Author: White Whale

I was sitting in the lobby of a very nice, large corporation the other day, looking at the art they had chosen to showcase, which like so much of such art seems calculated to not offend, and to blend obnoxiously, if I might be permitted an apparent oxymoron. It almost seems like the intent is to connote taste, but not too much taste. Aesthetics by committee.

Be that as it may, I got to wondering about the provenance of this piece. It was likely painted by some artist who needed the money. That person somehow amassed enough money for paint, a canvas, brushes. He or she painted something, then found a buyer. This person was a Capitalist. That is all Capitalism is. If that person had hired two friends to paint with him, and managed the sales channel, so they had reliable markets, even more so.

Capitalism is nothing but getting money somehow, making something useful, and selling it. If it isn’t useful to someone, it won’t sell, so usefulness is built in.

I believe strongly that our global goal should be self employment–Capitalist status–for everyone.

There are many good Muslims out there: I can feel them. There are also many cruel ones, who derive great satisfaction from sadistic violence in the name of God. Such a God is indeed not great.

That Islam can be turned to Goodness was shown by the Sufis. If it is a Goodness which wants to be insular and left alone by the world–a partial Goodness–I am fine with that. As long as they leave me and mine alone, we can share this planet happily.

TError as a political tool has of course been used many times in history. If memory serves, it was the Chinese Qu regime that tried to destroy all learning not originating with their state, and which burned many scrolls and buried alive many scholars to accomplish this end.

In the modern world terror has been used most often and perfected by the creed which calls itself “Marxist-Leninism”. As I understand the matter, Islamic terrorism can credibly be claimed to have originated in the minds of Soviet-bloc agitators. There is nothing in the Koran to justify it, and for his part Mohammad is at pains to denounce violence between Muslims. If the House of Peace becomes a House of War, then the point of the religion vanishes.

As I see it, over the long haul the best way to curb Islamic extremism is to build and build empirical understandings of the nature of the afterlife. This is certainly possible, and in a rational culture would be the subject of tremendous and well funeded investigation. It does not fit the ideological bigotries of those who control the money, however, so it languishes.

That I am the only one I know of saying such a thing explicitly speaks volumes to the idiocy on this planet.

If you could reduce the sensation of freedom to a smell, what would it be? You need not pick only one: they can rotate. Hamburgers? Cold beer? A flower scented breeze? The smell of diaper powder?

What if you could physically create a substance that smelled different to different people, adapting itself to their happiest memories? That idea has potential for good and harm. No doubt someone has thought of it, so there should hopefully be no danger advancing it.

What I am getting at here is that freedom means different things for different people: they USE it in different ways. For some, it means being able to pick up and move whenever they want. For others, the ability to stand up in town halls. For some, being left alone.

How much would you pay to increase your freedom? How much would you pay to opt out of the “Social security” system? You know, lump sum now for not making payments down the road. How much would you pay to consume drugs legally that are now illegal? If your town decided to legalize prostitution, but the price was an added tax for some socially noble goal someone had, would you do it?

How much would you pay to be able to drive any speed you like, a sort of premium drivers club? How much would you pay to skirt zoning laws?

In many parts of the world, this is more or less how things work. The system is called official corruption, and the method is bribes.

Just throwing some ideas out. Need to do some cleaning.

Winston Churchill always called World War 2 the “unnecessary war”, for the obvious reason that Hitler announced his intentions early on, and acted on them–in flagrant violation of the Treaty of Versailles–not once, but repeatedly.

The Depression of the 1930’s was likewise unncessary. Leaving aside the willfulness of the economic crimes committed by the Federal Reserve–they plainly deserve the blame for starting it, and in some measure for continuing–FDR and Hoover manifestly pursued counter-productive policies. In conditions of price deflation and business stress, they insisted on fixed, nationally determined wages for those workers who could get jobs. In conditions of deflation, this amounted to forced wage increases, which of course saddles business owners with greatly added costs, which meant they either went out of business, laid people off, or simply refused to hire more. France has this problem today. Under existing laws, their chronic unemployment will NEVER ease.

Maybe the slogan of the Tea Party should be “Economics education NOW”: “What do we want? FACTS. When do we want them. NOW.”

I have not seen a responsible treatment of this anywhere, although I have been busy, so I may have missed it.

As things stand, the plan is to borrow something like 40 cents of every dollar we spend forever. There is literally no point, under any scenario under active contemplation, in which the amount of money the Federal Government spends is equal to the amount which it takes in in taxes.

As I understand the matter, you can go out 40 years, and the math still won’t work. To point out that this is unsustainable and stupid does not require any particular intelligence. Presumably that is why the naked facts of the matter are not made clear by most Democrat apologists. Even the Republicans are doing little but try to slow down the pace at which things get worse. The boulder is still rolling downhill, though.

Obviously, a balanced budget amendment would force this process to stop instantly, but we will need to cut our spending nearly in half. To do this, we are talking about massive cuts not only to entitlements, but Defense. And that is just to STOP BORROWING. That says nothing about the annual payments on our current debt, which amount to some $250-$400 billion a year. This is money taken by our government in taxes, and given to foreign investors and domestic banks. Put another way, it is wasted money, just like paying interest on credit cards. If we posit the number at $350 billion and our population at 350 million, which is about right, then we get EVERY AMERICAN paying about $1,000 a year just to pay interest. Since almost half of all Americans don’t pay income taxes, this means that most of us productive sorts pay $2,000 or more.

[On one point here I am unclear: if Quantitative Easing consists in buying Treasury bonds, where does the interest go? As I understand it, the Fed refunds all profits, AFTER ITS EMPLOYEES GET PAID. How much do they get paid? Excellent question. There is no way of knowing. We don’t get their financials. They just control the value of our money. It’s not like that affects anything, right?]

Now, the baseline increase in our debt is somewhere between $7 and $10 trillion. How much to “cut” from this is the debate now. But this assumes economic stability. Obamacare is going to force massive new cost increases to most American businesses (it won’t affect the places Nancy Pelosi likes to eat, get her hair done, and where she gets here botox injections), which will be very economically damaging. All American businesspeople know this, and are planning for it now, in part by delaying expansions they could otherwise afford, to see what happens politically.

But if we can’t get this monstrosity reversed, then the amount paid in taxes will go down, since that is what happens when the economy declines (self evidently, given fixed tax rates, the opposite happens when the economy expands). This will mean the gap between income and expenses will widen, making even, say $9 trillion a low number. The real number may be $15 trillion.

Everyone who understands basic business and economics knows this. Moody’s (if you think about it, Moody and Standard and Poor are both interesting names, given what they do), the rating agency, knows this. This is why they are talking about a downgrade of our debt. There is a point you reach where it is likely that you will continue making interest payments, but at which over no timeline short of centuries that you will be able to pay off the principle. Add economic shocks to this, and you get uncertainty, which is bad.

What a downgrade will mean is simply that the national “stock” of the United States is worth less. This will mean that we pay higher interest rates, which in turn will mean, what? HIGHER ANNUAL EXPENSES.

So you have this loop where higher interest leads to higher expenses, which leads to more borrowing, which leads to more interest. None of this can be stopped using normal economic principles unless we stop spending more every year than we borrow. This is so self evident that one could accuse most journalists covering this poorly of failing professionally, either in perception or integrity.

As I say often, though, the pig with lipstick on it stinking up the room is the Federal Reserve and the fractional reserve banking system.

At some point it is my hope that some professional economist or politician will read and understand the basics of my plan to both end our financially abusive system, and propose a solution in the ballpark of what I have proposed. I assume I have missed something, but feel strongly the broad outline is correct. I never have the time to study these things to the extent I like–I need to be somewhere right now, actually–but I think my basic thought process, my use of facts and logic on a complex system, is sound.

Again, the link to that series is here: http://www.goodnessmovement.com/Page14.html

The more I think about it, the more I believe that the most practical way to get people working in our ghettoes is to repeal national and–where applicable–local Minimum Wage laws. [Edit: long term, by far our worst problem is the existence of monetary policy, particularly one controlled by unelected elites with massive conflicts of interest; but that is even farther out than the extremely difficult challenge of convincing people that wage controls generate far less wealth for everyong than free markets]

This is a blunt and politically incorrect way of putting this, but Mexicans who came into this country illegally are taking the jobs American blacks used to do. Unemployment rates among black people used to be close to zero; they were lower than the rates for white people. Now, among young kids in the ghettoes, they are pushing 50%.

Businesses operate for profit. This means they look for good deals. If you can pay people in America $3/hour for something you are paying a Malaysian $2/hour for, but having to transport the finished goods back here,then that is a good deal.

All sustainable positive relationships are win/win. People take jobs because they are better than being unemployed. People offer jobs because they are better than not using capital productively. This does not mean that people like their jobs on either side–there are many unhappy rich people out there, trust me–but that at that time and place it was the best they could do.

The people who disrupt this process are, in my view, the real exploiters, those who insist on Minimum Wages for OTHERS, while never suffering the consequences of such policies themselves. Such people have government jobs, nice pensions, and normally start out middle class and comfortable.

As a general policy recommendation we need to make it so that poverty and the accusation of racism don’t pay so well.

This story is interesting: http://www.theblaze.com/stories/right-out-of-atlas-shrugged-hear-an-exasperated-alabama-businessman-tell-the-feds-im-just-quitting/

“Nearly every day without fail…men stream to these [mining] operations looking for work in Walker County. They can’t pay their mortgage. They can’t pay their car note. They can’t feed their families. They don’t have health insurance. And as I stand here today, I just…you know…what’s the use? I got a permit to open up an underground coal mine that would employ probably 125 people. They’d be paid wages from $50,000 to $150,000 a year. We would consume probably $50 million to $60 million in consumables a year, putting more men to work. And my only idea today is to go home. What’s the use? I see these guys—I see them with tears in their eyes—looking for work. And if there’s so much opposition to these guys making a living, I feel like there’s no need in me putting out the effort to provide work for them. So…basically what I’ve decided is not to open the mine. I’m just quitting. Thank you.”

Who is being exploited here? Politically callous politicians are “protecting” the rights of miners, at the expense of preventing them from getting jobs. Particularly in our own day and age, accidents and reputations spread rapidly. It is never in the interest of any mine to operate sloppily, even if they can still get people to work there.

Regulations are costs. Red tape is a cost. Taxes are costs. All businessmen have to have profits to counterbalance costs, or there is no point in getting out of bed. This point is inescapable.

The more costs there are, the more profits there have to be. From this it follows as day follows night that the more expensive government makes it to do business, the less business will be done, and that the less business is done, the less jobs there will be.

In my view, the corporate tax rate should be zero. Not reduced, but zero. I understand the need for taxes and for local, state and Federal government. We cannot do without government: otherwise, there would have been no need to write the Constitution.

Correspondingly, then, income tax rates would need to be increased. This would happen, though, in a condition of burgening employment, since corporate capital now paid the government would be freed up for job creating business expansions.

With regard to my tagline, who benefits in Alabama? The workers don’t. The business owner doesn’t. Self evidently: the regulators and politicians who vote them funding. Government employees get handsome salaries, life-long jobs, and very generous pensions. These are NICE jobs, if you can get them.

And what happens to them if, for example, we largely entrust safety to mine owners? The rationale for the jobs is gone. They no longer have jobs.

These are the people to whom we are entrusting the enforcement of regulations: people who HAVE to find things to do, or else they will eventually have their funding cut.

It occurs to me that you can never evaluate your own teaching ability, absent feedback. It is the students who judge the teachers capacity. It is not what you know, but what you can communicate that matters, which necessarily means that only on the highest levels is there a strong correllation between knowledge and teaching ability, and even there one can only speak of capacity–potential–and not product.

An interesting corrollary to this is that if we look at Lao Tzu’s aphorism, “A good man is the teacher of a bad man, and a bad man a good man’s charge” (close), then if you cannot meaningfully communicate goodness, you are not a good person. By this, I mean the capability of altering peoples behavior in observable ways. The classic example of NOT teaching is to say one thing and do another.

By this measure, I think it is a necessary conclusion that in many important respects, Mohammad was not a good man. Among other things, he advocated the physical slaughter of all non-Muslims–which will not be found in the New Testament, and only where the land of Israel is concerned in the Old–and married a six year old, consummating the marriage when she was nine.

This story speaks volumes about the cultural development within Islam:
http://www.theblaze.com/stories/saudi-cleric-issues-fatwa-defending-pedophilia-as-%e2%80%98marriage%e2%80%99/

Why is pedophilia wrong? Within my terms, because it necessarily invokes a power relationship. The practice of marrying children is nothing but an extension of the more general rejection of the rights of women, which, again, invoke a power relationship. Anyone whose sense of self depends upon the subjugation of others is a bad person, and if they actively enjoy that subjugation–which is implied by marrying and raping 9 year olds–then they are evil.

I think I sometimes assume that since things are obvious to me that I have explained myself. This may possibly be true, but I have done enough teaching to realize that the contents of my brain do not always flow out by inferences and references that seem self evident to me. That may sound arrogant, and maybe it is, but hell that’s the way I see it. You’ll have to go elsewhere for hand wringing false modesty.

In my view, all individuals come into being within social contexts, but particularly the older they get, the more control they DO have–whether they choose to exercise it or not–over their lives. Most of us can imagine doing things better than we do, but we don’t. This is a loss. Whether it is a loss compensated with increased leisure I will leave to individual cases.

We are seeing, at least in a couple cases, “Christianity”, or “rightists” blamed for the murders in Norway of children, by an apparently conscienceless child of a safe home, and secure society.

What does the notion of valuing personal responsibility and following personal empowerment have to do with this? What does a religion devoted to love have to do with this?

In making very general claims about large groups based upon the extreme and deviant behavior of single members, ANY thinker is making a mistake.

Let me put it this way: anyone who wants to make general statements about groups of people this guy did not know or associate with is guilty of EXACTLY the same thought error he was. He thought that shooting terrified teenagers would somehow cause a seachange in Norway with regard to Muslim immigrants. Not only is this stupid, it is the result of the EXACT same structural mechanism–group guilt and redemption–he decried on the Left.

As I said, Leftists in general (and I will address this apparent hypocrisy in a moment) blame groups and not individuals. In this case, they are not blaming HIM, but rather the cultural milieu–the ideas–to which he was attracted; none of which, however, included provision for anything like mass murder of innocents.

Now, when I speak of the Left, I speak of history. I speak of the last century, and the words and actions of people motivated by eutopian [sic} creeds, which led to sickening cataclysms, from which some nations even now have not emerged (Tibet, North Korea, Cuba, and many other nations with curtailed freedoms, like China). There are common patterns one can see.

When speaking of Christians, there are no such patterns, unless we travel far in time or place. Now, today, “fundamentalists” want to oppose the use of the word marriage by homosexuals, and to try to regain the right plainly granted by the
Constitution to the sundry States to ban abortion. They further oppose the meaninglessness and drift so prevalent in our nation. These are not radical aims.

Few thoughts. Long day.

I think the foundational element of proper economics, from which all else flows, is the insight that life is not linear. Simply because you have a vision of the world, and a plan to change it, does not mean that any and all action based upon these factors will work to achieve your aims.

For example, some people assume that because some people set as their aim getting rich, that they necessarily achieve it. In point of fact, business is littered with failures, and many eventual successes–the “rich”– have several business and even personal bankruptcies in their past. McDonalds nearly foundered on a number of occasions.

Effective action always depends on accurate understandings, and the simple fact is that life is not always linear, and that sometimes the more profound realities have to be inferred from experience, and not deduced accurately a priori, as many academics assume they can do.

Hayek made this distinction as action to and for. What you are actually accomplishing is your “action to”, and what you think you are doing is “action for”.

No matter what you may think of the law of gravity, it will not stop because you don’t like it. No matter what you think of the laws of economics, they will operate as they operate.

Yes, it is likely possible to reduce human beings to robotic beings in order to make human social orders linear, but what is the point of that? Leftism of this sort–and in the final analysis there is no other sort–is an anti-humanism: a committment to the mechanisation of humanity, and the death of unmanageable spontaneity.

Lao Tzu “uncarved block”, as I point out in my Goodness Sutra, might more accurately be translated “uncut forest”, where forests are random, but still orderly, on a chaotic pattern.

Leftism causes poverty. It causes injustice. It supports racism, in the form of reduced expectations. These points are inescapable.

As much as our President may want to pout, his policies are hurting the very people he claims he cares about. He doesn’t care: his every meal is catered, and he sleeps in perhaps the most secure home on the planet.