(Un)Paving Our Way To The Future

Cutting Our Losses and Moving On

by James H. Kunstler

You can’t overstate the baleful effects for Americans of living in the tortured landscapes and townscapes we created for ourselves in the past century. This fiasco of cartoon suburbia, overgrown metroplexes, trashed small cities and abandoned small towns, and the gruesome connective tissue of roadways, commercial smarm, and free parking is the toxic medium of everyday life in this country. Its corrosive omnipresence induces a general failure of conscious awareness that it works implacably at every moment to diminish our lives. It is both the expression of our collapsed values and a self-reinforcing malady collapsing our values further. The worse it gets, the worse we become.

The citizens who do recognize their own discomfort in this geography of nowhere generally articulate it as a response to “ugliness.” This is only part of the story. The effects actually run much deeper. The aggressive and immersive ugliness of the built landscape is entropy made visible. It is composed of elements that move us in the direction of death, and the apprehension of this dynamic is what really makes people uncomfortable. It spreads a vacuum of lost meaning and purpose wherever it reaches. It is worse than nothing, worse than if it had never existed. As such, it qualifies under St. Augustine’s conception of “evil” in the sense that it represents antagonism to the forces of life.

We find ourselves now in a strange slough of history. Circumstances gathering in the home economics of mankind ought to inform us that we can’t keep living this way and need to make plans for living differently. But our sunk costs in this infrastructure for daily life with no future prevent us from making better choices. At least for the moment. In large part this is because the “development” of all this ghastly crap — the vinyl-and-strandboard housing subdivisions, the highway strips, malls, and “lifestyle centers,” the “Darth Vader” office parks, the infinity of asphalt pavements — became, for a while, our replacement for an economy of ecological sanity. The housing bubble was all about building more stuff with no future, and that is why the attempt to re-start it is evil.

Sooner rather than later we’ll have to make better choices. We’ll have to redesign the human habitat in America because our current environs will become uninhabitable. The means and modes for doing this are already understood. They do not require heroic “innovation” or great leaps of “new technology.” Mostly they require a decent respect for easily referenced history and a readjustment of our values in the general direction of promoting life over death. This means for accomplishing this will be the subject of Part II of this essay, but it is necessary to review a pathology report of the damage done.

Launching Nirvana

I have a new theory of history: things happen in human affairs because they seem like a good idea at the time. This helps explain events that otherwise defy understanding, for example the causes of the First World War. England, France, Russia, Germany, and Italy joined that war because it seemed like a good idea at the time, namely August of 1914. There hadn’t been a real good dust-up on the continent since Waterloo in 1814. Old grievances were stewing. Empires were both rising and falling, contracting and reaching out. The “players” seemed to go into the war thinking it would be a short,  redemptive, and rather glorious adventure, complete with cavalry charges and evenings in ballrooms. The “deciders” failed to take into account the effects of newly mechanized warfare. The result was the staggering industrial slaughter of the trenches. Poison gas attacks did not inspire picturesque heroism. And what started the whole thing? Ostensibly the assassination of an unpopular Hapsburg prince in Serbia. Was Franz Ferdinand an important figure? Not really. Was Austria a threat to France and England? It was in steep decline, a sclerotic empire held together with whipped cream and waltz music. Did Russia really care about little Serbia? Was Germany insane to attack on two fronts? Starting the fight seemed like a good idea at the time — and then, of course, the unintended consequences bit back like a mad dog from hell.

Inflation, Shortages, and Social Democracy in Venezuela

Venezuela’s economic policy is proving that economic intervention, leads to complete socialism and economic destruction

by Matt McCaffrey and Carmen Dorobat

The economic turmoil in Venezuela has received increasing international media attention over the past few months. In September, the toilet paper shortage (which followed food shortages and electricity blackouts) resulted in the “temporary occupation” of the Paper Manufacturing Company, as armed troops were sent to ensure the “fair distribution” of available stocks. Similar action occurred a few days ago against electronics stores: President Nicolás Maduro accused electronics vendors of price-gouging, and jailed them with the warning that “this is just the start of what I’m going to do to protect the Venezuelan people.”

Earlier this month, in another attempt to ensure “happiness for all people,” Maduro began to hand out Christmas bonuses, in preparation for the coming elections in December. But political campaigning is not the only reason for the government’s open-handedness. The annual inflation rate in Venezuela has been rapidly rising in recent months, and has now reached a staggering 54 percent (not accounting for possible under-estimations). Although not yet officially in hyperinflation, monetary expansion is pushing Venezuela toward the brink.

In such an environment, paychecks need to be distributed quickly, before prices have time to rise; hence, early bonuses. This kind of policy is nothing new in economic history: Venezuela’s hyperinflationary episode is unfolding in much the same way Germany’s did nearly a century ago.

Consequently, Venezuela’s economic policy is proving to be another example of Ludwig von Mises’s argument that economic intervention, if left unchecked, leads to complete socialism. The ever-expanding price controls testify to the fact that governments always search for new scapegoats in the market instead of admitting the failure of their own policies, and that it is always easier to increase government control than reduce it.

Maduro clearly knows the ropes when it comes to anti-market propaganda; like his predecessor, Hugo Chávez, he has placed blame for soaring prices on speculators and the “parasitic bourgeoisie.” But no witch-hunt for “price-gougers” will stop the eventual collapse of the economy that will result from further monetary expansion combined with crippling price controls. Inevitably, as Mises argued, “once public opinion is convinced that the increase in the quantity of money will continue and never come to an end, and that consequently the prices of all commodities and services will not cease to rise, everybody becomes eager to buy as much as possible and to restrict his cash holding to a minimum.”

Is France the New Italy?

With or without new monetary stimulus, though, France needs reform

By Bloomberg

If U.S. President Barack Obama thinks he’s having a difficult autumn, then maybe he should consider the season French President Francois Hollande is experiencing. Paris in springtime may have been lovely as usual, but fall has been horrible.

The French unemployment rate stands at 11 percent. After growing tepidly in the second quarter, the economy shrank again in the third. Standard and Poor’s just downgraded the government’s debt -- for the second time in less than two years. Hollande’s Socialist administration faces protests over taxes and burdensome regulation not just from business leaders, as you might expect, but also from farmers, shopkeepers, teachers, truck drivers and soccer players.

The European Commission recently called on the government to speed up economic reform. Speaking from its conveniently located Paris headquarters, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development restated the message in a detailed report issued last week: “In recent years, a significant adjustment has been under way in several European countries that have accelerated the introduction of essential reforms. This adjustment hasn’t yet happened in France.”

The White House is concerned that some recent polls have shown Obama’s approval rating dropping below 40 percent. For Hollande, who was elected only last year, it stands at 15 percent.

Even discounting for the French flair for umbrage, the backlash against Hollande is extraordinary. The economy -- the second-biggest in the euro area after Germany -- is in deep trouble, and the government looks helpless. Seemingly intractable problems and a lack of effective leadership threaten to turn France into Europe’s new Italy.

The New York Times versus the New York Times

Sometimes, the New York Times is not that bad

by David Henderson

I have known Hoover colleague, economist Paul Gregory, for about 5 years, and gotten to know him better in the last 3. An expert on Russia's economy and increasingly on China's economy, he has written two articles on those topics for Econlib. I had no idea, until reading this New York Times article, "Lee Harvey Oswald Was My Friend," earlier this month, that he had known Lee Harvey Oswald, the Communist ex-Marine who murdered John F. Kennedy. The whole piece is fascinating. Here are three paragraphs that make the case for Oswald's motivation and why Gregory finds it implausible that someone would conspire with Oswald:

On the Saturday morning after Kennedy was killed, I was sitting in my small apartment in Norman when a Secret Service agent and the local chief of police arrived and took me some 20 miles down I-35 to Oklahoma City for questioning. As we drove, I began telling them about how I met Oswald, the evenings driving around Fort Worth, the Dallas Russians and how a college kid got caught up with an accused assassin. After they escorted me into a nondescript conference room in a downtown building, the agents homed in on the question of the day, which, of course, has lingered over the past 50 years: Did I think Oswald worked alone or was part of a larger conspiracy? I told them simply that, if I were organizing a conspiracy, he would have been the last person I would recruit. He was too difficult and unreliable.

Gross Domestic Freebie

The gap between what’s actually happening in the economy and what the statistics are measuring is getting wider than ever before

BY JAMES SUROWIECKI

Titter’s recent I.P.O. bonanza gave us all some striking numbers to consider. There’s the company’s valuation: an astounding twenty-four billion dollars. And its revenue: just five hundred and thirty-five million. It has more than two hundred and thirty million active users, and a hundred million of them use the service daily. They collectively send roughly half a billion tweets every day. And then there’s the starkest number of all: zero. That’s the price that Twitter charges people to use its technology. Since the company was founded, ordinary users have sent more than three hundred billion tweets. In exchange, they have paid Twitter no dollars and no cents.

Ever since Netscape made the decision to give away its browser, free has been more the rule online than the exception. And even though traditional media companies have been erecting paywalls to guard revenue, a huge chunk of the time we spend online is spent consuming stuff that we don’t pay for. Economically, this makes for an odd situation: digital goods and services are everywhere you look, but their impact is hard to see in economic statistics.

Our main yardstick for the health of the economy is G.D.P. growth, a concept devised in the nineteen-thirties by the economist Simon Kuznets. If it’s rising briskly, we know that the economy is doing well. If not, we know it’s time to worry. The basic assumption is simple: the more stuff we’re producing for sale, the better off we are. In the industrial age, this was a reasonable assumption, but in the digital economy that picture gets a lot fuzzier, since so much of what’s being produced is available free. You may think that Wikipedia, Twitter, Snapchat, Google Maps, and so on are valuable. But, as far as G.D.P. is concerned, they barely exist. The M.I.T. economist Erik Brynjolfsson points out that, according to government statistics, the “information sector” of the economy—which includes publishing, software, data services, and telecom—has barely grown since the late eighties, even though we’ve seen an explosion in the amount of information and data that individuals and businesses consume. “That just feels totally wrong,” he told me.

Brynjolfsson is the co-author, with Andrew McAfee, of the forthcoming book “The Second Machine Age,” which examines how digitization is remaking the economy. “We’re underestimating the value of the part of the economy that’s free,” he said. “As digital goods make up a bigger share of economic activity, that means we’re likely getting a distorted picture of the economy as a whole.” The issue is that, as Kuznets himself acknowledged, “the welfare of a nation . . . can scarcely be inferred from a measure of national income.” For instance, most Web sites are built with free, open-source applications. This makes running a site cheap, which has all sorts of benefits in terms of welfare, but G.D.P. ends up lower than it would be if everyone had to pay for Microsoft’s server software. Digital innovation can even shrink G.D.P.: Skype has reduced the amount of money that people spend on international calls, and free smartphone apps are replacing stand-alone devices that once generated billions in sales. The G.P.S. company Garmin was once one of the fastest-growing companies in the U.S. Thanks to Google and Apple Maps, Garmin’s sales have taken a severe hit, but consumers, who now have access to good directions at no cost, are certainly better off.

New technologies have always driven out old ones, but it used to be that they would enter the market economy, and thus boost G.D.P.—as when the internal-combustion engine replaced the horse. Digitization is distinctive because much of the value it creates for consumers never becomes part of the economy that G.D.P. measures. That makes the gap between what’s actually happening in the economy and what the statistics are measuring wider than ever before.

Figuring out the invisible value created by the Internet is no easy task. One strategy that economists have used is to measure how much time we spend online (on the assumption that time is money). A recent study by Brynjolfsson and Joo Hee Oh concluded that in 2011 the value of free goods on the Internet was hundreds of billions of dollars, and that it was increasing at a rate of more than forty billion dollars annually. Another study, by the economist Michael Mandel, contended that the government had underestimated the value of data services (mobile apps and the like) by some three hundred billion dollars a year. These are rough estimates, but they give a sense of how much better off the digital economy has made us. 

A Great Society Grounded in Private Property Rights and Bourgeois Dignity

And somewhat less of a Commonwealth

  

In this delightful, humorous, and spot-on correct short video from Reason, we learn of the true source of America’s bounty: private property rights (to which I would add also – influenced as I am by Deirdre McCloskey – Americans’ cultural embrace, by and large, of bourgeois dignity).

America’s Coastal Royalty

The real national divide isn’t between red and blue states

By  Victor Davis Hanson

The densely populated coastal corridors from Boston to Washington and from San Diego to Berkeley are where most of America’s big decisions are made. 

They remind us of two quite different Americas: one country along these coasts and everything else in between. Those in Boston, New York, and Washington determine how our government works; what sort of news, books, art, and fashion we should consume; and whether our money and investments are worth anything.

The Pacific corridor is just as influential, but in a hipper, cooler fashion. Whether America suffers through another zombie film or one more Lady Gaga video or Kanye West’s latest soft-porn rhyme is determined by Hollywood — mostly by executives who live in the la-la land of the thin Pacific strip from Malibu to Palos Verdes.

The next smart phone or search engine 5.0 will arise from the minds of tech geeks who pay $2,000 a month for studio apartments and drive BMWs in Menlo Park, Palo Alto, or Mountain View.

The road to riches and influence, we are told, lies in being branded with a degree from a coastal-elite campus like Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, or Berkeley. How well a Yale professor teaches an 18-year-old in a class on American history does not matter as much as the fact that the professor helps to stamp the student with the Ivy League logo. That mark is the lifelong golden key that is supposed to unlock the door to coastal privilege.

Fly over or drive across the United States, and the spatial absurdity of this rather narrow coastal monopoly is immediately apparent to the naked eye. Outside of these power corridors, our vast country appears pretty empty. The nation’s muscles that produce our oil, gas, food, lumber, minerals, and manufactured goods work unnoticed in this sparsely settled fly-over expanse.

People rise each morning in San Francisco and New York and count on plentiful food, fuel, and power. They expect service in elevators and limos that are mostly made elsewhere by people of the sort they seldom see and don’t really know — other than to influence through a cable-news show, a new rap song, the next federal health-care mandate, or more phone apps.

In California, whether farms receive contracted irrigation water, whether a billion board feet of burned timber will be salvaged from the recent Sierra Nevada forest fires, whether a high-speed-rail project obliterates thousands of acres of ancestral farms, whether gas will be fracked, or whether granite should be mined to make tony kitchen counters is all determined largely by coastal elites who take these plentiful resources for granted. Rarely, however, do they see how their own necessities are procured. Instead, they feel deeply ambivalent about the grubbier people and culture that made them.

In Kansas or Utah, people do not pay $1,000 per square foot for their homes as they do on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. They do not gossip with the people who write their tax laws, as is common in the Georgetown area of Washington. Those in the empty northern third of California do not see Facebook or Oracle founders at the local Starbucks any more than they bump into the Kardashians at a hip bistro.

The problem is not just that the coasts determine how everyone else is to lead their lives, but that those living in our elite corridors have no idea about how life is lived just a short distance away in the interior — much less about the sometimes tragic consequences of their own therapeutic ideology on the distant, less influential majority.

In a fantasy world, I would move Washington, D.C., to Kansas City, Mo. That transfer would not only make the capital more accessible to the American people and equalize travel requirements for our legislators, but also expose an out-of-touch government to a reality outside its Beltway.

I would transfer the United Nations to Salt Lake City, where foreign diplomats would live in a different sort of cocoon.

I would ask billionaires like Bill Gates, Warren Buffet, and the Koch Brothers to endow with their riches a few Midwestern or Southern universities. Perhaps we could create a new Ivy League in the nation’s center.

I would suggest to Facebook and Apple that they relocate operations to North Dakota to expose their geeky entrepreneurs to those who drive trucks and plow snow. Who knows — they might be able to afford a house, get married before 35, and have three rather than zero kids.

America is said to be divided by red and blue states, rich and poor, white and non-white, Christian and non-Christian, old and new.

I think the real divide is between those who make our decisions on the coasts and the anonymous others who live with the consequences somewhere else. 

None Dare Call It Fascism

It is happening right now

By John C. Goodman

Here is something that is odd.

For the past six years President Obama and the Democrats in Congress have waged a relentless attack on the health insurance industry. In the most recent iteration, the president assures us he is not responsible for the wave of health insurance policy cancellations. The insurance companies are.

Okay, so where is the other side?

When is the last time you saw an insurance industry executive interviewed on a TV talk show, presenting the industry’s answer to all these attacks? You can’t remember seeing that? I can’t either.

Well what about the health insurance industry trade groups, the folks who are supposed to explain to Congress and the general public the industry’s position? When is the last time you saw one of those representatives on TV? Can’t remember? Nor can I.

Okay, let’s try one more option. When is the last time you saw someone from a university or independent think tank giving the health insurance industry side of all the complaints that are being slung their way? Don’t bother responding. We both know that answer as well.

I submit that this is not a small matter.

A free society requires the free flow of information. In any public policy dispute, if only one side is heard from, we are likely to get further and further away from the truth. The attackers will find there is no penalty for getting minor facts wrong or shading the truth. That will embolden them to make more serious errors, eventually resorting to downright lying. If the only entity providing any push back is the Washington Post fact checker, we are in real trouble. Roughly 99.99% of the population doesn’t read the Washington Post.

But what threatens the foundations of a free society most of all is when it is the government (and its allies in the private sector) who are doing the attacking, and when the reason there is no response is that the victims of the attacks have been threatened and bullied into silence.

I believe that is where we are today ? not just with respect to health insurance, but with respect to health care generally. I’m afraid other industries are not far behind.

During the debate leading up to the passage of the Affordable Care Act, I talked to a number of CEOs of large health insurance companies. I frequently heard such comments as, “Don’t tell anyone I told you this” or, “If you use this information, don’t mention my name” and even, “Don’t tell anyone that we ever had this conversation.”

As far as I can tell, things have gotten worse. In fact I don’t know any employee of any health insurance company that is willing to go on the record with any statement that is critical of the Affordable Care Act.

Now it’s possible that my experience is unique. And I know that there are many readers of this blog who also interact with folks in the industry. So if I’m wrong about this, please correct me in the comments.

Slouching Towards Sharia

At what point will the Darwinian survival instinct take hold?

by Richard Butrick 

The post WW1-2 attack on the authoritarian institutions of Western Civilization launched by The Frankfurt School created the opening and the intellectual foundation for Political Correctness - or so the story goes.

Horkheimer, Adorno, Marcuse and The Frankfurt School

Their targets?  The evil institutions that brought us World War I-II. Their weapon? Critical Theory. Their base of operations? Academe. The lasting effect was to provide a vacuum or an opening for the legitimization of a new metric of good and evil  - a  “transvaluation of values” -  which is now enshrined in the PC-think which dominates our culture today.

Critical theory was the brain child of Max Horkheimer, the founder of the Frankfurt School. The three leaders of the Frankfurt School (FS) of main interest here are Horkheimer, Ardorno and Marcuse. All three started out as Marxists of one stripe or another and all three became influenced by the newly hatched “sciences” of Psychology and Sociology. Their writing is a wondrous overblown admixture of techno-babble from  Marx, Freud and Weber strung together with post-Hegelian philosophical patois. Shall we say dense? Shall we say a sophomoric affinity for the polysyllabic? Shall we say a sophomoric affinity for hyperbolic juxtaposition (“Indelible in resistance to the fungible world“, “in semblance nonsemblance is promised“)?

Here is a key passage from Horkheimer:

Although most people never overcome the habit of berating the world for their difficulties, those who are too weak to make a stand against reality have no choice but to obliterate themselves by identifying with it. They are never rationally reconciled to civilization. Instead, they bow to it, secretly accepting the identity of reason and domination, of civilization and the ideal, however much they may shrug their shoulders. Well-informed cynicism is only another mode of conformity. These people willingly embrace or force themselves to accept the rule of the stronger as the eternal norm. Their whole life is a continuous effort to suppress and abase nature, inwardly or outwardly, and to identify themselves with its more powerful surrogates—the race, fatherland, leader, cliques, and tradition. For them, all these words mean the same thing—the irresistible reality that must be honored and obeyed. However, their own natural impulses, those antagonistic to the various demands of civilization, lead a devious undercover life within them.

Let me see now if I get this. Those of us who are too weak to stand up against reality? What do we do? We honor and obey the irresistible reality of more powerful surrogates? I just thought we were ducking reality but evidently we are identifying with “the” irresistible reality? Not only that, we secretly accept the identity of reason with domination! No wonder we obliterate ourselves by identifying with “it” and lead a devious undercover life.

Now check out this valiant attempt to explain critical theory. It is from Wikipedia but I could just as well taken the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Here it is:

Obamacare Will Follow the Fate of Prohibition

"Unintended Consequences" will be written on the tombstone of Obamacare

by Norman Berdichevsky

It may take as long, but Obamacare will certainly follow the ignominious example of Prohibition (the notorious 18th amendment that was the law of the land from 1920 to 1933) and ultimately be rescinded whether by simple legislative majorities in Congress with the approval of a sitting President or the much longer and demanding route of a constitutional amendment (the 21st which simply repealed the 18th).

Like Prohibition, Obamacare is a massive intrusion into the private lives of ordinary citizens with respect to the decisions they had always deemed their own responsibility in the marketplace. Like Prohibition, all sorts of pseudo-moral arguments about providing “care” for everyone, regardless where (if anywhere at all) on their list of priorities. Like Prohibition, it was exploited by politicians who argued that it was a step to protect the most innocent, defenseless segment of the population – women, the disabled, the aged, infirmed and very young.

This goes against the grain of many on today’s political scene who, when recalling Prohibition, cast it in terms of a move made by the most conservative elements in society attempting to impose their religious or moral values on those citizens who had other and more “liberal” social mores. This was a screen as is Obamacare today, hiding the triumph of massive federal power over individual liberties and states’ rights. Prior to 1920, the prohibition of the manufacture, sale and transport of alcoholic beverages had only been regulated at the county or state level.

The enforcement of Prohibition was beyond the capabilities of the Federal government and led to widespread flouting of the law and a massive “unintended” increase in violent crime, smuggling and the rampant corruption of public officials and the police forces of many major American cities. Although the  arguments used by some conservative and very naïve clerical circles made it initially appear that support for Prohibition came from the conservative Right and “traditionalists," it was criminal organizations, notably the organized Mafia and corrupt politicians working hand in glove through the Democrat Party in big city machines that protected racketeering and the ill-gotten gains of the bootleggers and smugglers. By 1925, in New York City alone, there were anywhere from 30,000 to 100,000 speakeasy clubs. Only when the Democrats finally understood that Prohibition was costing them votes, did they call for its repeal.

Prohibition lost its advocates one by one but it still took the hard and very long route of a constitutional amendment to alter the law. Obamacare’s victory in the Supreme Court promises that it too will resist all attempts to get rid of it because of the legal precedent. What had been a local issue in many “dry counties” where fundamentalist protestant sects predominated was elevated into a nationwide movement at the end of the 19^th century largely by what we would call the LEFT.

Who originally supported Prohibition and why it reveals much the same “logic” as the one behind Obamacare, the protection of the weak and the cries for social justice. The leading advocate on the national scene arguing for prohibition was the American Temperance Society (ATS). By 1845, a decade after its founding, the ATS had reached 1.5 million members. Predictably, women constituted from 35% to a majority of 60% of membership in local chapters. They argued from the very beginning that alcohol and saloons were intimately connected with prostitution and violence against women. Just as the Democrats cast their approach to health care with accusations that anyone opposed were mean spirited and lacking in compassion, they framed their arguments over prohibition in the same way as many in the clergy arguing that failing to ban alcoholic beverages would leave women and children unprotected.

When there was no going home

For the Pilgrims "going home" wasn't an option

by Jeff Jacoby

Thanksgiving is the quintessential American holiday. Nearly four centuries have passed since that first celebration in 1621, when, as Edward Winslow wrote in a letter to a friend back in England, the settlers of Plymouth Colony paused to "rejoice together after we had gathered the fruit of our labors" and "for three days … entertained and feasted" with 90 of their Wampanoag neighbors. What Thanksgiving was at the outset — part joyful harvest festival, part expression of prayerful gratitude, part occasion for games and reunions — it remains recognizably to this day.

The story of that first Thanksgiving is also a story of immigrants, whose journey to the New World prefigured tens of millions of immigrant stories that followed. There is irony in the fact that Thanksgiving today is so bound up with "going home," as the crowded highways and packed airports of the long holiday weekend attest. For the Pilgrims "going home" wasn't an option. When they left Europe the year before, they left for good. As they parted from friends and familiar surroundings, recalled Plymouth's governor William Bradford, "what sighs and sobs and prayers did sound amongst them; what tears did gush from every eye."

Well into the 19^th century, most immigrants to America knew there would be no turning back. Before telephones, air travel, and the internet revolutionized modern society, immigration typically meant not only transplanting yourself to a new home, but severing your links with the old. Once that boat to America sailed, you left behind people and places and connections you had known your whole life, yet would likely never see again.

The United States, we glibly tell ourselves, is a nation of immigrants, who have transformed America in the process of becoming American. Tens of millions of us have foreign-born loved ones, colleagues, neighbors, teachers. I grew up in Cleveland, where it was common to hear English spoken with Eastern European accents. Cleveland once had the world's second-largest Hungarian population and more Slovaks than any city on earth. I'm sure it never occurred to me how astonishing this was.

If you're a US native, it's so easy to take it for granted that waves of people from other lands uproot themselves to come here. Yet try to imagine the opposite: throngs of US citizens forsaking life in America in order to start anew in Hungary or Slovakia (or Ireland or Vietnam or Nigeria). Try to imagine yourself among them, undergoing such dislocation.

Recently I have been reading Becoming Americans, a sweeping collection of immigrant writing that conveys the experience of coming to America through the firsthand accounts of immigrants reaching back to 1623. Published by the Library of America, the anthology was edited by Amherst College professor Ilan Stavans, a Mexican Jew of Polish-Ukrainian ancestry who immigrated to America in 1985. He describes the book as his "love letter to the United States," but as many of the selections make clear, becoming Americans could be a wrenching ordeal.

Destructive Preservation

What the saving of their souls was for the ancients, saving of electricity has become for the moderns

by Theodore Dalrymple 

The one thing that many environmentalists seem not to care about is the environment. By this I mean its visual appearance. They would happily empty any landscape or any city of beauty so that the planet might survive. Like the village in Vietnam, it has become necessary to destroy the world in order to save it. And, of course, destruction of beauty has the additional advantage of being socially just: for if everyone cannot live in beautiful surroundings, why should anyone do so? Since it is far easier to create ugliness than to create beauty, equality is to be reached by the former rather than by the latter. 

The indifference of environmentalists to aesthetic considerations was illustrated by a friend, who kindly forwarded to me a brochure about a fully ecological house, erected (or assembled, since it was pre-fabricated) in the centre of Paris in front of Haussmann-style buildings. Needless to say, it completely destroyed the harmony of the surrounding townscape. 

It looked like a three-dimensional Mondrian, all boxes and bright colours. Inside, it was more a laboratory than a home, the kind of sterile environment necessary for in vitro fertilisation. However much it might have been heated by the sun, it lacked warmth. It was a proper place for androids, not for humans.

The brochure claimed many advantages for it, not the least of which was that the residents could monitor their energy consumption electronically hour by hour, minute by minute, in order to minimise it. Thus they could ensure that they never forgot their own impact on the environment, and were never totally free of anxiety about it. What the saving of their souls was for the ancients, saving of electricity has become for the moderns. 

No consideration was given in the brochure to such questions as the harmonisation of new houses with the pre-existing townscape or landscape, or how these cheap and gaudy constructions would look after a few years of wear and tear; but the smallness of the houses was vaunted as an enormous social advantage. There simply was not enough room, not enough land area, said the brochure, for everyone to occupy as much space as he wanted. 

This was an odd claim, because the house was by no means as efficient in concentrating the population as – the very Haussmann-style buildings in the front of which it was assembled, which manage so marvellously to combine elegance, grandeur, human scale and density of population, and which are now so desired and desirable as places to live that they have become too expensive to buy for anyone who does not already own part of one. Oddly enough, no one has ever suggested building as Haussmann did, albeit with such energy-saving devices as ingenuity might supply. The past is the one thing we don’t want to learn from, especially if we are architects. 

To go from the sublime to the ridiculous, I recently saw an example of environmentalist brutalism in a city not quite as famed as Paris for its beauty, namely Liverpool. Actually, Liverpool was once, at least in parts, a rather grand city, other parts of it being hideous beyond description, of course. It was once one of the largest entrepots and passenger ports in the world; the proceeds of the slave trade in the eighteenth century had been invested in elegant Georgian buildings and the proceeds of the hugely expanded trade of the Victorian and Edwardian eras in grandiloquent municipal buildings. 

The Love Potion of Socialized Medicine

Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea  

by Bryan Caplan

During my flight to Italy, I read Barbara Demick's outstanding Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea cover to cover. Even if you've studied Communism for decades, you'll be appalled: In the 90s, North Korea basically moved from total state control over the economy to having no economy at all. The government stopped paying salaries and stocking the stores - without relaxing the near-prohibition on all private sector activities. For most, the only way to obey the law was to sit still until you died of hunger. The exiles Demick interviewed, starved and imprisoned, were the lucky ones. All had friends and family who perished in this absurdist hell.

Yet after all their suffering, North Korean exiles who made it to South Korea still had good things to say about their homeland. The most striking:

There were things she [Mrs. Song] missed about North Korea - the camaraderie among neighbors; the free health care before the system broke down.

Frankly, this makes about as much sense as ex-cons pining for their prison hospital. The North Korean government turns a country into a prison, starves millions to death, and yet escapees still think "free health care" is worth mentioning? What's wrong with people? 

To me, this reveals a lot about the world-wide appeal of government-run health care. Socialized medicine is like a love potion. The government can treat you like dirt, but as long as it slips a little of this potion into your drink, you'll probably think "How wonderful - the government loves me so much that it takes care of me whenever I'm sick without asking for a thing in return." And who would be vile enough not to love such a government back?

My point: Whatever you think about socialized medicine, it's not that great. It's not remotely enough to, say, redeem North Korea. The fact that anyone would imagine otherwise reveals a strong human tendency to judge socialized medicine like a bad boyfriend - with our hearts instead of our heads. When someone says, "Dump him - he's just not good for you!" we really ought to calm down and listen.

Best of the Worst - What Price for Democracy

Majority rule ensures that collective choice trumps individual choice

by Anthony de Jasay*

For the last twenty years or so, the European economy looked tired, sluggish, beset by chronic unemployment while straining such muscle as it had to spread the "social" safety net ever wider, ever higher. At the same time, the American economy showed vigorous growth, resilience and innate energy. Europe was by and large social democrat, America unrepentantly capitalist. Opinions were deeply divided about the merits of each, mostly because they sprang from the ineradicable gut feelings of each side. Lately, however, the clean cut between the two systems has become more and more blurred. America has acquired a hugely expensive public health care system, an interventionist monetary policy to make Keynes blush, an inexorably rising deficit that made the Director of the Budget throw down his job in despair, a solid complicity between the labour unions, the tort lawyers and the administration, and an economy that seems unable to respond to doping and is crawling along as sluggishly as the European one. Perhaps a little too soon, some observers are now saying that the US have "Europeanised" themselves; both continents have become democratic in the same sense.

Valuation and Description

Any language worth the name makes a clear enough separation between words that evaluate and words that simply describe. Consider pairs of words that perform the former job and pairs that do the latter. In the first set, you find such pairs of opposites as "good-bad", "handsome-ugly", "nice-nasty", "right-wrong", "true-false" and "just-unjust". In each pair, the first word is indisputably, self-evidently superior and preferable to the second. It simple makes no sense to say that bad is better than good that nasty more agreeable than nice nor that false is worthy of more respect than true. In the second set of words, you find such pairs as "like-unlike", "great-small", "many-few", "long-short", "many-few", "equal-unequal". The first word in each pair is no more valuable, desirable or commendable than the second. They both describe; any ranking we give them comes from some particular context in which "long" is preferable to "short" or vice versa. "Equal-unequal" is such a pair of words, though you would not believe it from listening to everyday political rhetoric. So is "democratic-undemocratic".

The Maximin Rule

Winston Churchill is supposed to have said that democracy is the worst political system except for all the others.1 This is a good enough aphorism, but it is rather poor decision theory. It is hardly an ideal of rationality to adopt it as a rule.

There is a great multitude of possible political systems from theocracy to technocracy, feudalism to plutocracy, hereditary monarchy to populist mob rule, dictatorship of the few to democracy. Each system is capable of producing a range of good and bad outcomes, with probabilities we can only guess. It is no use saying that we refuse to guess at such uncertain outcomes; for whether we have guessed or not, or guessed right or not, the outcomes arrive just the same, and it is better to at least try and anticipate them even if we cannot be confident to guess right, than give up hope and not try at all. Perhaps needless to say, the outcomes a given political system produces depend not only on the system itself, but on the kind of people and the kind of historical conjuncture to which it is applied.

By opting for a political system, we opt for what game theorists would call a "strategy" in a game we play "against" destiny. Each strategy is geared to produce one out of a range of outcomes from very good to very bad. Rationality, understood as being true to one's likes and dislikes, requires us to opt for the strategy that offers the best combination of outcomes weighted by their probabilities.

Expect Cashless Society, Not Hyperinflation

Perhaps that's why art, diamonds, and Bitcoins are going through the roof?

By Martin Armstrong

One of the greatest failed predictions over the last few years has been that the Fed’s massive monetary stimulus would result in runaway hyperinflation. Certainly we can debate whether the official consumer price index is artificially lower than what reality would suggest, but it's clear current U.S. inflation is nowhere near levels of hyperinflation and has actually been trending lower over the past two years as deflationary trends persist, in spite of the Fed’s best efforts to the contrary.

So how is it that the Fed can create all this money and not create inflation? Martin Armstrong, who has long criticized calls for hyperinflation or even high inflation in the U.S., said one of the main reasons is because the U.S. dollar is the global reserve currency.

“Dollars are sloshing around the entire world, not just our global economy. And the idea that if you just increase the money supply you’ll create inflation, that’s really very old-school. That might apply to Bangladesh…but it doesn’t apply when the currency is actually the reserve currency and that everybody is using it on a global scale,” he said in a recent interview with Financial Sense.

But this begs the question: What happens if the U.S. dollar loses its reserve currency status?"

With regards to this point, Martin said, 

“The euro is a dead issue…You can’t use the yen. And China and Russia—forget it—their currencies aren’t ready for prime-time. So, unfortunately, everybody is in dollars.”

Then again, perhaps it’s not just due to a lack of alternatives. As Gary Shilling points out, from 2001 to 2013, the share of daily trading in U.S. dollars only declined 3%—even with the creation of the euro and massive trade coming out of China over that time. When you consider the Six Reasons Why the U.S. Dollar Won’t Collapse, it really doesn’t appear this will be changing any time soon.

Welcome to Cuba

They herd people into Borg-like collectives, yet every individual is savagely atomized. I never felt so alone in my life.

By Michael J. Totten

Okay, I didn’t have to lie to immigration, customs, and security officials at Havana’s Jose Marti International Airport. I could have just applied for a journalist visa and hoped they’d approve me. But colleagues warned I’d have to wait months for an affirmative, and the authorities wouldn’t tell me if the answer was no. They’d simply toss my application into the trash if they thought I’d write anything “negative.” Six months, nine months, a year would finally pass and I’d still be waiting and wondering if I’d ever hear from them.

I have a job to do. I can’t wait six to twelve months in bureaucracy hell. So I lied.

“Tourism” I said when the nice woman at Passport Control asked what I was doing there.

The Cubans knew I was coming. My name was on the flight manifest. If anyone Googled me, they’d find out at once that I work as a journalist. And if they checked their records they’d know I didn’t have the right visa. Reporters who work in Cuba on tourist visas are arrested, interrogated, and deported. It makes no difference whether or not off-the-books journalists are friendly to the government. They must register with and—more important—get permission from the proper officials.

I had to stay off their radar. Freedom House ranks Cuba as the sixth worst country in the entire world for journalists. The Castro government creates a more hostile working environment than even the Syrian and Iranian governments. The only countries on earth that repress reporters more ruthlessly are, in order, North Korea, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Eritrea, and Belarus. All are either communist or post-communist in-name-only.

Some of my colleagues in the media weren’t sure I’d get away with it. “You’re pretty high profile,” said one. “And it’s not like you can hide.”

Several who have worked in Cuba in the past warned me not to bring a laptop. “That alone will be a red flag,” said one. “They’ll put you under surveillance.”

I’d also have to hide my notebook.

“Cuban security agents from the Ministry of Interior will sweep through your hotel room,” warned a veteran American visitor to Cuba, “so lock all your note-taking materials up in your room safe.”

“The Castro government already knows who you are and what you’ll be doing,” said Valentin Prieto, a Cuban exile in Miami and founder of the blog, Babalu. “And make no bones about it, the KGB, Stasi, et al have nothing—and I mean nothing—on the Cuban security apparatus. It may seem primitive, but it is highly effective. You will be monitored from the moment you step on the tarmac. You will never be alone while on the island, even in your hotel room if not especially so. Be careful and keep in mind that you are in a very closed society whose fuel is fear.”