Bastiat

Protection and Freedom


The French economist Frédéric Bastiat is an economist whose writings are more than accurate, they are wise. This is a disturbing observation from  Economic Sophisms and “What Is Seen and What Is Not Seen”:


“What is the term that is common to both restriction and prohibition?”


“Protection.”


“What is the final effect of protection?”


“To require a greater amount of work from men for the same result.”


“Why are people so attached to protectionist regimes?”


“Because freedom is bound to provide the same result for less work, this apparent reduction in work terrifies them.”


One could argue Bastiat saw men as fulfilled by work and that the loss of work was threatening. Or is it the obverse? Is the freedom that less work offers the terrifying element?

Hitler/Darwin

Darwin and the Nazis

“Darwin was a direct and disastrous influence,”  and “Germany [enacted] the Reich Citizenship Law, the Blood Protection Law, the Marital Health Law and the Nuremberg Laws for racial segregation, all based on bogus Victorian science, much of which had started life in the gentle setting of Darwin’s study at Down House.” So writes A.N. Wilson in his recent book on Charles Darwin, a book seemingly geared to provoking.
 

This is a frequent argument, as if the Devil quoting scripture somehow diminishes it.

In 2013, the historian Robert J Richards composed an erudite rebuke to those who have made similar claims. In his essay “Was Hitler a Darwinian?”, Richards explained that many of Hitler’s remarks could be traced back to Darwin, “or to Aristotle, or to Christ” – if we just played a game of “six degrees of Charles Darwin”.

Sunday/Consciousness

Materialism, the notion that everything in the world has a Newtonian one-thing-bumping-into-the-next-thing evolutionary quality about it was the rage of the non-science science expropriators of the nineteenth century and now has come to a full stop in the discussion of consciousness.


Modern physics simply will not allow a Newtonian discussion about it. It now appears that we can not measure the position or the speed of anything in physics--and that measurement of speed and position is sort of the essence of materialism. A number of explanations have arisen to encompass (not really explain) this nature but they vary from the mystical to the weird. Worse, there is no agreement on how to experiment to improve our understanding; if you can not measure position and speed, where do you start ? One considered idea is that measurement immediately creates another universe where the measured elements flee to so they are beyond measurement.


With this as a background, consider a recent article in Aeon--written by an astrophysicist--which ends with this stunner: "...solutions include possibilities that overly project mind into matter. Consciousness might, for example, be an example of the emergence of a new entity in the Universe not contained in the laws of particles. There is also the more radical possibility that some rudimentary form of consciousness must be added to the list of things, such as mass or electric charge, that the world is built of."


Holy smokes

Reverie

"Thinking is the source not of truth but of meaning. It flirts with doubt, perplexity and wonder, and because of this it is the permanent enemy not just of ideological dogmatism but of all forms of intellectual complacency and elitism." -- Finn Bowring

 

Britain is home to up to 35,000 "Islamist fanatics," more than any other country in Europe, according to European Union's counter-terrorism coordinator, Gilles de Kerchove.

CNBC reports that the burger chain Shake Shack is planning to an experiment in New York which will not have a traditional cashier’s counter. Instead, “guests will use digital kiosks or their mobile phones to place [and pay for] orders.” Their order will be processed immediately to the kitchen and the guest will receive a text message when their food is ready. Then this line in the reporting article: "Adopting this payment policy in Astor Place will give the company a chance to work out the kinks before it rolls out a $15 minimum wage in these locations."

'And, at least in the 1940s, everyone knew that “the economic problem” was defined by Lionel Robbins as the allocation of scarce resources among alternative ends.  Scarcity, the inability to meet all demands, implies that choices must be made, from which it seems to follow directly that a criterion for “better” and “worse” choices is required.  This criterion emerges as some common denominator that allows the differing demands to be translated into a single dimension, which we [economists] then label as “utility” or “value.”'  

This is Buchanan redefining the basic idea behind economic: The allocation of scarce resources. The concept of scarcity is a difficult one for the Left.

The Spanish government’s “proportionate use of force” in Catalonia was necessary to uphold the rule of law, the European Commission declared on Wednesday. "Proportionate use of force." !!!! Governments always think the gun is comparable to the ballot.

Who is....Richard Thaler?
Arcadian: n and a:
1.	rural, rustic, or pastoral, especially suggesting simple, innocent contentment.
2.	of Arcadia.

Arcadia, in the central Peloponnesus, has no outlet to the sea and is very mountainous, even for Greece. Because the population of ancient Arcadia for the most part lived in small villages in mountain valleys, Arcadia played only a very small role in the tumultuous political life of the Greeks. Arcadia was also poor, and from the early 5th century b.c., its chief export was mercenary soldiers. Theocritus, a Greek poet who flourished about 270 b.c., was the first to set his poems in Arcadia as an ideal rural spot. Arcadian entered English in the 16th century.


This is an insightful observation by Buchanan on Marx: "We must, I think, appreciate the rhetorical genius of Marx in his ability to convert arguments advanced in support of market organisation into what could be made to appear to be support for a particular distributional class, the capitalists. By clever substitution of emotion-laden terminology, the market system became ‘capitalism’, and the search of every persons for his own advantage became the profit-seeking of the greedy capitalists."
This cleverly generally personalized the impersonal market force of individuals.


The steel company at the time of Venezuelan nationalization was producing 4.5 million tons of steel with 5,000 workers. It now has 22,000 workers but it's producing something like 200,000 tons of steel. So they ran those companies to the ground. Aluminum is almost not done any more, when Venezuela was producing about a million tons of aluminum when nationalized.
And, in a similar brain defect, N.Y. Bill de Blasio speaking of the difficulties of his job--now, keep in  mind, this is an educated Western leader--"...what's been hardest is the way our legal system is structured to favor private property. I think people all over this city, of every background, would like to have the city government be able to determine which building goes where, how high it will be, who gets to live in it, what the rent will be. I think there's a socialistic impulse, which I hear every day, in every kind of community, that they would like things to be planned in accordance to their needs. And I would, too. Unfortunately, what stands in the way of that is hundreds of years of history that have elevated property rights and wealth to the point that that's the reality that calls the tune on a lot of development."
de BLasio is no real threat to us. His is less a political statement than a fashion statement. One of the nation's great advantages is that most U.S. citizens know--indeed rely on the fact--the bloviating politician is more than inept, he is insincere. But what would happen if we had the bad luck to run into a well motivated, sincere guy like this one, memorialized on an Irish postage stamp? An Irish stamp!!

(Artist Jim Fitzpatrick who has created an Irish postage stamp using the poster of Che Guevara he created in 1968 entitled 'Viva Che!' based on a photograph by Alberto Korda poses for a picture at his studio in Dublin, Ireland October 11, 2017. REUTERS/Clodagh Kilcoyne)

The unjust discrimination, the denial of opportunity, the suppression, and the cruelty of apartheid and of Jim Crow were not the results of market forces; they were the results of government suppression of market forces.

Golden oldie:

http://steeleydock.blogspot.com/2013/07/the-filter-of-memory-and-motive.html

steeleydock: The Filter of Memory and Motive steeleydock.blogspot.com Suspicion and conspiracy have become a way of life. Today is the anniversary of the crash of TWA Flight 800 which, July 17, 1996, blew up over the Atlantic.

Why did Las Vegas dancer Kijuana Nige post video of what appears to be Dolphins assistant coach Chris Foerster snorting a white powder before going to a meeting? Social injustice. At least that was the explanation she gave on social media early Monday morning. The New York Daily News has the goods: "The white people mad at me like I forced blow down this mans nose and like I recorded it on tha low," Kijuana Nige wrote in now-deleted Facebook post. "No those are his habits and he recorded himself and sent it to me professing his love. So quick to make excuses for him but will roast a minority player over an athem, dog fights, weed, domestic issues etc. But y'all keep saying ALL LIVES MATTER STFU‼️ (Yahoo)
The world has turned a corner when you start getting sardonic Yahoo articles.


When the Pens could not find politics in the hockey rule book and visited the White House, the talk just stopped.

And Sumner on Thaler: "I had thought that the point of behavioral finance was to try to identify areas where the publics' intuition is in some sense "wrong" and design public policies to nudge them in the right direction. In that case, shouldn't we be encouraging price gouging, not discouraging it? Especially with public policy. Perhaps President Trump could "name and shame" companies that run out of essential supplies because of an unwillingness to price gouging. (Yes, not likely, I'm just trying to show the logical implications of behavioral economics.)"

The Cato Institute, the Fraser Institute, and more than 70 think tanks around the world have published the latest edition of Economic Freedom of the World. Canada and the United States are tied for number 11!

The point of democracy is not to discover and implement the so-called “will of the people,” for no such thing exists (as proven, among others, by Kenneth Arrow – who was no libertarian or classical liberal).  Instead, the point of democracy is to give each individual a say in making collective decisions.--Bordeaux 

Richard Thaler has won the Nobel Prize for initiating the behavioral moment in economics. This is an interesting article on it: https://thinkmarkets.wordpress.com/2017/10/09/richard-thalers-nobel-prize/

Richard Thaler’s Nobel Prize thinkmarkets.wordpress.com by Mario Rizzo Richard Thaler has won the Nobel Prize for initiating the behavioral moment in economics. My view of the Nobel Prize in economics is much like Time magazine’s view of its “Person of …

And Henderson comments: Mr. Thaler has yet to apply in a serious way his theory of irrationality to government officials. Their bad decisions are even worse because citizens bear most of the costs. It would be great if Mr. Thaler explored this area more. Someone should nudge him.

Vernon Smith on Adam Smith: Smith saw society as seeking human socio-economic betterment through the control of actions that our common experience leads us to judge as hurtful rather than through collective actions designed to achieve future conjectured benefits. The latter is uncertain and fraught with unintended consequences; moreover, history is littered with examples of grandiose failures. The former relies on natural impulses for individuals and assemblies to pursue betterment, risking only their own resources; this framework led him to oppose slavery, colonialism, empire, mercantilism, and taxation without representation at a time when such views were unpopular.
His policy views derive from his belief that every person’s socio-economic achievements should depend as much as possible on merit and as little as possible on privilege.


I still can't get over the Irish having a Guevara stamp.

 
 AAAAAAaaaaaaaaannnnnddddd.....a graph:

Tolkien

Tolkien was a philologist. He was also an expert on Old and Middle English, and on Old Norse (with a working knowledge of many other languages). Although specimens of his invented languages did not appear in print until the publication of The Lord of the Rings in 1954–5, he had been working on many of them for at least four decades by then.

Following the Indo-European model of a “tree of languages”, all originating from the same proto-language, and branching off to form language families and then individual languages, Tolkien started by inventing base-roots and modifying them to show how his fictional languages developed over time. His two main elvish languages, Quenya and Sindarin, are supposed to have originated from a common “proto-Eldarin”, and then modified on phonetic models based on Finnish and Welsh respectively. For example, the root GALAD- (“tree”) in Primitive Eldarin becomes alda in Quenya and galadh in Sindarin (the dh pronounced as a voiced dental fricative like the Welsh dd, or like “th” in the English words “these”, “there”).


Related words are formed to show phonetic and syntactic links. For example, the Quenya name of the Númenórean King Aldarion translates as “Son of the Trees”, while the people over whom Galadriel and Celeborn rule over are the Galadhrim, the “Tree-people” (a Sindarin name). The reason why Quenya and Sindarin diverged from their common root is part of the internal history of Middle-earth. Thousands of years before the Third Age (when The Lord of the Rings is set) some Elves journeyed to Valinor and later returned to Middle-earth as exiles, e.g. Glorfindel and his company in The Fellowship of the Ring. They are the speakers of Quenya. Other Elves stayed behind in Middle-earth – the Elves of Mirkwood we see in The Hobbit, for examples, and speak Sindarin.


Tolkien displays a remarkable attention to consistency and philological verisimilitude in his invented languages. Most readers will not pick up on the phonological and syntactical minutiae of his different languages and their interrelationships, but relations such as that between Moria (“Black Chasm”) and Mordor (“Land of Darkness”), both deriving from the root MORO-, (“darkness”), do register, if only subconsciously.
(from a recent article by Dimitra Fimi)

Parody

Parody and Satire

Alex Baldwin has been on the cover of Vanity Fair. He has become a Trump caricature on SNL. Everyone knows Tina Fey and her Palin doppelganger.

The first usage of the word parody in English cited in the Oxford English Dictionary is in Ben Jonson, in Every Man in His Humour in 1598: "A Parodie, a parodie! to make it absurder than it was." The next citation comes from John Dryden in 1693, who also appended an explanation, suggesting that the word was in common use, meaning to make fun of or re-create what you are doing.

Vladimir Nabokov made a distinction: "Satire is a lesson, parody is a game."

What we are seeing now as entertainment is a very sly distortion of parody into satire, where something funny is presented as having inherent meaning. Imagine a high school where everyone began to lisp like one student, or limp like one student. Imagine a school where the white 90% of the student body came to class in black face. Parody, yes. Funny, no. The point of attack, the subject of the humor is belittling  in nature, cruel in intent and overwhelming in its volume. And there is no lesson.

MacBird was play in New York in 1967  that was a parody of MacBeth but in that parody was something really very serious:  The suggestion that Lyndon Johnson was responsible for JFK's death.


Sarah Palin never said “I can see Russia from my house.” Tina Fey did. During an interview with Palin in September of 2008, ABC’s Charlie Gibson posed this question: “What insight into Russian actions, particularly during the last couple of weeks, does the proximity of this state give you?” She gave an earnest, but widely ridiculed, response: “They’re our next-door neighbors. And you can actually see Russia, from land, here in Alaska, from an island in Alaska.”
Russia as our neighbors! How absurd! What a hick!


Parody requires some strength in its target; its target must not be weak or vulnerable. You can always tell when parody loses its essence: When it becomes righteous. And relentless. And, most important, when it becomes cruel.

Reverie

The crucial disadvantage of aggression, competitiveness, and skepticism as national characteristics is that these qualities cannot be turned off at five o'clock. -Margaret Halsey, novelist (13 Feb 1910-1997)






From an article in the WSJ, "First, They Came for the Biologists: "Diversity offices, the very places that were supposed to address bigotry and harassment, have been weaponized and repurposed to catch and cull all who disagree.....Despite the benevolent-sounding label, the equity movement is a highly virulent social pathogen, an autoimmune disease of the academy.......The revolution on college campuses, which seeks to eradicate individuals and ideas that are considered unsavory, constitutes a hostile takeover by fringe elements on the extreme left."


Investigators of the Vegas shooting  are "puzzled" by two discoveries: first a charger was found that does not match any of the cellphones that belonged to gunman Stephen Paddock. Second, garage records show that during a period when Paddock's car left the hotel garage, one of his key cards was used to get into his room.


Who is...Jose Altuve?


Why did Las Vegas dancer Kijuana Nige post video of what appears to be Dolphins assistant coach Chris Foerster snorting a white powder before going to a meeting? Social injustice. At least that was the explanation she gave on social media. The New York Daily News has the goods: "The white people mad at me like I forced blow down this mans nose and like I recorded it on tha low," Kijuana Nige wrote in now-deleted Facebook post. "No those are his habits and he recorded himself and sent it to me professing his love. So quick to make excuses for him but will roast a minority player over an athem, dog fights, weed, domestic issues etc. But y'all keep saying ALL LIVES MATTER STFU‼️ (Yahoo)

Illegal drugs account for 0.7% of the death rate; murder, about 0.6%. So what is the big killer? Disease. And why do we emphasize these tiny elements in the nation's health when the diseases could be so readily attacked by better information, diet and behavior? Is it because there is no political/social reward, no self-congratulatory flush?

Jose Altuve is 5'5". He should be the AL MVP. There is an argument that his small size is a hitting advantage.

Has Antifa become the new zika?

From a review of Rethinking Capitalism: "In 1947, the future Nobel Laureate Franco Modigliani wrote that “stasis and routine are the only true danger of a socialist economic system.” A sympathizer with socialism, Modigliani thought nonetheless that there was a potential trade-off between centralized direction of the economy and a society hospitable to innovation. To hear these authors tell it, no such trade-off exists, and most of the innovation that we have in a capitalist society is due to government intervention." And: "Rethinking Capitalism is but the latest example of a notable stream of literature blaming capitalism for not accommodating the desires of its authors as quickly and comprehensively as they would like. Make no mistake, though, it is in its own way an important work. Arguments such as the ones I've explored won't convince an educated layman who comes to the book with no predisposition on the matter. But they are a formidable device to strengthen the convictions of those who already support big government. They would have us believe that the state is good in precisely those circumstances where even most interventionists have typically accepted that it is not: in prompting innovation."

Jeremy Corbin of the Labour Party is apparently a rising star. He is not an academic. (He left the equivalent of high school with two Grade ‘E’ A levels.) He has had a peculiar affinity for the T-shirt heroes of the Left; he has kindness for the IRA, Castro (whom he called “a champion of social justice”), Chávez (“he made massive contributions to Venezuela & a very wide world”), Trotsky, and Islamists. If he ends up as PM he may overshadow Trump in weirdness.

In late February, concerns about a potential nuclear "incident", reportedly in the vicinity of the Arctic circle, emerged when trace amounts of radioactive Iodine-131 of unknown origin were detected in January over large areas in Europe, according to a report by the Institute for Radiological Protection and Nuclear Safety, the French national public expert in nuclear and radiological risks. And while Norway was the first to measure the radioactivity, France was the first to officially inform the public about it.

Today the French nuclear watchdog ISRN reported that another spike in airborne radioactivity has been detected in the air in Western and Central Europe: "Ruthenium-106 has been detected by several European networks involved in the monitoring of atmospheric radioactive contamination, at levels of a few milliBecquerels per cubic meter of air." According to IRSN calculations, based on the concentration levels measured in several European countries and on the meteorological conditions of the last few days, the contaminated air could have been generated from southern regions of Ural or located close to those.

Vincent of Beauvais was a thirteenth-century Dominican friar who wrote “The Great Mirror,” an eighty-book compilation that attempted to summarize all practical and scholarly knowledge accrued up to that time, along with all history, beginning, like Genesis, with God and the creation of the world.

Teresa Ghilarducci is a labor economist at The New School, specializing in retirement security. Here’s what she told the Washington Post last month: “There is no part of the country where the majority of middle-class older workers have adequate retirement savings to maintain their standard of living in their retirement.” And this horrifying bar graph:

Image: Washington Post

This is an insightful observation by Buchanan on Marx: We must, I think, appreciate the rhetorical genius of Marx in his ability to convert arguments advanced in support of market organisation into what could be made to appear to be support for a particular distributional class, the capitalists. By clever substitution of emotion-laden terminology, the market system became ‘capitalism’, and the search of every persons for his own advantage became the profit-seeking of the greedy capitalists. This rhetorical genius, coupled with totally erroneous economic analysis embedded into pseudo-scientific jargon about the laws of history, was highly successful in elevating the distributional issue to centre stage, to the relative neglect of the allocational and growth elements that were central in the classical teachings. And, further, the whole Marxian- socialist challenge was introduced into the political arena in the middle of the post-Hegelian epoch, during which the state was conceptualised only in a romantic vision completely divorced from the observable reality of politics.

Golden oldie:
http://steeleydock.blogspot.com/2013/07/cab-thoughts-72413.html

Cab Thoughts 7/24/13 steeleydock.blogspot.com Trying to determine what is going on in the world by reading newspapers is like trying to tell the time by watching the second hand of a c...

In the Gospel, Christ updates the landowner and the vineyard parable in Isaiah. The New Testament is usually seen as a softening and broadening of the Old Testament; not so in this instance.


Boris Becker may have lost a substantial portion of his roughly €50 million fortune in part because of questionable investments in the Nigerian oil industry.

According to the Times, Becker is left with assets of only €540,000 (£481,483), based on reports in the German press. The money he earned on the court was spent on a divorce, an extravagant lifestyle, failed business projects and settling unpaid tax bills. He now works as a commentator for the BBC and other media. Details of Becker’s financial predicament are included in a report by the accountants appointed to administer his affairs after he was declared bankrupt, when he failed to repay a loan to the London private bankers Arbuthnot Latham & Co. His debts were said to include €38.4 million owed to Hans-Dieter Cleven, a Swiss businessman and his long-term business adviser.

Cato the Censor, in ancient Rome, moved a nation to undertake the final conquest of its rival, Carthage, by tacking on ‘Carthago delenda est‘ — ‘Carthage must be destroyed’ — to every public statement and private encounter. So the major concern of the day--at least Cato's--was prominent in every public official act.
So what statement today should be so applied?

Tim Murphy has a perfect 100% score with National Right to Life, having voted with the organization on five key pieces of legislation, including the "No Taxpayer Funding for Abortions Act." We would be better served governed at random.

AAAAaaaannnnnddddd.....something: