CENSORSHIP IS BEING OUTSOURCED TO THE MOB

Two recent cases Down Under show how dangerous Twittermobs can be.

By BRENDAN O’NEILL

One of the curious things about the twenty-first-century West is that it feels deeply censorious even though, historically speaking, there isn’t a huge amount of state censorship. Yes, many Western societies have anti-‘hate speech’ laws, debate-choking defamation statutes, and a host of methods for regulating the raucous press, all of which limit how daring or just downright offensive we can be. But we don’t exactly live under nightmarish Orwellian regimes that pass laws explicitly designed to silence political opinions, or to punish anti-Christ iconoclasm, or to criminalise people found in possession of indecent novels or art. How do we explain the existence of an almost unprecedented culture of censoriousness in the absence of too much old-style state censorship?

It’s because censorship has been outsourced to the mob. Censorship is alive and well; it’s just that today it is enforced, not so much by brute law and the copper’s boot, but by mobs of self-styled guardians of acceptable thought.

The illiberal job that was once done by the state and its offshoots - the policing of thought and the punishment of outré speech - is now increasingly done by informal intolerant networks. Outsourcing has been all the rage among Western states in recent years. They’ve outsourced responsibility for aspects of policing, for the guarding of prisoners, even for the fighting of wars, as we saw with the use of mercenary outfits in the West’s conquering of Iraq. Now, the moral authority to decree what can and can’t be uttered in the public sphere has been outsourced, too, passed from the government to moral lynch mobs, noisy cliques of non-state censors. The relatively small amount of explicit state censorship today shouldn’t be taken as a sign that we live in a more free society, but rather speaks to something quite terrifying - that the state doesn’t really need to enact laws that police our words at a time when there are so many mobs willing to do that dirty work on its behalf.

In Australia over the past week, there have been two striking examples of outsourced censoriousness, which reveal how this new phenomenon works and how damaging it can be.

In the first case, a Georgian opera singer, Tamar Iveri, was hounded out of Opera Australia (OA) after it was revealed she once made homophobic comments on her Facebook page. Ms Iveri had been due to perform in OA’s production of Otello, which opens in Sydney next month. But then someone exposed that, a year ago, she had said on FB that she was glad Georgian protesters had spat on Gay Pride marchers in Tbilisi, and had asked the Georgian president not to let into Georgia what she called the ‘West’s faecal masses’ - that is, homosexuals. Oz’s left-leaners, small-L liberals and artsworld inhabitants decided that such a person was not fit to perform in Australia, and so they used their considerable influence - their newspaper columns, their social-networking pages, the financial leverage of their patronage of the arts, which they made clear could be withdrawn - to put pressure on OA to drop Ms Iveri. They won. Ms Iveri was cast out, dumped by OA on the basis that her views were ‘unconscionable’. And thus was Australian opera made morally pure once more.

Read more : http://www.spiked-online.com/freespeechnow/fsn_article/censorship-is-being-outsourced-to-the-mob#.U7ima9fg_h4

Incredible confusions, Part 2

Of interest and the dangerous habit of suppressing it

By Detlev Schlichter 

The idea that the charging of interest is unethical and should be banned has a long tradition in the history of human civilisation. It seems to have played a role at some point in all the major religions, certainly in Christianity, Judaism and Islam, and it is today promoted most strongly by advocates of Islamic banking.

As an economist I cannot (and should not) comment on matters of religion. Religion and economics deal with completely different aspects of human existence. Religion is about ‘ultimate ends’ and ‘personal values’. Economics does not deal with ends but with means. Economics does not tell anybody what his or her values should be. Contrary to what is frequently claimed – usually by those who do not understand economics – economics does not tell you that you should strive for more material goods and more services at your disposal.

But it so happens that we live in a world in which most people have personal aims or goals that involve having at least a certain material wealth, and in which most people prefer the possession of more material goods to less material goods; and the science of economics – for economics is a science, and in fact an objective, wertfreie (value-free) science – can then explain why people have a better chance of achieving these (material) aims if they use such social institutions as the division of labor, private property, trade, money, and many others. Additionally, the science of economics can show how these social institutions work, demonstrate the laws and regularities inherent in them, and can develop rules for their most appropriate use. Economics is purely about the means of social cooperation for the attainment of material goals. It never concerns itself with ultimate ends.

If most of the population became Buddhist monks tomorrow and would lose any interest in accumulating material wealth, would happily withdraw into monasteries and dedicate themselves to meditation, none of the principles and laws of economics would have suddenly become less true or invalid. The law of comparative advantage as articulated by David Ricardo would be as true on that day as on any other. The laws of economics would still apply just as the laws of gravity would. Of course, the interest in economic studies would probably diminish rapidly but that is all. Or, not quite all: Society would also be rapidly impoverished in material terms – even to the point of mass starvation –, and this the economist can ascertain with certainty, although nothing can be said about any compensating gains in spiritual wealth, of course.

If you believe that your God demands that if you lend money you should not charge interest, than there is nothing that I, as an economist, can say to you – other than, maybe, give me a call whenever you have some extra cash. The point at which I can – and should – comment is when you were to claim in addition that the observance of this rule would lead to a more stable and better functioning economy, that the non-charging of interest would not diminish society’s wealth but even increase it, or that the resulting economic structure would at least conform better to some generally accepted notion of fairness. Here we have reached a point where debate has become possible, not because I, as an economist, have intruded onto the religious ground of values and ultimate ends but because the advocate of religion has intruded onto the economists’ ground of the study of the laws for wealth creation.

Read more at : http://detlevschlichter.com/2013/02/incredible-confusions-part-2-of-interest-and-the-dangerous-habit-of-suppressing-it/

Incredible confusions Part 1

‘Positive Money’ and the fallacy of the need for a state money producer

By Detlev Schlichter

I am usually inclined to encourage the inquiry of the fundamental aspects of money and banking. This is because I tend to believe that only by going back to first principles is it possible to cut through the thicket of widely accepted but deeply flawed theories that dominate the current debate in mainstream media, politics and the financial industry. From my own experience in financial markets I can appreciate how convenient and tempting it is in a business context, where quick and easy communication is of the essence, to adopt a certain, widely shared set of paradigms, regardless of how flimsy their theoretical foundations. Fund managers, traders and financial journalists live in the immediate present, preoccupied as they are with what makes headlines today, and they work in intensely collaborative enterprises. They have neither the time nor inclination to question the body of theories – often no longer even perceived as ‘theories’ but considered accepted common wisdom – that shapes the way they view and talk about the outside world. Thus, erroneous concepts and even outright fallacies often remain unquestioned and, by virtue of constant repetition, live comfortably in the bloodstream of policy debates, economic analysis, and financial market reportage.

This goes a long way in explaining the undeserved survival of a number of persistent modern myths: deflation is the gravest economic danger we face; Japan has been crippled by deflation for years and would grow again if it only managed to create some inflation; lack of ‘aggregate demand’ explains recessions and must be countered with easy monetary policy; and money-printing, as long as it does not lead to higher inflation, is a free lunch, i.e. we can only expect good from it. None of these statements stand up to scrutiny. In fact, they are all utterly absurd. Yet, we can barely open a newspaper and not have this nonsense stare us in the face, if not quite as bluntly as stated above, than at least as the intellectual soil from which the analysis or commentary presented has sprung. Deep-rooted misconceptions can only be dismantled through dissection of their building blocs and a discussion of basic concepts.

The dangers of going back to basics

However, going back to basics and to first principles, analyzing critically the fundamental aspects of our financial system, is not free of danger. Here, too, lies a minefield of potentially grave intellectual error, and when things go wrong here, at the basic level, the results and policy recommendations derived from such analysis are bound to be nonsensical too, if not even more nonsensical than what the mainstream believes. In this and the following essays I am going to address some of the erroneous notions at the fundamental level of money and banking that seem to have gained currency in the public debate of late.

I get periodically confronted with these confusions through readers’ comments on my website. Some of the questions and suggestions expressed there reveal the same, or very similar, errors and misunderstandings, and these often seem to have their origin in other publications circulating elsewhere on the web. Among them are the following fallacies, in no particular order:

§  The idea that the charging of interest, or in particular the charging of interest on money, is a fundamental problem in our financial system.

§  The notion that there must be a systematic shortage of money in the economy because banks, through fractional-reserve banking, bring into circulation only amounts of money equivalent to the principal of the loans they create but not the necessary amount to pay the interest on these loans.

§  The notion that it is a problem that money-creation is tied to debt-creation (again, as a consequence of fractional-reserve banking) and that it would be possible and advantageous to have the state issue money directly (debt-free) rather than have the banks do it.

§  The idea that schemes are feasible that allow the painless shrinkage or even disappearance of the national debt.

 All these ideas are nonsensical, based on bad economics and fundamental logical flaws, and to the extent that they entail policy proposals, these policies, if enacted, would not only not give us a stable and more prosperous economy but would surely lead to new instabilities or even outright chaos.

None of these misconceptions originate, or even resonate, as far as I can tell, with the ‘mainstream’. The mainstream– the financial market professionals, the central bankers, financial regulators, and the media – remain resolutely uninterested in dealing with fundamental questions of money and banking for the reasons given above. Here, the discussion continues to centre on how the economy can be ‘stimulated’ more, what ‘unconventional’ policies the central banks may still have up their sleeves, and if the central banks need new targets or better central bankers. Icebergs or no icebergs, these deckchairs need re-arranging.

Read more at :

http://detlevschlichter.com/2013/01/incredible-confusions-part-1-positive-money-and-the-fallacy-of-the-need-for-a-state-money-producer/