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.

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.

  

As the Euro-Worm Turns

Economist and author Detlev Schlichter weighs in on the  recently hyped anti-austerity movement in Europe:

For a long time media pundits have treated us to the perceived wisdom that economic growth can only come from the actions of the government. Only devaluation through euro-exit, inflation through more money printing and more government deficit-spending, preferably by the still credit-worthy Germans and then fiscally-transferred to the maxed-out Greeks, can revive the economy because only this can lift aggregate demand, the magic cure-all of economic problems.

What is lost on these commentators is that the European mess is nothing but the inevitable result of government-stipulated aggregate demand.  Easy money funded the Spanish and Irish real estate booms and bankrupted their banks and by extension their governments. Easy money allowed Greece’s political class to go on a borrowing binge that has now bankrupted the country and lured large parts of the population into zero-productivity, soon-to-be-eliminated public sector jobs.

Do you still want the state to ‘stimulate’ the economy? – Be careful what you wish for.

Since when have the masses been careful with wishes?

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.

Guernica

Reuters journalist Christopher Holme wired back to London that it had been the most terrible air strike of all time. But German squadron leader Wolfram Freiherr von Richthofen noted enthusiastically that Guernica "has been literally razed to the ground. Bomb craters can be seen in the streets. Simply wonderful!"

The entire article on Guernica.

PS

I had a great time in Gent, getting to know marvellous Professor Hülsmann and thoroughly enjoying his lectures. But I am under the weather with an obstinate cold and too exhausted to go into details of this most successful trip now.

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.

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 ...

If You Print It, They Will Succumb

Writes Phillipp Bagus:

The project of the euro leads to an ever-increasing rescue fund, and gradually toward a fiscal union and more centralization. A European financial government and the European super state, which would most likely abolish tax competition in Europe, are on the horizon. The highest cost of the Fed policy, therefore, may be liberty in Europe.

Full Article: The Fed's Swap Bailout of the Eurozone

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.