RedStateEclectic

On the Difficulty of Endogenous Change

In his book "The Unquite Ghost,"  dealing with Stalinism and how people in the Soviet Union tried to come to grips with the Stalinist terror, Adam Hochschild has this passage:

Rehabilitations in the 1950s proceeded very slowly, one case at a time.

Someone once asked Anastas Mikoyan, an adroit survivor who served in the Politburo both under Stalin and long after, why this was so.

Couldn't all these myriad "enemies of the people" simply be declared innocent all at once?

"No, they can't," he replied.

"If they were, it would be clear that the country was not being run by a legal government, but by a group of gangsters."

He paused, then added, "Which, in point of fact, we were."

The source.

C.P.E. Bach - Cello Concerto in A Major Wq172 - Mov. 3/3

CARL PHILIPP EMANUEL BACH (1714-1788)

Better President and Better Bill Required to Rule the Cosmos

From NewsBusters, we learn:

In a stunning rebuke of the Obama administration, NASA's James Hansen, one of the world's foremost climate alarmists, called the American Clean Energy and Security Act, the anti-global warming bill that recently passed the House, "less than worthless."

Not only that, he referred to it as a "counterfeit climate bill" that employs a "Ponzi-like 'cap-and-trade' scheme" setting the nation on a "disaster course" as a result of the 219 members of Congress he accused of voting for it without reading it.

As you might have already deduced, Hansen's complaint is that the bill doesn't go far enough to solve what he believes is a looming cataclysm.

But, who cares? It's fun watching the alarmists eat their own ...

The source.

Politics, in the conception of it that we are being spoon-fed every second, is based on the idea that mankind survives and thrives by recognising and acting on momentous exceptions to the outdated institution of durable rules and principles, that by the same logic are secondary and insignificant considering the dire need of their constant waving by "philosopher kings," who live by the insight that man is evil, unless he forms a powerful government.

Hansen is frustrated by the fact that his totalitarian scheme is not sitting in the driver's seat, while Obananas has been more successful at capitalising on a powerful confusion that has recently changed its name form "global warming" to "climate change." The confusion and the fear, that are supposed to bring us to heel, persist, only that the intimidating noise has been renamed to be even less specific, more open to whatever you care to be panicked about: if the climate does what it is all about - i.e. change - we are in danger and require urgent government action - of the sort Hansen envisages, thinks Hansen.

O(we-are-going)bananas(yes-we-can) and Hansen have us back to bygone times: the sun (a negligible factor compared to man's impact according to climate alarmism) is revolving around the human world, the mechanism of world weather, being much simpler than, and therefore tractable by, the complex, all-encompassing foresight of Comrade President Obananas, and his Central Committee, or an even better circle of sages. This being so, it is of the utmost importance to determine: what pick of appropriately empowered sages will lead us out of jeopardy and into enlightenment and bliss. Hansen endorses Hansen. Who do you support? Let us go vote.

In my post The Dismal Social Sciences, I quoted Arnold Kling, who suggests:

The main science of political economy is the science of obtaining and retaining power. As far as expertise goes, the pollster, the fundraiser, and the media expert are all fundamental to the operation. The public policy expert is for decoration. If you want to be an economic policy adviser when you grow up, then my advice is to learn to rationalize the methods used by leading politicians to obtain power.

• Is health care reform about health care? No, it is about seizing and retaining power. Was the stimulus about stimulus? No, was about seizing and retaining power. Is cap and trade about global warming? No, it is about seizing and retaining power. Was TARP about saving the financial system? No, it was about seizing and retaining power.

The social scientist's role in the political process is to say, "X is a problem. Government must solve X. Here are some solutions." The solutions that rationalize seizing and retaining power will bubble to the top.

[Emphasis added, G.T.]

Honduras and President Obanana's "Republic"

In using the above title, I do not mean to be offensive to Americans and their great nation. The title is meant as a criticism (spelled out more fully in the posts referenced below) focused on the conduct and attitudes betrayed by the present president of the United States.

In fact, I - a German - feel privileged and I am grateful for being embraced by my American friends amongst the contributors and the readership of RedStateEclectic to participate in this blog.

The sources and the base of my specific criticism, but also of my general views on politics and society, are largely of American origin - the American Constitution, the great tradition of freedom and libertarianism in America, and the rich offerings of analysis and commentary provided by American institutions and authors, in the absence of which I might well be endorsing the very convictions and views that I have learned to apply a critical mind to.

There is no better place than America with her freedom-loving people and excellent sources to understand liberty - and to feel liberty's real pulse.

On Honduras and Obama, the Coyote Blog has the below post:

In my July 4 post, I wrote that many Americans make what I think of as a mistake in elevating voting and democracy as the primary wonders of the United States.  In that post, I argued that  — 1.  The Rule of Law  2.  Protection of Individual Rights and 3.  The Subordination of the Government to the Citizenry — were all more important than voting.

It seems this was a timely post, as Obama appears hell-bent on making the same mistake in Honduras:

"Again and again Obama stresses the fact that Mel Zelaya was “democratically-elected”. But the same could be said about many of today’s dictators. Elections are only one part of the democratic process. The other, and the one that sustains the electoral process, is the rule of law. Focusing only on the fact that Zelaya was “democratically-elected” but ignoring the fact that he has attempted to subvert Honduran constitutional principles that ensure such democratic elections is bad enough."

"However, continuing that line of criticism after being apprised of the constitutional arguments and the process which led to Zeyala’s ouster is completely unacceptable. Yes, we back the right of people to democratically elect their leaders. But we must also back their decision, driven by the rule of law, to remove a leader when he refuses to follow the law he is sworn to uphold. Why is it that Obama, the “Constitutional law professor, doesn’t appear to “get” that?"

In Honduras, Obama is siding against the rule of law, against the legislative branch, and against the Supreme Court, but for Executive power and for an enemy of liberty.  Hmm, maybe he is consistent after all.

The source.

In his comment on the (QandO) post referenced in the Coyote post above, a certain Jeff Medcalf, offers an interesting discussion of how a similar scenario might play out in the United States.

For valuable further (background) information make sure to read Hans Bader's article, where he states:

Obama is quite wrong to claim that the removal of Zelaya was "illegal." The Honduran president forfeited his right to rule under Article 239 of the Honduran Constitution, which bans presidents from holding office if they even propose to alter the constitutional term limits for presidents.  And the Honduran military, which acted on orders of the Honduran supreme court, expressly had the right to remove the president for seeking to alter the constitutional term limit, under Article 272 of the Honduran Constitution, as even left-leaning commentators have now admitted.

Read the entire article here.

Short Term Serial Correlation and Long Term Mean Reversion - You What?

The Adam Smith Institue has a piece by Tom Papworth on Why Interventionism Works that puts the jargon into intelligible perspective:

Short Term Serial Correlation and Long Term Mean Reversion sound rather heavy. And so they should. They were conceptualised by statisticians, after all; people who make economists sound normal. Yet an understanding of these two phenomena helps explain why the myth that politicians can and do solve real problems continues.

Short Term Serial Correlation emerges because people like to see patterns. Random events are never evenly distributed; some areas will manifest more incidents than others. Geographically, there may be a larger concentration of accidents, or geniuses, or Stephens in one locality; chronologically, there will be more crimes, or jackpots, or bankruptcies in one month than another. For some of these there may be real causes (a criminal has moved into the area, thus triggering a local crime wave) but very often apparent rises or falls in frequency are just the results of random coincidence.

Long Term Mean Reversion is the inevitable “return to form”. If there is no cause for these clusters, in the long run they will even out. The average reasserts itself. Because there was no reason for the cluster of incidents, it is not sustained and everything returns to normal. All very dry stuff, you might think, and blindingly obvious. Except that this duel-phenomenon may explain why interventionism is so popular. Take two examples:

• A number of traffic accidents in a short space of time lead to a public outcry and a demand that something be done to improve safety in what is, apparently, a dangerous stretch of road. Local people focus not on the 10 year average but the tragedies of the past 12 months. Action is called for and local councillors step in. Money is spent changing the road layout, building speed humps or erecting a camera. The following year the number of accidents falls (returns to the long-term average) and both councillors and residents claim it is a success.
• The economy goes into a bit of a slide. Shares fall and unemployment rises. Worried citizens demand that something be done to prop up asset values and protect jobs. The government – ever eager to please – steps in with a lot of expensive and headline-grabbing measures. After a period, economic activity recovers its upward momentum. Government officials are quick to point out that the recovery results from their own policies. Put like this, the significance of these phenomena should be obvious.

The natural instinct of people to cry that “Something must be done” very often leads to policies that appear to have the desired result. This perpetuates the belief that politicians can make a difference and that without them the world would rapidly go to hell in a hand basket.

In the Middle of the Night

Let it inspire meditation in you, or enjoy otherwise.

For other goings-on in the middle of the night see here.

The Dismal Social Sciences

The social sciences (especially economics, law, and political science) have entirely lost their way. A long time ago.

On a world-historic scale, three most momentous events have occurred virtually at the same time (roughly during the course of the 18th century):

(1) the social sciences were borne, that is: they discovered their proper subject-matter,
(2) the theory of liberty reached a stage of unparalleled fruition (in the form of classical liberalism).
(3) after billions of years, evolution developed to the point where it discovered itself through the conduits of (1) and (2).

(1), (2), and (3) are simply different aspects of the same phenomenon.

The original and true, yet long abandoned subject-matter of the social sciences is the nature of self-generating order in human society.

It was through the observation of what originally was termed "the social" (the ability of society to organise itself without human design, a precondition of any human community of a higher complexity and capacity to sustain large populations) that classical liberalism discovered principles whereby an extended order consisting of millions of mutual strangers could persist and flourish in a way no rulers could ever accomplish.

This insight was the result of understanding grown order, or evolutionary processes, as one might call them today.

Before their untimely death, the social sciences passed on the paradigm of evolution to Darwin - and it is very sad that most people nowadays do not realise that biology is just another fruitful user of the concept of spontaneous growth, and that a society that confines the concept to biology is not likely to fare too well.

Ever since, the social sciences have strayed from this fundamental approach and reverted to treating social matters and the good society as a kit of readily observable and manageable components waiting for an interior decorator with bright ideas of arrangement. In that way, the social sciences have become the maidservant of ephemeral concerns, dirigism and its underlying intellectual hubris.

They are about feeling important (i.e. being in possession of the powerful ability to shape society properly) rather than probing into a way of order-generation exceedingly hard to understand, because this kind of order occurs amongst a far larger number of elements than we are used to deal with in our ordinary lives and occupations, or even natural scientists in capturing the comparatively simple phenomena that, say, physics ventures to make authoritative statements about.

I think, Arnold Kling is expressing an important aspect of this sad development in a post where he writes (I read his term "political economy" as synonymous with my term "social sciences":

The main science of political economy is the science of obtaining and retaining power. As far as expertise goes, the pollster, the fundraiser, and the media expert are all fundamental to the operation. The public policy expert is for decoration. If you want to be an economic policy adviser when you grow up, then my advice is to learn to rationalize the methods used by leading politicians to obtain power.

Is health care reform about health care? No, it is about seizing and retaining power. Was the stimulus about stimulus? No, was about seizing and retaining power. Is cap and trade about global warming? No, it is about seizing and retaining power. Was TARP about saving the financial system? No, it was about seizing and retaining power.

The social scientist's role in the political process is to say, "X is a problem. Government must solve X. Here are some solutions." The solutions that rationalize seizing and retaining power will bubble to the top.

Suppose you believe that regulators cannot possibly have the wisdom to direct human activity. Suppose you believe that politicians spending other people's money tend to choose less wisely than people spending their own money. If you want to get anywhere as a public policy adviser, keep those beliefs to yourself.

The source.

(PS: I do not consider that the evolutionary paradigm is committing one to an anti-religious position - rather to the contrary.)

The State of the Nation - 4th July 2009 (2)

467,000 jobs lost in June, with unemployment hitting a 26-year high of 9.5%.

Why is this job decline happening? The private sector — the real engine of economic and job growth — won't hire because it's scared of what it sees coming out of Washington.

On the horizon, as far as the eye can see, are higher taxes, uncontrolled spending and layers upon layers of new regulations.

Who would hire new workers faced with that?

Also, the federal government is meddling in the private sector as never before — in essence, nationalizing two of the three major carmakers with $200 billion in subsidies and capital infusions, turning our banking system into a fourth branch of government through the $700 billion TARP program, spending $200 billion to take over Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and put them back in the business of lending to people who can't pay their loans — which is how we got into trouble in the first place.

And that's only what's been done in the last half year or so. What really scares private businesses is what's in the pipeline.

Make sure to read the entire article.

The State of the Nation - 4th July 2009 (1)

"It is the duty of the patriot to protect his country from its government."
Thomas Paine

What Might the Founders Make of It?

David Boaz writes:

Both President Obama and Sen. John McCain cited the Founders in their weekly radio addresses today, as they made the case for government actions that would have appalled those Founders. Obama invoked “the indomitable spirit of the first American citizens who made [independence] day possible” in arguing for a federal takeover of education, energy, and health care.

He might have trouble explaining how his policies reflect the spirit of the men who left us such words as these:

He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harrass our people, and eat out their substance.

If we can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people, under the pretence of taking care of them, they must be happy.

Were we directed from Washington when to sow and when to reap, we should soon want bread.

A wise and frugal Government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. This is the sum of good government.

Meanwhile, McCain called for the American government to more vigorously support the protesters in Iran. What would the Founders say to him?

The great rule of conduct for us in regard to foreign nations is in extending our commercial relations, to have with them as little political connection as possible….Harmony, liberal intercourse with all nations, are recommended by policy, humanity, and interest.

Peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations, entangling alliances with none.

[America] has abstained from interference in the concerns of others, even when conflict has been for principles to which she clings, as to the last vital drop that visits the heart. …Wherever the standard of freedom and Independence has been or shall be unfurled, there will her heart, her benedictions and her prayers be. But she goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own.

Maybe each week there should be three national radio broadcasts: one from the incumbent president, one from the other big-government party, and one reflecting the views of the Founders.

The source.