“Had Keynes (really) spoken of the end of laissez faire et laissez passer, then he could not have failed to see that the world today is sick precisely because, for decades, things have not been regulated by this maxim. He who rejoices that peoples are turning away from liberalism, should not forget that war and revolution, misery and unemployment for the masses, tyranny and dictatorship are not accidental companions, but are necessary results of the antiliberalism that now rules the world.”
Category Archives: Art and Ideas
Thieving Theocrats: The Righteous Left-Wing Press Steals From Its Own
“The April 21, 2005 issue of the LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS carried a lead article titled ‘Blood for Oil?’
The paper is attributed to a group of writers and activists – Iain Boal, T.J. Clark, Joseph Matthews and Michael Watts – who identify themselves by the collective name ‘Retort.’ In their article, the authors advance a supposedly new explanation for the wars in the Middle East.
Much of their explanation – including both theory and fact – is plagiarized. It is cut and pasted, almost ‘as is,’ from our own work. The primary source is ‘The Weapondollar-Petrodollar Coalition,’ a 71 page chapter in our book THE GLOBAL POLITICAL ECONOMY OF ISRAEL (Pluto 2002). The authors also seem inspired, incognito, by our more recent papers, including ‘It’s All About Oil’ (2003), ‘Clash of Civilization or Capital Accumulation?’ (2004), ‘Beyond Neoliberalism’ (2004) and ‘Dominant Capital and the New Wars’ (2004).
In their paper, the Retort group credits us for having coined the term ‘Weapondollar-Petrodollar Coalition’ – but dismiss our ‘precise calibration of the oil/war nexus’ as ‘perfunctory.’ This dismissal does not prevent them from freely appropriating, wholesale fashion, our concepts, ideas and theories – including, among others, the ‘era of free flow,’ the ‘era of limited flow,’ ‘energy conflicts,’ the ‘commercialization of arms exports,’ the ‘politicization of oil’ and the critique of the ‘scarcity thesis.’ Nowhere in their article do the authors mention the source of these concepts, ideas and theories…..”
More at the website of Nitzan and Bichler.
The theocrats I refer to in my post title are the leftist ideologues (state socialists) who never met a fact they couldn’t twist into a socialist pretzel.
Writers As Hanging Judges
“The historian should be a hanging judge, for the Muse of history is not Clio but Rhadamanthus, the avenger of innocent blood.”
-Lord Acton
And journalists too…
Let The System Die..
The current financial crisis is the best opportunity we have had in a very long time for a bloodless revolution against the faceless fascism under which we have been living, unaware, for much too long. Let us seize the day….”
Douglas Rushkoff in Arthur Mag
Comment:
I won’t quibble about calling what we have fascism. I think that’s true in some ways.
But I’ll quibble about other things. The system didn’t turn people into debtors or the real world into speculative assets. The real world has always had a speculative angle to it. When people hoard, buy in bulk, store, buy cheap and sell high, they are speculating. People have always speculated. But it used to be that not everyone could speculate, because not everyone had access to cash or the savings needed for it. Or the knowledge and tools to do it. But now, the banks have sold everyone the possibility of risk-free speculation with other people’s money. They sold us on the notion that risk can be taken out of life. And we bought it. That every loss can be made good. That 1+1 can equal 3 or anything else, but that 1-1 can never be 0. That has nothing to do with business. It has to do with the desire for comfort, for being looked after and for having someone else do your thinking, your acting, your good deeds, your fighting, your spending and your saving for you.
That someone is the state.
And so I think this isn’t the end of the “machine” of statism at all. I think it’s just another stage – the death throes of the overly imperial nationalist form, leading to another, more internationalist….
Dante on the Reasonableness of the Universe
Ché la luce divina è penetrante per l'universo secondo ch'è degno, sì che nulla le puote essere ostante.
Because the light of God so penetrates the universe according to the worth of every part, that no thing can impede it.
Paradiso 31, La Commedia Divina,
Paradise, Canto 31, The Divine Comedy
Dante Alighieri
Oracle of Omaha Moodily Silent
Our Billionaire In Omaha, the virtuous Warren, who wisheth us all to pay our taxes with the same glee as he doth, hath not spoken? Wherefore?
Wherefore is he moody? Or, it Moody’s?
Wherefore art Warren’s fingers to be found in so many pies? Including AIG and its corrupt dealings with General Re…..and Goldman, of which we need say no more…..and now Moody’s?
Tell us it ain’t so!
Excerpt from the International Herald Tribune piece on Buffet’s ties with Moody’s:
“Berkshire owns a stake of roughly 20 percent in the Moody’s Corporation, parent of one of the three rating agencies that grade debt issued by corporations and banks looking to raise money. In recent months, Moody’s Investors Service and its rivals, Standard & Poor’s and Fitch Ratings, have featured in virtually every account of the What Went Wrong horror story that is the financial crisis………
…Moody’s rated Lehman Brothers’ debt A2, putting it squarely in the investment-grade range, days before the company filed for bankruptcy. And Moody’s gave the senior unsecured debt of the American International Group, the insurance behemoth, an Aa3 rating — which is even stronger than A2 — the week before the government had to step in and take over the company in September as part of what has become a $170 billion bailout.
Mr. Buffett, 78, one of the world’s richest men, is known for piquant and unsparing criticism of his own performance, as well as the institutional flaws of Wall Street. But on the subject of the conflict of interest built into the rating agencies’ business model, Mr. Buffett has been uncharacteristically silent — even though that conflict is especially glaring in his case because one of the companies that Moody’s rates is Berkshire. (Its Aaa rating, for the record, is the same as the one from Standard & Poor’s. Fitch downgraded Berkshire for the first time last week.)”
John Maynard Keynes: A General Theory of Lying, Swindling, and Hustling
Some revealing excerpts from “Keynes, the Man,” by Murray Rothbard (thanks to the Mises site), which describes the intellectual roots of Keynes’ discounting of empirical evidence or principle. Perhaps this explains Paul Krugman.
DISREGARDED EMPIRICAL EVIDENCE
“To destroy any possibility of applying general rules to particular cases, Keynes’s Treatise [On Probability] championed the classical a priori theory of probability, where probability fractions are deduced purely by logic and have nothing to do with empirical reality. Skidelsky makes the point well: Keynes’s argument, then, can be interpreted as an attempt to free the individual to pursue the good…by means of egotistic actions, since he is not required to have certain knowledge of the probable consequences of his actions in order to act rationally. It is part, in other words, of his continuing campaign against Christian morality..
By limiting the possibility of certain knowledge Keynes increased the scope for intuitive judgment.
Suffice it to say that Keynes’s a priori theory was demolished by Richard von Mises (1951) in his 1920s work, Probability, Statistics, and Truth. Mises demonstrated that the probability fraction can be meaningfully used only when it embodies an empirically derived law of entities which are homogeneous, random, and indefinitely repeatable. This means, of course, that probability theory can only be applied to events which, in human life, are confined to those like the lottery or the roulette wheel. Incidentally, Richard von Mises’s probability theory was adopted by his brother Ludwig, although they agreed on little else
VENERATED EXPEDIENCE AND ELITES
“What Keynes took from Burke is revealing……There is, first, Burke’s militant opposition to general principles in politics and, in particular, his championing of expediency against abstract natural rights. Secondly, Keynes agreed strongly with Burke’s high time preference, his downgrading of the uncertain future versus the existing present….. ……..
Thirdly, Keynes admired Burke’s appreciation of the “organic” ruling elite of Great Britain. There were differences over policy, of course, but Keynes joined Burke in hailing the system of aristocratic rule as sound, so long as governing
personnel were chosen from the existing organic elite…..
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LIED AND MISUSED STATISTICS
….Indeed Keynes displayed a positive taste for lying in politics. He habitually made up statistics to suit his political proposals,
and he would agitate for world monetary inflation with exaggerated hyperbole while maintaining that “words ought to be a little wild—the assault of thoughts upon the unthinking.” But, revealingly enough, once he achieved power, Keynes
admitted that such hyperbole would have to be dropped: “When the seats of power and authority have been attained, there should be no more poetic license”
*************
ARROGANT, BOMBASTIC AND IRRESPONSIBILE
One striking illustration of Maynard Keynes’s unjustified arrogance and intellectual irresponsibility was his reaction to Ludwig von Mises’s brilliant and pioneering Treatise on Money and Credit, published in German in 1912. …The book, he wrote condescendingly, had “considerable merit” and was “enlightened,” and its author was definitely “widely read,” but Keynes expressed his disappointment that the book was neither “constructive” nor “original” (Keynes 1914). This brusque reaction managed to kill any interest in Mises’s book in Great Britain, and Money and Credit remained untranslated for two fateful decades. The peculiar point about Keynes’s review is that Mises’s book was highly constructive and systematic, as well as remarkably original. How could Keynes not have seen that? This puzzle was cleared up a decade and a half when, in a footnote to his own Treatise on Money, Keynes impishly admitted that “in German, I can only clearly understand what I already know—so that new ideas are apt to be veiled from me by the difficulties of the language”…
********
CORRUPT IN PUBLIC OFFICE
In the fall of 905, he wrote to Strachey: “I find economics increasingly satisfactory, and I think I am rather good at it. I want to manage a railroad or organize a Trust or at least swindle the investing public”
Keynes, in fact, had recently embarked on his lifelong career as investor and speculator. Yet Harrod was constrained to deny vigorously that Keynes had begun speculating before 1919. Asserting that Keynes had “no capital” before then, Harrod explained the reason for his insistence in a book review six years after the publication of his biography: “It is important that this should be clearly understood, since there were many ill- wishers . . . who asserted that he took advantage of inside information when in the Treasury (1915–June 1919) in order to carry out successful speculations”. In a letter to Clive Bell, author of the book under review and an old Bloomsburyite and friend of Keynes, Harrod pressed the point further: “The point is important because of the beastly stories, which are very widespread . . . about his having made money dishonorably by taking advantage of his Treasury position.”
Despite Harrod’s insistence to the contrary, however, Keynes had indeed set up his own “special fund” and had begun to make investments by July 1905. By 1914, Keynes was speculating heavily in the stock market and, by 1920, had accumulated £16,000, which would amount to about $200,000 at today’s prices…..
*************
INDIFFERENT TO IMPERIAL EXPLOITATION
Maynard,” Skidelsky points out, “always saw the Raj from Whitehall; he never considered the human and moral implications of imperial rule or whether the British were exploiting the Indians.” In the grand imperialist tradition of the Mills and Thomas Macaulay in nineteenth-century England, moreover, he never felt the need to travel to India, to learn Indian languages, or to read any books on the area except as they dealt with finance. Keynes praised the Indian standard [Lila: a gold exchange rather than a gold standard] as allowing a far greater “elasticity” (a code word for monetary inflation) of money in response to demand. Moreover, he specifically hailed the report of a U.S. government commission in 1903 advocating a gold-exchange standard in China and other Third World silver countries—a drive by progressive economists and politicians to bring such nations into a U.S. dominated and managed gold-dollar bloc
*****************
MANIPULATED, SLANDERED, AND HARASSED COLLEAGUES
But Keynes used tactics in the selling of The General Theory other than reliance on his charisma and on systematic deception. He curried favor with his students by praising them extravagantly, and he set them deliberately against non-Keynesians on the Cambridge faculty by ridiculing his colleagues in front of these students and by encouraging them to harass his faculty colleagues. For example, Keynes incited his students with particular viciousness against Dennis Robertson,his former close friend. As Keynes knew all too well, Robertson was painfully and extraordinarily shy, even to the point of communicating with his faithful longtime secretary, whose office was next to his own, only by written memoranda. Robertson’s lectures were completely written out in advance, and because of his shyness he refused to answer any questions or engage in any discussion with either his students or his colleagues. And so it was a particularly diabolic torture for Keynes’s radical disciples, led by Joan Robinson and Richard Kahn, to have baited and taunted Robertson, harassing him with spiteful questions and challenging him to debate……
[Note: I’ve created subtitles, omitted citations and cut out intervening passages for the sake of clarity].
Comment:
Keynes was one of Time Magazine’s top 100 Men in 1999. They claimed he was the man who saved capitalism. And yet, from his writing, it’s clear that Keynes was clueless about the dynamism of genuine free enterprise. His vision is static, rigid, almost feudal. He divides the world into 4 classes: the consumer (driven mechanically by consumption, as though he had no free will); the evil saver (who embodies all the despised middle-class and Christian virtues of hard work, thrift, foresight*) whom he conflates with the rentier class; the admirable but boisterous entrepreneurs, also driven to and fro by swings in moods; and at the top, the only really virtuous and reasonable class – the intelligentsia, which rules through intellect, the philosopher-kings – of which he, of course, was one. This is a feudal and essentially medieval viewpoint, for surely one of the great achievements of modernity was to understand that money indeed has a rightful price – the interest rate, which is the price of time and deferred gratification. Keynes instead clung to an ossified pre-modern collectivist mind set. He’s the very antithesis of progressive thinking and yet he is a hero to progressives.
*Protestant Christian virtues, I should add.
Robert Pirsig On Platypi (Updated)
“Early zoologists classified as mammals those that suckle their young and as reptiles those that lay eggs. Then a duck-billed platypus was discovered in Australia….
The platypus isn’t doing anything paradoxical at all. It isn’t having any problems. Platypi have been laying eggs and suckling their young for millions of years before there were any zoologists to come along and declare it illegal…
Quality is in the same situation as that platypus.
Because they can’t classify it the experts have claimed there is something wrong with it….
Should reality be something that only a handful of the world’s most advanced physicists understand? ”
That’s Robert Pirsig in “Lila,”
Update: I thought I should add this to make it clear what Pirsig was trying to do. It’s from an Amazon reviewer, Ralph Blumenau, who, from his profile is a retired teacher (his students were lucky – the review is spot on).
“He had felt that the two modes of western thinking, the classical and the romantic, were both unsatisfactory. The romantic, which will not come to grips with the underlying meaning of phenomena, is basically superficial. The classical mode, with its analytical procedures, often destroys what it investigates. The romantic mode stresses the subjective impact on the observer; the classical stresses the objective nature of the things observed. Both are part of what, in Lila, Phaedrus calls the subject-object metaphysic; and the concept that the world can be understood in terms simply of subject and object has been deeply embedded in western thought ever since classical Greek philosophy. However, the pre-classical Greeks, through their concept of arete, held out the possibility of a richer understanding. Phaedrus translates arete as “Quality” (and sometimes as “Value”), and it is by Quality that the conclusions reached by the classical or the romantic processes need to be judged.”
“Managed” Economy, Managed Art..
“Opinions may, reasonably, differ on Buffet. He may not be to be everyone’s taste.”
So begins an interesting piece in the Independent this morning on Buffet…not Warren, the investor, but Bernard the painter.
It turns out that Bernard and Warren may in fact have something in common – they are both products of the managerial economy. (Think I blaspheme against Our Billionaire in Omaha? Check out Warren’s sweetheart deal buying a stake in Goldman Sachs. He paid half what ex-Goldman CEO and former Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson paid for the same stake when the public was footing the bill (5 grand versus 10). Back to Bernard:
“What is extraordinary, something with no parallel in the history of modern French art, is that a painter should have been once so admired, and remain admired abroad, but fall so utterly from critical grace in his homeland.
In 1955, he was chosen by 100 critics as the most impressive young painter in the world. In 1956, he was given a spread in Paris Match in which he was presented as the “young millionaire painter”.
Maurice Garnier is a Paris gallery owner and a friend of Buffet until the artist died in 1999. He still has exclusive rights to trade in Buffet paintings. M. Garnier believes it was Buffet’s lightning success and riches, just after the Second World War, which helped to turn the art establishment against him.
“He sold too well,” M. Garnier said. “He made a lot of money. He lived in an ostentatious way. The powers that be hated him for all that.” Buffet incurred, above all, the enmity of two of the great cultural figures of post-war France. The first was Picasso; the second was André Malraux, the writer who became President Charles de Gaulle’s minister for culture in 1959. Picasso would enter Paris galleries and stare at Buffet canvasses for hours, sometimes glaring in silent hatred, sometimes telling visitors how much he hated what he saw before him. Malraux also detested Buffet. M. Perier believes Picasso influenced Malraux, who knew little about art, but he says the culture minister’s motives for bad-mouthing Buffet were also partly political or art-political.
“Malraux was determined to re-establish the reputation of Paris as the art centre of the world,” M. Périer said. “He decided that the ‘abstract’ movement of the 1950s was the vehicle which would achieve that aim. Buffet was anything but an abstract painter. His success and his reputation threatened to muddle the argument that the future of art was abstract.”
Buffet also made another powerful enemy, or at least alienated someone who might have protected, and boosted, his career and reputation. In the 1950s, Buffet, then a homosexual, was the lover of Pierre Bergé, the man who later became the lover and business partner of the fashion designer Yves Saint Laurent. In 1958, Buffet had a spat with Bergé over his new friendship with the then debutant Yves Saint Laurent. Buffet took up instead with a young woman. Perier believes Berge would have reconciled the art establishment with Buffet if the young lovers had not fallen out. M. Garnier goes further and says Buffet attracted the enmity of several powerful gay figures in the art world because he switched his sexual orientation….”
More in The Independent about the spiteful vendetta to denigrate Bernard Buffet by arch rival Picasso and French cultural minister, Andre Malraux.
Comment:
In a previous article (“Portrait of the CIA as an Artist”), I wrote about how the ‘abstract art’ movement was purposely fostered by the intelligence community in the US. The story of Bernard Buffett depicts another angle of that story and shows how the scheming and envious rivalry of one of the icons of modernity, Picasso, combined with state action (Malraux was the French minister for culture) perverted the course of art – as it recently did of banking. The exaggerated worth of some artists at the expense of other artists that is a direct result of state intervention is surely as much an indictment of the state as the exaggerated worth of some businesses (financial) at the expense of others.
John Calvin On Learning From Everyone
“All truth is from God; and consequently, if wicked men have said anything that is true and just, we ought not to reject it, for it has come from God”
John Calvin.
(That should encourage people to link to this blog instead of reading it on the sly – hey, I know you do!)