The right to work

What does one call a state whose Senate says "no" to its public employee unions for strikes and collective bargaining? Perhaps Wisconsin, but in fact Chile. Seems it still likes being tops in economic freedom and growth.

After two days of debate, a proposed change to Chile's constitution allowing collective bargaining privileges and a "right" to strike for public unions was voted down. The change got just 21 votes, four short of a two-thirds needed. Even many of the left-leaning opposition abstained.

But you can't say they didn't try.

"Chile is the only country in the world whose constitution forbids collective bargaining and the right to strike, so we have to take care of this situation," Chilean Sen. Patricio Walker argued.

"This motion is a fundamental right enshrined in workers, whatever their performance level, and gives effect to the (United Nations') ILO Convention 151," said Sen. Pedro Munoz, reminding the public just why it shouldn't support the bill.

All this is relevant because Chile is the first nation whose return to democracy was based on economic freedom. On global economic freedom rankings, Chile stands near the top — in part because its public employees can't run up debt or corrupt the political process.

The existing constitution makes Chile a full right-to-work country and expressly prohibits government collective bargaining and public employee strikes.

The idea is to prevent the ugly anti-democratic dynamic — now seen in Wisconsin and elsewhere — of public employee unions extorting concessions from politicians in exchange for campaign support.

Under that system, taxpayers foot the bill. The team of Milton Friedman-influenced economists known as "The Chicago Boys" understood this dynamic well and its potential for cutting into economic freedom.

Labor and Social Security Minister Jose Pinera, who wrote the right-to-work proviso, knew that if public employee unions could get their hooks into the federal government, it would be a fiscal and economic disaster.

Chile posted 7% GDP growth in the last quarter, on par with recent trends. Per capita income is now $17,000, 10 times what it was in 1980, and its successful social security system is now private.

Chile's vote shows it has no desire to follow in the footsteps of bankrupt U.S. states like California and Illinois. It's good to see a nation that still knows how to grow.

CRAZED CULT LEADER JOINS CRAZED CULT

Crazed cult leader Charles Manson has broken a 20-year silence in a prison interview coinciding with the 40th anniversary of his conviction for the gruesome Sharon Tate murders – to speak out about global warming.

Manson's death sentence for his involvement in the Tate/LaBianca murders was commuted to life in prison when California abolished the death penalty.

Since then he has attracted a number of followers because of his infamy, but also because of his perceived environmental conscience.

He is a founder of ATWA (which both stands for Air Trees Water Animals and All The Way Alive). It's typically manic mission statement warns of the destruction of the planet from pollution.

Another ATWA founder, Lynette Fromme,  was jailed for the attempted assassination of President Gerald Ford with an unloaded gun in 1975. The claimed she did so 'for the redwoods'.  

On the environment, Manson said: 'Sooner or later the will of God will prevail over all of you. And I was condemned as the will of God.'

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1378178/Charles-Manson-breaks-20-year-silence-40th-anniversary-gruesome-Sharon-Tate-murders.html#ixzz1K6GVNEhI

Socialism by any other name ...

A First Step on the Road to Declining Life Expectancy in the United States

by Robert Wenzel 

There have been a number of reports lately about shortages of various drugs. Anyone who has taken an Econ 101 class should know that shortages come about because of price controls, you can't have shortages any other way. Without price controls supply and demand will simply move prices so that markets clear. So whenever you hear about shortages, you know some kind of government meddling is going on to prevent markets from clearing.

Those who have gone beyond Econ 101, and read a little bit on their own, also know that throughout history governments have ignored their role in creating shortages and have made it a crime for those who ignore price controls and attempt to bring product to market at clearing prices. In some cases, people have been sentenced to death for trying to work around price controls.

Thus, it is with alarm that I read a report at LaTi :

The number of medications in short supply has been rising, including some needed daily in hospitals, and regulators lack the tools to address the problem. One Senate bill in the works could help.

LaTi goes on:

One promising approach is a bill still being drafted by Sens. Amy Klobuchar (D.-Minn.) and Bob Casey, (D.-Pa.). Their measure would require that drug makers notify the FDA of any event that might affect supply — a manufacturing glitch, a merger, a simple business decision — and impose a penalty for silence.

H.L. Mencken’s 1940 assessment of politicians

“They will all promise every man, woman and child in the country whatever he, she or it wants.  They’ll all be roving the land looking for chances to make the rich poor, to remedy the irremediable, to succor the unsuccorable, to unscramble the unscrambleable, to dephlogisticate the undephlogisticable.  They will all be curing warts by saying words over them, and paying off the national debt with money no one will have to earn.  When one of them demonstrates that twice two is five, another will prove that it is six, six and a half, ten, twenty, n.  In brief, they will divest themselves from their character as sensible, candid and truthful men, and simply become candidates for office, bent only on collaring votes.  They will all know by then, even supposing that some of them don’t know it now, that votes are collared under democracy, not by talking sense but by talking nonsense, and they will apply themselves to the job with a hearty yo-heave-ho.  Most of them, before the uproar is over, will actually convince themselves.  The winner will be whoever promises the most with the least probability of delivering anything.”

How Vittorio Arrigoni Went to Gaza Hoping to Die

 By Jamie Glazov 

Bit by bit, decorate it, arrange the details, find the ingredients, imagine it, choose it, get advice on it, shape it into a work without spectators, one which exists only for oneself, just for the shortest little moment of life.

—Michel Foucault, describing the pleasure of preparing oneself for suicide.

The Italian cheerleader for Hamas, Vittorio Arrigoni ^[1], has died at the hands of the Islamic terrorism that he venerated throughout his life. The fellow traveler journeyed to the Gaza Strip to prostrate himself before his secular deity, Hamas, and to assist its venture of perpetrating genocide against Israelis. Islamic terrorists, who call themselves “Salafists,” showed their gratitude to Arrigoni by kidnapping, mercilessly beating, and executing him.

This episode was, of course, all part of an expected script: even though the media and our higher literary culture never discuss the reasons, the historical record reveals one undeniable fact: like thousands of political pilgrims before him, Vittorio Arrigoni went to Gaza to die. Indeed, consciously or unconsciously, in their unquenchable quest for sacrificing human life on the altar of their utopian ideals, fellow travelers always lust for death, and if not the death of others, then of their own.

It is no coincidence that a short while before “Salafists” killed Arrigoni, Juliano Mer-Khamis ^[2], a cheerleader of terrorism in Israel who, like Arrigoni, dedicated his life to praising the Palestinian death cult and working for the annihilation of Israel, was murdered by Islamic terrorists in Jenin. It is no coincidence that Rachel Corrie ^[3], the infamous enabler of the International Solidarity Movement, a group that disrupts anti-terrorism activities of the Israel Defense Forces, committed suicide in protecting Hamas terrorists by throwing herself in front of an Israeli bulldozer. And it is no coincidence that female leftist “peace” activists are routinely raped ^[4], brutalized, and enslaved by the Arabs of Judea and Samaria that they come to aid and glorify in their Jew-hating odyssey against Israel. And don’t hold your breath, by the way, waiting for leftist feminists to protest this phenomenon; they are faithfully following in the footsteps of American fellow traveler Anna Louise Strong and the Stalinist German writer Bertolt Brecht, two typical leftist believers who were completely undisturbed by the arrests and deaths of their friends in the Stalinist purges — having never even inquired about them after their disappearance.

Beneath the leftist believer’s veneration of the despotic enemy lies one of his most powerful yearnings: to submit his whole being to a totalist entity. This psychological dynamic involves negative identification, whereby a person who has failed to identify positively with his own environment subjugates his individuality to a powerful, authoritarian entity, through which he vicariously experiences a feeling of power and purpose. The historian David Potter has succinctly crystallized this phenomenon:

Econ 101

The damage that benevolent censors do.

by Sam Schulman

This weekend is the anniversary of the first truly liberal attempt to prevent hatred by restricting free speech. On March 15, 1939, Denmark made it a criminal act to spread “false rumors or accusations” in order to incite “hatred against a group of the Danish population because of its creed, race, or nationality”—with a fine for those who did so in speech and detention or prison for those who did so in print or broadcasts. The law was designed to hamper the activities of Danish Nazi sympathizers. On May 31 the same year, Denmark made itself even more secure against Nazism by signing a non-aggression pact with Germany. Less than a year later, Hitler initiated the six-hour conquest of Denmark by putting an armored battalion on the regular ferryboat from Rostock to Denmark. The treaty didn’t stop him, nor did the fear of feloniously violating Section 266b of the Danish Penal Code by inciting hatred against Jews and Communists.

The German Army packed its bags in 1945, but Section 266b remains in force, much modernized (it now applies to hatred of any group, not just Danes, and prohibits insults to sexual identity), a standing rebuke to what Europeans call “the American version” of free speech: freedom to speak unconstrained by restrictions against “hate,” against insulting or offending individuals or groups, and without special protection for specific religions (Islam), races, or historical facts. In 2011 so far, American-style free speech has been widely condemned (for the Tucson mass murder, notably), though it has also had moments of popularity, particularly since the Arab revolutions began in Tunisia, and again with the madcap activities of public employee unions in Wisconsin. Even Tom Friedman took a holiday from his admiration for Chinese autocracy to celebrate the Twitter revolutions.
But “the European version” of free speech, if we may call it that, soldiers on doggedly. Courts in Austria, Denmark, and France have this year convicted journalists and political volunteers (none of them neo-Nazis) of hate-speech crimes, which generally took the form of making observations about the frequency of certain violent crimes among immigrant groups in Denmark and France, and in Austria about the respectability of the historical Muhammad. Fashion designer John Galliano may soon go on trial in France for racial insults uttered in a Paris bar. There is no doubt among European liberals that “hate speech” must remain restricted in this fashion. After all, as a columnist in the Netherlands’ NRC Handelsblad explained, “everyone knows it’s wrong to insult someone’s race or religion. So why shouldn’t it be a crime as well?” 

We all pretend to believe what we know to be untrue

The phrase politically correct has its origins in the Stalinist left. Its revival not so long ago by America’s New Left was an ominous development. Its pertinence to the present discontents points to a propensity visible now, even among mainstream liberals, for politicizing nearly everything.

There was a time, however, in American life when the personal was not considered political and the political was not regarded as personal. The distinction was, in fact, a principle central to American life – for the modern liberal republic stands or falls on the conviction that religion and politics are separable. It is this notion – that what is primordially personal (religious faith, first and foremost, but other things as well) can be made for the most part politically irrelevant – which distinguishes the limited government peculiar to modern times from all prior government, which assumed the contrary. When the personal is made political and the political, personal, it is no longer theoretically possible to distinguish public from private, and it is no longer politically possible to restrict the government’s reach. This inability brought with it considerable disadvantages in earlier times. In an era in which modern technology has extended the reach of surveillance in manifold ways, it is a catastrophe.

Fashions in Forbidden Speech

D. G. Myers 04.18.2011 - 8:37 AM

The temptation to politicize nearly everything is nearly universal, at least among the ruling elite in America. “We live in a time in which those who want to advance in the professions must pretend to believe what we all know to be untrue,” the Hillsdale College historian Paul A. Rahe wroteon Saturday over at Ricochet. As an example, he repeated the story of Dr. Lazar Greenfield, an emeritus professor of surgery at the University of Michigan School of Medicine, who was bounced from the editorship of Surgery News for daring to suggest—on Valentine’s Day, no less—that “there’s a deeper bond between men and women than St. Valentine would have suspected,” and the bond appears to be biologically rooted.

Dr. Greenfield submissively apologized, but the gods of social constructionism were not appeased. Yesterday he resigned as president of the American College of Surgeons after two months of predictable “controversy” and “outrage.” His breezy and cheerful editorial, which Rahe conveniently reprints in full since it has been proscribed by Surgery News, “outraged many women in the field, some of whom said that it reflected a macho culture in surgery that needed to change,” the New York Times reported

The Auto Bailout and the Rule of Law

by Todd Zywicki 

When President Dwight Eisenhower named Charles Wilson — then the president of General Motors — to be his secretary of defense in 1953, some senators considering the nomination wondered whether Wilson could distinguish his loyalty to GM from his obligations to the country. Wilson assured them that he could, but then added that he did not think a conflict would ever come up. "For years I have thought that what was good for the country was good for General Motors, and vice versa," he said in his confirmation hearing.

Wilson's statement — especially that "vice versa" — was long considered the epitome of corporatist excess. To many, it represented the view that the government existed to advance the interests of large corporations (and, of course, vice versa), even if the arrangement came at the expense of average citizens and workers.

In the past three years, however, Wilson's attitude has come back into vogue, as a new approach to the relationship between the government and the private sector has taken hold in Washington. That approach — a kind of state capitalism that seeks to entangle the government and large corporations in order to allow for careful management of the economy — is perhaps best embodied in the government bailout and subsequent bankruptcy of Wilson's old company, and of one of its longstanding competitors.

The bailouts of General Motors and Chrysler have been held up by President Obama and his supporters as a great success story — proof that, by working together, government and business can save jobs and strengthen the economy. But this popular narrative is dangerously misleading. Far from a success story, the events surrounding the bailouts offer a cautionary tale of executive overreach. And their example clarifies the Obama administration's broader approach to economic policy — an approach that is both harmful to economic growth and dangerous to the rule of law.

THE FAIRY TALE

By December 2008, years of decline had finally caught up with Chrysler and General Motors. Unlike Ford, which had moved aggressively to fix its longstanding problems — chiefly by shedding unprofitable subsidiaries and renegotiating labor agreements — GM and Chrysler were still plagued by incompetence and inefficiency.

The EU Crackup

by Llewellyn H. Rockwell Jr.

Political upheaval has hit Finland, and it's merely a foreshadowing of bigger changes ahead. The core issue is whether Finland ought to be paying for bailouts for other EU states. In reaction to establishment support for the bailout, voters ousted the probailout ruling party and gave an upset victory to the bailout-critical conservative party. Against every expectation, the eternal rule of the social democrats is at an end.

But most striking of all are the gains made by a previously invisible party called True Finns. This is the only party to take a hardcore position: no bailouts at all. It also so happens that this party is predictably nationalist on issues of trade and immigration. But that's not the source of the appeal. The bailout is what is on everyone's mind. And you know that the anger must be palpable if it fired up the usually sleepy world of Finnish politics.

In the sweep of history, few issues are as politically volatile as tax-funded bailouts of foreign countries, especially during difficult economic times. It's a policy that provokes dramatic political change. The 20th century's most famous case was in interwar Germany, when nationwide resentment against payments to conquering allied nations ushered in National Socialist rule.

It should be no surprise that overtaxed Finns have no interest in sending their tax dollars to bail out the banking industry of Portugal, a country that is 2,500 miles and two days travel away.

The Moral Imperative of the Market

by Friedrich A. Hayek

In 1936, the year in which (entirely coincidentally) John Maynard Keynes published The General Theory, I suddenly saw, as I prepared my presidential address to the London Economic Club, that my previous work in different branches of economics had a common root. This insight was that the price system was really an instrument which enabled millions of people to adjust their efforts to events, demands, and conditions of which they had no concrete, direct knowledge, and that the whole coordination of the world economy was due to certain practices and usages which had grown up unconsciously. The problem I had first identified in studying industrial fluctuations — that false price signals misdirected human efforts — I then followed up in various other branches of the discipline.

Inspiration of Ludwig von Mises

Here my thinking was inspired largely by Ludwig von Mises's conception of the problem of ordering a planned economy. My early investigation into the consequences of rent restriction showed me more clearly than almost anything else how government interference with the price system completely upsets human economic efforts.

But it took me a long time to develop what is basically a simple idea. I was puzzled that Mises'sSocialism,[1] which had been so convincing to me and seemed finally to show why central planning could not work, had not convinced the rest of the world. I asked myself why this was the case.

A guide on how to loose elections

This is what happens when non-Muslims win an election in a partially Muslim country:

Deadly rioting erupted across Nigeria's largely Muslim north on Monday as youths torched churches and homes in anger at President Goodluck Jonathan's election victory.

Jonathan, the first president from the oil producing Niger Delta, was declared the winner with around 57 percent of votes. He defeated Muhammadu Buhari, a former military ruler from the north, who got around 31 percent.

Observers have called the poll the fairest in decades in Africa's most populous nation.

But to Muslims, an election is only valid if they win. If they don't, there is violence. The Muslim north went up in flames:

"In Kaduna we have seen dead bodies lying by the road," Red Cross official Umar Mairiga told Reuters. "Two thousand people have been displaced at one military camp alone."

Authorities in the northern state of Kaduna imposed a 24-hour curfew after protesters set fire to the residence of Vice President Namadi Sambo in the town of Zaria and forced their way into the central prison, releasing inmates.

The body of a small boy shot in the chest by a stray bullet was brought to a police station.

"They have destroyed our cars and our houses. I had to run for my life and I am now in my neighbour's house," said Dora Ogbebor, a resident of Zaria whose origins are in the south.

Plumes of smoke rose into the air in parts of Kaduna as protesters set fire to barricades of tyres. Security forces fired in the air and used teargas to disperse groups of youths shouting "We want Buhari, we want Buhari". …

Buhari was yet to make any public statement on the violence despite appeals by foreign embassies that he call for calm.

Now for the punch line:

Police said the violence was political rather than ethnic or religious.

Islam is a totalitarian political creed, dedicated to global conquest just like communism, but dressed in the mystical ravings of an unhinged warlord from the Dark Ages instead of sophomoric rhetoric about the proletariat and bourgeoisie. All Muslim violence is political, but it is also all religious.

Eventually Nigeria will reach the tipping point, and the same thing will happen to Christiansthere as in Lebanon. The Islamic empire will be one country larger; civilization will be one country smaller.

In the meantime, congratulations to Nigerians on their democratic election. They had better buckle up; any country where Islam has gotten its nose in the tent is in for a rough ride.

A new flotilla is under way ...

Whose war is it anyway?
The projection of the West’s Culture Wars on to the Middle East turns it into a permaconflict, depriving all sides of an incentive to compromise.
Brendan O’Neill 

Why, when other conflicts of the Cold War era have long since subsided, does the conflagration in the Middle East remain defiantly flammable? The anti-Israel lobby will put it down to Israel’s ‘expansionist frenzy’, its desire to ‘steal land’ and execute a ‘genocide against the Palestinians’. Pro-Israel observers will blame the ‘genocidal terror’ of Israel’s enemies, who apparently won’t be happy until they’ve brought about ‘the destruction of the Jewish state’ (1). In truth, it is not any innate, genocidal madness on the part of the protagonists that keeps this conflict alive and tragic, but the cynical actions of outside observers. The relentless internationalisation of the stand-off in the Middle East – more than that, the projection of the West’s Culture Wars on to Israeli-Palestinian tensions – has turned it into something like a permaconflict, in which neither side has much incentive to agree, settle or compromise.

The latest outburst of violence in Gaza is especially disturbing, where a cut-off section of the divided Palestinian people has been subjected to awful assaults. However, the reaction to the violence exposes the deeper, underlying problem: international exploitation of Middle Eastern tensions, and the hijacking of a complex conflict by international elements desperately seeking a simplistic sense of moral purpose. However desperate is the situation in Gaza, there is little justification for the widespread discussion of it as an ‘apocalypse’, ‘Holocaust’, or – amongst pro-Israel observers – as a ‘courageous’ invasion by Israel to ‘uphold freedom and enlightenment’ (2). Rather, such hyperbolic, histrionic and pseudo-historic language reveals the extent to which the West’s own existential crisis – over morality, meaning, purpose – has been exported to the Middle East. Israel/Palestine has been turned into a laboratory for working out Western angst. And this has placed an intolerable burden on a local conflict, deepening its divisions and prolonging its violence.

Of course, there has long been a powerful international element to the conflict in the Middle East. During the Cold War era, the US bankrolled and armed Israel as its gendarme in the Arab world, while the Soviet Union backed the Palestine Liberation Organisation and Arab nationalism more broadly. Those days, however, are long gone. The Soviet Union is no more, and while America still describes itself as a ‘friend of Israel’ it has, over the past 15 years, become far more critical of its former ally and is the driving force behind the creation of a ‘viable’ Palestinian state (3). The internationalisation we have today is far more desperate and reckless than that of the past. It is driven not by clear political or tactical objectives, but by their absence. It is political disarray in the West, a dearth of meaning and vision, that underpins contemporary interventions in the Middle East. The Western political and media classes are increasingly projecting their search for purpose – their defence of or disdain for Enlightenment values, and their political positioning in the Culture War itself – on to the clash between Israel and Palestine, and in the process are imbuing an increasingly degraded conflict with a profound, historic, fin-de-siècle momentum that makes compromise near impossible.

It is extraordinary the extent to which the conflict has been internationalised over the past 15 years. Virtually every government on Earth has created for itself either a direct or indirect stake in the stand-off between tiny Israel and the even tinier Palestinian-controlled territories. For example, the Roadmap for Peace of 2003 was overseen and enforced by a so-called ‘Quartet of Powers’ consisting of the US, the UN, the EU and Russia – in other words, every state in the world. The ‘peace process’ itself, instituted by Washington in the early 1990s, has been based on the idea that more and more outside observers are required to ‘fix’ the Middle East. The names of the historic signposts in the ‘peace process’ – the Madrid Conference, the Oslo Accords, the Washington Handshake, the Camp David talks – speak to the profound transformation of a local conflict into an international crisis, where the decision-making momentum is continually taken out of the hands of the people of the Middle East and placed at the table of supposedly neutral bureaucrats across the globe.

The People's Republic of San Francisco Wants Venue Owners to Take Pictures of All Patrons

The San Francisco Entertainment Commission wants to require all venues with an occupancy of over 100 people to record the faces of all patrons and scan their ID’s for storage in a database which they must hand over to law enforcement on request.

The Electronic Freedom Foundation notes what one would think is obvious:

Events with strong cultural, ideological, and political components are frequently held at venues that would be affected by these rules. Scanning the ID’s of all attendees at an anti-war rally, a gay night club, or a fundraiser for a civil liberties organization would have a deeply chilling effect on speech. Participants might hesitate to attend such events if their attendance were noted, stored, and made available on request to government authorities.

People are a factor of production

Julian Simon still winning 

Source: Global Financial Data

George Mason economist Don Boudreaux, writing today ("The Ultimate Scholar") in honor of resource economist Julian Simon, on the 10th anniversary of his death, revisits the famous bet in 1980 (it even has its own Wikipedia listing:
 "The Simon-Ehrlich Wager") between scientistPaul Ehrlich and economist Simon: Stanford University's Paul Ehrlich -- author of "The Population Bomb," foretelling disaster from population growth -- found economist Julian Simon's optimism about population growth to be so absurd that he famously accepted 
a bet from Simon in 1980. 

The essence of Simon's position in the bet was that, despite the population growth that was sure to occur during the 1980s, the effective supply of natural resources would increase during this decade because human beings would figure out how to find, extract and use such resources more efficiently.

And the surest measure of this increased supply would be lower inflation-adjusted prices of resources.

Convinced that higher population is a curse, Ehrlich accepted the $1,000 bet.
He chose (for Simon gave Ehrlich the choice of which resources to bet on) a bundle of copper, chromium, nickel, tin and tungsten and bet Simon that the real price of this bundle of resources would be higher in 1990 than in 1980.

In 1990 the prices in September of that year were compared to the prices of these resources in September 1980. Simon won convincingly. The real price 
of each of these five resources had fallen over the course of that decade, indicating that their supplies had grown even though human population 
had also grown by more than 800 million during that same time. 

Julian Simon wanted to enter into a second wager, based on either the same commodities, or a different group of commodities, but the terms of a proposed second wager were never agreed upon. Simon died in February 1998. 

What if the original bet had been extended for another ten-year period, from 1990-2000? Simon would have won again (see chart above), since all of the metals declined in real price except for tungsten, and the average price decline
of the 5-commodity group was -19%.

The fatal conceit

Why Socialism?

By Albert EinsteinFrom ''Monthly Review'', New York, May, 1949.

''A planned economy as such may be accompanied by the complete enslavement of the individual. The achievement of socialism requires the solution of some extremely difficult socio-political problems: how is it possible, in view of the far-reaching centralization of political and economic power, to prevent bureaucracy from becoming all-powerful and overweening? How can the rights of the individual be protected and therewith a democratic counterweight to the power of bureaucracy be assured?''

Is it advisable for one who is not an expert on economic and social issues to express views on the subject of socialism? I believe for a number of reasons that it is.

Let us first consider the question from the point of view of scientific knowledge. It might appear that there are no essential methodological differences between astronomy and economics: scientists in both fields attempt to discover laws of general acceptability for a circumscribed group of phenomena in order to make the interconnection of these phenomena as clearly understandable as possible. But in reality such methodological differences do exist. The discovery of general laws in the field of economics is made difficult by the circumstance that observed economic phenomena are often affected by many factors which are very hard to evaluate separately. In addition, the experience which has accumulated since the beginning of the so-called civilized period of human history has -- as is well known -- been largely influenced and limited by causes which are by no means exclusively economic in nature. For example, most of the major states of history owed their existence to conquest. The conquering peoples established themselves, legally and economically, as the privileged class of the conquered country. They seized for themselves a monopoly of the land ownership and appointed a priesthood from among their own ranks. The priests, in control of education, made the class division of society into a permanent institution and created a system of values by which the people were thenceforth, to a large extent unconsciously, guided in their social behavior.

But historic tradition is, so to speak, of yesterday; nowhere have we really overcome what Thorstein Veblen called "the predatory phase" of human development. The observable economic facts belong to that phase and even such laws as we can derive from them are not applicable to other phases. Since the real purpose of socialism is precisely to overcome and advance beyond the predatory phase of human development, economic science in its present state can throw little light on the socialist society of the future.

Second, socialism is directed toward a social-ethical end. Science, however, cannot create ends and, even less, instill them in human beings; science, at most, can supply the means by which to attain certain ends. But the ends themselves are conceived by personalities with lofty ethical ideals and -- if these ends are not stillborn, but vital and vigorous -- are adopted and carried forward by those many human beings who, half-unconsciously, determine the slow evolution of society.

Another Failed “Conservative Success Story”

by Paul Gottfried  

According to Joel Klein’s March 21 Newsweek column, “conservatives” went ballistic at their annual CPAC meeting in Washington because Obama had dared to question the holy doctrine of “American exceptionalism.” Supposedly Obama committed blasphemy when he observed that the British in the nineteenth century and the ancient Greeks thought of themselves as exceptional. We Americans are acting like other nations when we insist we’re unique. Obama’s crime was to have not noticed “our democratic institutions” and human-rights concepts, which have elevated us as moral giants above the rest of the human race.

This is a strange belief for people on the right to hold. For decades American conservatives were arguing that our society is decadent, much like the Roman Empire before it fell apart. Nor were these conservatives (speaking as a leading scholarly authority on this matter) pleased with “democratic” institutions, which they feared would lead to an uncontrollable central government that would confiscate our earnings in the name of equality. The religious right was complaining for decades that American morals were disintegrating and we were becoming the modern age’s Sodom and Gomorrah.

Obituary

Human capability peaked before 1975 and has since declined

I suspect that human capability reached its peak or plateau around 1965-75 – at the time of the Apollo moon landings – and has been declining ever since.


This may sound bizarre or just plain false, but the argument is simple. That landing of men on the moon and bringing them back alive was the supreme achievement of human capability, the most difficult problem ever solved by humans. 40 years ago we could do it – repeatedly – but since then we have *not* been to the moon, and I suggest the real reason we have not been to the moon since 1972 is that we cannot any longer do it. Humans have lost the capability.


Of course, the standard line is that humans stopped going to the moon only because we no longer *wanted* to go to the moon, or could not afford to, or something…– but I am suggesting that all this is BS, merely excuses for not doing something which we *cannot* do.


It is as if an eighty year old ex-professional-cyclist was to claim that the reason he had stopped competing in the Tour de France was that he had now had found better ways to spend his time and money. It may be true; but does not disguise the fact that an 80 year old could not compete in international cycling races even if he wanted to. 

They Wanted a New Order

by Anthony de Jasay*For ages before the panicky recession of 2008-2009, there has been a persistent anti-capitalist background noise all around us. It was loudest in France and Latin America, in the universities and the media all over the world. It was made up of the voices of socialists, professional politicians and union apparatchiks, cranks, "dealers in second-hand ideas" and resentful failures. Defence against them was not a very demanding task. While the dogs barked, the camels advanced. After all, in less than a century, the capitalist order made good the mad devastation of two world wars, beat and buried two mighty and nasty totalitarian systems, Nazism and Soviet socialism, and brought the standard of living of ordinary working people up to a level their grandparents have never even dreamed of.

Admittedly, while its competitive and meritocratic features broke down the privileges of birth, it did generate much inequality, too (though no one has managed to show why inequality was a wrong). It abused the environment (though it was a good deal easier to spare the earth when it was populated by one and a half billion people than now when it carries over six billion). Last but not least, it made it easy and tempting for people to enjoy the material good and forget the spiritual (though the choice was not imposed, but left to them to make). Above all, unlike any other system ever tried, capitalism worked.