Saving the planet, rescuing the poor and regulating the rest of us

The “virtueocracy”

By MARGARET WENTE

Laurel O’Gorman is one of the faces of Occupy Toronto. She believes the capitalist system has robbed her of her future. At 28, she’s studying for a master’s degree in sociology at Laurentian University in Sudbury. She’s also the single mother of two children. “I’m here because I don’t know what kind of job I could possibly find that would allow me to pay rent, take care of these two children and pay back $600 each month in loans,” she said.

Ms. O’Gorman is in a fix. But I can’t help wondering whether she, and not the greedy Wall Street bankers, is the author of her own misfortune. Just what kind of jobs did she imagine are on offer for freshly minted sociology graduates? Did she bother to ask? Did it occur to her that it might be a good idea to figure out how to support her children before she had them?

She’s typical in her bitter disappointment. Here’s Boston resident Sarvenaz Asasy, 33, who has a master’s degree in international human rights, along with $60,000 in student loans. She dreamed of doing work to help the poor get food and education. But now she can’t find a job in her field. She blames the government. “They’re cutting all the grants, and they’re bailing out the banks. I don’t get it.”

Then there’s John, who’s pursuing a degree in environmental law. He wants to work at a non-profit. After he graduated from university, he struggled to find work. “I had to go a full year between college and law school without a job. I lived at home with my parents to make ends meet.” He thinks a law degree will help, but these days, I’m not so sure.

These people make up the Occupier generation. They aspire to join the virtueocracy – the class of people who expect to find self-fulfillment (and a comfortable living) in non-profit or government work, by saving the planet, rescuing the poor and regulating the rest of us. They are what the social critic Christopher Lasch called the “new class” of "therapeutic cops in the new bureaucracy."

The trouble is, this social model no longer works. As blogger Kenneth Anderson writes, “The machine by which universities train young people to become minor regulators and then delivered them into white-collar positions on the basis of credentials in history, political science, literature, ethnic and women’s studies – with or without the benefit of law school – has broken down. The supply is uninterrupted, but the demand has dried up.”

It’s not the greedy Wall Street bankers who destroyed these people’s hopes. It’s the virtueocracy itself. It’s the people who constructed a benefit-heavy entitlement system whose costs can no longer be sustained. It’s the politicians and union leaders who made reckless pension promises that are now bankrupting cities and states. It’s the socially progressive policy-makers in the U.S. who declared that everyone, even those with no visible means of support, should be able to own a home with no money down, courtesy of their government. In Canada, it’s the social progressives who assure us we can keep on consuming all the health care we want, even as the costs squeeze out other public goods.

The Occupiers are right when they say our system of wealth redistribution is broken. But they’re wrong about what broke it. The richest 1 per cent are not exactly starving out the working poor. (In the U.S., half all income sent to Washington is redistributed to the elderly, sick and disabled, or to those who serve them, and nearly half the country lives in a household that’s getting some sort of government benefit.) The problem is, our system redistributes the wealth from young to old, and from middle-class workers in the private sector to inefficient and expensive unions in the public sector.

Among the biggest beneficiaries of this redistribution is the higher-education industry. In Canada, we subsidize it directly. In the U.S., it’s subsidized by a vast system of student loans, which have allowed colleges to jack up tuition to sky-high levels. U.S. student debt has hit the trillion-dollar mark. Both systems crank out too many sociologists and too few mechanical engineers. These days, even law-school graduates are having trouble finding work. That’s because the supply has increased far faster than the demand.

The voices of Occupy Wall Street, argues Mr. Anderson and others, are the voices of the downwardly mobile who are acutely aware of their threatened social status and need someone to blame. These are people who weren’t interested in just any white-collar work. They wanted to do transformational, world-saving work – which would presumably be underwritten by taxing the rich. They now face the worst job market in a generation. But their predicament is at least in part of their own making. And none of the solutions they propose will address their problem.

Ms. O’Gorman, the graduate student in sociology, didn’t bring her kids to the Occupy demonstration in Toronto because she was worried about security. Still, she hoped they would absorb the message. “I’m trying to teach them equity and critical thinking from a young age,” she said. If she’d only applied a bit more critical thinking to herself, she might be able to pay the rent.

Why I'm stocking up on dehydrated prunes.

The Children Are Our Future

By Jordan Chittley

Most children can't wait to collect candy on Halloween night, but when homeowners don't hand out treats some dire consequences can follow.

Some kids calling themselves Children of the Hood wrote a letter to one homeowner in Oshawa, Ont.explaining that he missed Halloween and left the letter in his mailbox. They write that the lady who used to own the house handed out candy apples, "but last night there were no candy apples. Come to think of it there was no candy at all from your home!"

The kids explain the mistake and say the homeowner can fix it next year by passing out chocolate bars. They say they will understand he probably can't make candy apples because he is a guy and that they receive too many bags of chips so chocolate bars are the perfect solution. Another way to rectify the issue is for the homeowner to deliver candy to the children on Saturday because they will probably have eaten all of their candy from Halloween by then.

But the homeowner didn't deliver any candy, instead he posted the note on Kijiji saying he is looking for the author.

"Dear Children of Entitlement (and likely their parents)," starts the Kijiji post. "You have gone ahead and reminded me of why I do not want children, and why I weep for the future."

The homeowner says he was not home on Halloween and has bought a huge amount of candy, which he will enjoy with his friends on Saturday.

The Case for Legalizing Capitalism

The Immorality of Democratic Voting

by Kel Kelly

Businesspeople, if they are successfully "greedy," become rich by providing their fellow citizens (i.e., consumers) with things that make them better off. In other words, they have to earn it. But many who espouse that people don't need more than a basic level of existence, in their own greed, constantly vote for politicians who will take money from others and give it to them. They, just like the businessman, want more than they currently have. But instead of earning it as the businessman or capitalist does, the socialists steal it from those who have more. The business people's actions are moral (unless they earned their money by theft or by being given privileges by government), while theirs are not.

The sad fact is that this is exactly what our political system — democracy — is all about. It is a system where the masses, those with less money than the minority group that has great wealth, vote for politicians who offer to take money from the wealthy minority and redistribute it to them in return for giving the politician their votes.

Voting wealth out of the pockets of those who have it is socialism, because it is done for the "common good," for the benefit of helping that part of society that earns less. This is why democracy has been likened to two wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for dinner. This is also what is known as "social justice." Politicians are simply people who learn to be good actors in order to win your vote. They ultimately care little about real progress for the country or the lives of individuals; they care about their political careers.

Wealth redistribution, therefore, is theft. It is the taking by force from one group in order to give to another. Force is involved because anyone who fails to pay assessed taxes — confiscatory taxes that mostly go directly into someone else's pockets — will be put in prison. People from whom money is taken have not usually voted for this action,[1] but those who wanted to receive others' money usually have voted to take it from them. Many socialists will dispute this and argue that most people want to pay the amount of taxes they pay. This implies, for example, that when the government doubled the tax rate during the Great Depression, people, coincidentally, simultaneously wanted to voluntarily pay double the amount of income tax. It implies that when marginal tax rates reached 90 percent, people truly wanted to work and hand over 90 percent of their marginal earnings. The argument is too weak to take seriously. Besides, if most people want to pay all the taxes they pay, socialists will have no problem switching the payment of taxes from being required by law to being voluntary.[2]

Wealth redistribution does not involve only social programs such as welfare, Medicaid, and Medicare. It involves any occurrence of one party receiving money, physical goods, or services, that they did not pay the full cost of, but that another party did, on their behalf. For example, public transportation involves wealth redistribution because most who use it did not pay for the bulk of the cost. Even though they contribute by purchasing their tickets, the ticket is highly subsidized because wealthier taxpayers fund most of the cost.

Similarly, National Public Radio (NPR) is a wealth-redistribution program (mostly from the rich to the middle class). Many who listen to it paid taxes toward it, but many of those who do not listen also pay for it — and often pay more. If NPR is a viable business that would have enough people wanting to use it, it would be profitable on its own without government funding. If NPR could not survive without the government, it is a loss-making enterprise that is consuming wealth. That wealth could instead be used for profitable ventures, which would better serve society. We can see from this last example that only by having profit-and-loss statements can we determine whether a product or service is something consumers really want to have. There are never any profit-and-loss statements associated with anything the government operates, so we do not know which services are really beneficial in economic terms.[3]

Most of the taxes paid in the United States (and most countries) are paid by a small group of people: the rich. In 2005, 53.7 percent of all income taxes in the United States were paid by those earning over $200,000. Those earning between $100,000 and $200,000 paid 28.3 percent of all taxes. This means that 82 percent of all taxes were paid by those earning over $100,000.[4] Those with incomes below $40,000, in total, paid no income tax: their tax liability was more than offset by the tax rebates from the Earned Income Tax Credit. In other words, many receive money (from the rich) "returned" to them for taxes that were never paid.

Further, most taxes do not go towards essential government services such as road infrastructure, parks, education, the legal system, or police and fire departments — they go directly into other people's pockets. No more than 10 percent of the 2009 federal-government budget goes towards these essential government services (and most of these services are taken care of with separate state and local taxes). More than 65 percent of the budget goes towards social programs or some other type of income support or assistance. (Most of the remaining portion goes to fund our wars, or, "national defense" as it's called.)

Many claim, without an understanding of what's really happening, that somehow the rich take money from the poor. The facts show it is quite the other way around, considering the following numbers. According to a detailed report[5] by the Tax Foundation,[6] in 2004, the bottom 20 percent of all income earners received $8.21 in government spending for every $1.00 in total[7]taxes they paid (and $14.76 for every dollar of federal taxes paid). The middle 20 percent received $1.30 for every $1 in taxes paid. But the top 20 percent of income earners received only $0.41 for every dollar of taxes paid. (Though they don't give the figures for the top 5 percent of taxpayers, who pay almost 60 percent of all taxes,[8] their receipt of government spending, by logical deduction, must be below $0.05 or less for every dollar they pay.)

In dollar amounts, households in the lowest-earning quintile in 2004 received about $31,185 more in government spending than they paid in taxes, while the middle quintile received $6,424 more than they paid. The top quintiles, however, paid $48,449 more in taxes than they received in government spending. In the aggregate, the top 40 percent of income-earning households paid roughly $1.03 trillion more in total taxes than they received in government spending, while the bottom 60 percent received $1.53 trillion more in government spending than they paid in taxes (the difference being the amount spent by government in excess of what it brought in — an excess mostly financed by the future top income earners). This is wealth redistribution.

We can see from these statistics how absurd is the phrase "tax breaks for the rich." The rich do indeed benefit most from tax breaks because of the fact that they pay most taxes. Tax breaks are the giving back to the rich some of the money that was previously taken from them. Yet socialists call this redistribution from the poor to the wealthy! In other words, if the poor aren't allowed to receive as much of others' incomes as before, and the rich are allowed to keep more of their income, then, in the eyes of socialists, the rich are taking from the poor. This is like saying that a thief who must return a woman's purse after getting caught stealing it is redistributing money from himself to her.

Keynesian economics and Totalitarianism

Keynes Was No Liberal

By Allen McDaniels

While reviewing the writings of the revisionist historian and former teacher of mine James J. Martin, I came upon a reference to John Maynard Keynes's German-language edition of his General Theory, published in 1936.[1][2] In this edition, Keynes wrote a special foreword for his German readers. This foreword has been largely overlooked by hagiographers, economists, historians, and journalists — definitely by sympathetic politicians and bureaucrats. At the time of the German foreword, September 1936, Adolf Hitler's National Socialists had been in power for nearly four years.

The kernel of Keynes's thought is summarized in a short passage within the foreword:

"The theory of aggregate production, which is the point of the following book, nevertheless can be much easier adapted to the conditions of a totalitarian state than the theory of production and distribution of a given production put forth under conditions of free competition and a large degree of laissez-faire. This is one of the reasons that justifies the fact that I call my theory a general theory.[3]

Keynes called his theory "general" because he claimed it would work not only in a laissez-faire setting but also, and more easily, in a totalitarian one. This contrasts with classical Austrian economics, which recommends free men and laissez-faire.

In a letter to Sir Percival Liesching of the British Board of Trade dated October 8, 1943, Keynes also made the following clear and unequivocal declarations:

Thank you for your note on state trading. If in this matter you leave loop-holes in your scheme, it will not upset me. Indeed, the more loop-holes you leave the wiser you will be in my opinion.

As you know, I am afraid, a hopeless sceptic about this return to nineteenth century laissez faire, for which you and the U.S. State Department seem to have such a nostalgia.I believe the future lies with

1.   State trading for commodities;

2.   International cartels for necessary manufactures; and

3.   Quantitive import restrictions for nonessential manufactures.

Yet all these future instrumentalities for orderly economic life in the future you seek to outlaw.[4]

The Obama administration's brain trust of Keynesian economists and sympathizers continue massive government intervention in the economy, euphemistically referred to as stimuli, in a vain attempt to rescue it from the brink. Thus far, such intervention has made any recovery more remote.

Is the administration at the same time working to create a totalitarian state where Keynesian economics has a better chance of success?

Do Americans want to sacrifice their remaining freedom in order to prove Lord Keynes correct?

Who is confronting the administration with these questions?

Notes

[1] Keynes, J.M. Allgemeine Theorie der Beschaftigung des Zines und des Geldes (Berlin and Munich: Duncker & Humblot; 1936, 1952, 1955, 1967).

[2] In Martin, J.J. Revisionist Viewpoints: Essays in a Dissident Historical Tradition (Colorado Springs: Ralph Myles, 1971), pp. 197 ff.

[3] Idem, pp. 203–5.

[4] Idem, pp. 198–9.

I want more

Christina’s toxic cookbook

by DETLEV SCHLICHTER

Keynesian and other mainstream economists cannot explain the present crisis. That doesn’t seem to bother them.

All they can offer is a description of symptoms, such as with their favourite phrase of lack of ‘aggregate demand’, which, if you think about it, doesn’t really explain anything. How come demand dropped? Why did it drop now and not at any other time? Whose demand dropped? (Hint: mine didn’t.)

“Sigmund Freud meets Dr. Ruth”

But hey, when faced with a lack of proper economic explanations, you can always fall back on some amateur psychology. Everything must be down to what goes on in people’s heads, right? People just get all mixed up. Too pessimistic. Animal spirits, anybody? That’s why it is always up to those cool-headed guys and gals in government to use their policy tools to change expectations, change the psychology of people, cajole everybody into some elevated state of positive thinking and hence more economic activity. Save the masses from their own silly notions in their tiny heads, like saving and getting rid of debt. They all just clam up and save. Pitiful. But most importantly, why even worry about explaining the recession if you are confident, if you simply know deep down in your heart, how to get out of it.

Most politicians don’t know any better. They certainly don’t know any economics. So the same toxic policy mix of Keynesian deficit spending and Monetarist money printing has been implemented around the world since this crisis started four years ago. Just like in any other recession of the past forty years, ever since Nixon cut the last link to gold and fulfilled every interventionist’s wildest fantasy: unlimited paper money under full control of the state! Yeah, baby, no more recessions!

 Alas, it is not working, is it?

Rates were cut and the state did not only spent money it didn’t have, as usual, it spent much more money it didn’t have. But the economy did not recover. So more of this policy was implemented. And then, more again. In fact, by any standard, never before in modern times has the economy been ‘stimulated’ more through Keynesian and Monetarist government intervention than over the past four years. Balance sheets of major central banks have tripled, banks have been receiving limitless funds for free and will continue to do so forever, and governments are running deficits the likes of which mankind has only ever seen at the height of major wars, and which are increasingly funded by the printing press.

It is still not working.

You would probably guess that the interventionists of Keynesian and other ilk would be a bit more humble by now. Maybe check a few of those premises in their models? Or maybe start thinking again about those elusive explanations for what’s wrong with the economy in the first place? Are we really suffering from a lack of paper money and government spending? Maybe it is not simply down to all of us being too depressed, morose, and in need of some policy Prozac. Maybe something else is broken.

Alas, no. The academically trained Keynesian economist is too committed to his or her beliefs to let the facts get in the way. Why has policy not worked? Because, wait for it, we have been too timid. We need the same policy. We just need more of it. A lot more.

More monetary madness

Here is the High Priestess of Keynesianism, Christina Romer in her recent op-ed in the New York Times. She suggests a radical policy ‘change’ at the Federal Reserve: toward more money printing.

Rather astutely, she calls for Helicopter-Ben to embrace a Volcker-moment. Maybe by quoting the poster boy of the Reaganites and the hard money crowd she hoped to reach a new audience for her tiring and dreary old policy recipe of more and bolder interventionism. She almost had me fooled. Wait a minute, I thought. Volcker? He is the guy who abruptly stopped the printing press and allowed high real market rates to cleanse the system of the dislocations of previous booms and to squeeze inflation out of the system, thus giving the paper dollar another lease of life – albeit one that is quickly running out. I thought, has Christina finally seen the light? Has she begun to realize how massively disruptive a constantly expanding supply of fiat money is for an economy? Is she calling, as I do, for an end to this monetary madness of zero policy rates and quantitative easing?

Well, no, she isn’t. She wants the Fed to print more money, much more. She wants the Fed to adopt a nominal GDP target. This will allow the Fed to become even more aggressive in its monetary policy and to communicate this aggressiveness better. Make people trust in that aggressiveness. And this is important for Romer. The communication. As we have seen, for the good Keynesian the policy was never wrong. The policy was just not ambitious enough. All it needs is a more ambitious goal and better communication. People just have these bad thoughts and wrong expectations. The public is just not playing ball, not going along with this enlightened economic program. Well, we’ll teach them.

The Volcker-analogy works like this for Romer: In 1979 inflation was too high and small rate hikes didn’t work. So Volcker implemented a much tighter policy and crushed inflation. And it worked because people believed him. Today unemployment is too high. Gradual policy easing – not sure what planet Christina is on but from where she is sitting monetary policy in the U.S. must have appeared to be gradual, hmmm – is not working either. So Bernanke needs to become more aggressive, and publicly so. Because if people believe that you stick to your policy, which – please remember – was of course the right policy to begin with, than the policy will really begin to work. You just need to drill it into those blockheads.

Every first semester economics student, not only those at Berkeley where Romer is economics professor, should be able to tear this apart with ease. The analogy with Volcker is, of course, completely silly. Volcker used monetary policy to fix a monetary problem, inflation. Stopping inflation by not printing money anymore is pretty straightforward. The link is kind of — direct? To be honest, it doesn’t even matter what the public believes or not. If you stop printing money, inflation will drop. Period. The link is that direct. You don’t need the accompanying belief system.

Was there full employment in Weimar Germany?

However, unemployment or the level of ‘aggregate demand’ is decidedly not a monetary phenomenon. Only in the airy-fairy dreamland of macroeconomic models is there a direct link. To assume that we can simply and straightforwardly establish whatever nominal growth rate and level of employment we desire by means of the printing press is precisely the type of naïve ‘building bloc economics’ that got us into this mess in the first place. According to this worldview, the economy is just a machine, and all we need to do is to pull the right levers. Or it is like a cooking recipe, in which we need to simply change the ingredients a bit and – voila! The soufflé will rise!

It is precisely because (a certain type of) economists have been telling us – wrongly! – that we can have more growth and high employment by constantly debasing money that we created this highly levered economy over the past four decades that is so thoroughly addicted to ever larger fixes of cheap credit and that is now choking on excessive debt and weak banks. By printing money and artificially lowering interest rates we have, again and again, bought near-term economic growth at the expense of long-term economic imbalances. That this was bad economics everybody is now learning the hard way. Everybody, that is, except Christina Romer. Her simple worldview is unshaken.

It is this weird combination of childlike belief in the simplicity of the problem (aggregate demand, lack of optimism) and the striking arrogance of the notion that the government can and should control the economy by simply pulling at the right strings hard enough, that makes Romer’s article such an illustrative example of the intellectual dead end that is mainstream economics today.

Romer has apparently no notion of relative prices and of the importance, in particular, of interest rates for coordinating saving with investment. She cannot see that lowering interest rates administratively and injecting new money into the financial system will have many additional effects, other than lifting some statistical measure of aggregate economic activity. Easy money will always change resource use and capital allocation. Cheap credit encourages borrowing and debt accumulation, and will cause additional problems for the economy later.

Romer cannot perceive of these complexities. In her ivory tower, the world is one of simple statistical aggregates and large wholes that you can direct and mend to your liking. You just add the desired real growth rate (2.5 percent) and the acceptable inflation rate (2 percent) and stir it nicely to come up with the nominal growth rate (4.5 percent). How hard can it be?

We have some indication that Bernanke is not very sympathetic to this proposal at present. It doesn’t look like this will become official policy any time soon. But who knows? A lot of what is now accepted monetary and fiscal policy in major countries and debated dispassionately by financial market economists would only a few years ago have been the mark of the economic crank, or the populist policy program of some economic backwater just before it was put under IMF surveillance.

But what is striking is this: Such rubbish emanates from the highest echelons of academic economics in America. Christina Romer is economics professor in Berkeley, California, and I fear that a lot of very bright young people burden themselves and their families with student loans and waste valuable time absorbing such drivel. If Romer is all that economics in Berkeley has to offer, why not emulate the late Steve Jobs and drop out?

The prime importance of individual freedom

Literature and the Search for Liberty

What is lost on collectivists is the prime importance of individual freedom for societies to flourish and economies to thrive.

By MARIO VARGAS LLOSA

The blessings of freedom and the perils of its opposite can be seen the world over. It is why I have so passionately adhered to advancing the idea of individual freedom in my work.

Having abandoned the Marxist myths that took in so many of my generation, I soon came to genuinely believe that I had found a truth that had to be shared in the best way I knew—through the art of letters. Critics on the left and right have often praised my novels only to distance themselves from the ideas I've expressed. I do not believe my work can be separated from its ideals.

It is the function of the novelist to tell timeless and universal truths through the device of a fashioned narrative. A story's significance as a piece of art cannot be divorced from its message, any more than a society's prospects for freedom and prosperity can be divorced from its underlying principles. The writer and the man are one and the same, as are the culture and its common beliefs. In my writing and in my life I have pursued a vision not only to inspire my readers but also to share my dream of what we can aspire to build here in our world.

Those who love liberty are often ridiculed for their idealism. And at times we can feel alone, as there appear to be very few dedicated to the ideals of true "liberalism."

In the United States, the term "liberal" has come to be associated with leftism, socialism, and an ambitious role for government in the economy. Many who describe their politics as "liberal" emphatically favor measures which desire to push aside free enterprise. Some who call themselves liberal show even greater hostility toward business, loudly protesting the very idea of economic freedom and promoting a vision of society not so different from the failed utopian experiments of history's socialist and fascist regimes.

In Latin America and Spain, where the word "liberal" originated to mean an advocate of liberty, the left now uses the label as an invective. It carries connotations of "conservative" or reactionary politics, and especially a failure to care for the world's poor. I have been maligned in this way.

Ironically enough, part of the confusion can be pinned on some who champion the market economy in the name of old liberalism. They have at times done even more damage to freedom than the Marxists and other socialists.

There are those who in the name of the free market have supported Latin American dictatorships whose iron hand of repression was said to be necessary to allow business to function, betraying the very principles of human rights that free economies rest upon. Then there are those who have coldly reduced all questions of humanity to a matter of economics and see the market as a panacea. In doing so they ignore the role of ideas and culture, the true foundation of civilization. Without customs and shared beliefs to breathe life into democracy and the market, we are reduced to the Darwinian struggle of atomistic and selfish actors that many on the left rightfully see as inhuman.

What is lost on the collectivists, on the other hand, is the prime importance of individual freedom for societies to flourish and economies to thrive. This is the core insight of true liberalism: All individual freedoms are part of an inseparable whole. Political and economic liberties cannot be bifurcated. Mankind has inherited this wisdom from millennia of experience, and our understanding has been enriched further by the great liberal thinkers, some of my favorites being Isaiah Berlin, Karl Popper, F.A. Hayek and Ludwig von Mises. They have described the path out of darkness and toward a brighter future of freedom and universal appreciation for the values of human dignity.

When the liberal truth is forgotten, we see the horrors of nationalist dictatorship, fascism, communism, cult fanaticism, terrorism and the many savageries that have defined all too much in the modern era. The problem is less pronounced in the United States, but here there still remain problems resulting from the abandonment of these key principles.

Many cling to hopes that the economy can be centrally planned. Education, health care, housing, money and banking, crime control, transportation, energy and far more follow the failed command-and-control model that has been repeatedly discredited. Some look to nationalist and statist solutions to trade imbalances and migration problems, instead of toward greater freedom.

Yet there is reason for hope here and elsewhere. The American system still allows for open dissent, the hallmark of a free society, and in a healthy fashion both left and right practice this cherished freedom. Throughout the world, anti-Americanism and anticapitalism are in decline. In Latin America, outside of Venezuela and Cuba, dictatorship of the old socialist and fascist varieties is dead, with market reforms sweeping even nominally leftist regimes.

The search for liberty is simply part of the greater search for a world where respect for the rule of law and human rights is universal—a world free of dictators, terrorists, warmongers and fanatics, where men and women of all nationalities, races, traditions and creeds can coexist in the culture of freedom, where borders give way to bridges that people cross to reach their goals limited only by free will and respect for one another's rights. It is a search to which I've dedicated my writing, and so many have taken notice. But is it not a search to which we should all devote our very lives? The answer is clear when we see what is at stake.

The pseudo-scientific scaremongering lobby

Welcome to the era of the post-moral panic

In our morally unanchored society, elite fearmongers prefer to use so-called science rather than moralism to reshape our behaviour.

by Brendan O’Neill 

One question we should ask ourselves is whether it’s possible to have a moral panic at a time when there is no moral consensus. At a time when traditional values are going down the toilet, and when traditional morality no longer holds sway, is it possible to have a panic about ‘folk devils’ who allegedly pose a threat to the moral fabric?

I don’t think it is. Because in order to have a proper moral panic, you need to have some proper morality. You need to have a generally agreed-upon set of moral values that people can be accused of transgressing. And we just don’t have that today. In our era of moral relativism, it is actually increasingly difficult to have an old-fashioned moral panic.

That might sound like good news. No one is really in favour of moral panics, except maybe the Daily Mail. But the tragedy is that moral panics have been replaced by something even worse – by panics underpinned by science rather than by morality. And these new, post-moral panics are having a seriously detrimental impact on society.

What we have seen over the past few years is a massive rupture between panic and morality, a massive dissociation of the politics of fear from any system of moral meaning. These days, panics are not motored by moral sensibilities – they’re motored by scientific claims or health advice or what are presented to us as objective facts.

Consider the panics about young people. In the past, there were moral panics about young people drinking too much, fornicating and being generally depraved. These randy, alcoholic youth were accused of sinning against the natural moral order.

Today, there are still panics about young people’s behaviour, but they’re presented as health advice. So young people are warned off underage sex and sex outside of a committed relationship through adverts telling them they will get chlamydia or gonorrhoea. They’re warned off boozing with graphic photographs of what too much drink might do to their livers.

A society that has no clear moral line on marriage or sex or hedonism is forced to fall back on a grisly, bovine form of moral pressure. Incapable of telling young people what is right and what is wrong, our society prefers to spread panic about physical decay and physical ailments. It appeals to us to modify our behaviour, not in the name of morality and decency, but in the name of protecting our own livers and genitalia from disease.

Often, what we have today is the rehabilitation of old forms of moral disgust in a new pseudo-scientific language. So one of the most unhinged panics of modern times – the panic about the so-called obesity epidemic – is really just the resurrection of the sins of gluttony and sloth. But because society lacks the moral resources to lecture people about being gluttonous and slothful, which would involve making moral judgements and behaving with explicit superiority, it instead spreads all sorts of nonsense about Body Mass Index, calorie counting, and so on.

Even the moral panic about football hooligans, one of the great mad panics of the 1970s and 1980s, has been put through the de-moralisation process and turned into a pseudo-scientific issue. So recently, Cardiff University published a report arguing that gatherings of 70,000 or more football fans are a threat to the environment. Apparently such gatherings leave an eco-footprint 3,000 times the size of the pitch at Wembley. This eco-unfriendly mass of people leaves behind it 37 tonnes of glass and eight tonnes of paper.

It reveals a lot about the moral disarray of today’s cultural elite that even one of their favourite, easiest moral panics, even their disgust with working-class football fans, now has to be swaddled in a kind of neutral academic lingo.

The rise and rise of these post-moral panics has led to some extraordinary double standards in the arena of the politics of fear. Because the new post-moral panic-mongers are often the people who are most sniffy about old-fashioned moral panics promoted by the likes of the Daily Mail.

So the broadsheet journalists who criticise right-wing tabloids and politicians for spreading panic about terrorism are the same ones who argue that actually global warming is going to burn us all to death and it’s all the fault of unthinking people taking too many cheap flights. The people who argue that the working classes are making themselves sick by eating Turkey Twizzlers are the same ones who balk when the Daily Mail says that chavs undermine moral decency.

This double standard was really brought home at the end of October. After the Lib-Con government published its report on the August rioting in England, which revealed that 42 per cent of the rioters had received free school meals, some clever members of the Twitterati started tweeting: ‘Oh I bet I know what the Daily Mail’s headline will be. It will be “Free School Meals Cause Riots”.’ Hilarious, right? But what these Twits forgot is that actually that panic has already been done. Over the past few years, respectable publications like the Times Higher Education have published articles with headlines like ‘Unhealthy school dinners linked to anti-social behaviour’, a fancier way of saying ‘School meals cause rioting’.

So the moralists at the Daily Mail can be slated for even thinking about pursuing a panic that had already been done by others, in post-moral, respectable language, of course. Today, there is no real constituency for traditionalist moral panics – it’s the new post-moral, pseudo-scientific panics that make a big impact.

The post-moral panic-mongers have developed their own language to try to distinguish themselves from their forebears. So where they accuse right-wingers of ‘playing the fear card’, they claim that they are simply trying to ‘raise awareness’. They’re always ‘raising awareness’, whether it’s about the imminent collapse of the biosphere or the gastronomical depravity of the working classes. Where they accuse old-style moral panickers of using shame and stigma, they claim only to be interested in ‘modifying behaviour’. Through such terminology, they seek to make their own playing of the fear card and their moral fury with the little people appear good, decent, driven by expertise rather than moral judgementalism.

There is one really key difference between old moral panics and the new post-moral panics. Where the old moral panics were attempts to express or enforce an already-existing moral outlook, the new post-moral panics are a substitute for any coherent moral outlook. Today, fear is used not as a complement to morality but as a stand-in for morality. We have a situation today where society tries to reconstruct something approaching a moral outlook through fearmongering. This is quite new, and it is giving rise to a situation where basically we haveconstant panic – one fleeting scare after another, as our superiors try to magic up some behavioural norms and behavioural barriers in our morally bereft society.

As to what impact post-moral panics have on the public – it is a bit weird and contradictory. On one hand, precisely because the new fearmongering is detached from any bigger moral picture it doesn’t have the purchase that the old moral panics had. It doesn’t connect with the public in the same way. The politics of fear is no longer experienced collectively, as it was when we were all told to be scared of the prospect of Hell, but rather is experienced in a super-individuated way, as people are encouraged to panic about their own livers or hearts or waistlines. But on the other hand, because there are so many post-moral panics, there is a cumulative effect. The fleeting scares build on each other to create a kind of free-floating sense of unease and dread – and often unease and dread about the most mundane things, such as eating and socialising and having half a glass of wine.

Even the moralistic panic-merchants of old never achieved something as destructive as what we have today, courtesy of the pseudo-scientific scaremongering lobby: a kind of everyday, run-of-the-mill doom.

"Peak Oil" is "Peak Idiocy"

New Research Reveals Huge Geothermal Resources in U.S. Accessible with New Advanced Technology

By Mark Perry
As a green energy source, geothermal heat is tough to beat, but until recently, it was believed to be economically feasible only in areas with shallow tectonic (volcanic) activity. Now, with a generous grant from Google.org, the search engine giant's philanthropic arm, two scientists from Southern Methodist University (SMU) have pooled together the results from more than 35,000 data sites to paint a very different, almost rosy, energy picture for the United States and, indeed, the world.

We now know that potentially exploitable EGS resources can be found in all 50 U.S. states and countless regions around the globe as well, so it's only a matter of time before abundant clean energy begins to flow from tapping into that massive molten furnace churning below our feet.

SMU Geothermal Lab Coordinator Maria Richards and Geophysics professor David Blackwell's research has revealed, however, that a much larger portion of the earth's crust can yield usable energy than was previously thought, especially in the eastern U.S. The project's findings indicate that, with advanced technology already available, the continental U.S. harbors a staggering 2,980,000 MW of potential energy! That's especially impressive considering the current global geothermal generating capacity is only 9,000MW.

"Both Google and the SMU researchers are fundamentally changing the way we look at how we can use the heat of the Earth to meet our energy needs, and by doing so are making significant contributions to enhancing our national security and environmental quality," said Karl Gawell, executive director of the Geothermal Energy Association.

To view the new Enhanced Geothermal Systems maps constructed with SMU's data , go here to get the latest version of Google Earth, then download and open the file here."

Believe it or Not

Chairman of China's SWF Lectures Europe on the Accumulated Troubles of Worn-Out Welfare State

At about 12:30 in the interview above with Aljazeera (link here), Jin Liqun, the chairman of China's sovereign wealth fund, gets tough with Europe and criticizes its welfare state:

"If you look at the troubles which happened in European countries, this is purely because of the accumulated troubles of the worn out welfare society. I think the labor laws are outdated. The labor laws induce sloth, indolence, rather than hardworking. The incentive system, is totally out of whack. Why should, for instance, within the Eurozone, some members' people have to work to 65, even longer, whereas in some other countries they are happily retiring at 55, languishing on the beach? This is unfair. The welfare system is good for any society to reduce the gap, to help those who happen to have disadvantages, to enjoy a good life, but a welfare society should not induce people not to work hard."

The world sure has changed. If you had told me 10 years ago that China would be preaching the virtues of capitalism and the pitfalls of a welfare state to Europe (and be right), I would have never believed you.

Transforming citizens into clients

Quotation of the Day…

by DON BOUDREAUX 

… is from pages 168-169 of H.L. Mencken’s priceless 1956 collection, Minority Report; I recalled it upon reflecting on Pres. Obama’s warning, in a speech a couple of weeks ago to his supporters in San Francisco, that (quoting Mr. Obama) “The one thing that we absolutely know for sure is that if we don’t work even harder than we did in 2008, then we’re going to have a government that tells the American people, ‘you are on your own.  If you get sick, you’re on your own.  If you can’t afford college, you’re on your own.”

Imagine being responsible for yourself.

Anyway, here’s Mencken on FDR:

Roosevelt transformed millions of Americans from citizens into clients.  The direct effect of this was evil, and the indirect effect was even worse, for all these people were robbed of their self-respect.