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.
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.
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 ...
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 ...
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.
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,
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.
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.
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.
Recent Comments