RedStateEclectic

The Language of the World

What this (see below) means in terms of spreading the message of liberty is hard to underestimate. America has been late in becoming a social democratic nation. She still brims with the spirit of freedom. Other countries have lost their antennae for freedom much earlier. Their languages and domestic-language-based institutions serve as powerful repellents against libertarian thinking. The more widely spoken English is, the greater will be the resonance of freedom-loving thinking.

The second president of the United States, John Adams, predicted in 1780 that "English will be the most respectable language in the world and the most universally read and spoken in the next century, if not before the end of this one." It is destined "in the next and succeeding centuries to be more generally the language of the world than Latin was in the last or French is in the present age."

It was a bold prediction, for at that time there were only about 13 million English-speakers in the world, almost all of them living in Britain or on the eastern seaboard of North America. They were barely 1 percent of the world's population, and almost nobody except the Welsh and the Irish bothered to learn English as a second language.

So how is Adams' prediction doing now?

Well, it took a little longer than he thought, but last week one of the most respected universities in Italy, the Politecnico di Milano, announced that, beginning in 2014, all its courses would be taught in English. 

Make sure to read the entire article.

Lies Both Sides of the Atlantic

Among the biggest lies of the welfare states on both sides of the Atlantic is the notion that the government can supply the people with things they want but cannot afford. Since the government gets its resources from the people, if the people as a whole cannot afford something, neither can the government.

The source.

We the Greedy Pigs

Not much difference between Britain and East Germany. The image is from England in the 1960s, but in the 1980s, when I lived in England, there was still a lot of GDR-type dereliction and bleakness around. Image credit.

Referring to political criticism of private equity firms, Don Boudreaux argues:

So if politicians and pundits really wish to excoriate those responsible for shutting down hopelessly inefficient producers and for forcing others to operate more efficiently, they should blame consumers.  These pols and pundits should demonize the likes of families and small businesses that greedily seek to get as much as possible in return for each dollar they spend.

The source.

I do not disagree with Boudreaux, but I insist that the picture is larger than he paints it. The initiative of entrepreneurs is a vital force in its own right in this process.

If we had only demanding customers but no entrepreneurs, not much in the way of advancement would happen. In fact, in such a situation, faithfully enacted in a system called socialism, consumers will, for lack of clout and comparison, tend to adjust to the low quality produce surrounding them all over the place, as I witnessed in East Germany and the UK.

It was hard to fathom for me what kind of grotty stuff the British (not to mention the East Germans) would get excited about after years of socialist gagging. Especially with the British, there was also a good portion of nationalism in their excitement, say, for cars ("made in Britain"), residences etc that people in other countries would turn up their noses at.

The prime status symbol prominently displayed in the living rooms of East Germans was an empty can of Coke.

The Garden of Forking Paths

“I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.”

    Jorge Luis Borges

Find more of Borges at The Garden of Forking Paths.

  

Letter from Nebraska

 

Here is what Buffett is talking about.

Lucky, Fawn, Martingale, and Stockman

Before ushering you to some weekend reading at the bottom of the post, some light personal news.

I had a perfect Saturday, collecting Lucky early in the afternoon to take him for a two hour tour of the wilderness. Just before we were going to return to the civilised world, a man turned up with a beautiful she-dog. Lucky had fun with black beauty Lola for another two hours, while I joined our new companion on his search for a ditched glider. Mysteriously, yet reassuringly, there was a note on the glider to the effect that the pilots had decided to land so as to have a drink in the pub of a nearby village.

There was one thing, however, that made me feel very sad. Lucky ferreted out a dead fawn, probably the victim of an unusually cold night yesterday. Once again, Lucky proved an excellent tracking dog and pointer with no interest in actually killing game. I observed carefully how he approached what turned out a dead fawn. Once again, Lucky remained perfectly obedient to me in the face of game alive or dead. He would be the ideal dog for a hunter who does not want his dog to interfere with the killing job or the prey.

However, the sight of the perished mini deer, so beautiful and cute (probably only a few days old), did make me feel really awful for a while.

Life goes on.

For a weekend read, try this on Martingale, and this by David Stockman.

PS

While Lucky was right with his prediction that my home team would suffer relegation from the first German soccer division this year, I am glad to report:

Hurrah, Borussia Dortmund, who have snatched the German soccer championship for the second consecutive year from Bayern München, look like defeating Bayern again decisively, in the final of the German Football Federation Cup. This being a most remarkable fifth consecutive win over Bayern, who in their turn have made it to the final of the European Champions League, where they face the English team of Chelsea.

The Mineral Paradox

The pursuit of self-interest and the insatiability of human desires and needs are not the problem. Rather they are the solution provided by a supremely adaptable species to the challenge of survival. Thus I argue in the first two posts listed at the bottom of this article. For a case in point consider ...

The Mineral Paradox

Mineral resources, not synthetically producible in human time frames,1 are fixed in the earth. As each is mined, less supply remains, suggesting that cost and, thus, price must increase as production cumulates.

Yet, for virtually all minerals, the opposite seems to be true: As more is mined, more is discovered to be mined. Prices and costs do not inexorably rise. What was high-cost yesterday has become lower-cost, undercutting the perennial complaint that “the easy stuff has been found.” Overall, there seems to be little difference between minerals and general goods and services.

Solving the Mineral Paradox

[R]esources are not known, fixed things; they are what humans employ to service wants at a given time. Human “appraisal” turns the “neutral stuff” of the earth into resources. What are resources today may not be tomorrow, and vice versa.8

Zimmermann wrote:

Resources are highly dynamic functional concepts; they are not, they become, they evolve out of the triune interaction of nature, man, and culture, in which nature sets outer limits, but man and culture are largely responsible for the portion of physical totality that is made available for human use.9

Zimmermann concluded: “Knowledge is truly the mother of all resources.”10

The functional or real-world theory clearly distinguished between the natural scientific and social scientific views of resources. “To the physicist the law of the conservation of matter and energy is basic,” Zimmermann stated. “The economist, however, is less interested in the totality of the supply than in its availability.”11  He warned: “To those who are used to view resources as material fixtures of physical nature, this functional interpretation of resources must seem disconcerting” because “it robs the resource concept of its concreteness and turns it into an elusive vapor.”12

Physical to functional; objective to subjective; absolute to relative; static to dynamic; one- to multi-dimensional: Orthodox economists ignored the real world in their quest to remake their discipline into a “hard” science based on mathematical relationships. Economists embraced deterministic ideas of known, fixed resources that enabled them to calculate the “optimal” extraction rate of a “depletable” resource.13

But this determinism came at the expense of understanding the dynamic nature of real-world resources. This explains why, time and again, economists have fallen short of finding a “depletion signal” in the empirical record, breeding false worries about “peak oil” or peak minerals in general.

Back in the 1970s, Hotelling’s framework captured the thinking of the economics profession and policymakers. “We have a classic Malthusian case of exponential growth against a finite source,” stated economist and Department of Energy secretary James Schlesinger. “[I]n five years’ time we may have chewed up most of the possibility of further expansion of oil production.”

Paul Samuelson called for a “Manhattan Project” to counter dwindling oil and gas.14  And at Resources for the Future, once a bastion of resource optimism, depletionism was de rigueur.15

The source.

See also: Politically Correct Neanderthal, Greed versus Self-Interest, Homo Faber, The Obsolete Economics of Peak Oil.

Good Morning, Copenhagen

Or is this taking place at some other time of the day? How cold it must have been, only a month ago.

 

In the Era of Unaccountable Permanent War

Read the fascinating story of the cheap lies you are being told to make you feel patriotic in the face of unjust wars:

It is now clear that CIA officials were blatantly misrepresenting both bin Laden’s role in al-Qaeda when he was killed and how the agency came to focus on his compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan.

Read The Truth Behind the Official Story of Finding Bin Laden.

Crepuscular Rays

Still weak and wobbly from a cold, I draw strength from Telemann's music.