Author: White Whale

A world with neither prices nor values. Note this puts them even farther down the scale than Wilde’s cynic.

I am going to call that a bon mot. I can do that: it’s my blog.

Environmentalists argue constantly that it’s hard to understand complex biophysical systems. They are “complex”, in the formal sense of that word.

Economic systems are the same, as I argue constantly. Small effects can have large impacts. Minimum wages reduce employment among those most in need of it. Price caps cause rationing.

An idea that just occurred to me, though, is that there is a social concomitant to my argument that Keynesian economics is a formal system for price derangement. Specifically, I would like to posit that moral relativism is a Value Derangement Enterprise.

In Keynesian economics, it is hard to know to estimate value because the future is uncertain, and it is hard to sift the economic noise caused by govermental intrusion in the economy, from actual free market signals; which is to say fake prices from real prices, and the unproductive use of capital, from the productive use of it.

In classical Liberalism–which I will point as I do from time time means roughly what Leftists call Conservatism, and what the proper object of Libertarianism would be, if their thinking was not so woolly–people wander around thinking “I am Right”, but recognize the political and legal need to recognize the rights of others. In contrast, Leftists wander around thinking “I am wrong”, and believe strongly that everyone else is wrong too, and therefore those who think they are right need to be eliminated or tamed.

Now, obviously, they are among the most self righteous sanctimonious human being on the planet. Many of them make Christian Fundamentalists look like anything-goes hippies. So when I use the work “right”, what I intend is “possessed of a stable moral sense, and a loyalty to specific people and places”.

Take the claim that homosexuality is wrong. In a truly Liberal society, there is nothing at all wrong with people believing that. It is just wrong for them to interfere with the material and legal freedoms of people on that basis. In a truly Liberal society, one group can wander around thinking “sinner”, and the other can wander around thinking “asshole”. This is perfectly fine.

But the Leftist enterprise, being based on what it is NOT, rather than what it IS, is intrinsically leveling and self destructive. Granted: you are not homophobic, racist, nationalistic, classist, imperialist, ungreen (should be call those who question environmental alarmist “Browns”? I’ll accept that moniker), etc. You get the idea. Cause de jour, then cause de jure.

And this “negativeering” is always based on a lie. They are anti-church. They are anti-traditional marriage. There is concrete content to their beliefs, but like some atheists, they pretend that the burden of proof rests with anyone who believes anything other than what they do.

The end result of this is a society with no attributes at all, outside of what those in authority impose. The French Revolutionaries tried to rename the months, and create new “festivals”. Such festivals were presumably grim affairs after a time, somewhat reminiscent of what one would imagine as the experience of celebrating the birthday of someone who molested you.

The point I am trying to make is that what we might term the “No operator”–you can’t be that, you can’t believe that, nor that, nor that–works to make it impossible to gauge right from wrong, and this bears a structural similarity to operation of Keynesism in the economic sphere. It is hugely destructive but in a gradual way.

We need to recapture the meaning of the word “tolerance”, which necessarily includes tolerating people who believe different things.

The word “right” has many meanings. One of them is the sense of being correct. Perhaps we could define tolerance as “the acceptance of the right to many ‘rights'”.

That might be clever. I’m not sure. Need to finish my beer and walk the dogs.

That’s a new riff on the old Jerry-Wright-inspired theme, eh?

The phrase popped in my head, but I had intended to post on this rough topic anyway. What is the value of hope? What are its pluses and minuses?

We assume hope is useful, but what if the condition is objectively hopeless–as for example for a Soviet dissident in the Gulag Archipelago?

I have spoken before of the value of learning to breath underwater, and wanted to add an another analogy. Many years ago I read somewhere about the Australian SAS selection process, which is different from any of which I have read. In most Special Operations selection processes, you have a defined period of “hell”, which ends roughly on schedule. Usually you go 4-5 days with little or no sleep, and considerable physical stress.

In the SAS Selection, though, they told them several times, after days of arduous work, that it was over. In the case I remember, a truck came to pick them up from the desert somewhere, then drove off just as they were to get in. As I recall thinking at the time, the process seemed to be geared to select people who were able to operate without hope, who just went on and on no matter what.

As an interesting, to me, historical note, I was reading the memoirs of a VC commander and he said they feared the Aussies more than anyone. He said the Americans–SEAL’s and Army SF–would set an ambush, then call in air strikes. Once the air strike was over, they were safe. With the Aussies, however, they would engage them in close over and over, and killed a lot more of them, since their fire was obviously more accurate. They could see their targets.

The value of hope is that it fills you with energy; it gives you pleasing images that comfort you in distress. No matter how bad your present reality, you can look forward to something better.

The detriment to repeatedly dashed specific hopes–and yes I am allowing myself some vague autobiography here–is they turn easily to cynicism, anger, and hopelessness of the sort that causes a collapse of effort.

My confidence in myself is that I know I can endure damn near anything. I do often. Hell: been there, done that. I allow myself images. I try to see positive futures for myself, those I care about, and the world as a whole; but I don’t expect them. Hoping too much is like leaning forward too far–you are prone to falling over.

The last post got me to thinking “what is a working economy?” In my view, it is one in which we have full employment, and people can meet their basic needs, and many advanced needs, doing primarily work they actually want to do, and not much of that. I think we should be able to live well on 15-20 hours of work a week. Imagine that the purchasing value of the dollar grew 15% annually for the next thirty years, at steady wage rates. It could be done, if we eradicated the Federal Reserve and rationalized our banking system. Our monetary policy needs to be that we have none. We create money, once, then forget about it for the next 1,000 years.

But in my imaginative universe, there would be people who wanted to farm “old school”, maybe even with horses and plows, for the satisfaction of the work. Some would use tractors. For maximal efficiency, though, farming could likely largely be automated. I imagine large farm factories, with robotic plowing, fertilizing, weeding and harvesting.

This in turn got me to thinking about artificial intelligence. With ample cause, we do not fear the robots at Ford. Automated attendants, and automated checkouts at grocery stores are no danger.

What should inspire fear in us are what might be termed “functionally aggregated” robots, which do many different things. As long as things are physically confined along a literal or figurative groove, then AI is no danger.

It seems to me, then, that some system of grading AI could be established, in which the potential danger is rated according to the number of tasks that robot can do. The closer they get to functional,physical freedom, the more hazard they present.

“If it’s dumb, but it works, it isn’t dumb.” My uncle.

Corrollary: If it’s brilliant, but it doesn’t work, it isn’t brilliant.

I was trying to solve a physical problem–a wiring problem to be exact–last night, and having troubles. There is an orthodox way to solve the problem, but required a tool I didn’t have. I kept failing, then a little lightbulb went off and I noticed a consistent pattern that nobody told me to look for. I treated it as a valid, and POOF the problem disappeared.

There is always some track people tell you to follow, but there is always more information available, that is hidden to all but the attentive. If the pattern is consistent, then it exists, and if it is useful then use it. No other justification is needed.

As I understand the matter, if you or I took a form–let’s say my birth certificate, which I have in my personal possession (actually, I thought I had lost it at one point, and was easily able to get a copy from the State I was born in)–and scanned it, there would be one layer. It would be a simple document.

Obama’s supposed birth certificate has nine layers. In one of them, something impossible for humans happens: perfection. Here is the treatment of the topic.

As I have been at pains often to point out, my concern with this issue is not primarily politically. If Congressional or other investigators are not able to find it to be fraud conclusively, it might well hurt Republicans.

My primary concern is with morality and following truth telling. And I am not talking about Obama telling us the truth. Manifestly, he is a calculating and utterly cynical liar, who doesn’t even CARE what the truth is. Whatever serves his purposes always works best for him. That was the essence of the Alinskyan creed he lived and taught.

What matters is that the American people tell ourselves the truth, and more importantly, that our supposed “leaders” demonstrate that they actually adhere to the best, most noble traditions of our nation. We have produced some damn fine people. That is why we are the most powerful nation on Earth.

So why put up with a patent lie? Why not at least investigate whether or not our President, for naked political purposes, committed an impeachable act of fraud? Why not? Are you mental defectives or simple cowards? Or do you simply not hold principles in high esteem any more, and therefore relate to Obama’s cynicism in very ugly and politically pragmatic ways?

It is worth noting what Social Security is and isn’t. What it is is a system in which 12% of every paycheck we get is deducted and handed to the Federal Government. This goes to pay the salaries of some 60,000 Social Security employees, who at some point will give you some of your money back–if you live long enough–and additional money taken from current receipts from your children and grandchildren. Many people contribute their entire lives, and never get anything back; many people, who live long lives, get back much more than they put in; and people retire independently wealthy get money regardless of whether or not they need it.

Social Security is not, in design, a wealth redistribution scheme. Yet, in practice, it is, but not in a rational way (I will bracket for now whether such schemes are morally defensible in the first place). What happens is that Congress periodically votes increases in the Social Security benefits that have not been paid in by the generation drawing them. You were getting $600/month, now you get $800/month. Where does the money come from? We borrow much of it, and the rest comes from the 12% taken from the checks of following generations.

It is not rational, because every generation the expenditures go up, without any expectation that our economy will grow sufficiently that our kids and grandkids will be able to meet the burden. Payments go up because it is politically convenient, primarily but not exclusively for Democrats, to pretend that this can go on forever. To paraphrase Keynes: “in the long run, we will no longer be in office”.

Medicare is roughly 3% of your check. The way Medicare works is that money is taken out of your check, used in part to pay for the 64,000 Health and Human Services employees, and your contributions grant you access to government funded healthcare when you reach a certain age. Self evidently, they don’t pay for everything, but they pay for a lot.

The simple reality is that when you get older you get sicker. This is inevitable. We all die, and most of us die of something that plagued us for some period of time before killing us.

In the past several decades, all sorts of medical treatments have come about that do not really have a significant effect on life expectancy–which is mainly tied to your diet and lifestyles choices–but which do something, and which people therefore consume. Medicare pays for much of this.

One way to think of this is that the cost of medical care has inflated because there are more things you can spend your money on. If a store offers only hot dogs and ice cream, they will only sell to people who like those things. If they instead offer every type of food under the sun–Italian, Indian, Moroccan, Mexican, German, Chinese–then more people will go in there. As more people go in there, they expand. This is all that has happened with healthcare costs, which have gone up a LOT without much decrease in mortality. Stupid people, who do not understand basic economics, blame this on profiteering, as if such an explanation were tenable in a free market.

So the cost of Medicare keeps going up, too. Again, the increase in costs is delayed and deferred, not paid. HHS is roughly 25% of Federal outlays. Think about that. We have funded a massive insurance complex that does not even remotely pay for itself, which does not ask people if they can afford to pay for their own healthcare, and which keeps ballooning benefits by borrowing money from creditors, and from future generations, who will inherit a bankrupt nation in the not-too-distant future.

To this must be added demographics. Put simply, there will soon be a lot more old people than young people. The Baby Boom was just that: an explosive rise in birth rates, that followed WW2 and ended about 1960 or so.

On our current path, if we keep offering the benefits we have been offering to a pool of people that will keep growing and growing for several decades to come, the total benefits paid out will cause major harm to our economy, and likely a general impoverishment that is preventable and unnecessary.

I like to pretend from time to time that conservative economists have called things largely correctly, and that we actually do live in a nation with free markets. Compared to many other nations, this is true, but the simple reality is that no nation in history has had what I would label a proper monetary policy.

Monetary policy is where people glaze over and stop paying attention. The simple reality, though, is that we could have our cake and eat it too, if we were not being robbed blind by the monetary cartel.

Put simply, if we had a rational money system, we would not need Social Security, or Medicare, because we would eliminate poverty in short order. The simple reality is that many people benefit from the current system. There are many who want poverty and (generally alleged) racism to continue, because it puts money in their pockets. You can impoverish a nation, but that effect will never include everyone.

Further, of course, the masters of money benefit hugely from the status quo. It is not so much that they use poverty to amass their own wealth–few understand what they do, so there is no need to lie cynically about it–as that they are heartless bastards who could care less about the effects of their greed on the world at large. Too much is never enough.

My treatment of monetary policy is here: http://www.goodnessmovement.com/Page14.html

This, too, I noted a while back, but will likely treat a little differently. I write so much I can’t remember what exactly I wrote where.

It seems to me that the constant search for various sorts of emotion–one might almost refer to such people as experience collectors–is an orienting gestalt, or what I have termed a meaning system. It is a way of answering the question: what should I do today and why? Your answer: seek out new experiences and emotions, since that is the point of life.

The problem with this way of living is that often the best emotions come unbidden, when we are trying to do something else entirely. It takes a lot of skill to properly consume experience–to feel the feelings you think you are supposed to be feeling, and which in my estimation most people don’t–and so you get yourself to some experience that should be exhilirating, and it doesn’t measure up. Very little in life can measure up to, as Paul Simon put it in Kodachrome, “our sweet imagination”.

Moreover, this is not really a principle that can guide your life, particularly in conditions of conflict. If feeling is what you want, then is the feeling of comfort and safety not preferable to strenuous exertion and danger, at least if choosing the latter implies a moral decision, as in participating in war? At what point do you fight, and why? Because it feels good? There was a soldier portrayed in the Russian movie Company 9 who talked about the value of war. He was killed. Was his death meaningful? The war was lost.

In my view, you have to have principles with some actual content–which as I say often necessarily includes the integrity to regularly compare stated aims with actual results–or you will wind up lost and unhappy.

I’m taking some notes off that I left myself, and one thing I know I have mentioned, but will mention again slightly differently is that it is far better to acknowledge to yourself what happened when you violate your own chosen moral standards, than to rationalize. It is better to live in conflict than to achieve a false synthesis at the cost of constant compromise. Such compromise amounts to changing who you are, invisibly, at the cost of losing your sense of self, also invisibly. You feel lost and angry, but you forget why.

My first principle is the rejection of self pity. It is worth noting, though, that pain and self pity are two different things. You can be miserable, and not feel sorry for yourself. You can also MAKE yourself miserable through self pity, in conditions most people in the world would envy.

There is a phenomena, though, that is not quite either, which I diagnose in myself, which is blocking happiness. True pleasure is spontaneous. It opens you. It is necessarily generous, helpful and kind. It consists in the capacity for wonder and enthusiasm. Goodness and the capacity for this sort of pleasure are synonymous.

But often we stop ourselves, for fear of being giddy, or too open. I say we: certainly I, although often I do NOT stop myself, and am known at times for being an enthusiast.

What is this called, though? It’s not pain and it’s not self pity. It is a failure of happiness. You can label it protective, but that describes what it tries to do, not what it IS.

Is fear the right word? We think of fear as a presence of anxiety and tension, but could it not equally be seen as an ABSENCE of grace and pleasure? Can we not look more productively to what did not happen, as opposed to what did?