RedStateEclectic

A Ship with the Engine Off

Notes Steven Kates, author of the best introduction to economics there is:

If even Chris Matthews is done with Obama, who’s left? You can even watch the video here but this is the text:

‘What part of the presidency does Obama like? He doesn’t like dealing with other politicians — that means his own cabinet, that means members of the congress, either party. He doesn’t particularly like the press…. He likes to write the speeches, likes to rewrite what Favreau and the others wrote for the first draft,’ Matthews said.

‘So what part does he like? He likes going on the road, campaigning, visiting businesses like he does every couple days somewhere in Ohio or somewhere,’ Matthews continued. ‘But what part does he like? He doesn’t like lobbying for the bills he cares about. He doesn’t like selling to the press. He doesn’t like giving orders or giving somebody the power to give orders. He doesn’t seem to like being an executive.’

On Tuesday’s program, Matthews similarly called Obama ‘a ship with the engine off.’

“A ship with the engine off.” He’s actually much worse than that and far more destructive but it will do for now.

The source.

Compare this with what Richard Epstein has to say (in the first 2 minutes of the below video) about his former colleague.

 

NJ Senate Open Mic :Confiscate, Confiscate, Confiscate

The problem with compromising your principles means that you have to give up some of them, and for the past 45 years, GOP leadership has been willing to hand off our 2nd amendment rights in exchange for nothing more than, at best,  attempting to quiet down the chattering class of the left.

Those of us 50 and older learned a long time ago that the left will never be satiated.  They will never have a government to suit them. They will never have enough welfare programs. Nobody will ever pay their fair share.  And no amount of private firearm ownership is permissible. 

Of course, the manipulations always come with demeaning, condescending statements from both sides of the aisle, assuring us that nobody wants to take guns away from everybody. They only want to decide who is allowed to have them.

They're liars. They are too politically savvy to actually talk about repealing the 2nd Amendment. Instead they content themselves with taking our rights away through incremental-ism. Every snippet of freedom the government allows us to keep in the name of compromise moves to the top of the list of the next loophole to close. Private sales of guns, for example. But make no mistake - the long term agenda of the big government politicians is to take all guns away from anybody not carrying a government ID.

Via Paul Mushine,  the Association of New Jersey Rifle and Pistol Clubs  brought us this less than shocking audio of Democrat legislators caught talking on an open mic.  Their ultimate goal? "Confiscate, confiscate, confiscate."

"We needed a bill that was going to confiscate, confiscate, confiscate.” 

"They want to keep the guns out of the hands of the bad guys, but they don’t have any regulations to do it.” 

"They don’t care about the bad guys.  All they want to do is have their little guns and do whatever they want with them.” 

"That’s the line they’ve developed.”  

 

 

 

 

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A Perspective on Europe

Niall Ferguson on the European Union - see also my Another Medal for the EUSSR:

I’m absolutely certain that Lord Mandelson and Daniel Cohn-Bendit will tell you that the European experiment has succeeded because there has been peace in Europe since it began in the 1950s. Can we just knock that on the head? European integration has had absolutely nothing to do with peace in Europe since World War II; that has been the achievement of NATO [the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation]. The creation of the European Union was not about war and peace, otherwise there would have been a European Defence Community, and that was vetoed by the French National Assembly in 1954.

[...]

Europe has to be judged in economic terms, since its own terms have always been economic. And how did it do? In the 1950s the economy of integrated Europe grew at 4 per cent. In the 1960s, it was about the same. In the 1970s, growth was 2.8 per cent; in the 1980s, it slid to 2.1 per cent; in the 1990s, it was only 1.7 per cent: and so on, down to zero.

As European integration has proceeded, its growth has declined. The share of Europe in global GDP has fallen since 1980 from 31 per cent to just 19 per cent. Since 1980 the EU has grown faster than the United States in only nine out of 32 years. Never has its unemployment rate been lower than the US unemployment rate.

Are any of you investors? What were the worst equity markets of the last 10 years? They were Greece, Ireland, Italy, Finland, Portugal, the Netherlands, and Belgium — the worst in the world. And on top of all of this, we have monetary union — the ultimate experiment gone wrong.

We warned them, ladies and gentlemen. We said, if you have a monetary union without labour market integration and without any fiscal federalism, it will blow up. I predicted that in 2000. It is happening in real time, in a chemistry lab, on the other side of the Atlantic.

But this was also a political experiment gone wrong. Do you know what that experiment was? The experiment was to see if Europeans could be forced into an even closer union — despite their wishes — by economic means because the political means failed.

[...]

And when the European peoples voted against further integration, their respective governments were told to try again. It happened to the Danes in 1992, and to the Irish twice: in 2001 and again in 2008. Their citizens gave the wrong answer in the referendum, so the governments just held another one. This tells you something about why this experiment has failed — it has failed because it has lost political legitimacy. And we see this not only in Greece but in government after government across Europe. Thirteen have fallen since this crisis began two years ago, and more will follow in the months to come.

Read the full article here.

Despicable Optimists

For German intellectuals, optimism is a sort of American mental illness.

Read more in this post at NoTricksZone, the blog of an admirable American living in Germany.

Palatine Boors

[W]hy should the Palatine Boors [ie Germans] be suffered to swarm into our Settlements, and by herding together establish their Language and Manners to the Exclusion of ours? Why should Pennsylvania, founded by the English, become a Colony of Aliens, who will shortly be so numerous as to Germanize us instead of our Anglifying them, and will never adopt our Language or Customs, any more than they can acquire our Complexion.

The source.

 I'm asking you, Benjamin, don't let's be beastly to the Germans.

See also A Plea to James.

PS

The above image represents the distribution of German Americans according to the 2000 census.

Savings and Consumption

Following up on Angela's Stimulating the Economy With Food Stamps, here's a neat little video on what really matters:

 

Classical Liberalism vs. Anarchism (3/3)

Image credit.

The idea that all human concerns can be dealt with in a market context, by voluntary transactions, which is usually implied by AC, is patently inapplicable in reality. Markets only work to the extent that agreement (of a certain sort) is possible. But life is full of issues where agreement is not possible. So, there is a competition amongst intransigent concerns (“political scarcity”), and we must often yield to positions we do not like, and there must be sufficient authority to police controversy in the face of unforgiving opposition.

Large communities work differently than small groups. Coordination and cooperation in very large groups requires adequate forms of authority, powerful enforcement agencies. We cannot do without them. We must try to keep them sufficiently constrained. But there is no guarantee that we will be able to keep them under control. I am not aware of a social technology that can preclude the enormous toxic potential of the state. I sincerely regret this state of affairs; but the matter is not altered by insisting on the impossible – a world without the constraints that I have tried to outline in this note, as well as here and here. We must enter the political process and try to shape the political mood and the state so as to enhance liberty and ensure respect for her. It is an open-ended battle. We have no better means.

There is another conundrum associated with AC. Take my part of Germany as it was 1 000 years ago, and compare it to today. The difference is a huge increase in liberty. At the same time, we register a huge increase in the extent and impact of the state. Would AC deny that liberty has increased? If not, I cannot take that position seriously. If yes, how is a substantial increase of liberty compatible with substantial state growth? Ah, all the additional liberty is due to non-state agents! Well, that, however, is hardly credible. It is not my neighbour or my girl friend who enforce my rights, it is the state. And if I can prove that my neighbour has stolen X from my premises, I can be pretty sure, the state will rectify the matter.

I am not defending the state – like I do not defend the elephant. I look at both, and acknowledge their features and reality.

If one wishes to promote more liberty, one has to acknowledge the substratum within which she will have to be fought for and established.

I shall not deal with the poor philosophical underpinnings of Rothbard-type of AC; I think Feser has done an excellent job at it - for more see Natural Ends and Prudential Judgement.

 It is worth noting, however, that Rothbard clearly believes that the nature of the state can be deduced without reference to the empirical world – a preposterous position that must lead to conclusions severely at odds with reality. It only goes to show the solipsistic, the hedonistic dogmatism underlying his approach to the issue.

Not only is the AC approach in its dominant Rothbardian variant methodologically fatally flawed (in its unsustainable, anti-empirical apriorism), it is also attitudinally repugnant: people who fail to discover the purportedly self-evident features of AC’s actually contradictory system of non sequiturs and arbitrary and uncompelling premises are treated as idiots or collaborators of evil powers. Naturally, an incoherent and empirically false theory can be maintained only by dogmatic arrogance.

Thus, the Rothbardian AC sits in his rocking chair savouring the joys of self-righteousness to be had from (the travesty of) an axiomatic theory of politics and morality. He refrains from politics, and specialises one-sidedly in complaining about the state. He diverts talent and impetus away from the freedom movement, binding it in self righteous, morbid inaction ( - Bob Higgs strikes me as a prime example of AC as a form of personal depression).

The adherent of AC does not understand the conditions of liberty, he damages the reputation of liberty, distorts its meaning and weakens its forces. He is either enraged, depressed, or both, and full of acerbic contempt for anyone with a divergent view.

Personally, I find it a lot harder to be a liberal, now that I have given up my implicit AC-illusions. By the latter term I mean this: since most of the valuable material that I used in recent years in order to educate myself about issues concerning liberty were provided by AC-sources, I developed the AC-habit of restricting my perceptions of the state to its lamentable aspects. This habit makes life easier, things always fit into a neat pattern. And there is a huge industry (blogs etc.) that caters to this view. I can no longer convince myself of the simplicity of that stance.

Liberty, to me, is not an end in itself. I give precedence to the unending quest by which I seek to approximate truth.

I see a certain analogy between the struggle for liberty and the Christian notion of original sin. Man is apt to act sinfully and must constantly struggle not to yield to this propensity. Liberty is a battle not to yield to conditions of the human life that tend toward arbitrariness and inordinate domination. It is an endless endeavour, never to be replaced by a final state of uncontested and perfect liberty.

See also Classical Liberalism vs. Anarchism (1/3) and Classical Liberalism vs. Anarchism (2/3).

Classical Liberalism vs. Anarchism (2/3)

Image credit.

There are two more important aspects concerning the inevitability of the state – and in as much as state structures are inevitable we have simply got to work with them to achieve freedom as best as possible – anyone who runs away from this inconvenient constraint, as do statists and anarchist, is not capable of serving freedom.

Aspect One: Human capabilities are often prismatic and ambiguous, capable of creating both good and evil, the useful and the useless etc from the same essential resource base. But this ambivalence is a vital tool in the business of adapting to a changing environment – it is part of the conditio humana. Take aggression: human beings would be incapable of surviving if they did not have the ability to become aggressive. It’s a matter of dosage and context whether aggression is good or bad.  We cannot preclude that we will – often with the best of intentions use our human talents to drift from the realm of the good over into the realm of the bad.  We may disagree on what is good and what is bad. We may differ in our assessments as to whether a certain type of action is going to elicit good or bad consequences. There is any number of occasions to move from good to bad, and to not concur as to the moral nature of the state achieved. All we can do is learn from experience, try to avoid the most egregious excesses, and - at least as a last resort - wait for cultural evolution to weed out those practices most detrimental to our species. In this sense, the state will develop within a corridor defined by the natural limits to its destructiveness and the limits to its functional strengths. Within this corridor the state develops as a highly complex evolutionary product, indeed a composite product, for which it is often difficult or impossible to determine whether or how problematic aspects are related to welcome aspects and vice versa.

This brings me to Aspect Two: I have developed 3 theorems to explain the persistence of the state, the reason why no civilisation (since the Neolithic, which saw the emergence of enough productivity to sustain specialists of violence, power-wielding, administration and other state functionaries) has ever existed that does not elicit state structures.

Theorem 1: Whenever there is a chance to influence people and outcomes by power and force, people will develop Structures of Maximal Power (SMP) – and be it for purely defensive reasons. This launches a persistent competition for SMP, the most powerful and sophisticated variant of which being the modern territorial central state.

Theorem 2: In order to overthrow a SMP you need another SMP that is even more powerful.

Theorem 3: The individual has two options in the face of SMP. (3a) Either he complies, in which case he supports the SMP. (3b) Or he resists and revolts, in which case Theorem 2 applies.

As for Theorem 3a: Never underestimate the motives for an individual to wish to comply with and support the state; the most powerful of all being the state’s ability to overcome anarchy, or if you like anomie (both of which words have the same meaning to me, as the absence of SMP means violent chaos, a gory rush to develop stable SMP where none exist).

Well captured in Mancur Olson’s theory of the transition from regimes of roving bandits and stationary bandits (the state), both rulers and the people benefit from state structures as compared with anarchy. As the success of the Taliban attests, people support those – even though disliked in many other respects by them – who can bring an end to anarchy. The difference between anarchy and non-anarchy is huge. Which is – regrettably - hard to understand by people thoroughly used to (state guaranteed) peace.  

http://www.svt.ntnu.no/iss/Indra.de.Soysa/POL3503H05/olson.pdf

See also Classical Liberalism vs. Anarchism (1/3) and Classical Liberalism vs. Anarchism (3/3).

Classical Liberalism vs. Anarchism (1/3)

Image credit.

I have come to believe that anarcho-capitalism (AC) is a second – rather successful – attempt at usurping the meaning of liberalism; the first usurpation having been accomplished by America’s socialists and social democrats, i.e. the Democratic party, its doctrine and followers.

I see classical liberalism standing between and clearly separated from two extremes: statism - an attitude that uncritically ascribes more benignity and problem solving capability to the state than is warranted; and anarchism, which is statism in reverse, ascribing counterfactually total malignity and dysfunctionality to the state. Both extremes represent a form of escapism, a running away from an uncomfortable area of ambiguity.

The classical liberal, by contrast, bears up against the tension that emanates from the ambivalent mix of good and bad which has evolved along with the state. He faces this messy part of reality, recognising that the state is an evolutionary product that will not go away (in any reasonably foreseeable time) and, in fact, represents a condition of liberty, a requirement for liberty to exist.

The crux of the AC error lies in a tacit assumption on which the entire philosophy is based: liberty must be self-generating. The opposite is true, of course, as is nicely captured in the motto of our RSE blog. While it is certainly desirable for liberty to be self-generating, the desired condition can never come about.

Liberty is always being won from a hodge-podge of things outside of or even antithetical to liberty. The factors outside of or antithetical to liberty are persistent or are renewing themselves so that they need to be incessantly repelled and rolled back. In fact, liberty is conducive to producing anti-liberty material, for instance by allowing people to develop and propagate doctrines that compete against liberalism.

I have recently come across a quote (I can’t remember where) to the effect that philosophical schools often take perfectly reasonable continua and get into trouble by turning them into dichotomies.

That’s the problem with AC, too.  

The state is a multi-dimensional continuum which includes grown goods and bads, which are often inextricably intertwined. The state cannot be arbitrarily bad, it must be good as well, to survive.

Ce qu'on voit et ce qu'on voit pas: followers of AC suffer from a bit of a Bastiat-deficit in this respect – they only see what is bad about the state, they do not see what is good about it.

However, much of what is good about the state is naturally hard to see – like peace, freedom or justice which come about when certain things DO NOT OCCUR.

I am being protected and helped in countless ways by the state. To the extent that the state depends on popular acceptance and a sound, preferably even a growing material base, it is rational for government to enforce individual rights etc. For instance, the gradual rise to power of the French central state/royal dynasty of the Carpet and the rise of its partner, the bourgeois commercial classes in France against the emperor, the clergy and the feudal power holders is a well documented example of how the state has rationally sided with individual and property rights and many other conditions conducive to free(er) markets and personal liberty.

Other forms of SMP (Structures of Maximal Power – see more in Classical Liberalism vs. Anarchism (2/3)) such as state leagues and city states failed to prevail in the competition with the central territorial state. In the case of these alternative, ultimately defeated SMP, the structure of coercive capability was simply not stringent enough.  Put more bluntly, they were not powerful enough to be effective supporters of budding capitalism and the freedom that comes with it.

See also Classical Liberalism vs. Anarchism (2/3) and Classical Liberalism vs. Anarchism (3/3).

RIP Margaret Thatcher

Margaret Thatcher:

On productiveness and the charitable instinct:“No one would remember the Good Samaritan if he’d only had good intentions; he had money as well.” On the hostile press: “If my critics saw me walking over the Thames they would say it was because I couldn’t swim.”

Read more at the source.

On Europe:

Thatcher’s basic take on a tight European federation was that it was unnecessary, unworkable, and dangerous. The nation state, she insisted, should remain at the heart of the international system, and a federated Europe would threaten its sway.

Moreover, Thatcher had misgivings about the Continent as a source of moral inspiration. “During my lifetime,” she reminisced, “most of the problems the world has faced have come, in one form or another, from mainland Europe, and the solutions — from outside it.”

That insight alone is priceless, but it still pales compared with what she wrote more than a decade ago, when the euro was still a toddler, and the economies of Greece, Spain and Cyprus seemed as distant from calamity as they now are from salvation. “The European single currency,” wrote Thatcher in 2002, “is bound to fail — economically, politically, and indeed socially.”

Thatcher’s reasoning for this was not ideological. It was monetarist. There can be no such thing as a united currency without a united budget, she argued, at a time when it was impolite to suggest that the euro’s newlyweds would soon accuse each other of theft, deceit, laziness, imperialism and oppression.

The source.