Category: Uncategorized

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.

I am in constant movement in all parts of my life. It can be maddening and it can be liberating. I can migrate from extreme sensitivity to being more or less callous and back again, and do often.

Some things I read about bother me greatly, but for whatever reason the slayings in Norway have not had much emotional effect on me.

I recently finished listening to Thomas Sowells excellent book “Basic Economics”. IN terms of articulating the virtues of free markets–which we do not have here in this country, by the way–he does an excellent job (although I would quibble with his treatment of monetary policy).

One point he makes is that many economic errors–perhaps most or even all–stem from looking at the effect of a policy on one group, but not on the economy as a whole.

When we protected domestic steel production from foreign competition, it helped that industry, but it also made domestic steel far more expensive that it would have been, here, and thus HARMED other domestic steel-users, like builders and car manufacturers. By most reckonings, the tariffs COST American jobs, even if they were not lost in the steel industry.

Although this likely sounds a bit clinical, this was the metaphor that kept crossing my mind reading about Norway. There are likely 80 black kids killed in the US weekly. There are likely 80 kids that have starved to death weekly for periods of time in North Korea, even in recent years. In the continent of Africa, a multiple of this dies weekly of war, hunger, or diseases that are gone from the industialized West.

I can and often have lamented the extent of preventable human suffering the world over. If you look at Africa, as an example, their pain cannot be understood without the initial efforst of many nations there to implement socialism, with all the economic injustice and stagnation that implies–and the efforts of international “aid” agencies to support such efforts, apparently as a part of their real mission, which is international Fabianism.

Norway has sheltered behind the shield American military power offered them from the ravages of history for more than a half century. Plainly, they are existentially threatened by facilitating their internal cultural subversion by anti-Liberal Muslims; even if, self evidently, reactions like shooting kids are evil, counterproductive, and ultimately amount to little more than the cry of a profoundly weak and self absorbed man for relevance.

If I believe cyanide is poison, and you do not, a reasonable compromise does not consist in diluting it by half and then drinking it.

To quote Bruce Springsteen: “There’s a dark cloud rising on the desert floor
I’ve packed my bags and I’m headed straight through the storm
It’s gonna be a twister that’ll blow everything down
That ain’t got the faith to stand its ground

Blow away, the dreams that tear you apart
Blow away, the dreams that break your heart
Blow away, the lies that leave you nothing but lost and broken hearted.”

As a postscript, I will add that my three favorite albums, taken as wholes, are Springsteen’s “Darkness on the Edge of Town”, Tom Waits’ “Heart of Saturday Night”, and Lyle Lovett’s “Joshua, Judges, Ruth”, all for different reasons.

In our identity-starved age, our musical choices in large measure define us, along with our profession and hobbies and perhaps sense of style (my style is invisibility, so I forget it is important to some).

Religion and family used to be primary, but in our optical age–where in large measure our interaction with culture and others is visual and abstract–these things have come into much greater prominence. That they are in many respects shallow is of course problematic. My whole output is related to solving that problem, so I will leave it at that for now.

The net, though, is that we need to stop making things worse. That is step one. “Primere non nocere.”

One cannot help but notice how often “Elvis” is invoked in hipster joints. The recent obvious example for me was visiting the original Chuy’s down in Austin. Elvis is almost invoked as a sort of patron saint of coolness in dens of irony, the places where all the women are covered in tattoos and the men effeminate; where traditional cultural standards are upended and eroded.

In my view, as I think about it, this is the whole zombie thing again. Elvis died a miserable death–on a toilet, as a result in my understanding of drug-related constipation. He took several flights of drug cocktails nightly. He take his first “attack”, as I believe he called it, then eat fried peanut butter and banana sandwiches until he passed out. This would keep him asleep a couple hours, then he would do it again. Despite his good looks and talent, he was decaying from within.

A zombie is a human being without firm form, without direction, who is lost. It seems to me that Islamic extremism in one respect has to be seen as the interaction of historical jihad with Leftist sociopathy–the reduction of human beings to talentless lumps of expendable clay.

At the same time, all so-called “Fundamentalisms” have to be seen as efforts to avoid being turned into zombies, shiny and smiley on the outside, but stitched together in an unstable way on the inside, with staples, rings and tattoos.

The pessimist sees a glass half empty; the optimist, a glass half full. Someone who can see, however, sees 4 ounces of water, and a method of storing that water, of containing and giving form to that water, without comment.

Water is present, and there is little need to measure air. The size of glass itself is irrelevant, to the extent that it is sufficiently large to accomplish its storage task. An aquifer might be 90% empty, but able to provide for a city.

It is my own species of “optimism” to try and reliably see what recources ARE available. It is little use to imagine the endless infinity of things which are NOT present before us. Rather, an acceptable use of imagination is to see the endless things which can be done with what we have.

I had to solve a physical problem the other day. I “knew” what the range of possibliities was, and failed repeatedly (note, this is different than the last such problem I mentioned a bit back). I persisted, and the problem was something that was not supposed to be possible. I had never heard of it happening to anyone, and only isolated it by removing every other possibility. “Once you eliminate the impossible, what remains–however improbable–must be the truth.”

So often we go through life thinking we know what the range of the possible is, when in reality the only means we have of testing such theories is to compare them to the general atmosphere around us, to see if anyone else shares our views. They always have roughly the same inputs you do, and if they reach different conclusions, that does not mean you were wrong. It is quite possible to be the only correct person in the room.

To my mind, this is the value of periodically considering various conspiracy theories. Sirhan Sirhan was brainwashed. The pyramids are 20,000 years old. The plains of Nazca were alien landing strips. Jack the Ripper was a freemason. Christ married and had children.

Quick progress in perception happens when you substitute a better paradigm than the old one. The practical effects of Newtonian physics and General Relativity are quite similar, but the nets that can be cast by taking the latter seriously are much wider. Why else would we have suspected light bent in gravitational fields, or that atomic energy was possible?

This basic premise operates equally in all areas of life. You can “reparadigmatize” people, cultures, or small physical problems right in front of you. If, as Einstein said, “imagation is more important than intelligence”, it is because it grants you the ability to see–through new eyes–what you have never seen before.

When I was in my late teens I had this very romantic notion of what went on at universities. There was this authenticity and happiness and “learningness”–if I might be permitted indulgence in my neologistic hobby–that went on. Kids were free and they did and said cool things and listened to cool music. There was this vibe of being different than the dull mundane sameness of suburbia. All my problems were going to vanish.

I was a profoundly stupid kid. I say this with absolute sincerity and painfully clinical precision.

But water rolls downhill, does it not? Clouds that are full rain, and in the right conditions seeds will always grow. I was at that age who I had to be.

I went to good schools. I majored in the quirky sorts of things that normally get you locked up in a coffee shop or bookstore somewhere. This was not wasted time, but it was time spent finding what was NOT a pathway forward.

The path of the intellectual–the thought esthete–is not one of emotional skill, social productivity, or anything but self absorbed narcissism which protects against the ravages and conscious awareness of sheer uselessness.

These people litter average cities. They litter universities. They float like seeds on the wind, but they never flower. Theirs is a self important flatulence that to the extent it has an effect makes things worse.

I no longer have positive feelings about universities. I admire the productive parts, but view the rest as worse than useless.

If the task of the Liberal Arts is teaching self government in both the personal and national sense, then they are failing. This is incompetence, and it is precisely the utter futility of calling someone in one of these places incompetent who hews to the proper ideology such a name that makes the whole thing stink.

I don’t “long” any more. I seek understanding–actionable understanding–that when applied should lead to useful outcomes. I am quite prepared to alter my views and processes if and when it should be necessary.