RedStateEclectic

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.

Letter from Nebraska

 

Here is what Buffett is talking about.

Politically Correct Neanderthal

Btw, a nice representation of the sense of proportion I have when grooming a horse.

In a recent post I suggest ...

... the way in which human beings adapt to their environment is by having and satisfying desires/needs. The greater the variety, variability and degree of differentiation of a specie's ability to have and satisfy needs/desires, the greater its ability to fit successfully with the wider environment. So the ability to constantly renew, extend and grow this ability is key to survival and advancement. 

Now, what is wealth? Wealth consist of things and practices that enable man to satisfy his desires/needs. Hence, if an open-ended development of desires is an anthropological sine qua non and the key to continuous successful adaptation to a changing and changed environment, then incessantly growing wealth is just as important.

If man's ability to adapt to and advance in his environment is damaged and curtailed, he suffers impoverishment (relative to the unhampered presence of this ability), even to a degree that may well lead to stark poverty, misery, and death.

Truncating, inhibiting or fully precluding man's ability to develop and satisfy ever more desires/needs and hence to build up more and more wealth is quite simply inhumane. Not to mention that resource-intensive ambitions like comprehensive environmental protection cannot be achieved unless a high level of wealth is achieved and maintained.

These ideas in mind, I found the below both congenial and most instructive in its own right:

The idol of “renewable” energy is part of the broader idol of “sustainability.” Both of these are false idols that obscure the true beauty of capitalism, which is that in producing energy–and everything else–it is better than “sustainable”–it is progressive. “Renewable” or “sustainable” implies that the ideal life trajectory is one of repetition, using the same methods and materials over and over. But that is an ideal fit for an animal, not a human being. The human mode of existence is to always get better, always improve, always discover how to use new raw materials to create energy.

Make sure to read the entire article.

See also my Politics - Legacy of Primitive Man ...

Excited about Tuesday

I almost gave up on the idea of going there, owing to a complete lack of decent, central accommodation. However, at long last, I have managed to book a very nice place right in the middle of the city's historical core, and its just within walking distance from the exciting events:

I am going to meet Jörg-Guido Hülsmann, sitting in on two lectures he is giving at the University of Gent, Belgium.

I absolutely adore what Jörg-Guido calls "the great charming historical commercial towns [of] Bruges, Antwerp, and Gent." Bruges and Gent used to be whistle stops on my way to and from England. I count them amongst the most beautiful cities of Europe.

 

See also Guido Hülsmann on the Division of Labour, Fiat Money and Central Banking - A(n Ethical) Disaster, Corrupted Economics and the Federal Reserve (2/2), and If a German ...

Greed versus Self-Interest

Image credit.

While I consider this article by Dwight R. Lee a good read, I differ with the author's conclusion

that self-interest is not good or bad, but an unalterable fact of life.

I would argue that self-interest is good - and not bad - in that it is a fundamental part of human nature and as such a requirement not only for man's survival but also for his continuous improvement, materially and spiritually.

There are two aspects to my argument, the first, I have written about before. So I touch on it only briefly.

I.

Every human being is an individual, separate from every other individual, and must therefore perceive and cope with the world in a way unique to himself. Inevitably, he has concerns alone to himself. Man quite simply does not have the perspective of another person but only his, he does not live the life of another person but his life, and he does not have the needs of another person but his own needs. If he does not know how to heed his very own concerns he cannot but (a) damage himself seriously and ultimately mortally, and he will (b) lose the ability to improve himself and to make his best contribution to the improvement of his fellows.

The idea of freedom is essentially the idea of personal freedom, the need of which is based on the recognition of point (b) above.

The constructive and conducive aspects of self-interest are manifold, complex and absolutely indispensable for human survival and advancement. Unfortunately they are only too often swept aside by crudely equating the concern of the individual for himself with greed or other forms of objectionable misconduct. This habit appears to be a remnant of the times when the individual was constantly and  brutally bullied and terrorised by the tribal collective. Today, the ideological war on self-interest is part of the efforts to turn human beings into mere means for the ends of the powerful.

II.

The second aspect that is even more pervasively overlooked concerns the nature of human needs. I mention this aspect because it leads me to the conclusion that man must and ought to strive for ever growing wealth. If this desire for more wealth is crudely equated with greed (which is silly) then greed is morally desirable - as one might argue for rhetorical effect, while correctly speaking greed is bad, of course, and self-interest good in the above sense. In fact, what is bad about greed is that it represents an overdoing, a transgression of the right measure of something, an excess beyond the harmless or wholesome, whereas an excess of self-interest does not make conceptual sense as defined above, since it would imply a violation of self-interest by self-interest.

The crux: the way in which human beings adapt to their environment is by having and satisfying desires/needs. The greater the variety, variability and degree of differentiation of a specie's ability to have and satisfy needs/desires, the greater its ability to fit successfully with the wider environment. So the ability to constantly renew, extend and grow this ability is key to survival and advancement. 

Now, what is wealth? Wealth consist of things and practices that enable man to satisfy his desires/needs. Hence, if an open-ended development of desires is an anthropological sine qua non and the key to continuous successful adaptation to a changing and changed environment, then incessantly growing wealth is just as important.

If man's ability to adapt to and advance in his environment is damaged and curtailed, he suffers impoverishment (relative to the unhampered presence of this ability), even to a degree that may well lead to stark poverty, misery, and death.

Truncating, inhibiting or fully precluding man's ability to develop and satisfy ever more desires/needs and hence to build up more and more wealth is quite simply inhumane. Not to mention that resource-intensive ambitions like comprehensive environmental protection cannot be achieved unless a high level of wealth is achieved and maintained.

See also my posts: The Most Stupid Statement about Capitalism, Greed - Detractors and Defenders of Capitalism Get It Wrong, Personal Freedom, Inequality and Justice,

Saving the Titanic - An Alternative Currency

Image credit.

As the two pieces below show, imagery drawn from the Titanic's disaster enjoys much currency these days, even though the anniversary of the super-vessel's sinking is still five days away.

I consider the Vieira interview (bottom of post) especially noteworthy - a very serious attempt at finding a practical way to fundamentally change the monetary framework of the USA. Vieira makes one wonder: will perhaps Nebraska spearhead a new American currency?

But first this:

We are like passengers on the Titanic ten minutes after its fatal encounter with the iceberg: the idea that the ship will sink is beyond belief.
 

As we all know, the "unsinkable" Titanic suffered a glancing collision with an iceberg on the night of April 14, 1912. Ten minutes after the iceberg had opened six of the ship's 16 watertight compartments, it was not at all apparent that the mighty vessel had been fatally wounded, as there was no evidence of damage topside. Indeed, some eyewitnesses reported that passengers playfully scattered the ice left on the foredeck by the encounter.

But some rudimentary calculations soon revealed the truth to the officers: the ship was designed to survive four watertight compartments being compromised, and could likely stay afloat if five were opened to the sea, but not if six compartments were flooded. Water would inevitably spill over into adjacent compartments in a domino-like fashion until the ship sank.

We can sympathize with the disbelief of the officers, and with their confused reaction, simultaneously reassuring passengers and attempting to goad them into the lifeboats. With the interior still warm and bright with lights, it seemed far more dangerous to clamber into an open lifeboat and drift off into the cold Atlantic than it did to stay onboard.

As a result, the first lifeboats left the ship only partially full. Only when it became undeniable that the ship was doomed did people attempt to "make other arangements," but by then it was too late.

The tragedy was a cruel mix of human error (entering an ice field at nearly top speed, 23-25 knots), hubris-soaked planning (only enough lifeboats for half the passengers and crew) and design flaws: the high-sulfur iron hull plating did not bend when struck by the ice, it shattered like china.

As noted above, the watertight compartment design was also flawed; indeed, some studies have found that the ship would have stayed afloat an additional six hours had there been no watertight compartments, as water would have sloshed evenly along the entire length of the vessel.

I think this perfectly describes the present. Our financial system seems "unsinkable," yet the reliance on debt and financialization has already doomed it, whether we are willing to believe it or not.

Read the entire post.

 

And now, Dr. Edwin Vieira, Jr., Constitutional Attorney and Author, and his plan for a Constitutional alternative gold and silver currency, run at the state level, to bring sound money to America.

 

The Anti-Bernanke

During a lecture entitled “The Fed Unspun: The Other Side of the Story”, Peter Schiff responds to Bernake’s recent four-part college lecture series.

 

Personal Freedom

An epistemological perspective on personal freedom, from F.A. Hayek:

Most of the knowledge on which we rely in the pursuit of our ends is the unintended by-product of others exploring the world in different directions from those we pursue ourselves because they are impelled by different aims; it would never have become available to us if only those ends were pursued which we regarded as desirable.

The source.

Incidentally, complete incomprehension of the above explains why the statists of the left and the right are (not only epistemological) authoritarians that cannot see farther than the end of their nose. What they find at the end of their nose, they think, is the kind of ultimate knowledge that makes it their duty to run society in an utterly unenligthended spirit, and effectively by the practice of 'might makes right'.

Our Abstract Society

There is nothing more practical than a good theory.

Unfortunately, there are many preconceptions that tempt people to take a depreciatory view of theory.

Nothing alerts me more than a person taking pride in being "a practical man," thereby implying a corresponding disutility of theory.

We live in a civilisation that is abstract (i.e. ruled by evolved abstract principles) and cannot survive unless we are in a position to mentally (i.e. theoretically) reconstruct and act in accordance with the theoretical scaffolding of the human environment in its hitherto most advanced state.

Regrettably, the contemporary economist does not understand the rule of law, as being the precondition and originator of a free economy, while the contemporary lawyer does not understand that the rule of law of necessity and quite naturally produces a free economy, which, at the same time, instantiates the benign nature and superior civilizatory performance of a social order protected against arbitrariness.

Rather than appreciating this systematic nexus, economist and lawyer consider it their calling and duty to meddle with the social order on the basis of ad hoc intuitions largely separated from a sound theoretical framework, increasingly so when political correctness (i.e. compliancy with the powers du jour) promises far greater rewards (especially from a practical point of view) than intellectual honesty and thoroughness.

Today, we are in a mess because of a severe lack of good theory, which Don Boudreaux expresses in a statement that fully corresponds to my experience:

Quotation of the Day ...

… is from pages 4-5 of what is perhaps the single book that has had the greatest impact on my thinking, Hayek’s 1973 Law, Legislation, and Liberty: Rules and Order:

One of the main themes of this book will be that the rules of just conduct which the lawyer studies serve a kind of order of the character of which the lawyer is largely ignorant; and that this order is studied chiefly by the economist who in turn is similarly ignorant of the character of the rules of conduct on which the order that he studies rests.

The source.

Thoughts On A Freedom Movement

As a libertarian, it's nice to see the growing appeal surrounding Ron Paul's candidacy. Over the years, we here at RSE have discussed the particulars surrounding the movement that we were sure was building. I'd say it has been a resounding success so far. To me, the "irate minority" jargon came across sounding awfully naïve, at times, when considering the vast government leviathan we've been up against. However, a new populist freedom movement has emerged and expanded via the new electronic medium and the government propagandists have, so far, failed to halt it.

The internet has done its part in fomenting the ideas of liberty and has brought with it the ability to network instantly. We are not alone and we're discovering that our political parties and leaders have been rather underhanded in what was thought to be a fair election/debate procedure. There can be no doubt that Ron Paul has been treated differently and that the monopolistic main stream media possesses far too much control over the process. Also, a very large academic support framework has appeared to help in riposting the to-be-expected onslaught of ad hominems, as well as non sequiturs so obtuse they’re undeserving of the descriptive nobility found in Latin terms.

Even so, the masses have been dialectically conditioned over many years to believe that the synthesis of Hegel's technique, useful in promoting socialist outcomes, is the best we can hope for in a Machiavellian world. This juxtaposed, two-party version of freedom - where blue people supposedly defend personal freedoms and red people guard economic freedoms - has led to government growing against both areas. Control still trumps repeal in the present political atmosphere.

This brings me to the political constituency. The crowds who vote for all of this status quo. …

{See the comments section for the rest.}