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.
Notice how it is not the head of the department that is at fault, but the collective “we” and their processes which occur beneath him. They, who or whatever ‘they’ are, provide cover for all that is wrong. The singular in politics exists for promotion only.
I am compelled to quote Tolstoy once again:
“From the day when the first members of councils placed exterior authority higher than interior, that is to say, recognized the decisions of men united in councils as more important and more sacred than reason and conscience; on that day began lies that caused the loss of millions of human beings and which continue their unhappy work to the present day.”
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.
We live in a free society with unprecedented access for everyone to information essential to the critical mind, and yet mass deception and consequential madness and hysteria are rampant - in fact, they define the profile of our political system.
It is the lack of interest to exercise their critical faculties that distinguish today's Mitläufer (literally: fellow-runner, i.e. the opportunistically compliant person) from the Mitläufer of the 1930s, the latter having been in an incomparably more disadvantaged position to probe the news and other forms of propaganda.
Even science has been captured by it to an extent that has turned it into a politically correct force ready to buttress any charlatanry.
One of the world’s biggest green-energy public-policy experiments is coming to a bitter end in Germany, with important lessons for policymakers elsewhere. [...]
Germans have paid about $130 billion for a climate-change policy that has no impact on global warming. They have subsidized Chinese jobs and other European countries’ reliance on dirty energy sources. And they have needlessly burdened their economy. As even many German officials would probably attest, governments elsewhere cannot afford to repeat the same mistake.
Read the entire piece.
See also my post The Sun Queen of Germany and The Epistemic Consequences of Totalitarian Democracy.
While both caught in a spell of crisp winter, Laura in Nebraska, and I in the South West of Germany, this gentlemen demonstrates how to have fun with snow bubbles.
What an odd coincidence that I should have been working on bubbles all day long. In fact, I have been tracing insights into a rather neglected part of the Austrian Business Cycle Theory (ABCT) - the subsistence fund. The central importance of which I have been made aware of by reading the superb articles of Frank Shostak at LvMI. However, I never managed to fully understand his rendering of the theory of the subsistence fund. So I followed the literature that Shostak lists, in particular Richard von Strigl's Capital and Production and two excellent articles by Sechrest. With this preparation, Sechrest's paper Capital, Credit Expansions, and the Subsistence Fund has enabled me to reach a level of comprehension that I am perfectly satisfied with.
Writes George Reisman on the historic significance of the abandonment of the subsistence fund approach, as quoted in Sechrest's paper, where "wages-fund" is basically synonymous to "subsistence-fund" - the latter really being the more accurate term, since businesspeople must compensate the suppliers of any and all inputs, not just the suppliers of labour:
The wages-fund doctrine held that at any given time there is a determinate total expenditure of funds for the payment of wages in the economic system, and that the wages of the employees of business firms are paid by businessmen and capitalists, out of capital, which is the result of saving; not by consumers in the purchase of consumers’ goods….[T]he abandonment of the wages-fund doctrine and with it, classical economics’ perspective on saving and capital, made possible the acceptance of Keynesianism and the policy of inflation, deficits, and ever expanding government spending.
PS
Two personal memorabilia: at the time of my studies at the University of Kent at Canterbury, I knew a lecturer, Cyril Isenberg, who specialised in the physics of bubbles.
To think, I may have ended up a colleague of the superb George Reisman at Pepperdine University. Mind you, I did not know of Reisman at the time. And I do not think I was mistaken in not exploring the invitation any further - in the 1990s, I had not matured enough in my intellectual development to be able to assume an academic position of lasting satisfaction. The whole thing may have turned out quite a bubble.
But this time, it would be different.
Steven Horwitz has a short and excellent piece on why value creation matters first and foremost:
Creating jobs is easy; it’s creating value that’s hard. We could create millions of jobs quite easily by destroying every piece of machinery on U.S. farms. The question is whether we are actually better off by creating those jobs — and the answer is a definite no. We want labor-saving, job-destroying technology because it creates value by enabling us to produce things at lower cost and thereby free up labor for more urgent uses.
A century ago 40 percent of Americans worked in agriculture; today it’s less than 2 percent. The former farm workers didn’t all go unemployed. The wealth created by higher farm productivity and lower prices enabled us to demand all kinds of new products that in turn created many more jobs than were lost in agriculture. This is the story of innovation everywhere.
So rather than talking about job creation, let’s focus on value creation. The case for freeing markets is that such freedom best enables individuals to find ways to use their knowledge and skills to create value for others and thereby create wealth for themselves. The more wealth that value creators can keep, the more likely they are to continue to create it. Even if a value-creating innovation destroys jobs in the short run, the increased wealth will bring a great deal of job creation in its wake.
The source.
See also Say's Law, Ground Control to Major Tom - A Note on Creative Destruction, Inequality and Justice, Digging Ditches, and Catallactic Intelligence.
I have come across a book entitled Beyond Politics in a reading list provided by Don Boudreaux.
He described the book as the best introduction to Public Choice he knows of.
Yesterday, I started reading Beyond Politics. I am at page 110 of 220.
It is a truly excellent book. Easy to read, thorough, comprehensive, graphic.
It is a bit of a puzzle to me how it can be that we know so much about government failure (the subject of public choice), and still predominantly behave as if government is the all-purpose producer of benign solutions to almost any problem or challenge under the sun.
It so happens, The Independent Institute has this interview with one of the two authors of the earlier 1990s editions (see cover image).
I find Simmons' chuckle somewhat irritating, it sounds like a dog sniffing or panting. However, what counts is that he has coauthored a book that every grown-up should read.
Note what Simmons (to the right) has to say about his own experience in an active political career.
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