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.

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.

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.

Everyone is a Speculator

It is impossible not to speculate.

Speculating is a form of behaviour, active or passive, resulting from a view taken on the course of future events. If you do not participate in the stock market you are effectively taking a speculative position. Your speculative position will be rewarded if the stock market is doing badly; you will be punished if exchange-traded equities are doing well.

Probably the most risky and most questionable form of speculation is to be long, as it were, on government and the state, i.e. to rely on these forces to influence and shape your fate.

My own generation is likely to become part of a long and uninterrupted sequence of generations totally destroyed (physically and/or materially) by the German state (First World War, hyperinflation, depression, Third Reich, Second World War, impending currency collapse and break down of the "welfare state").

Don Boudreaux has an excellent letter to the editor, where he brilliantly debunks the unthinking emotionalism - "the stakeless and idle yammering" - of those who blame rising oil prices on speculators.

You speculate that “excessive speculation, mainly by Wall Street index-fund traders, is needlessly driving up [gasoline] prices” (“Speculators and the Gas Pump,” April 19).

Speculative buying is excessive only if it pushes prices higher than will be warranted by tomorrow’s conditions.  But no one – not even the academic authors of papers to which you link – knows for certain just how tight gasoline supplies will be tomorrow.  Many investors are speculating that these supplies will be very tight indeed.  If these investors are correct, they’ll earn profits and their purchases today will be revealed tomorrow not to have been excessive.

You, in contrast, insist that these speculators are mistaken (that is, you think they’re destined to lose money on their investments).  So put your money where your mouth is: invest contrary to these speculators by going short in gasoline.  If you’re correct that today’s speculation is excessive, not only will you make a killing when proof of your prescience arrives tomorrow in the form of gasoline prices that are lower than are expected by the speculators who you criticize, you’ll also put downward pressure on today’s gasoline prices.

Rather than opine with no skin in the game, get involved!  Show the world that your intellectual speculations aren’t idle.

The source.

Greed versus Self-Interest

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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,

Unbelievably Misanthropic

And that's putting it mildly.

In a remarkably churlish article on Sunday, Britain's influential left-leaning newspaper (The Observer is The Guardian's sister Sunday paper) pronounced Harper's parents "environmentally irresponsible" for choosing to bring her into the world. Headlined "Beckhams a 'bad example' for families," the piece was a sour blast at parents who raise good-sized families. "One or two children are fine but three or four are just being selfish," Simon Ross, executive director of the Optimum Population Trust, told reporter Tracy McVeigh. "The Beckhams . . . are very bad role models with their large famil[y]."

McVeigh also quoted natural-history broadcaster David Attenborough, who recently "made a passionate speech about how the world's baby-making was damaging the planet."

Read the entire article.

See also my entries The Sport of Facile Killing ..., An Overpopulation of Malthusians, and Be Fruitful and Multiply ...

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.

 

Millions from Waste - How Capitalism Saves the Environment

90% of deforestation occurred before the global spread of carbon based fuel. The advent of coal etc. saved forests, protected the soil against overuse on account of highly unproductive, energy-starved agricultural practices.

From the time of their emergence, industrial entrepreneurs have been society's leading protagonists and most efficient and successful practitioners of conservation and environmental protection.

Indeed, many 19th-century authors argued that pollution, whether it be unburnt fuel released into the air or sludge dumped into rivers, was a form of waste that no competitive business could afford.

For instance, the journalist Peter Lund Simmonds (1814-1897) published in 1862 his best-seller Waste Products and Undeveloped Substances, in which he discussed the profitable recovery of previously "injurious" waste ranging from bones and other animal by-products to the acid manganese solutions of chloride of lime factories, from the scoriae of metals produced by blast furnaces to "poisonous" gases which used to escape during the process of smelting, from the distillers' wash to the "impurities" of coal gas, and many others. Interestingly enough, Simmonds felt compelled to write at the beginning of his 420-page book that his treatment would have to be superficial because his subject was "too extensive in its scope to be discussed successfully in detail ... since any one branch would of itself form a useful and interesting volume." Confronted with the incessant rate of innovation in this field, he revised his book extensively and published a second edition in 1873.

"In every manufacturing process," Simmonds observed, "there is more or less waste of the raw material, which it is the province of others following after the original manufacturer to collect and utilize. This is done now, more or less, in almost every manufacture." Just as utilization was the great law of nature, man also had to provide "for converting all the material he uses into useful purposes. There must be no loss of anything once within his grasp." The results of such creative behaviour were not only increased profitability, but improved environmental amenities.

Among countless examples, Simmonds related that a process had been developed at the Kinghole woollen mills, near Dumfries, by which the hitherto refuse water of the washing houses was now converted into valuable commercial material. "By means of mechanical appliances and chemical action," he wrote, "the refuse formerly turned into the river Nith to the injury of the salmon, is made to produce stearine, which forms the basis of composite candles, as well as a cake manure that sells at 40s per ton."

Similarly, Simmonds pointed out that what should be done with the fifth quarter of the animal, or the "offal," was a question that "formerly used to be perpetually assailing Boards of Health, and other sanitary bodies who have the supervision of slaughter-houses, meat-markets, etc." By the time he wrote his books, however, the offal of cattle suited for food, the waste from dressing skins and preparing leather, and other animal refuse had all found "distinctive and remunerative uses." If "such skill and ingenuity" had not been exhibited in the case of bones, and if bones had been left to rot or decay, "producing fever and disease," there would indeed have been "cause for anxiety amongst sanitary authorities." Yet, this was not the case and it was there for all to see "how the danger is dispelled, and a source of evil becomes the agent of much good, and the subject of a thriving and prosperous industry."

Why did Simmonds' contemporaries behave this way with industrial waste? Simply because "as competition becomes sharper, manufacturers have to look more closely to those items which may make the slight difference between profit and loss, and convert useless products into those possessed of commercial value, which is the most apt illustration of Franklin's motto that 'a penny saved is twopence earned': Our manufacturers have not been slow to appreciate this truth."

These processes were so prevalent that an acquaintance of Simmonds, a fellow by the name of Karl Marx, later made similar remarks in Volume III of his Capital. Marx identified industrial waste recovery as the "second big source of economy in the conditions of production" (after large-scale production). As he put it: "This waste, aside from the services which it performs as a new element of production, reduces the cost of the raw material to the extent to which it is again saleable ... The reduction of the cost of this portion of constant capital increases pro tanto the rate of profit." As a result, "the so-called waste plays an important role in almost every industry."

While Simmonds' may have authored the first treatise that systematically described the widespread and spontaneous recycling behaviour of all industries, his book would not be the last of this genre. In the following decades, other lengthy books on the topic would be written in the United Kingdom, the United States, Germany and France, and most certainly in other languages and places. In all of these, authors went out of their way to argue that turning industrial waste into profitable by-products almost always made economic sense and that, as a by-product of such innovative behaviour, the state of the air, the rivers and the forests were usually improving.

The bottom line of green has always been black. Good entrepreneurs, engineers and technicians have always been able to figure out that pollution is wasteful and doesn't make good business sense. Although it may prove hazardous to their belief system, some environmentalists will eventually have to come to terms with the fact that the invisible hand was busy cleaning up and restoring the environment long before they entered this world.

The source.

Also, do make sure to listen to this 50 minute interview of Pierre Desroches, one of the world's leading researchers on the real, positive relationship between capitalism and our environment.

See also The Master of Doomslaying ..., Unecological Ecologists, A Flow System Far from Equilibrium, The Obsolete Economics of Peak Oil, The Sun Queen of Germanny.

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.

 

Inundated with Fake Science

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We are being inundated with "news" of scientific studies that supposedly prove or lend significant credibility to propositions like "margarine increases cancer risk," or as one may read years later: "margarine reduces cancer risk." While I have made up these specific examples, I have actually witnessed similar allegations over the years of compelling benefits and significant dangers ascribed contradictorily to butter and margarine respectively.

Apparently there is a vast and widespread faking industry at work being guided by awkward notions of best practice ( - the below excerpt, unlike the clip, is not an April's Fools Day tall tale, but the "science" referred to in it certainly has that quality:

A former researcher at Amgen Inc has found that many basic studies on cancer — a high proportion of them from university labs — are unreliable, with grim consequences for producing new medicines in the future.

[...]

Part way through his project to reproduce promising studies, Begley met for breakfast at a cancer conference with the lead scientist of one of the problematic studies.

“We went through the paper line by line, figure by figure,” said Begley. “I explained that we re-did their experiment 50 times and never got their result. He said they’d done it six times and got this result once, but put it in the paper because it made the best story. It’s very disillusioning.”

The source.

 

And: