Author Archives: Lila

Speaking Blogistani….

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Thanks to all readers who write in to correct my frequent typos.
You will have to forgive me for speaking blogistani.

For years, I taught spelling, grammar, punctuation, and the rest. I corrected fine distinctions of meaning. I forced captive student to rewrite words.

But it turned out that I was more captive than they were.

Blogistani is now my native language and I speak it like any transplant, picking up the rules as I go along.

One rule of blogs is that corrections should appear as corrections.

But for minor matters of grammar and spelling, that would create a fine mess and be more confusing than useful most of the time. So I simply rewrite mistakes as I spot them. And the same goes for changes in style, or additions of non-essential detail (although I’ll make note of an update and time, if the information is more critical).

Of course, for any important details, or for citations or quotes where other people are affected, or for breaking news, I cross out and insert an apology as well.

There are also some physical reasons.

The charm of blogistani is that you can speak it as you go along and so I rarely reread my posts before posting. I like the feeling of writing on the run. That has its upside – I catch all those fleeting thoughts. But it also has its down side – typos.

Another thing. I rarely wear my glasses and sometimes don’t see errors until I (or you) reread a post.
This isn’t vanity (since I lead a reclusive life). It’s my fixation with the thesis that crutches make muscles weaker. And glasses are crutches. I got that notion into my head as a child when I read a copy of the “Bates’ Method,” which is a system of natural corrective exercises for myopia. Whether they work or not, I don’t know. But after a lifetime of squinting at piano scores, exam papers, manuscripts, and pixels, in all sorts of light, without my glasses, my eyesight hasn’t got any worse than the original prescription. I see this as something of a vindication of a pet crank of mine, and naturally I hang on to it by going without my glasses.

The third reason for my blindness is my way of reading. I either read at lightning speed, absorbing big chunks of reading matter at a glance….or I take forever to get through a paragraph.

Both styles of reading suit me and have their uses.

I use the slow method for philosophy and fiction.

I use the fast method for getting through the news on the net.

Fast reading is also partly a bad habit left over from exams in India, where we had to extract the salient facts from reams of overwritten material. My eye sometimes doesn’t actually see the individual phrases but gets the information out of the writing holistically. People who sight-read music a lot use the same technique. They can get through and synthesize a lot of information this way very fast. But it also means they need to proof their writing more than most people.

I’ll post more on this subject, because I’ve thought about it a lot over the years – how we absorb information, how we remember it and reuse it, how we process our sensory input.

And I come at this not from the point of view of a specialist in cognitive research (although I’m familiar with some of it), but from the point of view of pedagogical theory….

R. D. Laing On The Absurdity Of Normal Men

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Psychoanalyst R. D. Laing on Normality:

“From the moment of birth, when the Stone Age baby confronts the twentieth century mother, the baby is subjected to those forces of violence, called love, as its mother and father, and their parents, and their parents before them, have been. These forces are mainly concerned with destroying most of its potentialities, and on the whole this enterprise is successful. By the time the new human being is fifteen or so, we are left with a being like ourselves, a half-crazed creature more or less adjusted to a mad world. This is normality in our present age……

The condition of alienation, of being asleep, of being unconscious, of being out of one’s mind, is the condition of the normal man.

Society highly values its normal man. It educates children to lose themselves and to become absurd, and thus to be normal.

Normal men have killed perhaps 100,000,000 of their fellow normal men in the last fifty years.”‘

“The Politics of Experience” (New York: Ballantine, 1967), pp. 58, 28.

My Comment

Laing is making an extreme statement, I realize. But there are insights in what he writes, as well, for instance,  when he says that habits are imposed on us early in life  to make us conform to certain ways of thinking and acting – habits which alienate us from our conscience and from our authentic self.

That’s close to the teaching of “mechanical man” in Gurdjieff’s writing.

The Hindu teaching about “vasanas” or sense impressions (that we cultivate) seems close too. The vasanas.drive us (through cause and effect) into mechanical action. The emphasis here is less on external conditioning as on our own unconscious role in creating mechanical patterns.

In Christianity, the closest teaching is the one in the Gospel about casting off  the “old man” and putting on the new. The “old ma”n conforms to the outward appearance of things; he’s driven by the “old Adam”. I take this to mean biological urge (one form of habit and enslavement), but surely it must also include conventions formed by society and by state, although we have to distinguish between these types as well.

Couldn’t that be why one of the teachings of the Gospel – a controversial teaching – is that the love of God comes before love of parents and family? And that it can bring a sword between family members?

If we set aside the theology for a moment, isn’t that close to Laing’s comments about our need to escape our family conditioning, a conditioning imposed on us often in the name of love?

All these traditions are very dissimilar and we can’t gloss over the differences, but the underlying phenomena are not that far apart, either. Laing’s conclusions can be  indiscriminate, but the questioning of childhood conditioning seems very useful.

Those are my thoughts, anyway, coming from my interest in how and why people become deluded or propagandized.

Why Pork-Chop Health-Care Doesn’t Work

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Donald J. Boudreaux on why collectivized health care solutions don’t work (hat-tip to Cafe Hayek):

“Collective efforts — which, in practice, mean “imposed by government command” — typically allow each of us to free-ride off of each other’s resources. And when I get to spend your money and you get to spend mine, it’s a sure bet that that money will be spent wastefully.

Consider Medicaid and Medicare — huge socialized health-care programs. Funded with tax dollars, these programs allow the millions of Americans covered by them to consume medical services without paying the full cost of those services. The predictable result is that these services are over-consumed.

To see why, ask the following question posed by my George Mason University colleague Russell Roberts. If you go to dinner with a large group of strangers and you know that the bill will be split evenly, aren’t you more likely to order pricier dishes and drinks than you would order if you, and you alone, were responsible for picking up your full tab?

The answer is surely “yes.” Let’s say that you’d be content to order the pork chop priced at $15, but would get even greater enjoyment from ordering the rack of lamb priced at $25. If you alone were responsible for your tab, you’d order the lamb only if it is worth to you at least the extra $10 that it costs. So suppose that you value the lamb by only $8 more than you value the pork chop. In that case, you’d order the pork chop. You wouldn’t spend an extra $10 to get extra satisfaction worth only $8.

But if the bill is evenly shared among, say, 10 diners (yourself and nine others), then if you order the lamb, your share of the higher bill will be only $1. That’s $10 split evenly 10 ways. You’ll order the lamb.

You might think that this sharing arrangement is good. After all, in this example, the cost to you of getting something you valued more (the lamb rather than the pork chop) was reduced. It became sensible for you to order the lamb.

Look more deeply, though. What happened is that society (here, the 10 diners) was led to supply something that wasn’t worth its cost. The lamb was worth to you only an additional $8, but to make it available to you, society spent $10. Ten dollars were used to raise the welfare of society by only $8. (You’re a member of society, so any improvement in your welfare counts as an improvement in the welfare of society.) That’s a waste of $2…”

My Comment

(Check back later tonight)

Paul Volcker Praises the Grace of Government

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The Bureau of Economic Analysis released the Q1 ’09 GDP numbers.

The annual rate of decline came in at the expected 6.1%  (a decline of 6.3% in real GDP).

Calculated Risk has an optimistic assessment of the Q1 numbers.

The optimistic case rests on the following:

  • Declining residential investment contributed more to the GDP slump in Q1’09 than in Q4 ’08 and will likely come to an end by Q2’09, in keeping with its role as a leading indicator of recession.
  • Simultaneously, the contributions of lagging indicators (like unemployment, declining investment in equipment & software, and declining non-residential investment) have increased.
  • The over-weighting of lagging indicators in the decline of GDP signals the end of recession.
  • Real personal consumption expenditure (PCE) was up in positive territory (2.2%) in Q1’09, where it was negative (4.3%) in Q4’08.

Mish Shedlock is less optimistic. He says that the Q1 ’09 rise in PCE is either an outlier  or temporary, and will be followed by another dip in 2010-11 and more trough for a few years.

Meanwhile, former Fed chairman Paul Volcker, head of Barack Obama’s economic team, thinks the economy is “leveling off,” according to this Bloomberg report.

Highlights of what Volcker is reported to have said:

  • Bernanke is “doing a great job”
  • the economy is functioning “by the grace of government intervention”
  • a strong recovery is “going to take a while”
  • “systemically important institutions” are going to be kept afloat
  • the expansion of the Fed’s balance sheet to more than $2.2 trillion as of last week will likely lead to inflationary problems in 2-3 years, but not immediately
  • Glass-Steagall (repealed in 1999) isn’t likely to be resuscitated but proprietary trading and commercial banking activity should be kept apart (Lila: how?)
  • no regulation of hedge funds is likely but in the case of those that get too big capital requirements and a cap on leverage might be imposed (Lila: this is vague and opens the door to selective regulation)
  • regulation of executive compensation isn’t likely but there could be a “quid pro quo” for federal aid. It would have to be a “culture of exchange” with Wall Street (Lila: more weasel words that allow for selective regulation).

Altogether, I thought Volcker’s comments were evasive, inadequate, and temporizing.

Factory Farms and Swine Flu

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I’ve been listening unmoved to all the hysteria about swine flu, feeling skeptical about some of the reporting. There was, after all, a 1976 swine-flu epidemic that never was, according to a piece by Patrick de Justo in Salon.

There’s no clear evidence of how this thing was triggered or how bad it is, but already the government is stocking up from the drug companies. You’ve got to wonder if all the alarmism isn’t just a distraction from the financial shenanigans in DC.  And if it will just provide another excuse to clamp down on the population.To wit., the Massachusetts Senate passed a bill on April 28 that would let the public health commissioner  “close or evacuate buildings, enter private property for investigations, and quarantine individuals” during an emergency, as well as impose fines of up to$1000 for not complying with public health orders. [Credit to Rady Ananda for providing the link].

Someone, somewhere is making a few bucks off those vaccines – you can be sure of that.

The New Scientist doubts that this is a genetically-engineered virus that was accidentally (or, as some cynics write, purposefully) let loose in the population. Swine-flu might still be man-made, it concedes, but the culprits are more likely to be factory-farms:

(New Scientist):

“Animal vaccines might seem like the answer, but vaccines that do not provide 100% protection can actually make things worse. When there is widespread vaccination, viruses can spread without any visible disease. Ineffective vaccines also create strong selective pressure driving the evolution of new strains that can dodge the immune attack provoked by the vaccine.

Already, attention is turning to the big pig farms in Mexico, and the role they may have played in creating this new strain of swine flu.

The fact is that we still know so little about flu, and what makes it capable of spreading from human to human, means that deliberately engineering a virus of this kind would be a huge challenge. Yes, it’s possible that this virus was created by a mistake at a research laboratory or a vaccine factory.

But by far the most plausible explanation is that this monster is the long-predicted product of our farming system....”

_________________________

Update: Here’s Ron Paul, as usual right on the money, cautioning against the scare-mongering and pointing out that last time around 25 people died of the vaccine, while only 1 person died from the flu itself. And 500 people also developed Guillane Barre syndrome, a serious neurological disorder.

Update: From The Independent, UK:

“Q What defence do we have against swine flu?

A Better than we did against the last pandemics in 1957 and 1968. We have a stockpile of anti-viral drugs – Tamiflu and Relenza – which we did not have then. We also have a pandemic plan, drawn up by the Government since avian flu became a threat in 2003, which sets out what is to be done – from distributing the drugs and setting up helplines to closing schools and banning public events.

Q Has the pandemic plan ever been tested?

A Yes, in one of the biggest emergency planning exercises since the end of the Cold War that took place in 2007. It involved hundreds of health officials across the country.

Q Are there enough anti-viral drugs?

A Not according to the Tories. The Government says it has over 30 million courses of the drugs, enough for half the population. The Tories say this is not enough if family members of an infected person are to be treated prophylactically. In that case, enough drugs to cover three-quarters of the population will be necessary, they say….”

My Comment:

That’s a lot of drugs. And a lot of money for the drug manufacturers. Food for thought…

Hilaire Belloc On Prophecy And Time

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“On Anything,” Hilaire Belloc
Constable & Co., 1910

“The truth is that men pass under strong influences of time that fill them more than with wine, rather with an entirety of life. The time in which a man lives may be an exalted time or a weary one, but it fills him altogether, whether it is on fire or drowned. He can conceive, as a rule, nothing in the future different from the temper of his time, though there is all the past to teach him his folly. If he makes a picture of the future, that picture is a mere extension of his own tiny and ephemeral experience, and the more confidently certain he is of that future the more rigidly is it seen by the critical onlooker to be a puppet dressed up in the clothes of the present.

All these things Dunoyer’s careful book upon two men of the Revolutionary Tribunal, a monograph characteristic of that ceaseless and immense research which dignifies the modern French School of History, has suggested to my mind.

Now, whenever I read of the Revolution, in general or in particular, while that lesson of the folly of prophecy perpetually returns to me, yet something else rises from the page. In a certain sense, almost in a mystical sense, the periods of profound faith in a particular future were right. Not because the picture that they saw was true, but because those things outside time upon which they relied were and are true. And even to-day in the sheer anarchy and welter of the time we suffer there is a method of thought which has anchoring ground in the permanent fate of mankind. But what that method may be there is no space to discuss here.”

My Comment:

Belloc is less familiar to me than Chesterton, but it’s an ignorance I mean to remedy swiftly. I encountered him during childhood through his nonsense rhymes and modeled an early unpublished collection of light verse on them. I always meant to get around to reading more of him.

It’s one of the horrid things about governments that we have to spend so much time figuring out what new imposition they mean to levy on us that we have no time left over for things we actually enjoy. Some days I wonder if we wouldn’t be wiser to simply ignore what’s going on and live “underground,” hiding as much of our lives as we can from the powers that be.

The Belloc passage I posted expresses a conundrum that often troubles me and surfaced in an article I posted a while ago by Naomi Wolf, in which she compares the US government to the Nazis.  Joey Kurtzman correctly called this historically inaccurate. I concurred with Kurtzman, but still agreed that Wolf had said something “true,” even if partially inaccurate.

This I take to be the substance of what Belloc is saying. Our predictions are always intensely colored by the particular time in which we live and thus are  always suspect. But at moments of crisis – revolutionary moments – we can nonetheless correctly predict the direction of the future, not because of any perspective lent to us by the time in which we live, but because of something outside time, some truth beyond particularity. That is what seizes us and speaks through us…

PS: I corrected the title of this post, from “Hilaire Belloc on the effect of time” to “Hilaire Belloc on prophecy and time” for the sake of clarity.

Tom Woods On Wealth Creation

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Nice finale to Tom Woods’ piece at Taki Magazine, putting an end to some superstitions about labor and wealth:

“Leaving aside the odd view that only manual laborers engage in “work,” all the brawn in the world could never have produced a steam engine or a Pentium processor. Only when informed by the knowledge of inventors and supplied with the capital saved by capitalists can the average laborer produce the tiniest fraction of what he is today accustomed to producing. The central ingredient in a laborer’s physical productivity is the equipment and machinery at his disposal. There is nothing natural or inevitable about the availability of this productivity-enhancing capital equipment.  It comes from the wicked capitalists’ abstention from consumption, and the allocation of the unconsumed resources in capital investment. This process is the only way the general standard of living can possibly rise.  Hartmann thinks it’s just swell to tax it.

The increases in the productivity of labor that additional capital makes possible, by increasing the overall amount of output and thereby increasing the ratio of consumers’ goods to the supply of labor, make prices lower relative to wage rates and thereby raise real wages.  That’s why, in order to earn the money necessary to acquire a wide range of necessities, far fewer labor hours are necessary today than in the past—say, 1950 or 1900. Thanks to capital investment, which is what businesses engage in when their profits aren’t seized from them, our economy is far more physically productive than it used to be, and therefore consumer goods exist in far greater abundance and are correspondingly less dear than before……

Hartmann’s argument runs, in effect: “Citizen, you need to be looted in order to stabilize the system [a nonsensical idea Hartmann came across in the popular Keynesianism that forms the entirety of his economic knowledge].  Let us hear no more anti-social talk about your so-called rights. All hail The System!  Wherever would we be without the stabilizing power of violence!”

As for the nonsense about FDR’s New Deal “stabilizing us”—and the perverse argument that our economy will never be stable unless the people are violently expropriated—check out economist Robert P. Murphy’s new book The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Great Depression and the New Deal.  Its playful title notwithstanding, this book mercilessly bludgeons thoughtless clichés like this.

At least the mafia has the decency not to put such transparently phony claims over on you. They’re honest: we’re taking your money because we have power, and you don’t.

What it all boils down to is this: one side of our political spectrum favors the central planning of Iraq, while the other favors the central planning of Americans. We can only hope for the continued growth of a third side, one that rejects as unworthy of a free people all the superstitious nonsense about the magical powers of our overlords, whether that power is exercised at home or abroad.”

Carson Versus Marks On Libertarianism And Scarcity

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An interesting exchange from The Libertarian Alliance’s website on libertarianism and scarcity, with Kevin Carson responding to Paul Marks’ critique of his work:

[Marks]

“Neither land nor capital are [sic] “artificially scarce” – they are just scarce (period).  There are billions of people and only a certain amount of land and machinery?  .[T]he idea that land and capital are only scarce [emphasis mine] compared to the billions of people on Earth because of either wicked governments or wicked employers (or both) is false.”

[Carson]

First, simply to get the second part of Mr Marks’ statement out of the way, I nowhere asserted that all scarcity of land and capital is artificial.  I argued only that they were more scarce, as a result of state-enforced privilege, than they would otherwise be, and that returns on land and capital were therefore higher than their free market values.  In any case, as Franz Oppenheimer observed, most of the scarcity of arable land comes not from natural appropriation, but from political appropriation. And the natural scarcity of capital, a good which is in elastic supply and which can be produced by applying human labor to the land, results entirely from the need for human labor for its creation; there is no fixed limit to the amount available.

But getting to his main point, that land and capital are not artificially scarce, I’m not sure Mr Marks is even aware of his sheer audacity.  In making this assertion, he flies in the face of a remarkable amount of received libertarian wisdom, from eminences as great as Mises and Rothbard.  As a contrarian myself, I take my hat off to him.

Still, I wonder if he ever made the effort to grasp the libertarian arguments, made by Rothbard et al, that he so blithely dismisses.  Is he even aware of the logical difficulties entailed in repudiating them?  Does he deny that state enforcement of titles to land that is both vacant and unimproved reduces the amount available for homesteading? Does he deny that the reduced availability of something relative to demand is the very definition of “scarcity,” or that the reduction of supply relative to demand leads to increased price?  Or is his argument rather with Rothbard’s moral premises themselves, rather than the logical process by which he makes deductions from them?  I.e., does he deny that property in unimproved and vacant land is an invalid grant of privilege by the state, and thereby repudiate Locke’s principle of just acquisition?

It seems unlikely, on the face of things, that Mr Marks would expressly repudiate Mises and Rothbard on these points.  After all, elsewhere in his critique he cites Human Action and Man, Economy and State as authorities.  Perhaps he just blanked out on the portions of their work that weren’t useful for his apologetic purposes.

In any case, if he does not repudiate either Rothbard’s premises or his reasoning, Mr Marks has dug himself into a deep hole.  For by Rothbard’s Lockean premises, not only the state’s own property in land, but “private” titles to vacant and unimproved land, are illegitimate. Likewise, titles derived from state grants are illegitimate when they enable the spurious “owner” to collect rent from the rightful owner – the person who first mixed his labor with the land, his heirs and assigns.  And the artificial scarcity of land resulting from such illegitimate property titles raises the marginal price of land relative to that of labor, and forces labor to pay an artificially high share of its wages for the rent or purchase of land….”