Author: White Whale

The basics of economics are well understood, and well articulated by people like Thomas Sowell, in his “Basic Economics”.

The crux of my own contribution is to point out that the demand for money is fixed. There is never any intrinsic value in money, qua money. Yes, gold can be converted to fine jewelry, but it is not then acting as money.

Mutability in supply is, then, necessarily a corruption of the generalized wealth building that would otherwise happen in conditions of free markets.

Given a fixed supply of money, the purchasing power per unit of labor would logically rise. This follows as an element of common sense from the obvious fact that productivity has been surging vastly faster than population for the last centuray and more, yet what you can buy–although it has increased vastly in quality–is really not that much more. What has in fact increased VASTLY is our collective debt. This is the fault in the US, primarily, of the Federal Reserve, and in the developing world that of the World Bank and IMF.

As should be obvious as well, this corruption is necessarily in the favor of some, at the expense of others; and, to the point here, to the benefit of a few, at the expense of most of us.

Monetarists like Milton Friedman looked at what happened, and thought about how to improve it. They saw monetary contraction causing recessions, and concluded therefrom that a modest amount of inflation, by extension, was the corrective. Friedman’s arguments in favor of capitalism and free markets were sound, but in my view he missed this very fundamental point, for the simple reason that he was an economic historian. This perhaps made him a realist, but in my view there is also a moral principle involved here, that we still have kings and economically non-productive avenues to vast accumulations of wealth.

This is unfair. It is literally and with no exaggeration theft, and on a scale beyond even my own comprehension.

The economic system I am talking about (here, if you have not see it) has never happened anywhere, since the beginning of recorded history, to the extent of my knowledge.

Neither have nuclear bombs. It is time we begin in earnest the new thinking that needed to attend our new capabilities that Einstein talked about.

The demonic are among us, and collectively probably do have the ability to crash the global economy. Their numbers are not great: merely their money and following power are.

Our task is to reach those capable of moral judgement and encourage them to change their mind–and I have in mind here those who think they are “improving” the world by eliminating political liberty; and to fight like hell those who are psychopaths. Where George Soros lies on that continuum is unclear, but that he has in mind the enslavement of the many for the benefit of the few is clear enough.

Most Communists take as their task the REPLACEMENT of a Capitalist elite with an elite of their choosing. The fundamental power relationship, however, devolves from one of what can amount to de facto slavery–although in historical reality it has always been liberting–to one of actual and overt slavery of the worst sort. No slave plantation in the American South ever erected psychological torture camps to “free” the souls of their charges.

I will add that they have always lived among us. Globally, genuine Goodness is probably increasing rapidly, with the “outbreaks” of peace we see. I doubt that fewer wars have been fought around the world ever, in human history.

There is certainly room for cautious hope, but only if people keep waking up to the danger they are in, and the fundamentally corrupt nature of our current system.

I first watched this many years ago when the kids were little, thought then, and think now, that it is an excellent metaphor for things an observant person will notice every day all around them.

Please note in advance that it is, in fact, a silly song, but one with a larger point than the one made in the video.

I will add for those with young ones that I was a big fan of Veggie Tales. I would watch them to this day if my kids still enjoyed them. They are genuinely funny, at last as I recall them.

The Yodelling Veterinarian of the Alps.

Please do not ask me for a consistent tone. I can’t do it. Why be flat when you can roll?

The essence of community organizing is convincing people that you know better than they do, and that they should follow you. Since you need a “them” to fight a war, it normally consists in extorting money from people who have it, but doing it in such a way that no one involved in the process learns anything about business, how to create jobs, how to run a business, or has any creative economic ideas.

In spite of what are no doubt some temporary victories, then, the net effect is community impoverishment. If Van Jones had gotten his “green jobs in the ghettoes” program going, it would have been dead in ten years, at considerable expense not just to the taxpayers, but to the economies unfortunate enough to have allowed actually viable business enterprises to atrophy due to competition happening outside the free market.

The reality is you can’t extort money from intelligent people–and by definition those who own businesses know how to run them, or they would go out of business anyway–forever. If you are doing it in the form of coerced unionism, you will steadily lose jobs over decades, as has happened in the Northeast, with Detroit being particularly hard hit. What happens is that the business owners know that to stay competitive, they have to cut costs. If Unionism makes that impossible, then they avoid the unions by going somewhere beyond their reach. Had activists in Seattle not been so greedy, they would have a lot of jobs that instead went to South Carolina.

Given their choice, most people are intelligent enough to realize that a job with lower wages is better than unemployment, since even the most generous unemployment packages run out eventually, and are always combined with a loss of self esteem and typically depression and anti-social behavior. Not working too long is psychologically damaging.

Likewise, you can extort “blood money” from governments, but eventually the people paying that money rebel, and either change the government, or move out of the jurisdiction involved; again, as happened in Detroit.

One would think that the organizers would realize the damage they are causing at some point. One would think that common sense at some point would cause them to question whether or not their hard work to create a legally sanctioned labor monopoly–which denies individual workers the right to self determination, and by extension the use of their own judgement, rather than that of the community organizer–was a good idea.

Here is the reality: Marxists like Trumpka and Van Jones think of people as consisting in generic types. How you classify them depends on the particular radicalization you are working on–inner city blacks require a different set of lies than suburban unionists–but fundamentally you assume they are stupid, homogeneous, and without the capacity for self determination without the “enlightened” intervension of their future dictators.

The rhetoric of class warfare does not admit of personal consciousness. It never considers that the “rich” might in fact be providing some needed service, like jobs; and that the poor might be poor because they are unintelligent and unmotivated, and just fine with their station in life. Most of Appallachia is like that. They just want to be left alone.

As I think about it, once you think of people as generic, where does the qualitative outlier come from, that enables their organization? Is it not the “leader”, and have we not directly derived the “Fuehrerprinzip”? Hitler’s entire argument rested on the idea that the German people were generically perfect, but rudderless without him. The Jews were generically wicked, and could thus be judged, condemend and slaughtered en masse. There was no room for qualitative variation.

The Soviets, and Chinese, and Vietnamese did the same thing. They decided that having a certain amount of wealth, in and of itself, and without regard to the sources or uses made of that wealth, constituted a capital crime. Of course, there was always the enticement of legalized theft, rape, torture and murder, for people of a psychopathically sadistic mindset. Imagine what Ted Bundy could have made of the opportunities granted the Cheka, and NKVD. They never took human beings into those dungeons: their class membership told them all they needed to know.

Yet all developed societies reject the notion of collective guilt. Most white southerners–something like 95%–were not slave owners. Many were uncomfortable with slavery. They fought for their homes, under invasion–Unconstitutionally–from the North.

Presumably in our day and time, not all Arabs are comfortable with the idea of slavery either, even thought it is explicitly authorized in the Koran, including the taking of sex slaves (and in unlimited quantities; only wives were limited to four).

In our own day and time, manifestly (Allan West and Herman Cain being two examples) not all black Americans are happy about the implicit paternalism and smug arrogance with which leftists assume that they can arrogate to themselves the right to speak for people they don’t understand. Is Van Jones “one of the people”? He went to Yale Law School. I don’t know where he gets his suits, but it probably isn’t JC Penny, where I have always bought mine.

Obama went to a prep school where he smoked pot, drank, and snorted cocaine “when he could get it”. This was the sort of place where Biff and Buffy go, and where tennis and golf are the big sports. He followed this with trips to very expensive Ivy League schools, where the power elite and political radicals congregate. He is no more ghetto than I am, and likely less, since I have spent a lot of time working alongside normal people who will wear a hard hat the rest of their lives. I’m not anti-union: I’m against using the power of law to prevent people from making their own decision as to whether or not to join.

Obama’s only apparent talent is convincing people who should know better than he knows what is best for them. The implicit message of “hope and change” was “you don’t need the details, because I am all that and a bag of chips: trust me”. Newsflash: not only does he not have the faintest clue how to help people in actuality, he is leading them to hell in a handbasket. Moreover, he will never personally have to face ANY of the consequences of his actions. The Party members never do. They just blame bourgeois traitors and foreign influences for failures occasioned by stupidity, and the predictable results that follow it.

Two characteristics of cults is they have leaders, and they demand perfect conformity to the dictates of those leaders.

What is interesting is that the Anthrogenic Global Warming crowd keep making dire predictions–the world is COMING TO AN END. We have to end freedom. Liberal democracy is the tool of the rich elites (who of course will just build mansions on the moon when the planet melts) and needs to be ended.

Do you remember Al Gore, when he was Vice President (We Americans sure know how to pick ’em, don’t we?), telling us in 1998 how many awful things were going to happen within ten years if we didn’t act then? James Hanson was doing the same dog and pony show a decade before that.

Five years or so ago, we were told with absolute confidence that global warming was going to cause a bunch of really bad hurricances, and weren’t we going to feel sorry we didn’t listen to our mental superiors. We are at a 40 year low.

So what do they do when they are wrong? What do all Millenarians do when they pick a date for the end of the world and it doesn’t happen? They find some slight miscalculation in their basically correct forecast, and pick a new date.

Alternatively, they tell us they are absolutely right, but they can’t say when our doom and destruction will come, but we sure better listen to them now, and repent for our freedom and impoverty. Sell your house: the world is on fire. We can’t say when, but when those giant mosquitoes come for you, you’re going to wish you hadn’t mowed your lawn, eaten beef (cow farts), and driven to work each day.

This is what those capable of irony call farce. “Unscientific” would do as well.

Listen to this song, and feel it. Somewhere down the crazy river.

Here are the lyrics:

Yeah, I can see it now
The distant red neon shivered in the heat
I was feeling like a stranger in a strange land
You know where people play games with the night
God, it was too hot to sleep
I followed the sound of a jukebox coming from up the levee
All of a sudden I could hear somebody whistling
Fromright behind me
I turned around and she said
“Why do you always end up down at Nick’s Cafe?”
I said “I don’t know, the wind just kind of pushed me this way.”
She said “Hang the rich.”

Catch the blue train
To places never been before
Look for me
Somewhere down the crazy river
Somewhere down the crazy river
Catch the blue train
All the way to Kokomo
You can find me
Somewhere down the crazy river
Somewhere down the crazy river

Take a picture of this
The fields are empty, abandoned ’59 Chevy
Laying in the back seat listening to Little Willie John
Yea, that’s when time stood still
You know, I think I’m gonna go down to Madam X
And let her read my mind
She said “That Voodoo stuff don’t do nothing for me.”

I’m a man with a clear destination
I’m a man with a broad imagination
You fog the mind, you stir the soul
I can’t find, … no control

Catch the blue train
To places never been before
Look for me
Somewhere down the crazy river
Somewhere down the crazy river
Catch the blue train
All the way to Kokomo
You can find me
Somewhere down the crazy river
Somewhere down the crazy river

Wait, did you hear that
Oh this is sure stirring up some ghosts for me
She said “There’s one thing you’ve got to learn
Is not to be afraid of it.”
I said “No, I like it, I like it, it’s good.”
She said “You like it now
But you’ll learn to love it later.”

I been spellbound – falling in trances
I been spellbound – falling in trances
You give me shivers – chills and fever
I been spellbound – somewhere down the crazy river

This is a very sensuous song. It evokes that period in the morning when it is warm, and possibility is in the air, you are alert and waiting, but you don’t know for what.

Add to this her admonition, apparently emotionally congruent with the moment of “Hang the rich”. When I realized that was what he said, this song changed for me.

There is an element to Leftism of what the Germans call “Sehnsucht”, and the Portuguese “saudade”. Looking it up, I see I am not the first to make this connection. That piece is actually worth the read.

For my own purposes, the analogy I use–which admittedly is a strange one–is getting poison oak. I had a summer job in college hiking through the woods, and even though I took care to protect myself, invariably both of my forearms would get completely covered in an itchy rash, that drove me nuts. Running hot water over it both made it worse, and created a sensation of pain, pleasure and release. I have never felt anything like it.

But I feel this longing is always a gap. Now, gaps can be useful: they create space into which you can move, but it is important where that gap is, or alternatively in what direction you choose to move.

Mystical literature is full of “saudade” for God. You see poets like Hafez and Rumi, Kabir, Mirabai, St. John of the Cross, Teresa of Avila and many others describing meetings that are all too short, connections of bliss felt and then withdrawn. I have felt brief flashes myself, of a connection in which the entire universe is experienced as a sea of rich and infinite joy.

I don’t know what the answer is, but I am going to stop because thinking about this makes me sad. I hit it again after a while in a new way.

Pure socialism, which we can define as a system in which there are no economic difference between non-Party members, is really the same as feudalism, in that an unelected aristocracy uses its power to bestow favors on those it likes, and to withhold them from those it does not like. If you want to start a business in China or Vietnam, you better know somebody, or do a lot of palm-greasing.

This is, of course, a regression to another age, that of kings. You have no rights. From where you are sitting, if you aren’t part of the system, they may as well be Gods. They just invoke History, rather than the much more tangible presence of God.

I was thinking about it, though: what would be more fair, bestowing favors arbitrarily, or by chance? It is argued that having bad luck in Capitalism is unacceptable, that you have to have a “safety net”, which in reality consists in a pair of handcuffs and a jail cell you are locked in for your own “safety”.

But is a system better in which, say, black people can’t even be considered for some positions, say Party membership? Or white people? Or Muslim Uighurs?

Would it not be more just to offer up Party membership–and all the opportunities for corruption that go with it–on a lottery basis?

When you analyze, really analyze Leftism, it is a species of lunacy. Literal insanity, in the sense of a complete separation of idea from reality, truth from falsehood. If we define schizophrenia as what it is, a complete separation from the capacity for rational analysis, then Communists are schizophrenic. And this includes large swathes of our academic world, and other thought leaders.

Really: how is it possible to be so stupid? My thought is that it results from a crisis of identity that attends metaphysical pessimism, which itself is a result of failing to understand reality.

It’s a mystery, but it’s also the problem of all right-thinking people to do what we can to keep these nuts away from our children, and away from our political and economic lives.

I do have readers: I checked the stats. For those unwilling to sort through what is a LOT of words, I did want to point out that I created this blog initially in frustration at the lack of a simple, logically coherent refutation of the Anthropogenic Global Warming conjecture.

This is what I came up with. My arguments have only gotten stronger in the last few years, with Phil Jones admitting he was withholding data from people he knew were on to his game; hurricanes at a 40 year low after we were told confidently that what has now become “climate change” would cause them to increase in size and intensity; and frankly weather that is not hot.

If something is heating somewhere, self evidently that just means the Earth is getting hotter. It does that, and it’s a good thing too, since we have spent most of our history in ice ages.

As I defined it on my other site, this is the economic doctrine which holds that the more wealth is created, the poorer we will all be. It underlies, as a quasi-moral sentiment, all variants of Leftism.

To call it pessimistic is to miss the point: it is a misanthropic anti-humanism. A great many of the exponents seem uncomfortable that humans exist at all. They seem to be quite willing to kill the human race to save the planet. This is the necessary outcome of removing notions of qualitative superiority from the table.

The reality is that I can think better than my dog. I can think much better than plants. I have a right to exist, and a duty to exist. Everything that is, endures. This principle reality necessarily reaches into an understanding of reality, and the nature of life.

People that think we are machines made out of meat have no way of differentiating us from machines made from fewer parts. As William James pointed out, all questions of action and philosophy necessarily proceed from a fundamental myth–taken in the sense of a gestalt that involves more than just your brain, and that is a whole–of reality.

The vision popped into my head of a virus that helped people, that rather than debilitating them made them smarter, stronger, wiser.

What does a virus do? It has the capacity to remain motionless for long periods of time, and go into frantic motion when the conditions are right. It has the ability, in effect, to put its life on hold, and to accellerate it.

Can some sorts of ideas not do this, such that the are dormant for long periods of time, then resurrect and furiously reproduce? How much life is in an idea, that can potentially be expressed? This is a measure of its quality.

It struck me today that Fundamentalism is at root a desired relationship with the future. Obviously, it looks back, generally to a past that never was, and seeks to impose a reality on the present. But what is really desired is the ability to predict the future, which is all too uncertain in the modern age.

We all want immortality of some sort. For his part, Sade wanted his grave to disappear; but one senses he wanted his books to survive. Ho Chi Minh was buried, as I understand it, on three different unmarked hills, presumably as bones. But he wanted his vision of a socialist Vietnam to endure.

Tradition represents a continuity with the future. You do as your father did. He sees this, and assumes your grandchildren will do as his grandparents did. One can call it a circle or a line, but it is a series of points which are connected, one to the other.

In our own age, it is impossible to see what will happen because we have no–or very few–traditions. We have science, but of its nature science necessarily will always make contingent claims, not final ones. There is no other way to do it.

So we see people wanting to fetishize specific ontologies, particularly orthodox materialism of the ping-pong ball or Relativistic sort. Whatever else changes in science, they feel, this will not change.

And of course we have our genetics. However we modify life, what we really ARE will not change; nor will our perception of what we are. This is very important to people of a certain bent.

This, too, is a fundamentalism, which rather than looking to the past looks to what parts of reality can be assumed to be ineluctably real; that whatever interesting discoveries will be made in 24th century science, if we live that long, will be RELATED to them and their work.

There is so much sadness in this world, and so much pain. People need figurative walls to lean on, floors to hold them. They need, as George Jones sang, “four walls around me, to hold my life, and keep me from going stray”.

Yet there is much light in this world too, and it is infinite. Einstein wanted to make it the only constant in the universe. Perhaps in its form as motion and infinite expansion, we can agree with him.