Curtains

The greatest gift to the Greeks might be to let them go it alone

by B. johnson

There comes a moment in any decent tragedy when the penny finally drops. The light breaks. The protagonist suddenly realises what a chump he has been - that he has somehow managed accidentally to marry his mother and kill his father - and that all his assumptions about his life are upside down. And the really awful thing about the tragedy now playing on the streets of Athens is that we haven’t even reached that bit yet.

We are all still kidding ourselves that the moment of reversal can be avoided. All the other governments of Europe, including, alas, the Coalition, are pretending that Greece can remain in the euro. If only the EU finance ministers can just have a bit more lunch in Brussels; if only Nicolas Sarkozy and Angela Merkel can hammer out another plan to reschedule the Greek debt; if only UK taxpayers can stump up a bit more for the bail-out fund - then somehow the Heath Robinson contraption is supposed to limp another few miles further on down the road with the Greeks bubblegummed to the roof.

All we need is for Athens to sack a few thousand more public sector workers, lop a few billions more off their pensions, chop more benefits, collect more taxes, and perhaps the problem will go away. If the Greeks would only change their national character, and suddenly discover a Scandinavian faith in government combined with German habits of industry and thrift - then, or so we are told, the catastrophe could be averted.

All it would take, say the European elites, is for the government of George Papandreou to discover a crazed Thatcherite zeal that inspires them to sell every Greek asset from the Port of Piraeus to Olympic Airways to the remaining marbles of the Parthenon. That should do it, they say. That should keep the show on the road. Will it work? I have to say I now doubt that very much indeed.

The trouble is that the Greek austerity measures are making the economy worse. Unemployment is now officially at 16 per cent, though the rate among under twenty-fives is approaching 40 per cent. Productivity is crashing under the weight of strikes and unrest, and debt is now more than 160 per cent of GDP, compared to 60 per cent debt to GDP in the UK.

The Greek debt crisis is deepening, in other words; and there are only two options. We could continue down the road we are on, in which the euro shambles becomes an invisible and surreptitious engine for the creation of an economic government of Europe. Indeed, there is a sense in which the slow-motion disaster of the PIGS - Portugal, Ireland, Greece, Spain - has been terrific for the federalist cause. Bit by bit we seem to be creating a fiscal as well as a monetary union, in which huge sums - including about £20 billion of UK bail-out cash - are being transferred from the richer to the poorer parts of the EU. The idea is that Germany, France and others should “socialise” the debts of the periphery - take them on, in other words - so as to keep the eurozone together and to stop the domino effect, with all the attendant damage it is feared that would do to the European banking system.

These profligate and improvident countries would be obliged, in return, to submit to a kind of economic supervision that is now proposed for Greece. Taxes, spending, benefits - all the panoply of economic independence - would then be subject to agreement with Berlin and Brussels. I sometimes think Kohl, Mitterrand, Delors and co instinctively knew that this would happen.

They probably calculated that if only they could achieve monetary union, the euro would create such strains that the de facto creation of a United States of Europe would be impossible to resist. The trouble is that there is just no democratic mandate for anything of the kind.

As Angela Merkel is constantly obliged to point out, the German people would never have supported joining the euro if they had been told that they would become the guarantors of the debts of Greece. The Greeks would never have gone into the euro if they thought it meant the complete surrender of their economic independence and the destruction of their standards of living. As for the UK taxpayer, none of us believed that a condition of EU membership was the payment of billions in ransom money to stop the euro blowing up.

For years, European governments have been saying that it would be insane and inconceivable for a country to leave the euro. But this second option is now all but inevitable, and the sooner it happens the better. We have had the hamartia - the tragic flaw in the system that allowed high-spending countries to free ride on low interest rates. We have had the hubris - the belief the good times would never end. We have had nemesis - disaster. We now need the anagnorisis - the moment of recognition that Greece would be better off in a state of Byronic liberation, forging a new economic identity with a New Drachma. Then there will be catharsis, the experience of purgation and relief.

I don’t believe that Greece would be any worse off with a new currency. Look at what happened to us after we left the ERM, or to the Latin American economies who abandoned the dollar peg. In both cases, it was the route to cutting interest rates and export-led recovery.

The euro has exacerbated the financial crisis by encouraging some countries to behave as recklessly as the banks themselves. We are supposedly engaging in this bail-out system to protect the banks, including our own. But as long as there is the fear of default, as long as the uncertainty continues, confidence will not return across the whole of Europe - and that is bad for the UK and everyone else.

It is time for a resolution. And remember - if Greece defaults or leaves the euro, then we will not see that UK cash again. Indeed, we are more likely to be repaid in stuffed vine leaves or olive oil than we are in pounds or euros. We should stop chucking good money after bad.

A framework to interpret the world

The Chicago School versus the Austrian School

by R. Murphy

People often ask me, "How are the Austrians different from the Chicago School economists? Aren't you all free-market guys who oppose big-government Keynesians?"

In the present article I'll outline some of the main differences. Although it's true that Austrians agree with Chicago economists on many policy issues, nevertheless their approach to economic science can be quite different. It's important to occasionally explain these differences, if only to rebut the common complaint that Austrian economics is simply a religion serving to justify libertarian policy conclusions.

Before jumping in, let me give a few obvious disclaimers: I do not speak for all Austrian economists, and in this article I will be discussing modern Austrian followers in the tradition of Ludwig von Mises and Murray Rothbard. (On methodology in particular, the Austrians in the Rothbardian camp differ somewhat from those who look more to Friedrich Hayek and Israel Kirzner for inspiration.) It's also important to note that not every Chicago School economist thinks alike. Even so, I hope the following generalizations are representative.

Methodology

The Austrians are oddballs among professional economists for their focus on methodological issues in the first place. Indeed, Mises's magnum opus, Human Action, devotes the entire second chapter (41 pages) to "The Epistemological Problems of the Sciences of Human Action." There was no such treatment in the last Freakonomics book.

Although most economists in the 20th century and our time would disagree strongly, Mises insisted that economic theory itself was an a priori discipline. What he meant is that economists shouldn't ape the methods of physicists by coming up with hypotheses and subjecting them to empirical tests. On the contrary, Mises thought that the core body of economic theory could be logically deduced from the axiom of "human action," i.e., the insight or viewpoint that there are other conscious beings using their reason to achieve subjective goals. (For more on Mises's methodological views, see this and this.)

In contrast, the seminal Chicago School article on methodology is Milton Friedman's 1953 "The Methodology of Positive Economics." Far from deriving economic principles or laws that are necessarily true (as Mises suggests), Friedman instead advocates the development of models with false assumptions. These false premises are no strike against a good theory, however:

The relevant question to ask about the "assumptions" of a theory is not whether they are descriptively "realistic," for they never are, but whether they are sufficiently good approximations for the purpose in hand. And this question can be answered only by seeing whether the theory works, which means whether it yields sufficiently accurate predictions.

Although Friedman's analysis sounds perfectly reasonable, and the epitome of "scientific," Mises thought it was a seductive trap for economists. For a quick illustration of the difference in perspectives, let me relay an example from my teaching experience.

It was a principles of microeconomics class, and we were using the (excellent) textbook by Gwartney, Stroup, et al. In the first chapter they have a list of several guideposts or principles of the economic way of thinking. As I recall, these are items such as, "People respond to incentives," and "There are always tradeoffs." These were noncontroversial things that every economist would agree were important for getting undergrads to "think like an economist."

However, the one guidepost that stuck out like a sore thumb announced, "To be scientific, an economic theory must make testable predictions." I explained to the class that even though this was a popular view among professional economists, it was not one that I shared. I explained that everything we would learn the entire semester from the Gwartney et al. textbook would not yield testable predictions. On the contrary, I would simply teach them a framework with which they could interpret the world. The students would have to decide whether the framework was useful, but ultimately their decision wouldn't boil down to, "Did these tools of supply and demand make good predictions?"

After I went through my spiel, one of the students made the excellent observation that not a single one of the other guideposts was a testable prediction. He was right! For example, how could someone test the claim that, "People respond to incentives"? I could say to a person, "I'll give you $20 if you cut off your big toe." Regardless of what happens, my claim is safe and secure. If the person doesn't cut off his big toe, it just shows that I didn't offer him a big enough incentive.

This is not mere philosophical grandstanding. Mises stressed that the important heritage of sound economic thought is not a collection of empirically tested claims about the behavior of economic variables. Rather, economic theory is an internally coherent framework for interpreting "the data" in the first place.

It's true that certain applications of economics involve historical evidence — such as investigating whether the Federal Reserve played an important role in the housing bubble — but this is a far cry from the typical mainstream economist's justification for mathematical model building.

Booms and Busts

Another major divergence between the Austrian and Chicago Schools is their explanation for booms and their policy prescriptions for busts. The readers of this article are likely familiar with the Austrian view, so I will omit another discussion.

Chicago School economists obviously have nuanced views, but generally speaking they subscribe to the "efficient markets hypothesis." In its strongest form, the EMH denies that there could even be such a thing as the housing bubble (see here and here). Given their assumptions of rational actors and markets that quickly clear, and given that they lack a sophisticated theory of the capital structure of the economy, the Chicago School economists are forced to explain recessions as an "equilibrium" outcome due to sudden "shocks."

Historically they didn't consider the distortions caused by below-market interest rates (which of course are the key ingredient in the Austrian theory of the business cycle). However, recently more and more Chicago School critics of the Fed have been pointing out the dangers of Ben Bernanke's zero-interest rate policy.

Ironically, the policy area where the Austrians and the Chicago School differ most is in regards to money, the issue in which Milton Friedman specialized. Friedman (and coauthor Anna Schwartz) famously faulted the Federal Reserve for not printing enough new money in the early 1930s to offset the decline fueled by bank runs. In our time, some Chicago-trained economists — who justifiably point to Milton Friedman himself for vindication — blame the crisis in the fall of 2008 on Bernanke's "tight-money" policies. Naturally, these views are anathema to modern Austrians in the tradition of Murray Rothbard, who think the central bank should be abolished.

Law and Economics

Finally, most modern members of the Austrian and Chicago Schools have vastly different ideas when it comes to the field known as "Law and Economics." Whether based in natural law or the traditional inheritance from the common law, Austrians tend to think that people objectively have property rights, full stop, and once we specify these rights the economic analysis can begin. In contrast, some of the more extreme applications of what could be called "the Chicago approach" would say that the assignment of property rights themselves should be determined on the grounds of economic efficiency. (In Walter Block's reductio ad absurdum, a judge decides if a man has stolen a woman's purse by asking how much each party would be willing to pay for it.)

This is a particularly subtle area that I cannot adequately summarize in this article. Suffice it to say, Austrians and Chicago School economists alike can appreciate the amazing insights — and challenge to the standard Pigovian critique of the market — contained inRonald Coase's famous article. However, the Chicago School tradition has taken Coase's work to conclusions that many (perhaps most) modern Austrians find repellant.

Conclusion

On typical issues such as the minimum wage, tariffs, or government stimulus spending, Austrian and Chicago School economists can safely be lumped together as "free market." However, on many other areas — particularly issues of pure economic theory — the two schools are entirely different. As a self-described Austrian economist, I would encourage free-market fans who only know Friedman to add Ludwig von Mises and Murray Rothbard to their reading lists.

Death Wish

Public Financing of Reconquistadors Explodes

by Dave Blount 

Letting your enemies run your country isn't cheap. The Community Organizer in Chief has been buying the support of militantly racist Reconquistadors with your money:

The influential and politically-connected National Council of La Raza [The Race] (NCLR) has long benefitted from Uncle Sam's largess but the group has made a killing since Obama hired its senior vice president (Cecilia Muñoz) in 2009 to be his director of intergovernmental affairs.Ignored by the mainstream media, Judicial Watch covered the appointmentbecause the president issued a special "ethics waiver" to bring Muñoz aboard since it violated his own lobbyist ban. At the pro illegal immigration NCLR, Muñoz supervised all legislative and advocacy activities on the state and local levels and she was heavily involved in the congressional immigration battles that took place in the George W. Bush Administration.
She also brought in a steady flow of government cash that's allowed the Washington D.C.-based group to expand nationwide and promote its leftist, open-borders agenda via a network of community organizations dedicated to serving Latinos. Among them are a variety of local groups that provide social services, housing counseling and farm worker assistance as well as publicly-funded charter schools that promote radical Chicano curriculums.

Now that Comrade Obama needs Hispanics to line up behind him electorally against theGringo, public funding for this fifth column has exploded.

In fact, the government cash more than doubled the year Muñoz joined the White House, from $4.1 million to $11 million.

The money comes from a variety of departments — Labor (headed by Hilda Solis, a radical leftist with La Raza ties), Housing and Urban Development, Education, even the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Wherever government has expanded its reach, it will create siphons to move money from taxpayers to its friends.

A social service and legal assistance organization (Ayuda Inc.) that didn't receive any federal funding between 2005 and 2008 got $600,000 in 2009 and $548,000 in 2010 from the Department of Justice. The group provides immigration law services and guarantees confidentiality to assure illegal aliens that they won't be reported to authorities.Once again, we are forced to finance our own illegal colonization and eventual demographic obliteration. The hostility of our rulers to our country could not be more obvious.

Like religion, the family must be destroyed before liberty can be snuffed out completely

NY Times Attacks Traditional Family on Father's Day

by Dave Blount 

Yesterday the New York Times celebrated Father's Day by publishing an exceedingly lengthy piece on its conception of the modern family:

The setup is complicated. Griffin's mother, Carol Einhorn, a fund-raiser for a nonprofit group, is 48 and single. She conceived through in vitro fertilization with sperm from Mr. Russell, 49, a chiropractor and close friend. Monday, Tuesday, Thursday and Sunday nights, Mr. Russell stays in the spare room of Ms. Einhorn's apartment. The other three days he lives on President Street with his domestic partner, David Nimmons, 54, an administrator at a nonprofit. Most Sundays, they all have dinner together.

We are asked to regard this grotesquely pathological situation as normal.

Such is the hiccupping fluidity of the family in the modern world. Six years running now, according to census data, more households consist of the unmarried than the married. More people seem to be deciding that the contours of the traditional nuclear family do not work for them, spawning a profusion of cobbled-together networks in need of nomenclature. Unrelated parents living together, sharing chores and child-rearing. Friends who occupy separate homes but rely on each other for holidays, health care proxies, financial support.

The conventional family just isn't hip anymore, so get with the program. Soon the termsfather and mother will have been made into obscenities, as Aldous Huxley predicted in A Brave New World.

Reducing our culture to a freak show may make the creeps writing for the Times feel more at home, but the real underlying purpose is the same as with all their propaganda: to increase the power of government. Like religion, the family must be destroyed before liberty can be snuffed out completely, because it is a bulwark against the authority of the State.

“Sometimes you can’t defend the indefensible,”

Boiling over

June 19th, 2011

The frustration is palpable. Washington Post:

It was supposed to be the White House’s latest make-nice session with corporate America — a visit by Chief of Staff William M. Daley to a meeting with hundreds of manufacturing executives in town to press lawmakers for looser regulations. But the outreach soon turned into a rare public dressing down of the president’s policies with his highest-ranking aide. One by one, exasperated executives stood to air their grievances…
When a paper company executive said Environmental Protection Agency regulations might cost her $10 million to $15 million to upgrade a mill, Daley said the number of rules and regulations “that come out of agencies is overwhelming.”…
the room erupted in applause when Massachusetts manufacturing executive Doug Starrett, his voice shaking with emotion, accused the administration of blocking construction on one of his facilities to protect fish, saying government “throws sand into the gears of progress.” Daley said he did not have many good answers, appearing to throw up his hands in frustration at what he called “bureaucratic stuff that’s hard to defend.” “Sometimes you can’t defend the indefensible,” he said

Theater has apparently stopped working. Get involved. Here are acouple of suggestions.

Demographic Materialism

The “youth bulge” explanation

From a post by Baron Bodissey at Gates of Vienna, an interesting thesis

…The 63-year-old German sociologist Gunnar Heinsohn professor at the University of Bremen published his findings in his sensational and politically incorrect book Söhne und Weltmacht: Terror im Aufstieg und Fall der Nationen [Sons and World Domination: Terror in the Rise and Fall of Nations], published in 2003. The book became widely known and discussed after the prominent German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk had characterised it as being as groundbreaking as Karl Marx’s Das Kapital. Sloterdijk thought that the book might pave the way for a new realism within a field that might be labelled “Demographic Materialism”.
Heinsohn is not concerned with the absolute size of populations, but rather with the share of teenagers and young men. If this share becomes too big compared to the total population, we are facing a youth bulge. The problem starts when families begin to produce three, four or more sons. This will cause the sons to fight over access to the positions in society that give power and prestige. Then you will have a lot of boys and young men running around filled with aggression and uncontrollable hormones. And then we shall experience mass killings, until a sufficient number of young men have been eradicated to match society’s ability to provide positions for the survivors.
According to Heinsohn, 80 per cent of world history is about young men in nations with a surplus of sons, creating trouble. This trouble may take many forms — a increase in domestic crime, attempts at coups d’état, revolutions, riots and civil wars. Occasionally, the young commit genocide to secure for themselves the positions that belonged to those they killed. Finally, there is war to conquer new territory, killing the enemy population and replacing it with one’s own.
But, as Heinsohn emphasizes again and again, the unrest and the violent acts caused by youth bulges have nothing to do with famine or unemployment. In his book he describes it as follows: “The dynamic of a youth bulge — it cannot be emphasized too often — is not caused by a lack of food. A younger brother, who may be employed as a stable hand by the first-born son and who may be well fed and perhaps even fat, does not seek food but position, one that can guarantee him recognition, influence and dignity. Not the underweight but rather the potential losers or the déclassé are pushing forward” (p. 21).
In recent years the West has been facing a gigantic youth bulge in large parts of the Muslim world. This bulge is created by a Muslim population explosion. Over the course of just five generations (1900-2000) the population in the Muslim countries has grown from 150 million to 1 200 million — an increase of 800 per cent. As a comparison the population of China has grown from 400 million to 1 200 million (300 per cent). The population of India has risen from 250 million to 1000 million (400 per cent)….
“This brings me to something that I call ‘Demographic Capitulation’. It has a very simple definition: Take all the men aged 40-44 and compare them to the boys aged 0-4. Demographic capitulation is when you have 100 males aged 40-44 compared to less than 80 boys aged 0-4. In Germany the numbers are 100/50, in the Gaza Strip they are 100/464…
“Let us look at the small countries in Europe that were capable of conquering and colonising large parts of the world from around 1500, starting with Portugal and Spain. Our explanation is usually that there was a pressure on resources because of overpopulation. The opposite was the case. When Spain started its conquests in 1493 with Columbus’ second expedition, Spain had a population of six million, but in 1350 it had had nine million inhabitants. Spain was not overpopulated. There was, however, a sudden a growth in childbirths because in 1484 Pope Innocent VIII had decreed that birth control was punishable by death, which caused an immediate explosion in births. In the middle ages the average number of children per family was 2-3; now it was suddenly 6-7. That caused the median age in the population of six million to be 15, whereas the nine-million population of 1350 had had a median age between 28 and 30. So there was no lack of land or food. However, there was a sudden scarcity of positions. Previously there had been one or two boys in the family. One could take over the farm and the other might become a tenant somewhere else. Now you had three sons who had food but no positions, and these boys started the conquests and the colonising. It was quite telling that the Spaniards called then secundones, the second sons.”…
“When the time is ripe, new religious pamphlets and books will be written on the spot and in no time. From your holy books — the Koran, the Bible, The Communist Manifesto etc. — you take what fits your purpose. You know that you are going to use violence but want a justification. For you are a righteous person. But when the youth bulge is spent, the books that were distributed in millions of copies cannot even be sold in second-hand bookshops. Everybody knows that they are full of rubbish. But while the movement is on, these young men are impervious to arguments. So the false ideas do not arise from holy scripture. They are generated by the young men themselves because they need wrong ideas to justify their actions. Consequently you cannot stop them by explaining that their ideas are wrong. The movement is not created by wrong ideas. On the contrary, the wrong ideas are created by the movement. Islam does not create Islamism, young Muslims do.”

This calls to mind Spengler’s view that literacy and consequent falling birthrates, are issues of major importance in ultimately resolving this problem.

The Political Economy of Morality

Political Pretense vs. Market Performance

by Dwight R. Lee

There is a large gap between the performance of markets and the public's approval of markets. Despite the clear superiority of free markets over other economic arrangements at protecting liberty, promoting social cooperation and creating general prosperity, they have always been subject to pervasive doubts and, often, outright hostility. Of course, many people are also skeptical about government. Yet when problems arise that can even remotely be blamed on markets, the strong tendency is to "correct" the "market failures" by substituting more government control for market incentives. Recent evidence of this bias is healthcare reform, which, instead of freeing up healthcare markets to correct the distortions created by government subsidies and mandates, made the distortions worse by expanding the subsidies and mandates.

Public choice theorists have explained the bias favoring government expansion that does more harm than good by emphasizing concentrated interests vs. diffused costs. They point out that politicians often choose policies whose costs exceed their benefits if the costs are diffused among tens of millions of "losers," and the benefits are concentrated among a much smaller number of "gainers." The losers, they point out, will have little or no role in the policy process, while the gainers, with much more at stake per person, will have a huge role. Interests are clearly important in explaining why socially harmful government policies trump socially beneficial market solutions.

But that's not the whole story. Widely held moral perceptions also favor politics over markets. Those perceptions reflect a serious flaw in the political process and a failure to appreciate the moral foundations and outcomes of markets.

Two Types of Morality

What most people think of as moral behavior can be briefly described as satisfying three conditions: (1) helping others intentionally, (2) helping them at a personal sacrifice, and (3) helping identifiable people or groups. We all seem hard-wired to like this morality, which I refer to as "magnanimous morality." Magnanimous morality is an indispensible factor in living a meaningful life. But it is not the only type of morality we rely upon. While magnanimous morality is important in many of our economic activities (for example, practicing a certain measure of generosity and kindness to those we deal with directly), it is not the moral foundation of markets.

The moral foundation of markets is what I call "mundane morality." Mundane morality requires no more than what we would expect of any decent person and has, for most people, little of the emotional appeal of magnanimous morality. Mundane morality can be described broadly as obeying the generally accepted rules or norms of conduct, such as telling the truth, honoring promises and contractual agreements, respecting the property rights of others, and refraining from intentionally harming others except through legitimate competition. As Adam Smith stated:

Mere justice is, upon most occasions, but a negative virtue, and only hinders us from hurting our neighbour. The man who barely abstains from violating either the person, or the estate, or the reputation of his neighbours, has surely little positive merit.... We may often fulfil all the rules of justice by sitting still and doing nothing.1

One can question Smith's characterization of following the rules, or mundane morality, as having little positive merit. There is a continuum between magnanimous morality and mundane morality: on occasion, following the rules (mundane morality) satisfies some of the conditions of magnanimous morality. Professional golfers, for example, are known to call an infraction of the rules of golf against themselves even when no one would have otherwise known. Such behavior is done intentionally, is personally costly and is instinctively applauded as morally meritorious. But whether or not Smith saw mundane morality as having positive merit, he did see it as necessary and sufficient for people to coordinate their decisions through markets with large numbers of others in ways that promote their general interests, something that cannot be accomplished by magnanimous morality alone. In his famous "invisible hand" statement, Smith concludes that people, by pursuing their self-interest in the marketplace, unintentionally promote the public interest more effectively than if that had been their intention.2

Dan Quillen - RIP

The Architech

 by Steve Landsburg

Through the 1970s — which is to say, yesterday — Dan Quillen barraged the field of algebraic topology with a stream of new techniques and concepts that not only invigorated the field, but ramped up its power to solve problems in geometry, arithmetic and other mathematical areas where you might have thought topology had no business sticking its nose.

The greatest of these great accomplishments was Quillen’s development of higher algebraic K-theory, a long-sought holy grail for mathematicians. Pre-Quillen, one had a sense that there ought to be a subject called higher K-theory, and a general sense of what it should look like, and reasons to hope that K-theory, if only we could figure out what it was, would be the great unifying theme behind much of mathematics, and a tool for translating insights in one field into useful techniques in another. Many had tried and failed to lay the foundations of the subject. Then Quillen, in one 63 page paper, not only laid the foundations but brought the subject to a state of maturity that, in the words of Hyman Bass, one normally expects from the efforts of several mathematicians over several years:

The paper…is essentially without mathematical precursors. Reading it for the first time is like landing on a new and friendly mathematical planet. One meets there not only new theorems and new methods, but new mathematical creatures and a complete paradigm of gestures for dealing with them.

Much of my mathematical youth was spent exploring that planet. I met Quillen only once, and very briefly, but great mathematicians, like great poets, reveal so much of themselves in their work that one comes to feel a certain intimacy just by studying them. In that sense, Quillen was my close companion many a year.

Dan Quillen died this week at the age of 70, after a five year battle with Alzheimer’s. Scouring the web for obituaries and other recent mentions, I found very little besides a brief article from a Gainesville newspaper about an Alzheimer’s patient named Daniel Gray Quillen who had gone briefly missing in June, 2010. Followup stories identify the missing man as “a senior citizen with Alzheimer’s”.

“A senior citizen”?!?!?! Part of me wants to scream: “Dammit, this is no generic senior citizen! This is Daniel Fucking Quillen, Fields Medalist, Cole Prize Winner, architect of higher K-theory, conqueror of the Serre conjecture, and one of the intellectual giants of the 20th century!”

Arguably none of that has any place in a short note about a man gone briefly missing, so my gripe is not with the Gainesville Sun. My gripe is with the Universe. If I were running the Universe, there’d be some level of accomplishment that confers immunity from death, deterioration and obscurity. I’m not sure exactly where I’d set that bar, but I’m sure Dan Quillen would have cleared it.

The Silent Death of Harol Brito"

I am 39 years old and i have spent ALL my life in prison 

At the time of his death, Harol Brito was only 39 years old. He had spent 16 years of his life in prison because of ‘disrespect’ against the Commander in Chief, threat, resistance and disobedience against the authorities. State Security began to investigate him when he was 13 years old due to ‘ideological diversion’. While he was serving a sentence in the provincial ‘El Tipico’ prison of Las Tunas for supposedly robbing someone violently, he died handcuffed in a room of the Che Guevara Hospital at 1:30 pm on February 12, 2011.

Letter from Hellby Harol Brito Parra

January 26th 2011- “I, prisoner Harol Brito Parra (number 35166), am locked away in cell # 4 of Hallway H of Detachment #15 of the Provincial Las Tunas Prison for being a political persecuted pacifist who, ever since I was a child, proclaimed myself an enemy of the Castro tyranny which, for 52 years, has oppressed and subdued our Cuban nation, killing, torturing, and terrorizing without the least bit of remorse.

They jail us, they disappear us, they harass us, they insult us, and I really think that there are no words adequate to describe so much criminality. And the nations, governments, and humanity in general, around the world do nothing to put an end to so much pain and suffering.

I am 39 years old, and I have spent my life in prison. I spent approximately 14 years in prisons of maximum security and 2 years in the prisons which apply forced labor. These consisted of subhuman conditions, thriving with diseases such as HIV and AIDS, tuberculosis, bronchitis, leptospirosis, broncho-pneumonia, as well as famine, rats, cockroaches, fleas, and other bugs. God knows this is true.

The prisons of the Castro tyranny are hell on earth. They refuse us medicines and on top of that they take away our medical attention to hand it out among the terrorist buddies of the Castros throughout various countries of the world. And of course, as the saying goes ‘there is no one more blind than he who wishes to not see’. Neither nations nor the world want to take a look at the suffering of the Cuban people. And I am not saying this without facts and proof. I have been victim of everything I said I have suffered, and much more. My intention is not to speak lies, I have much proof to show of what my life has been like, and proving that all I say is true.

In 1996, while I was imprisoned in the punishment cells of Detachment #47 in Combinado del Este in the city of Havana, I became sick due to the excessive humidity and the subhuman conditions. I suffered from broncho-pneumonia, and my left lung was heavily damaged, and I am convinced that it was God who saved me. And I say that because the doctors said I was miraculously fine after they saw that the liquid which had gotten into my lung and ribs had disappeared by giving me medicines.

After suffering this disease, my health did not improve, for I never was able to get back to my normal weight. My body has been sick, so much so that words cannot describe it. Last year, in April, I nearly died. Or better said, they did all in their power to let me die.

Thanks, first of all to God and his will, many members of the opposition and many independent journalists worked together to not let me die: Jose Daniel Ferrer, “Papito”, Caridad Caballero, Juan Carlos Gonzalez Leyva, Alberto Mendez Castello, Ana Belkis Ferrer, Roberto de Jesus, and many other people and various churches from my village (Puerto Padre) prayed for my health, offered me food and medicine, something which the “New Pines” Church, which my mother attends to meet with Jesus Christ, did as well.

When the guards had no other option but to let the doctors tend to me for so many reasons and so much pressure, then they were not able to get pleasure from seeing me die little by little.

I had a very large tumor in my throat and suffered from ganglionic pneumonia which affected all my organs and all my body. Once again they had no other option but to isolate me and give me medicines.

I am writing this letter to denounce to the world that the medicines given to me did not cure my disease. I took the 100 doses given to me during a period of 6 to 20 days, the 60 doses of 14 pills day after day, and the 40 doses of 7 pills on Mondays and Thursdays for 4 months and 20 days. Not once did I refuse those medications. I took all the pills that were given to me. And I am not lying about what I am going to say:They released me without having been cured. On November 4th, the pneumonia specialists told me they were going to take me back to prison.

Since that day, I have been in the prison of Las Tunas living in conditions which are truly subhuman. I have told my relatives, my brother dissidents, the independent journalists, my friends, and everyone that I am fine. Having much faith in God, and confiding in him and trying to prevent those who love me from suffering. But everything has its time and everything under this sky has its day. The time has come to, with much valor, tell the world that I am slowly dying because of my lung disease. And it must also be said that neither the directors of this prison nor the health workers of the prison have done what they are supposed to do and are letting me die. In December, because of my demands, the prison authorities were forced to do a sputum test on me and x-rays. The results of the sputum exam were not shared with me or my family. Why do they hide the results? The x-ray appeared in one of the thousands of drawers of the prison, but not as something that was being filed, but something that was being hidden.

Thank God I was there the moment they took it out, because, thank God I knew that it was there where they were hiding it. Why was it not sent to a pulmonary specialist and why was it being hidden? Why do they hide it? Please, someone on earth, upon knowing of my situation, please intercede for me so that I do not die little by little, like the Castro dictatorship wants”.