Month: June 2011

It really is essential to grasp the demonic, consciously destructive nature of the work of Keynes. He was not wrong. There is no point in arguing Keynes versus Hayek. The answers are self evident to competent minds filled with accurate facts. The argument is lunacy versus reason, the wrecking ball versus brick and mortar.

As I thought about it this morning, I got to thinking about his coalmine analogy, reliably reproduced by reliable idiot Paul Krugman:

What is he arguing for? The diversion of money from productive to non-productive uses; the channelling of money from the actual economy to an artificial economy created by the government that will cease the moment the government stops spending money.

But the longer you can get the government to sustain an artificial economy, the more damage you do to the actual economy, and most importantly, the more DEPENDENT you make more people on the government. As I have said, this makes them pliable.

This is what was done in the Great Depression by FDR. He did “stimulus” spending on things–like the TVA–that were not inherently productive, and he deranged prices through wage and price controls.

A further consideration, plainly operative in our own day, is the mystification that deficit spending produces with respect to clarity on the part of producers what their future costs will be. Clearly, at some point tax rates or interest rates will go up, but it is hard to say when and how much. How do you price your products? How do you plan production? Is it not easier to produce less, and wait and see? Is it not more intelligent?

Add to that ridiculous idiocies like Obamacare and you get long term, unnecessary, economic malaise.

I was thinking the other day, also, about the French banlieus (spelling close), which are large housing complexes that are isolated from the economy. They are government built and maintained, but they CANNOT, of their nature, be self reliant. If we take as one pole of a continuum a subsistence farmer, who doesn’t really need anything from anyone, the opposite pole is that of people whose housing and income is provided by the goverment, and who are incapable of any independent economic activity of their own. No wonder they riot.

It is important to grasp that deep, profound intelligence can coexist in the same mind with profound evil. Not only can it, but it often does.

If you are only hard, you are cruel. If you are only soft, you are irrelevant.

The task of Goodness it to be relevant–to make a difference–but self evidently not to take pleasure from cruelty. I do strongly believe, though, that it is necessary at times to act cruelly, as in military drill instructors, and parents who want self reliant children.

If you’re sending snails out in the world without their shells, that is true cruelty. You have sentenced them to a life of pain.

As I ponder this notion of price derangement, the vision comes to me of setting small fires all over the economy, whose source no one can determine. Some of them–like the housing bubble–become quite large. Always there are these autonomous entities wandering our economic landscape and disrupting everything that is stable.

There are many examples, but let’s pick Davis-Bacon wages as an example. This scheme was enacted under Hoover, and stipulates, in effect, that any project involving labor pay above market wages. This is great for those who get those wages. It is bad for all the people who could have underbid them, and gotten work, but who couldn’t, by law. It is bad for taxpayers, who of course get more money siphoned out of their pockets. And to the point here it is a price derangement scheme, in which the proper value of labor is disrupted.

Mad genius that he was, he could clearly see that, in good times and bad, the constant prevention of the achievement and maintenance of rational pricing would over time cause recurring crises–of the sort Marx predicted, but which never occurred, forcing Leftists to “validate” him by causing disasters intentionally–and if the “solution” was always further price derangement, sooner or later the whole house of cards would collapse. This was his goal.

A further thought occurred to me today. I was sitting in a hipster bar, where everyone has long hair, beards of various sorts, where some of the women look like mannequins and others pincushions, and where everybody has a scooter. Somewhat incongruously, there was a very good bluegrass band playing. Bluegrass is real music.

Obviously, this is the sort of place where artwork of various sorts is on display. I looked at a crudely rendered painting of a women, where her breasts physically emerged from the canvas. Oi: not really that clever. Then I realized they were skulls. The skull theme again. It’s all around you if you pay attention. Death and aggression.

Anyway, it occurred to me that moral relativism is consonant with, resonates with, is systemically connected with, the abandonment of the gold standard. Eradicating the gold standard was a virtual obsession with Keynes, and was accomplished early in FDR’s first term.

What does abandoning the gold standard do? It makes price derangement easier. Unbacked currencies can be inflated and deflated almost at will.

One gets the sense that there he was, in Paris for the WW1 negotiations, furious at the terms imposed on the Germans. He writes a scathing condemnation of the Versailles Treaty in the work that made him famous: “Economic Consequences of the Peace”, where among other things he points out that inflation is a means of wealth confiscation, and that it had been lauded by Lenin as the best means of undermining Capitalism”.

Lightbulb moment, somewhere in the early 20’s, perhaps a bit later: inflation AND deflation derange prices, and the two combined at the same time will create an invisible and damaging wave that will cause problems that can always be claimed to be curable by government. This allows a gradual take-over of all economic sectors that will ACCEPTED by the people, since they will be in crisis, and the consequences of which will only gradually dawn on them, after it is too late.

This was the task he set himself, and the “intellectual” underpinning of which he clearly accomplished.

Moral relativism: in what does this consist? Does it not consist, practically and empirically, in condemnation of specific practices, but never an affirmation of actually universal values. We can judge racism in this country, but not in other nations.

What gold does is anchor value. What moral systems–meaning systems, in my rendering–do is anchor meaning. If values are allowed to float, then they become unclear, do they not? A sense of right and wrong becomes diffused, then gone. You have the commands of the leaders, but that does not work on a sacral level. There is no sublimation of pain into meaning. All you have is pain.

So I watch these people who poke thick rods through their noses, and eyebrows, and get tattoos all over their body. What they are doing is functional for them, useful for them, but only based upon defective starting points.

One last thought, then VOB: I was watching something like Jackass, but different. Guys driving camper trucks over ramps and getting 20′ air, then crashing. Flipping go-carts in water pools. Boys being boys.

This is male masochism. I have said for years that most boys are lucky to make it to physical adulthood. Males just take risks, and enjoy taking risks, well knowing what the possible results are. In olden days, this was the impulse behind war. The goal is to win, but many men just want to get it on, and see who prevails. You have energy, and you want to walk into a wall and knock it over.

We have reached a point in our cultural history where we can begin asking general questions about what sort of life we want in the future. There are many correct answers to this question, and as I have often argued, I expect the best ones to be local. Meaning, like investment, is best deployed locally, using local information and intelligence.

We can and should ask questions, though, like “what POSITIVE role has and does war play, and how can it be replaced?” What sorts of pain are desirable, and how best should we pursue them consciously?

Well qualified people are coming forward stating that Obama’s purported birth certificate is a forgery. http://www.wnd.com/?pageId=316749

When is someone in our government going to grow the balls to challenge him on this? I understand politics, but the essence of the Alinskyan method is terror, and if you give in to it, it works, to the detriment of everyone but the sociopathic sons of bitches trying to erect hell on earth.

This situation is very simple: if Obama had had a birth certificate, he would have released it in 2008. He did not. He put a picture of tampered document on the internet, along with the word of campaign supporters that it was real.

There are two failures here, both inexcusable: first, the Supreme Court SHOULD have rendered a judgment as to whether or not a man with a foreign national father was “natural born”. Self evidently, the warranted concern on the part of the Founders would have been divided loyalties, and in point of fact Obama has undermined our special relationship with England, and it would seem obvious beyond the need for argument that his identification with his Kenyan father–the book, remember, was “Dreams from my father”–has played a role in this.

Secondly, the Supreme Court should have forced a disclosure of a legally valid document with respect to the birth certificate. The lawsuits were there; they could have heard them, and done their job.

Cowards that they are, they failed in both tasks. We can still hope that someone in our government will do their jobs, but right now I want to spit in their collective faces for shaming our proud history, and all the brave men and women who died protecting our nation–and who used their lives building our nation–by letting patent lies with respect to important issues pass by without action.

I don’t have time to type out some of his memorable statements, but I want to strongly recommend students of economics–which should include people who genuinely want to help the poor, but want to do so from a position of intellectual clarity, and not childish sentimentalism–read Peter Bauer’s excellent “Equality, the Third World and Economic Delusion”.

I think the evidence speaks clearly that so-called “aid” policies have had the net effect over the last 60 years or so of promoting totalitarianism, slowing or halting economic development, and contributing to even wider poverty throughout the world.

Put another way, leftist politics have damaged the lives of nearly every person on the planet Earth, in clearly identifiable and quantifiable ways.

In silence, lines extend.

PSALM OF THE DAY.

A something in a summer’s day,
As sIow her flambeaux burn away,
Which solemnizes me.

A something in a summer’s noon, —
An azure depth, a wordless tune,
Transcending ecstasy.

And still within a summer’s night
A something so transporting bright,
I clap my hands to see;

Then veil my too inspecting face,
Lest such a subtle, shimmering grace
Flutter too far for me.

The wizard-fingers never rest,
The purple brook within the breast
Still chafes its narrow bed;

Still rears the East her amber flag,
Guides still the sun along the crag
His caravan of red,

Like flowers that heard the tale of dews,
But never deemed the dripping prize
Awaited their low brows;

Or bees, that thought the summer’s name
Some rumor of delirium
No summer could for them;

Or Arctic creature, dimly stirred
By tropic hint, — some travelled bird
Imported to the wood;

Or wind’s bright signal to the ear,
Making that homely and severe,
Contented, known, before

The heaven unexpected came,
To lives that thought their worshipping
A too presumptuous psalm.

——————————————————————————–
Emily Dickinson

What if you knew it was your destiny to spend your next 1,000 lifetimes fighting like a son of a bitch for what is just and right in whatever world you land on?

It’s always one hill at a time, isn’t it? Me: I like the idea.

I posted the following on this website.

This is a topic I have given a lot of thought to. As I see it, the core problem that faces all human beings is the problem of pain. Why should we live at all, as Camus, asked, particularly if there is no larger world around this one? Atheism makes this a very hard question to answer.

Now, the existence or non-existence of God is an empirical question which I won’t examine here. (I do on my website cursorily).

But all of us have to figure out some means of transmuting pain into something higher, or we WILL kill ourselves.

Look at this video, from one of the rougher parts of the training of American Air Force Special Operations troops http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X07-xQ_YajI&feature=relatedIs this not a type of torture? But it has a purpose, that of making them stronger. Their motto is “voluntary suffering is weakness leaving the body”.

But what if you are unable, within the constraints of your perceptual abilities–as expressed in the latent or explicit philosophies we all use to guide our lives–to find any good reason to live?

Do you then not enter into a direct, unmediated relationship with pain, almost as a protective reaction? If you are seeking shelter from the maladies of bitterness, self pity, resentment and unrelenting hostility to the world, can you do better than to make of submission a creed, a religion, and is it not the hope of all the faithful to be martyred for their faith?

My preoccupation is with Goodness, but I see no way to pursue the idea properly without seeing life on this planet as it really is. Plainly, these sorts of things help some people. As I imagine it, it makes them feel more alive, more tingly, and releases some latent energy in them.

The question, though, is: is this the only way, and if not, is it the best way? Many of us look at these practices and see mental illness. I look at them and see defective solutions, but to real problems, and solutions which are better than the alternative in most cases, which for many would likely include suicide.

Foucault spent a career talking about power, and yet he liked to be whipped.

I could go on, but I have things to do. There are parts of these things that are mildly erotic for me, for moments, but mostly they are gross, and the awaken empathy in me for the women who are so desperately sad and lonely–don’t call this love–that they endure these things just to stay with the man who abuses them. “I’d rather feel pain than nothing at all”.

I have called BDSM “ersatz sacred”. True sacrality is something which converts pain into meaning. It is the reason we suffer voluntarily. People obviously suffer voluntarily in BDSM, but they don’t BUILD anything from it. There is no more complex structure there afterwards than before. There is perhaps release, but not expansion, at least over the longer term.

Free markets less price derangement=generalized wealth.

The question arises from time to time about monopolies and cartels. There are exceptions to all rules, but in my view, over the long haul, this problem can be solved in two ways. First, the development of cultural habits that demand enough, but not too much. Second, if the value of money is allowed to rise through a policy of monetary stasis, then wealth will be generalized and spread broadly enough that there will be no NEED for monopolies.

There are people in this world who enjoy fighting and winning zero sum contests. But they are not the majority, and the goal is not perfection. If we have a reactive surface of educated, motivated and diligent citizens, problems can be dealt with as they come up, within the larger context of free markets less price derangement.

I will add that one problem with futurists, as I see it, is projecting what will HAPPEN, rather than who we will be. The first flows naturally from the second, making cultural contuity and improvement infinitely more important than technological improvement.