RedStateEclectic

RIP Margaret Thatcher

Margaret Thatcher:

On productiveness and the charitable instinct:“No one would remember the Good Samaritan if he’d only had good intentions; he had money as well.” On the hostile press: “If my critics saw me walking over the Thames they would say it was because I couldn’t swim.”

Read more at the source.

On Europe:

Thatcher’s basic take on a tight European federation was that it was unnecessary, unworkable, and dangerous. The nation state, she insisted, should remain at the heart of the international system, and a federated Europe would threaten its sway.

Moreover, Thatcher had misgivings about the Continent as a source of moral inspiration. “During my lifetime,” she reminisced, “most of the problems the world has faced have come, in one form or another, from mainland Europe, and the solutions — from outside it.”

That insight alone is priceless, but it still pales compared with what she wrote more than a decade ago, when the euro was still a toddler, and the economies of Greece, Spain and Cyprus seemed as distant from calamity as they now are from salvation. “The European single currency,” wrote Thatcher in 2002, “is bound to fail — economically, politically, and indeed socially.”

Thatcher’s reasoning for this was not ideological. It was monetarist. There can be no such thing as a united currency without a united budget, she argued, at a time when it was impolite to suggest that the euro’s newlyweds would soon accuse each other of theft, deceit, laziness, imperialism and oppression.

The source.

 

Liberty's Dawn

Writes Emma Griffin, the author of Liberty's Dawn: A People's History of the Industrial Revolution:

Writers and academics often show an interesting ambivalence about industrialization. Today, they regard it as a blessing, the single-most-effective way to lift people out of poverty. But in thinking about Britain’s Industrial Revolution, they have tended to reach the opposite conclusion: The rise of the factory, they argue, caused the end of more “natural” working hours, introduced more exploitative employment patterns and dehumanized the experience of labor. It robbed workers of their autonomy and dignity.

Yet if we turn to the writing of laborers themselves, we find that they didn’t share the historians’ gloomy assessment. Starting in the early 19th century, working people in Britain began to write autobiographies and memoirs in ever greater numbers. Men (and occasionally women) who worked in factories and mines, as shoemakers and carpenters, and on the land, penned their stories, and inevitably touched on the large part of their life devoted to labor. In the process, they produced a remarkable account of the Industrial Revolution from the perspective of those who felt its effects firsthand -- one that looks very different from the standard historical narrative.

Make sure to read the rest.

See also this excellent lecture by Ralph Raico:

 

Je vous en prie - un éléphant!

Happy Easter, everyone.

It's April 1 over here.

 

Egoism, Altruism, and the Welfare State

Jaana Woiceshyn offers an interesting take on the dichotomy of egoism and altruism. In the below article, she makes an observation whose implications I find highly disturbing. If people stop learning (in term of moral discernment) in their "best" years, and if by then the majority are steeped in politically correct altruism, liberty has a naturally restricted target groups, in fact, a tiny one, indeed.

Research shows that most people do not think about ethics explicitly after their late teens or early twenties, implicitly choosing instead to follow cultural norms and the values they were taught at home, if any. The closest they come to choosing an “obvious” moral code is to follow cultural norms—which means subscribing to the moral code dominant around the world: altruism.

The entire article.

David Kelly gives an excellent presentation on the "moral" underpinnings of our radically altruistic welfare state.

 

Hormesis versus Leviathan

Radiation hormesis hypothesis compared with LNT and linear model with threshold. In all 3 graphs, x-axes represent radiation dose and y-axes represent magnitude of health effect. Zero-equivalent point (ZEP) represents level of health effect in absence of radiation. The quadratic model of Figure 1 approximates threshold graph of this figure. A threshold model would imply no effects of radiation up to certain level, after which risk rises linearly with dose. The radiation hormesis model, in contrast, shows beneficial effect at low levels of exposure as it drops below ZEP.

Dr. Calabrese presents his (highly generalisable) findings about the nature of dose response in the low dose zone, discovering that longstanding "scientific" standards underlying regulatory rulings systematically ignore the true reaction pattern, thereby introducing massive bias. The key insight presented by Dr. Calabrese seems to me to consist in the fact that rather than following a linear pattern, dose responses are characterised by two phases such that at low doses they may act in a stimulating way, only to display inhibiting effects at higher doses - (hence the terms "biphase" or "hormetic"). Low doses of radiation for instance may stimulate healthy reactions in the human body, thus actually improving their well-being, while causing harm only at higher doses.

For more on what hormesis is, consult my post Hormesis and Regulation Failure. See also Hiroshima Victims Live Longer.

 

Landing On Your Feet

Image credit.

This is how it's done, by cats.

 

The Economics of Lushness

In a strand of his argument, Matt Ridley seems to imply that man-made global warming is of a significant magnitude. Which puzzles me, as the evidence available to me seems to suggest that anthropogenic contributions are minute compared to non-human drivers of CO2 emissions. Be that as it may, I like the gist of the presentation:

 

The source is the excellent PERC - Property and Environment Research Center.

Cyprus

Following up on Angela's Meanwhile, Over In Cyprus, listen to what Nigel Farange has to say:

 

In the Soup

Enjoy:

 

The Life and Death of Democracy...

...is the title of a book by John Keane that I am reading in substantial extracts, at the moment. It is an exceedingly well written, thoughtful and inspiring book.

I have never been an anarcho-capitalist, but as a user of the vast resources - articles and ebooks - available from the LvMI, I have been tempted into ignoring alternatives to the often simplistic and enclosed views of the Rothbardians, especially concerning the state, democracy, and a number of topics in the field of economics. 

Presently, I am looking into the issue of democracy, and have made this diary entry to encourage me to pursue the below intuition - and it turns out, Keane's book provides material that confirms the hunch:

Freedom and democracy form a tense relationship. Isonomia, equality before the law – that precursor and beginning of the rule of law – gives rise to a desire to further strengthen this firewall against tyrannical domination: democracy is added to it, as a means of controlling rulers and permitting a bloodless change of government.

Why is it that there seems to be a continuing affinity that ties together the rule of law, a comparatively high degree of personal and economic freedom, and democracy?

A vague suspicion: practises characteristic of the rule of law, personal and economic freedom are protected by a subset and intersecting set of rights equally requisite to maintain democracy. In order to keep democracy alive one mustn’t undermine these common rights. Though democracy may be popular because it opens up options to act in ways that can be directed against freedom, still continued effectiveness of democracy is wedded to the need to respect rights that lend a certain robustness to freedom, too.