aspect of the educational system is rarely, if ever, contemplated: the huge amount of pain it inflicts on children. For sure, the overwhelming needs of society trumps the freedom of individuals (the draft in wartime is another example), but the sacrifice that we force our children to make against their will should never be taken lightly.

Hey, Hey, My, My, Socialism Can Never Die

There's more to the picture than meets the eye? Hey, Hey, My, My.

While our attention is focused on the Middle East and beyond, storm clouds are gathering in other parts of the world. For example, on May Day, Bolivia nationalized its natural gas and oil fields. The president, Evo Morales, "ordered soldiers to occupy Bolivia's natural gas fields..." He plans to nationalize other sectors as well.

Morales seems to be part of a small, but growing, contigent of socialists. He joins Venezuela's President Hugo Chavez and, of course, Fidel Castro, who are intending to create a web of socialist economic alliances in South America.

These developments prompted Lee Harris, in yet another excellent article, to ask "why isn't socialism dead?" After all, each of the many versions of socialism that has even been implemented has been far from optimal and has very often created massive suffering and death. It's usually very difficult to answer most complex economic questions regarding optimal organization of societies, but the hypothesis that socialism doesn't work has an overwhelming preponderance of evidence supporting it.

So why isn't socialism dead? Short answer: it can't die. Longer answer:

It may well be that socialism isn't dead because socialism cannot die. As Sorel argued, the revolutionary myth may, like religion, continue to thrive in "the profounder regions of our mental life," in those realms unreachable by mere reason and argument, where even a hundred proofs of failure are insufficient to wean us from those primordial illusions that we so badly wish to be true. Who doesn't want to see the wicked and the arrogant put in their place? Who among the downtrodden and the dispossessed can fail to be stirred by the promise of a world in which all men are equal, and each has what he needs? [...]

[T]he whole point of the myth of the socialist revolution is not that the human societies will be transformed in the distant future, but that the individuals who dedicate their lives to this myth will be transformed into comrades and revolutionaries in the present. In short, revolution is not a means to achieve socialism; rather, the myth of socialism is a useful illusion that turns ordinary men into comrades and revolutionaries united in a common struggle -- a band of brothers, so to speak. [...]

Thus, in the coming century, those who are advocates of capitalism may well find themselves confronted with "a myth gap." Those who, like Chavez, Morales, and Castro, are preaching the old time religion of socialism may well be able to tap into something deeper and more primordial than mere reason and argument, while those who advocate the more rational path of capitalism may find that they have few listeners among those they most need to reach -- namely, the People. Worse, in a populist democracy, the People have historically demonstrated a knack of picking as their leaders those know the best and most efficient way to by-pass their reason -- demagogues who can reach deep down to their primordial and, alas, often utterly irrational instincts. This, after all, has been the genius of every great populist leader of the past, as it is proving to be the genius of those populist leaders who are now springing up around the world, from Bolivia to Iran.

In other words, ideas are more powerful than facts. Myths are more powerful than reason. Humans are not primarily rational animals and can never be primarily rational animals. Indeed, I doubt we even have the mental capacity to make rational decisions in the face of great complexity and uncertainty. Following our intuitions, institutions, and traditions is probably the best we can ever do.

Lee Harris finishes with the following:

This is the challenge that capitalism faces in the world today -- whether it will rise to the challenge is perhaps the most urgent question of our time, and those who refuse to confront this challenge are doing no service to reason or to human dignity and freedom. Bad myths can only be driven out by better myths, and unless capitalism can provide a better myth than socialism, the latter will again prevail.

I believe this to be true. Fortunately, the American myth, which is a combination of Christianity and the puritan work ethic intertwined with a belief in self-sufficiency, strong property rights, and free markets, is quite a powerful myth as well. Thus Americans are fairly well inoculated from being infected by "bad myths."

However, I cringe when the Rationalists and Materialists among us strive to weaken or destroy the American myth. They do so, in my opinion, at great peril. I believe America's myth was crucial to keeping civilization going in the 20th century. It may well be needed again in the 21st.

I Love $3.00 Gasoline!!!

If you could pay $2.00 a day to shorten your daily commute time by 10 minutes, would you do it? That's the equivalent of $12.00 per hour in order to avoid sitting in stop and go traffic. I would take that deal in a second.

Well, that's exactly the deal for me with high gas prices. As prices rise, my commute time shortens. The cost is definitely worth it to me.

Too bad the money goes to such nasty and undeserving countries.

One Economy to Rule Them All...

... is one of the category names for posts at Brothers Judd. The economy they're referring to is the economy of the United States and right now I definitely have to agree with them.

It's amazing to me that we can achieve this level of GDP growth with the current global political climate. The preliminary estimate for the first quarter 2006 is 4.8% annualized real growth. Coupled with the previous 3 quarters the growth was 3.5%. Those are really excellent numbers, even for really wonderful economic environments.

But consider what happened in those 12 months. Several devastating hurricanes, continued war in Iraq (and Afghanistan), already high oil prices increasing an additional $10 per barrel to nearly $70 per barrel, the presidents popularity plummeting (though this may be due to the other factors), rising interest rates, the imminent collapse of a housing bubble (supposedly), a series of political scandals (Jack Abramoff, Duke Cunningham, Tom Delay, etc.), huge trade deficits (investment surpluses), and sizeable federal deficits.

If the economy can do that well during periods like that, what growth would we have if the circumstances became more favorable?

The End is Near

The New York Times has been critical of the economy ever since Bush was elected president, though I'm sure that's just a coincidence. Through robust GDP growth numbers, rising productivity, increasing wealth, dropping unemployment, recording breaking corporate earnings growth, etc., the New York Times, with the help of their columnists such as economist Paul Krugman, has rarely, if ever, praised the economy in the last several years. Even before that, the New York Times was a pretty good contrarian index. Whatever they're saying, believe the opposite.

That's why I'm now worried. Much to my dismay, they've now used the word "boom" to describe the economy:

[T]he national economy continues to speed ahead, with families and businesses spending money at an impressive pace. Forecasters expect the Commerce Department to report this morning that the economy grew at a rate of around 5 percent in the first quarter, the biggest increase since 2003. [...]

Americans seem to have noticed the boom, too.

I'd say that's an indication of imminent collapse. Run for the hills!!!