A, not so new, "New World Order"

Bilderbullshitting the Public

by The Editors of Taki Mag

From June 9-12, while the American media was focusing its cruel klieg lights on, oh, Betty White switching her brand of adult diapers or something, over a hundred of the world’s most powerful financiers and policymakers convened in Switzerland to nearly inaudible fanfare.

One would think an event that clustered together high-ranking officials from some of global finance’s biggest names—the Federal Reserve, the IMF, the WTO, World Bank, Bank of Canada, European Central Bank, Citigroup, Barclays, Chase Manhattan, Goldman Sachs, and numerous European national banks—would have attracted more attention.

One would think wrong.

It would seem to be a major news story when corporate titans from Microsoft, Coca-Cola, Alcoa, Nestlé, Fiat, Airbus, Siemens, Shell, and Pfizer joined all of the above behind closed doors, wouldn’t it?

Only to a paranoid mind.

And only a lunatic would suggest that bringing together avowed globalists such as David Rockefeller and Henry Kissinger alongside such globalist and quasi-globalist organizations as the Council on Foreign Relations, the European Commission, the European Council, the Center for Global Economy and Geopolitics, and the United Nations World Food Programme would have anything to do with attempts to shape a global agenda.

So please, for the sake of your sanity, sweep away all such suspicions from your mind.

Since 1954, the Bilderberg group—named after the Hotel de Bilderberg in the Netherlands, home of their first meeting—have secretly convened yearly in Europe and America to ear-splitting silence and a blinding absence of media coverage.

But don’t ask why. There’s no reason. No reason at all. Nothing to see here, folks. Keep moving along. This is merely a bunch of old, washed-up farts sipping tea, playing miniature golf, and giving each other prostate massages.

If you suspect they are doing anything more than that, you are a “conspiracy theorist”—a meaningless ad-hominem attack used to shame and silence anyone who’d dare suggest that the world’s elites would ever so much as lift a pinkie to maintain, consolidate, and even enhance their power.

The Washington Post used the “conspiracy theorist” smear regarding anyone who’d dare assail the inviolably secret sanctity of this year’s Bilderberg convocation. But it neglected to mention that its owner, Donald Graham, attended last year’s Bilderberg meeting as an invited guest.

The BBC dismissively alluded to “wacky cabals,” reptilian shape-shifters, James Bond, Freemasonry, “extreme fear,” and, of course, anti-Semitism. Any skepticism about the Bilderbergs and their motivations was linked, locked, and forever welded to The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion.

That’s a strange accusation, seeing as how prominent Bilderbergers have undeniably Nazi roots. Former Nazi Party member Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands was one of the Bilderberg group’s founders, and David Rockefeller’s Chase Manhattan Bank was financially enmeshed with the Nazis.

But the Protocols analogy is instructive because, like it or not, it irrefutably proves the existence of political conspiracies. Allegedly a Jewish plot for world domination, the document has been widely denounced as a fraud perpetrated by Russian Tsarists. But if that’s the case, weren’t those Tsarist apologists CONSPIRING to deceive the public? Either way, a political conspiracy was involved.

And don’t dare consider that the CIA helped orchestrate and fund the Bilderbergers’ creation, because we all know the CIA bleeds tens of billions of our tax dollars yearly under strict instructions to never lie to us.

No. Scrape every last fleck of such suspicions from your mind with a rusty wire brush.

If you don’t, the mincing Ford Foundation toady Chip Berlet will scoff at you as someone who’s full of “baloney” and who spouts “malarkey.” What Chip doesn’t seem eager to reveal is that the Ford Foundation helped finance America’s first Bilderberg meeting back in 1957. Instead, Chip has a tendency to link all Bilderberg skepticism to anti-Semitism, which is brain-explodingly ironic considering the Ford Foundation’s namesake.

Despite what the servile media ball-washers of the world’s golfing elite insist, alleging that international financiers manipulate global events and profit from hopelessly bloody wars is not the sole domain of schizophrenics and racists. Fervid abolitionist Lysander Spooner made the same sort of allegations way before the Protocols appeared with his searing 1869 polemic No Treason. The highly decorated Marine General Smedley Butler claimed that in 1934, a group of industrialists approached him and asked him to help them overthrow FDR. He demurred and in 1935 penned the indispensable War is a Racket. Even that famously paranoid anti-Semitic tinfoil-hat-wearing loon John F. Kennedy—before someone blew out his brains—is on record condemning “secret societies.”

Still, the world’s smackably smug paid pundits sneer at the very idea of the Bilderbergers or any other group attempting to consolidate world finance and establish a “New World Order.”

It’s not as if any prominent Bilderbergers have ever alluded to such a thing.

From David Rockefeller’s Memoirs:

Some even believe we are part of a secret cabal working against the best interests of the United States, characterizing my family and me as ‘internationalists’ and of conspiring with others around the world to build a more integrated global political and economic structure – one world, if you will. If that’s the charge, I stand guilty, and I am proud of it.

From Denis Healey, member of the Bilderberg Steering Committee:

To say we were striving for a one-world government is exaggerated, but not wholly unfair.

And it’s not as if perennial Bilderberg attendee Henry Kissinger mouths the term “New World Order” all the time or writes entire New York Times editorials with the phrase in the title.

So why would anyone think that the Bilderberg group convenes yearly for anything beyond harmlessly polite banter and a lavishly catered buffet? What are you—nuts?

Πάντων χρημάτων μέτρον άνθρωπος

In defense of animal experimentation

It’s time that medical researchers were unequivocal in putting human need ahead of animal-welfare concerns.

by Patrick Hayes 
How did a small, fairly insignificant group like Animal Aid manage to make a big splash this week on the alleged horrors of animal experimentation? Not because it is influential or powerful in its arguments, but because society feels queasy about vivisection. At a time when the authorities and even medical researchers seem unwilling to stand up and make an unequivocal case for the importance of animal experimentation, groups like Animal Aid are empowered to spread doubt and suspicion.

Animal Aid’s campaign is a rehash of the same old anthropomorphic, misanthropic arguments: mice are being ‘tortured in water mazes’, zebrafish are being ‘mutilated’, pigs are being ‘sacrificed’ all for no real reason except seemingly to satisfy the perverse pleasure of sadistic medical researchers. The reasons given by Animal Aid for a financial boycott of four charities that benefit from animal experimentation - Cancer Research UK, the British Heart Foundation, Parkinson’s UK and the Alzheimer’s Society - are nothing the British public hasn’t heard before.

Animal Aid’s report Victims of Charity, which supposedly provides the evidence base that lends support to its advertising campaign, fails miserably in its attempt to suggest that animal ‘suffering’ should be prioritised over trying to find a cure for cancer or Alzheimer’s. And the group’s attempt to conclude that animal-based research is a ‘wasteful and futile quest’ that doesn’t actually yield positive benefits to humans is laughable, contradicted by countless medical discoveries, from the use of dogs to extract insulin to treat diabetes to the experiments on armadillos that developed a cure for leprosy.

So why are major figures taking the Animal Aid campaign seriously, suggesting that a motley crew of bunny-worshipping nutjobs could have a major effect upon the public’s financial support for medical research? Lord Willis of Knaresborough, chairman of the Association of Medical Research Charities, rightly dismisses the campaign as ‘illogical and ill-conceived’ but then suggests: ‘It will have consequences for charities targeted as, during tight economic times, any small downturn in donations could really put back cures by decades.’

Why should even such a small downturn in donations happen? The assumption seems to be that the very presence of this advertising campaign will mean that – rather than seeing Animal Aid’s arguments for the nonsense they are – financial supporters of these charities will somehow be fooled by these arguments and withdraw their financial support. Do they really think that a potential donor, initially inspired by trying to prevent others having to experience the suffering that a family member or friend went through, would suddenly have a change of heart in order to save a zebrafish?

Yet such concerns appear widespread. A report in the UK Independent asserts: ‘Privately, the charities are concerned that the Animal Aid campaign could have an effect on donations – but they are also worried about tackling the organisation head-on in case it exacerbates the problem.’

When contacted by spiked yesterday, more often it seemed that, privately, the charities were more concerned about giving publicity to a small bunch of hysterical no-marks than making the case for animal testing. All were willing to put forward statements about the importance of animal testing and engage in a debate, but they often came across as unnecessarily apologetic and defensive.

James Culling, head of individual giving, legacies and membership at Parkinson’s UK, said that his charity was not concerned about the impact of the Animal Aid campaign on donations and that ‘our members and supporters know that a small, but vital part of our research programme involves animals.’

Dr Kieran Breen, director of research and development at Parkinson’s UK, used the example of the Parkinson’s drug Levodopa, ‘which would not have been developed without the insights gained from research involving animals’. He argued that animal research would play a ‘key role’ in ultimately developing a cure for Parkinson’s.

You can't find wealth, you must create it

The Market Economy and the Distribution of Wealth

By Ludwig M. Lachmann

Everywhere today in the free world we find the opponents of the market economy at a loss for plausible arguments. Of late the “case for central planning” has shed much of its erstwhile luster. We have had too much experience of it. The facts of the last forty years are too eloquent.

Who can now doubt that, as Professor Mises pointed out thirty years ago, every intervention by a political authority entails a further intervention to prevent the inevitable economic repercussions of the first step from taking place? Who will deny that a command economy requires an atmosphere of inflation to operate at all, and who today does not know the baneful effects of “controlled inflation?” Even though some economists have now invented the eulogistic term “secular inflation” in order to describe the permanent inflation we all know so well, it is unlikely that anyone is deceived. It did not really require the recent German example to demonstrate to us that a market economy will create order out of “administratively controlled” chaos even in the most unfavorable circumstances. A form of economic organization based on voluntary cooperation and the universal exchange of knowledge is necessarily superior to any hierarchical structure, even if in the latter a rational test for the qualifications of those who give the word of command could exist. Those who are able to learn from reason and experience knew it before, and those who are not are unlikely to learn it even now.

Confronted with this situation, the opponents of the market economy have shifted their ground; they now oppose it on “social” rather than economic grounds. They accuse it of being unjust rather than inefficient. They now dwell on the “distorting effects” of the ownership of wealth and contend that “the plebiscite of the market is swayed by plural voting.” They show that the distribution of wealth affects production and income distribution since the owners of wealth not merely receive an “unfair share” of the social income, but will also influence the composition of the social product: Luxuries are too many and necessities too few. Moreover, since these owners do most of the saving they also determine the rate of capital accumulation and thus of economic progress.

Some of these opponents would not altogether deny that there is a sense in which the distribution of wealth is the cumulative result of the play of economic forces, but would hold that this cumulation operates in such a fashion as to make the present a slave of the past, a bygone an arbitrary factor in the present. Today's income distribution is shaped by today's distribution of wealth, and even though today's wealth was partly accumulated yesterday, it was accumulated by processes reflecting the influence of the distribution of wealth on the day before yesterday. In the main this argument of the opponents of the market economy is based on the institution of Inheritance to which, even in a progressive society, we are told, a majority of the owners owe their wealth.

This argument appears to be widely accepted today, even by many who are genuinely in favor of economic freedom. Such people have come to believe that a “redistribution of wealth,” for instance through death duties, would have socially desirable, but no unfavorable economic results. On the contrary, since such measures would help to free the present from the “dead hand” of the past they would also help to adjust present incomes to present needs. The distribution of wealth is a datum of the market, and by changing data we can change results without interfering with the market mechanism! It follows that only when accompanied by a policy designed continually to redistribute existing wealth, would the market process have “socially tolerable” results.

This view, as we said, is today held by many, even by some economists who understand the superiority of the market economy over the command economy and the frustrations of interventionism, but dislike what they regard as the social consequences of the market economy. They are prepared to accept the market economy only where its operation is accompanied by such a policy of redistribution.

The present paper is devoted to a criticism of the basis of this view.

I'm just getting old, dammit.

The Terrifying Truth About New Technology

Do robots and Twitter make you nervous? Growing old is what you're really afraid of

By DANIEL H. WILSON

A pilot virtual senior center program in New York City is allowing homebound seniors to use social technology to battle isolation and depression. WSJ's Andy Jordan visits the home of one participant who says he was waiting around to die until a computer gave him a new lease on life.

In movies, on television, and in books, robots are stalking the land, scanning for human victims. The technology we depend on is going awry. Our civilization is going up in flames.

As we consider the umpteenth round of cutting-edge cellphone upgrades, we feel a creeping unease settle over our shoulders. Dread drips from every new device that dances into our lives: newer, shinier, faster. This time in white.

At some point, you probably stopped to wonder where all the pay phones had gone. You've been heard to say, "May I speak to a human, please?" Perhaps you've even contemplated the deeper questions, like just what in the hell does Twitter do?

We think we're afraid of the technology. But we're really afraid of getting old.

I turned 33 this year, plenty old enough to have grown weary of being bombarded by the new. For my part, I channeled my fear and worry into a novel called "Robopocalypse." The book is about, well… by the fourth or fifth syllable of the title, you should start to get the gist of the plot.

"Robopocalypse" joins a proud tradition of techno-apocalyptic tales, stretching from high-flying Icarus, to Frankenstein's monster, and to many a giant radioactive creature who has crashed the streets of Tokyo. And then, of course, there's the Terminator.

The fear of the never-ending onslaught of gizmos and gadgets is nothing new. The radio, the telephone, Facebook—each of these inventions changed the world. Each of them scared the heck out of an older generation. And each of them was invented by people who were in their 20s.

Mark Zuckerberg didn't create Facebook for people with kids and mortgages. Technology is created by the young, for the young. The young revel in new gadgets with small, deft thumbs. They beg for them in acronym-laden speeches because OMG, you need this stuff to be cool IRL. Then they use them to take lewd pictures of themselves, even though this is obviously a very bad idea. They are the fearless ones.

Why are the young able to thrive, tossing away instruction manuals and digging in with reckless abandon?

Thankfully, Jean Piaget, one of the first developmental psychologists, figured out part of this puzzle years ago.

Piaget observed his own infants rapidly gaining simple skill sets related to manipulating objects in their environment. Skills like grabbing a Cheerio and stuffing it toward their mouth holes. These skills are the starting point for exploring a diverse and ever-changing world. Piaget called them schema.

And a schema is designed to evolve. When exposed to some novel object, infants don't start over from scratch. They choose an existing schema and enact it. With a rather limited repertoire, you can expect infants to exercise the "grab and gum" schema quite often as they explore the world. (This is why you don't allow unsupervised babies near cat food.) This process of applying an existing schema to a new object is what Piaget called assimilation.

Death, Taxes and Defaults

Postponing Greece’s inevitable default

by Martin Feldstein
Even though the Greek parliament has given the government some breathing space with its vote of confidence late on Tuesday, a default by Greece is inevitable. With a debt to gross domestic product ratio of more than 150 per cent, large annual deficits and interest rates more than 25 per cent, the only question is when the default will occur. The current negotiations are really about postponing the inevitable default.

If Greece were the only insolvent European country, it would be best if its default occurred now. Cutting its debt in half and replacing the existing debt with low interest rate bonds would allow Greece to service its debt without the excruciating pain that would be involved if it tried to service its current debt.

But Greece is not alone in its insolvency and a default by Athens could trigger defaults by Portugal, Ireland and possibly Spain. The resulting losses would destroy large amounts of the capital of banks and other creditors in Germany, France and other countries. There would be a drying up of credit available to businesses throughout Europe and there could be a collapse of major European banks.

This inevitable contagion and its potential consequences for the European financial system is the reason the European Central Bank is determined to avoid a default at this time. The challenge, therefore, is to find a way to postpone the defaults long enough for the banks and other creditors to withstand the write-downs of bond values if Greece, Portugal and Ireland default simultaneously.

The process is complicated by the German government’s position that it will support the extension of more official credit now only if the existing private creditors participate. The ECB insists that the private creditor participation must be “voluntary” so that no technical default occurs.

The essential feature of any solution is therefore for the existing bondholders to “voluntarily” agree to capitalise the interest that is now due and to provide new multi-year loans at a below-market interest rate to replace the bonds that are now maturing. That should satisfy the German demand for participation of private lenders while meeting the ECB’s requirement that any adjustment be voluntary so that no default is deemed to occur.

But how to get the existing creditors to agree to these terms? If it is not to be mandatory, it must be in each creditor’s interest to do this. Three things might make this possible.

Make me laugh

The Feminist Betrayal of Norma Jeane
by D. Mamet

A student, lawyer, teacher, artist, mother, grandmother, defender of animals, rancher, homemaker, sportswoman, rescuer of children — all these are futures we can imagine for Norma Jeane. If acting had become an expression of that real self, not an escape from it, one can also imagine the whole woman who was both Norma Jeane and Marilyn becoming a serious actress and wise comedienne, who would still be working in her sixties, with more productive years to come. But Norma Jeane remained the frightened child of the past. And Marilyn remained the unthreatening half-person that sex-goddesses are supposed to be. It is the lost possibilities of Marilyn Monroe that capture our imaginations.– Gloria Steinem, foreword to Coffee with Marilyn, by Yona Zeldis McDonough

Marilyn Monroe, then, though her work brought and brings delight to literally hundreds of millions of people, although she created for herself one of the most revered icons in show business, had an impossibly successful career, though she did this through persistence, talent, hard work, and guts, must be dismissed by the wiser, nonworking Left, which finds her neither a serious actress nor a comedienne. She did not, sadly, fulfill the vision which Gloria Steinem had for her, because she was not an intellectual — she was an actual worker.

In a more equal world, a top-down world, a world of equality (as envisioned and enforced by the Left) Ms. Monroe might have been taken in hand (by whom?) early on, and cured of her unreal escapist self (her talent), and still be alive playing Mother Courage in some Resident Theatre somewhere.

Can this be feminism? A dismissal of the greatest comedienne in the history of the screen because her work did not meet the high standards of Gloria Steinem?

Is it possible that the wise Ms. Steinem mistakes the performances of Marilyn with the person? She does conflate, and seems to connect causally, Marilyn’s screen persona with her use of sleeping pills, suggesting that she killed herself (an open point) because she was “denied the full range of possibility” and, so, was forced to disappoint Gloria Steinem.

Would Ms. Steinem be happier if Marilyn had lived to play Medea and Queen Elizabeth? Is she ignorant of the working lifespan of an actress? Did she never laugh or smile at one of Marilyn’s performances? Of course she did, but now she wants to throw it in reverse and, having derived enjoyment from her work, derive further enjoyment from her superior sad understanding of Marilyn’s essential “slavery.” Marilyn, though vastly wealthy, though widely accomplished, though revered worldwide (and to this day), was somehow a “slave to men.” Why? Because she was a woman, and acting, thus, was somehow not “an expression of her real self.”

What balderdash. Shame on you, Ms. Steinem, for promoting hypocrisy. For anyone who might be foolish enough to nod along with your sanctimony will, along with you, the next time they watch one of Marilyn’s films, laugh and smile; you, then, are promoting a dual-consciousness, an indictment of that which one enjoys, of a legitimate pleasure brought about through the work and the talent of an actual human being, who, in your sad lament, you belittle and patronize. Were or are you smarter or more talented than Marilyn Monroe? Make me laugh.

[And note, Ms. Steinem, that it is not the job of an actor to “express her real self.” (Which of us knows what his real self is?) It was her job to entertain the audience. That was her job. And she did it as well as anyone who ever acted. What entertainment has ever come from your beloved solipsism? Would you go to see such a performance -- an evening of someone “expressing her true self”?]

And where was the Left, and where the feminists, during President Clinton’s savaging of Juanita Broaddrick, Gennifer Flowers, Paula Jones, Susan McDougal, and Monica Lewinsky? These women, who suffered, if anyone has ever suffered, “workplace harassment,” were dismissed from consideration by the Left, who mentioned their struggles not at all; and Monica Lewinsky, a Nice Jewish Girl from Brentwood, working as an intern in the office of the most powerful man on the planet, was treated to the silence of the feminists as she was accused, by her employer, the President of the United States, while he was committing perjury, of being unbalanced and, perhaps, of having had a “bad childhood.”

How, by the Left, can this be excused? It cannot. But it may be partially explained — Flowers, Jones et al., were dismissed by the Left not merely because they accused the Left’s avatar, but because of their class. They were, to the Left, “trailer trash,” and so, de-facto, undeserving of a hearing let alone a defense. The feminists of the Left were voluble in their indictment of Justice Thomas, in Anita Hill’s, at best, “he said, she said” controversy; using racist language and innuendo against him unheard in this country in decades.

They supported Tawana Brawley’s improbable claims of rape up to, and, indeed, past the point at which they had been proved fraudulent and her testimony found perjured. But what of the death of Mary Jo Kopechne by drowning? What feminist spoke up for the dead victim? Or against the man who drove her to her death? He remained an icon of the Left for the rest of his life. Are those feminists, then, spokespersons for the Rights of Women? Demonstrably not. They are not even spokeswomen for the rights of Liberal women — Ms. Kopechne was working for a Democrat, as was Ms. Lewinsky. They are advocates only of the positions of the Left — at whatever cost to women. If feminism does not consist in the actual defense of actual women, what in the world are those people talking about?

Dance of the Post-Modern Veils

By Mark Steyn  

This one may make your head hurt. From a court in New South Wales:

A MUSLIM woman sentenced to six months’ jail for making a deliberately false statement that a racist policeman tried to forcibly remove her burka has been freed on appeal.

Judge Clive Jeffreys said he was not satisfied beyond reasonable doubt it was Carnita Matthews, a 47-year-old Muslim woman from Woodbine, NSW, who accused the police of racism…

Fair enough. So why aren’t you sure it was Mrs. Matthews?

. . . because the person who handed in the complaint to police was wearing a burka at the time.

To reach the level of proof of identity to prove the case, it appears Mrs Matthews would have been required to identify herself by lifting her burka at the police station to prove her identity – which is what started the uproar in the first case.

So, if I follow correctly, we can never establish the identity of the woman who falsely accused the police of demanding she remove her burka because to establish her identity the police would have to demand she remove her burka thereby rendering her false accusation true.

As to what Mrs. Matthews looks like in or out of her burka, I’m none the wiser. She was flanked by a phalanx of young Muslim men who prevented anyone getting a look at her.

Mrs Matthew’s lawyer Stephen Hopper defended them, saying: “They are obviously happy with the result and are expressing it in a way that is culturally appropriate to them”.

. . . by yelling “Allahu Akbar!” and attacking cameramen. You can’t get more “culturally appropriate” than that.

Trading with the Devil

The devil's black gold

By Roger Meiners

“Chevron Guilty of Polluting the Amazon” reported Greenpeace on its website in February. Chevron was ordered by a court in Ecuador to pay $9.5 billion in damages for injuries imposed on people and the environment in Ecuador from its oil operation.

Does Greenpeace think “justice” is likely in Ecuador? It is one of the most corrupt nations in Latin America, coming in at #127 (out of 178 nations) in the Transparency International rankings, tied with Syria and Belarus.

This case goes way back. As a federal court explained in Phoenix Canada Oil Co. Ltd. v. Texaco (1988), under a 1965 agreement with Ecuador, Texaco, which later became Chevron, searched for oil, found it, and in 1972 began transporting oil to the coast via a 318-mile pipeline that cost $108 million—back when that was real money. Seeing the bonanza, the government of Ecuador jacked up the royalty rate in 1969 from 6 to 11 percent.

The next government raised the royalty rate to 17 percent in 1975, declaring that all hydrocarbons “belong to the inalienable and imprescriptible patrimony of the State.” In addition, the size of Texaco’s exploration area was cut. Texaco asked for compensation, but was refused by the militarybased government, which stated that payment was “inconsistent with the petroleum policy of the ‘Nationalistic and Revolutionary Government of the Armed Forces.’”

Ignoring many other legal squabbles that help make this story a non-hydrocarbon gusher for lawyers, Texaco was sued in 1993 in federal court in New York by communities in Ecuador that claimed that contamination killed many people, sickened more, and caused massive environmental damage in the Amazon Basin. After Texaco was merged into Chevron in 2001, a federal appeals court agreed that the case should be tried in Ecuador. The case bounced around as Chevron and Ecuador squabbled over where and how to deal with the matter.

Obama vs. ATMs

Why Technology Doesn't Destroy Jobs

Doing more with less is what economic growth is all about.

By RUSSELL ROBERTS

The story goes that Milton Friedman was once taken to see a massive government project somewhere in Asia. Thousands of workers using shovels were building a canal. Friedman was puzzled. Why weren't there any excavators or any mechanized earth-moving equipment? A government official explained that using shovels created more jobs. Friedman's response: "Then why not use spoons instead of shovels?"

That story came to mind last week when President Obama linked technology to job losses. "There are some structural issues with our economy where a lot of businesses have learned to become much more efficient with a lot fewer workers," he said. "You see it when you go to a bank and you use an ATM, you don't go to a bank teller, or you go to the airport and you're using a kiosk instead of checking in at the gate."

The president calls this a structural issue—we usually call it progress. And it isn't exactly a new phenomenon. It's been going on for centuries, and its pace has accelerated over the past 50 years. Businesses relentlessly look for ways to replace workers with machines. The machines get better and smarter. We go from spoons to shovels to excavators, not the other way around.

Telephone switchboard operators lose jobs to automated switching. Toll collectors get replaced by E-ZPass. Auto workers get replaced by robots.

The magnitudes are stunning. As the Washington Post reported in 2007:

"The textile industry has been particularly aggressive in replacing people with machines. A half-century ago, a typical North Carolina textile worker operated five machines at once, each capable of running a thread through a loom at 100 times a minute. Now machines run six times as fast, and one worker oversees 100 of them."

That's a 120-fold increase in output per worker. When a worker is 120 times more productive, you usually don't need as many workers as you did before.

Or look at eggs. Today, a couple of workers can manage an egg-laying operation of almost a million chickens laying 240,000,000 eggs a year. How can two people pick up those eggs or feed those chickens or keep them healthy with medication? They can't. The hen house does the work—it's really smart. The two workers keep an eye on a highly mechanized, computerized process that would have been unimaginable 50 years ago.

But should we call this progress? In a sense it sounds like a deal with the devil. Replace workers with machines in the name of lower costs. Profits rise. Repeat. It's a wonder unemployment is only 9.1%. Shouldn't the economy put people ahead of profits?

Well, it does. The savings from higher productivity don't just go to the owners of the textile factory or the mega hen house who now have lower costs of doing business. Lower costs don't always mean higher profits. Or not for long. Those lower costs lead to lower prices as businesses compete with each other to appeal to consumers.

Prison Rape

The Becker-Acton Model Confirmed

by Bryan Caplan

The latest U.S. Department of Justice National Inmate Survey confirms my earlier report that prison staff commit more prison rape than prisoners.  Lovisa Stannow of Just Detention International boils down the results in Reason:

The U.S. Department of Justice recently released its first-ever estimate of the number of inmates who are sexually abused in America each year. According to the department's data, which are based on nationwide surveys of prison and jail inmates as well as young people in juvenile detention centers, at least 216,600 inmates were victimized in 2008 alone. Contrary to popular belief, most of the perpetrators were not other prisoners but staff members--corrections officials whose job it is to keep inmates safe. On average, each victim was abused between three and five times over the course of the year. The vast majority were too fearful of reprisals to seek help or file a formal complaint.

As Becker might say, "Incentives matter."  Or in Acton's immortal words:

I cannot accept your canon that we are to judge Pope and King unlike other men with a favourable presumption that they did no wrong. If there is any presumption, it is the other way, against the holders of power, increasing as the power increases. Historic responsibility has to make up for the want of legal responsibility. All power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men... There is no worse heresy than that the office sanctifies the holder of it.