Does Environmentalism Cause Amnesia?

Climate-change alarmists warn us about coming food shortages. They said the same in 1968.

By BRET STEPHENS

Warming is becoming a major problem. "A change in our climate," writes one deservedly famous American naturalist, "is taking place very sensibly." Snowfall, he notes, has become "less frequent and less deep." Rivers that once "seldom failed to freeze over in the course of the winter, scarcely ever do so now."

And it's having an especially worrisome effect on the food supply: "This change has produced an unfortunate fluctuation between heat and cold, in the spring of the year, which is very fatal to fruits."

That isn't a leaked excerpt from the latest report of the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, but it may as well be. Last week, Canadian journalist Donna Laframboise of the website No Frakking Consensus posted a draft of a forthcoming IPCC report on the alleged effects climate change will have on food production. The New York Times then splashed the news on its front page Saturday. It's another tale of warming woe:

"With or without adaptation," the report warns, "climate change will reduce median yields by 0 to 2% per decade for the rest of the century, as compared to a baseline without climate change. These projected impacts will occur in the context of rising crop demand, projected to increase by 14% per decade until 2050."

If this has a familiar ring, it's because it harks back to the neo-Malthusian forecasts of the 1960s and '70s, when we were supposed to believe that population growth would outstrip food production. This gave us such titles as "Famine 1975!", a 1967 best seller by the brothers William and Paul Paddock, along with Paul Ehrlich's vastly influential "The Population Bomb," a book that began with the words, "The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s and 1980s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now."

In case you're wondering what happened with that battle to feed humanity, the U.N.'s Food and Agriculture Organization has some useful figures on its website. In 1968, the year Mr. Ehrlich's book first appeared, Asia produced 46,321,114 tons of maize and 439,579,934 of cereals. By 2011, the respective figures had risen to 270,316,205, up 484%, and 1,289,633,254, up 193%.

It's the same story nearly everywhere else one looks. In Africa, maize production was up 247% between 1968 and 2011, while production of so-called primary vegetables has risen 319%; in South America, it's 308% and 199%. Meanwhile, the world's population rose to just under seven billion from about 3.7 billion, an increase of about 90%. It is predicted to rise by another 33% by 2050.

But what about the supposedly warming climate? According to the EPA, "average temperatures have risen more quickly since the late 1970s," with the contiguous 48 states warming "faster than the global rate." Yet U.S. food production over the same time has also risen by robust percentages even as the number of acres under cultivation has been steadily falling for decades.

Yellenomics – Or The Coming Tragedy of Errors

Keynesian Paradigm to Be Revived

Keynesian central planner Janet Yellen: believes the free market doesn't work and needs utterly clueless people like her to function 'better'.

by Pater Tenebrarum

We have come across a recent article at Bloomberg that discusses the philosophical roots of Janet Yellen's economics voodoo. This seems in many ways even more appalling than the Bernanke paradigm (which in turn is based on Bernanke's erroneous interpretation of what caused the Great Depression, which he obtained in essence from Milton Friedman).

Janet Yellen, so Bloomberg informs us, was a student of the Keynesian James Tobin at Yale, the economist whose main claim to fame these days is that a tax is named after him. Tobin, like other Keynesians, was an apologist for central economic planning, which made him eligible for the central bank-sponsored Nobel Prize in Economics. He was undoubtedly a man after the heart of the ruling class. It is therefore not a big surprise that one of his students gets to run the Federal Reserve, which is one of the main agencies, if not the main agency, by which the rule of money power and central economic planning are perpetuated. It should be noted that the inflationist who runs the central bank of Argentina, Mercedes Marco del Pont, was also trained in Yale. Marcos del Pont once asserted sotto voce in a speech that the enormous ongoing plunge in the purchasing power of the Argentine peso was not a result of her incessant massive money printing. Since she didn't deign to explain what actually causes it then (foreign speculators perhaps? Just guessing here…), it presumably is just a case of 'sh*t happens'. This just as a hint as to what can be expected from economists trained at Yale. 

From the Bloomberg article:

“When James Tobin joined President John F. Kennedy’s administration in 1961, the U.S. economy was struggling to recover from its third recession in seven years. As a member of Kennedy’s Council of Economic Advisers, the Yale University professor put his theoretical research on asset markets to work in fashioning a novel strategy — nicknamed Operation Twist — to reduce long-term interest rates. 

Now, more than half a century later, two of Tobin’s Ph.D. students — Janet Yellen, nominated to be the next chairman of the Federal Reserve, and Koichi Hamada, a special adviser to Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe — are applying some of those same concepts in their efforts to boost their respective countries’ economies. 

Obama’s Catastrophic Victory

A parlay of poisonous P’s

By Peggy Noonan

Years ago John McPhee wrote a great book about Bill Bradley called “A Sense of Where You Are.” I keep thinking about that title. You have to know where you are in time and space, you have to know who you are and what you’re doing, you have to be able to locate the moment and reorient yourself within it.

Politically where are we right now, at this moment?

We have a huge piece of U.S. economic and social change that debuted a month ago as a program. The program dealt with something personal, even intimate: your health, the care of your body, the medicines you choose to take or procedures you get. It was hugely controversial from day one. It took all the political oxygen from the room. It failed to garner even one vote from the opposition when it was passed. It gave rise to a significant opposition movement, the town hall uprisings, which later produced the tea party. It caused unrest. In fact, it seemed not to answer a problem but cause it. I called ObamaCare, at the time of its passage, a catastrophic victory—one won at too great cost, with too much political bloodshed, and at the end what would you get? Barren terrain. A thing not worth fighting for.

So the program debuts and it’s a resounding, famous, fantastical flop. The first weeks of the news coverage are about how the websites don’t work, can you believe we paid for this, do you believe they had more than three years and produced this public joke of a program, this embarrassment?

But now it’s much more serious. No one’s thinking about the websites. They wish you were thinking about the websites! I bet America hopes the websites never work so they never have to enroll.

The problem now is not the delivery system of the program, it’s the program itself. Not the computer screen but what’s inside the program. This is something you can’t get the IT guy in to fix.

They said if you liked your insurance you could keep your insurance—but that’s not true. It was never true! They said if you liked your doctor you could keep your doctor—but that’s not true. It was never true! They said they would cover everyone who needed it, and instead people who had coverage are losing it—millions of them! They said they would make insurance less expensive—but it’s more expensive! Premium shock, deductible shock. They said don’t worry, your health information will be secure, but instead the whole setup looks like a hacker’s holiday. Bad guys are apparently already going for your private information.

The Problem with Pay-As-You-Go Social Programs: They're Ponzi Schemes

Ignoring the facts won't help us address the insolvency of pay-as-you-go social programs

By charles hugh smith

I was fortunate enough to be invited back on Max Keiser's Keiser Report for a wide-ranging discussion of Peak Retirement, currency wars and more. Since the topics Max raises are profound and not always that easy to summarize (if there is another media host who covers complex topics in such profusion and with such a diverse range of guests, he/she is unknown to me), I'm devoting the next few blog entries to offer context for the topics Max and I discussed.

Max's first question related to my entry on Peak Retirement (October 15, 2013) in which I showed that the ratio of full-time workers to Social Security beneficiaries has dropped to 2-to-1.

Why does this matter? It matters because our social programs arepay as you go, meaning that current workers pay current retirees' benefits. There is no "trust fund" and the proof is simple: now that Social Security is operating at a deficit, i.e. payroll tax revenues no longer cover benefits paid out, where does the U.S. Treasury get the money to pay the benefits not covered by tax revenues?

Social Security Ran $47.8B Deficit in FY 2012

It sells bonds, just like it does to fund any other deficit spending of the federal government. The Trust Fund is a politically useful fiction, period, end of story. The bonds in the bogus Trust Fund are non-negotiable, i.e. worthless. The Treasury funds Social Security deficits by selling Treasury bonds.

(Social Security reports "interest earned" on the phony non-negotiable bonds, but where does the U.S. Treasury get the money to pay the interest? It sells T-Bills, adding to the national debt. No matter how you slice it, the programs' deficits are funded by selling debt, i.e. T-Bills, just like all federal deficit spending.)

I bobbled my response to Max's question, so he helpfully stepped in and explained that social programs like Social Security and Medicare are paid by payroll taxes, not income or other taxes. Employers and employees both pay 7.65% of earned income/wages to fund these two monster programs--a total payroll tax of 15.3%. (12.4% is for Social Security and 2.9% is for Medicare.)

Those who receive no earned income (self-employment earnings, wages, salaries, tips, etc.) and only receive unearned income (dividends, capital gains, rents, etc.) pay no Social Security/Medicare payroll taxes. That's one reason why unearned income is so sweet: it avoids the 15.3% payroll tax right off the top.

(Those of us who are self-employed pay the entire 15.3%.)

Why Don’t More People Want a Job?

Share of Americans over age 16 who say they don’t want a job, up to 34.3% from about 30% two decades ago

by John Doe

Americans aren’t just leaving the labor force — those who have left it are drifting further away.

Economists studying the labor market have traditionally focused on two types of people: those who have jobs (the employed) and those who are trying to find them (the unemployed). Together, those groups make up what is known as the “labor force.”

As close observers of the economy already know, the labor force has been shrinking as a share of the population, a trend that began in the early 2000s, accelerated in the recession and has continued during the weak recovery. The so-called “participation rate” — the share of the population that’s working or looking for work — now stands near a three-decade low.

Such measures, however, treat all those out of the labor force as a single group, lumping together retiring Baby Boomers and stay-at-home moms with laid-off factory workers. The Labor Department publishes estimates of “discouraged workers” — those who have given up looking because they can’t find a job — but it uses a narrow definition. Someone who decides to take care of the kids rather than keep looking for work might not count as discouraged — even if the person wants a job and plans to look for one in the future.

But in a new paper, economists Regis Barnichon and Andrew Figura divide up those out of the labor force using a simpler standard: whether or not the person says they want a job. And they uncover an interesting previously unnoticed trend: As a share of all those “not in the labor force,” the number of people who want a job has been generally declining since the early 1980s. Three decades ago, more than 10% wanted a job; on the eve of the latest recession, the share dipped below 6%.

Moreover, Messrs. Barnichon and Figura found, the decline in people who want a job wasn’t driven by people entering the labor force. It was driven by people switching from wanting a job to not wanting one. Long before the recession, in other words, Americans were drifting away from the labor force.

The recession changed the picture: The surge in layoffs and plunge in hiring left millions of Americans who wanted jobs on the sidelines. But even so, the share of those not in the labor force who wanted jobs peaked at around 7.5%, far below its 1980s level.

U.S. Oil Output to Double Every Three Years

Unless “They” Get Their Way

by  Bob Adelmann

If the increase in U.S. oil output continues to increase by 25 percent every year, as it did from September 2012 to September 2013, total U.S. output would double every three years. It’s a simple case of mathematics, compound interest, and the Rule of 72. The main people working to keep that from happening are Josh Fox and his friends.

According to the latest report from the Department of Energy, the U.S. oil industry produced an average of 7.8 million barrels of oil every day during September, the highest monthly output since May 1989, more than 24 years ago. Doing some math of his own, economist Mark Perry estimated that at this rate, U.S. crude oil production will hit 10 million barrels a day early in the year 2015 — a level not seen since November 1970. 

Josh Fox and his friends have other ideas, however. As the co-producer of the film Gasland in 2010 and Gasland II earlier this summer, Fox joined forces with Debra Winger, Pete Seeger, and California environmentalist Mark Jacobson to bring the anti-fracking message to millions of uninformed Americans. Fox had some help from HBO, aided and abetted by Robert Redford’s Sundance Festival, which awarded Fox’s first effort its “Jury Prize.”

Fox’s lies about fracking may just do him in before he does much more damage. Investigative journalists have had a field day in pointing out the falsehoods abundantly displayed in his original film Gasland, starting from the very first scene. Fox is sitting at his kitchen table, holding something that looks like a serious proposal, saying:

Native American Reservations: “Socialist Archipelago”

The abysmal failure of Red Atlantis

by Andrei Znamenski

Imagine a country that has a corrupt authoritarian government. In that country no one knows about checks and balances or an independent court system. Private property is not recognized in that country either. Neither can one buy or sell land. And businesses are reluctant to bring investments into this country. Those who have jobs usually work for the public sector. Those who don’t have jobs subsist on entitlements that provide basic food. At the same time, this country sports a free health care system and free access to education. Can you guess what country it is? It could be the former Soviet Union, Cuba, or any other socialist country of the past.

Yet, I want to assure you that such a country exists right here in the United States. And its name is Indian Country. Indian Country is a generic metaphor that writers and scholars use to refer to the archipelago of 310 Native American reservations, which occupy 2 percent of the U.S. soil. Scattered all over the United States, these sheltered land enclaves are held in trust by the federal government. So legally, many of these land enclaves are a federal property. So there you cannot freely buy and sell land or use it as collateral. On top of this, since the Indian tribes are wards of the federal government, one cannot sue them for breach of contract. Indian reservations are communally used by Indian groups and subsidized by the BIA (the Bureau of Indian Affairs, Department of the Interior) with a current annual budget of about $3 billion dollars. Besides being a major financial resource that sustains the reservation system, BIA’s goal is also to safeguard indigenous communities, or, in other words, to make sure that they would never fail when dealing with the “outside” society. People in the government and many Native American leaders naively believe that it is good for the well-being of the Indians to be segregated and sheltered from the rest of American society.

This peculiar trust status of Indian Country, where private property rights are insecure, scares away businesses and investors.[1] They consider these forbidden grounds high risk areas. So, in Indian Country, we have an extreme case of what Robert Higgs famously labeled “regime uncertainty” that retards economic development.[2] In fact, this “regime uncertainty” borders on socialism. James Watt, Secretary of the Interior in the first Reagan administration, was the first to publicly state this. In 1983, he said (and then dearly paid for this), “If you want an example of the failure of socialism, don't go to Russia, come to America and go to the Indian reservations.”[3]

In the 1990s, I had a chance to travel through several reservations. Each time when I crossed their borders I was stunned by the contrast between the human landscapes outside and those within Indian reservations. As soon as I found myself within a reservation, I frequently had a taste of a world that, in appearance, reminded me of the countryside in Russia, my former homeland: the same bumpy and poorly maintained roads, worn-out shacks, rotting fences, furniture, and car carcasses, the same grim suspicious looks directed at an intruder, and frequently intoxicated individuals hanging around. So I guess my assessment of the reservation system will be a biased view from a former Soviet citizen who feels that he enters his past when crossing into Native America.

The Collectivist Mind Game, Part 3

Demonizing Human Nature

By Oleg Atbashian

If Robert Heinlein were to write The Moon today (see Part 1), there's no doubt his notion of the future oppressive global government on Earth would be very different.  With such forces at play, the free-market revolution in Lunar colonies would likewise be fought by different means, struggling to overcome the tidal wave of government indoctrination and demonization, in addition to an army of statist looters hiding behind the army of statist moochers, who will be hiding behind an army of statist Blue Helmets of the statist United Nations.

That would be an asymmetrical warfare if ever there was one.  The individualist free-market rebels wouldn't be able to respond in kind by playing the collectivist mind games with the statists because it would turn them into their own enemies.  Their only hope would be to learn to recognize the game when it is being played, not to fall for any of its seductive illusions, methodically expose the players at every turn, call every little manipulative trick in their arsenal for what it is, and help to immunize the rest against its corruptive influence.

The tidal wave of propaganda notwithstanding, the rebels would still have the most important ally on their side -- human nature.  No matter into what society they are born and what mind conditioning they receive, people will never stop being competitive individuals.  They will always long for individual freedom, rationality, objectivity, personal achievement, and the pursuit of a better life for themselves and their families.

Without these traits humanity would never have risen from the ignorant tribal collectivism of hunters and gatherers, with its brutal mores, dark superstitions, and average life expectancy of 30 years, when few lived long enough to develop complete self-awareness, formulate a coherent individual thought, and pass it onto others.  There would be no division of labor, no markets, and no capitalist wealth to sustain the advances in science, arts, and technology -- let alone to feed the multitudes of Marxist intellectuals and statist plutocrats.  There would be nothing to lose and nothing to fight for.

The Collectivist Mind Game, Part2

Demonizing the Opposition

By Oleg Atbashian

Most modern-day leftists in Western countries have abandoned the idea of a violent revolution, having replaced it with “the long march through the institutions” as part of the culture war to transform the society through cultural hegemony.  Instead of commanding firing squads, they play mind games of manipulative illusions, in which the demonization of dissent plays a crucial role.  The basic premise hasn’t changed: as much as the statists want you to love them, they want you to hate their opponents even more.

Until a time when political opposition can be eliminated completely, having opponents can still be useful: you can steal their ideas, take advantage of their desire to help the economy, and blame them for any of your own failures.  In the meantime, certain rules must be followed to control the public opinion and, through it, the opposition itself.

Maintain the perception of being constantly under attack.  Don’t examine the opponents’ beliefs, nor answer their arguments.  Discredit any media channels that offer them a platform.  Enforce the following media template: the opposition is evil, treasonous, unfathomable, and psychotic.  They can’t be reasoned with.  They are inspired by fascism and financed by a conspiracy of shady oligarchs.  Defame their donors.  Whatever the mischief you’re planning to pull off, accuse them of doing it first; then proceed as planned, describing your actions as a necessary intervention.  And ridicule, ridicule, ridicule!

This is what made it easy for Stalin to purge his opponents: by the time he charged them with treason, the orchestrated media coverage had already made them universally hated.  Having purged all of his enemies, Stalin continued to manufacture the evidence of their presence.  There came a time when even the true believers were being rounded up and forced to confess publicly about one or another fabricated “crime” against the people and the Party.  Some did it to avoid torture, some to save their families, and some even cooperated out of the altruistic desire to support the illusion and keep everyone else’s beautiful dream alive.  Unfortunately for them, that beautiful dream required human sacrifice.

The Collectivist Mind Game, Part 1

Demonizing the Non-Compliant

By Oleg Atbashian

In the libertarian sci-fi classic, "The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress," Robert A. Heinlein describes a successful revolution of the individualistic, free-market-oriented residents of the Moon against the Earth's tyrannical big government.  The ins and outs of agitating and organizing the masses to fight the oppressive Authority feel just as realistic as the finer points of everyday life in the underground Lunar cities of the future.

The proposed revolutionary scenario could even serve as a workable model for similar real-life endeavors, if only the renowned futurist author hadn't neglected to factor in the immanent function of any oppressive regime: systemic brainwashing of its subjects through the media, education, and entertainment channels.

If the tyrants on Earth were worth their salt, all the freedom-loving colonists would be subjected to an intense, manipulative indoctrination, which would shape their self-image as small and sinful "little guys" vis-à-vis  the powerful, virtuous government that serves the powerless and protects them against all enemies, including themselves.

Thus, the government's propagandistic narrative would establish the illusion of a society divided into three major classes: the ruling government class, endowed with benevolent powers to guide or punish; the majority class of hapless losers, whose survival depended on the government's largesse and protection; and an unquantifiable class of demonized mysterious enemies of the government and, by extension, of the people, who would be the perceived culprits of all failures, hardships, and misery of the little guys' everyday existence.

Hidden Pleasures

Paul Ehrlich’s False Gospel

by Theodore Dalrymple

John Maddox (1925 – 2009) was for many years the editor ofNature, one of the two most important general science journals in the world. In 1972 he published a broadside against the radical pessimism then very prevalent with the title The Doomsday Syndrome: An Assault on Pessimism. In this book, which makes interesting reading today, Maddox attacked the propensity of scientists such as Paul Ehrlich and Barry Commoner to project current trends indefinitely into the future and to conclude therefrom that catastrophe must sooner or later (usually sooner) result.

Ehrlich – who is still predicting catastrophe with as much confidence as if all that he had predicted for the recent past had actually come to pass – famously, or infamously, asserted in his neo-Malthusian book, The Population Bomb, published in 1968, that the battle to feed mankind was over and that hundreds of millions of people would inevitably starve to death in the 1970s, irrespective of what anyone did to try to avoid it.

His prediction was not borne out; forty years later the greatest nutritional problem in the world is probably obesity caused by over-eating. But like those persons on the fringe of religion who predict that the world will beyond peradventure end on a certain date but whose faith is quite unshaken by the failure of that wicked world to conform to their righteous prophecies, so Professor Ehrlich continues to assert that really he was right all along: merely that he mistook the date of the great reckoning.

The problem with an open-ended prediction, or rather prophecy, is that it can never be proved wrong, however long it fails to be borne out. To the argument that the prophet’s direst prognostications have not come to pass, he can always return the answer, ‘No, not yet.’

Why Do Economists Urge College, But Not Marriage?

Both are good for you. Only one is viewed as a proper aim of society

by Megan McArdle

College improves your earning prospects.  So does marriage.  Education makes you more likely to live longer.  So does marriage.  Yet while many economist vocally support initiatives to move more people into college, very few of them vocally favor initiatives to get more people married.  Why is that, asks Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry? His answer:

Meanwhile, economists’ “cosmopolitan perspective” (as Cowen puts it) makes them not feel good at the idea of public policy that would interfere with personal choices (allowing for a second that getting married is a “personal choice” in a way that going to college isn’t). Most economists think that government should not interfere or have a stance one way or another with decisions that feel intimate to people. That is a complete value judgement. And it’s a completely defensible one.

But at the level of the economics profession, this leads to bias: much more ink is spilled on, and thought given to the college wage premium than the marriage wage premium. One is mostly praised and interpreted in a certain way, while the other is mostly ignored. And, of course, the thing that academic economics focuses on has an effect on elite debate and public policy, especially when the socially liberal, pro-higher ed biases of economists line up well with those of the rest of the elite.

Bryan Caplan has more thoughts.

I can come up with stories as to why this might be the case.  We might think it's easier to get college professors to teach useful classes than it is to get spouses to treat each other well. (I'm not sure how much evidence we have that this is true, but it's not unreasonable.)  

We might not want to make people who fail to marry feel bad, since many of them probably feel pretty bad about it already.  

Birth of the Nation

How this surprising political form became the framework of Western civilization

By Pierre Manent

The motor of human history turns on the question of political form. In the ancient world, two such forms prevailed: the city-state and the empire. Indeed, the history of the ancient world is essentially the history of the interplay of these two forms, whether through war (as in the Greek cities’ war against the Persian Empire) or through a city’s becoming an empire. Athens was an imperialistic city, but it didn’t succeed in becoming—or at least in maintaining—an empire. It was Alexander, who came from the periphery of the Greek world, who established the Greek empire. From then on, an imperial Greek space existed that was soon occupied by a newcomer: Rome, which made the almost unbelievable effort of transforming itself from a little city into a world empire (see “City, Empire, Church, Nation,” Summer 2012).

These are elementary historical facts, and yet, on close inspection, they reveal a remarkable intelligibility. The city is the smallest human association capable of self-government, while the empire is the most extensive possible grouping under a single sovereign. Thus we have two conceptions of humanity, two ways of crystallizing the fact of being human. Not only might we say that the ancient order was based on these two great political forms and their interrelations; we might add that this ancient order was the “natural” order of human things, as both forms developed spontaneously, without any previous idea or conception—unlike the modern state.

The persistence of empire in European history after the fall of Rome is striking: the Holy Roman Empire, the French Empire, the German Empire, and now the European Union, which some call an empire. Yet empires didn’t determine the form of Europe. Nor was European life organized mainly in city-states, though the city saw some remarkable developments in such places as Italy, Flanders, and the Rhineland. Why did Europe gradually abandon the two natural forms of human association? And why did a third form, for which there was no equivalent in the ancient world, finally prevail?

Why Democracies Will Always Go Bankrupt

Bankruptcy is the inevitable, inexorable end

By Gonzalo Lira

When I was growing up, finance was mother’s milk to me, especially as I was a bit of a math geek. But for my formal education, I was trained—rather rigorously, and in spite of my laziness—as a philosopher and a historian. This odd combination is why I have such a jaundiced view of economics: I don’t find economics particularly intimidating, or even particularly challenging—it’s just finance’s snooty but poor (and slightly daft) older cousin. History’s surprisingly ignorant and blinkered accountant. Philosophy and Math’s lightly retarded, Puritanically rigid, and altogether rather embarrassing spawn.

Now, it’s all good and fine for me to rant about how useless economics is—but these aren’t empty complaints on my part: I can point to a single, specific, monumental failing of economics—a failure in the discipline which pretty much proves my point:

The United States is going bankrupt—and economics cannot explain why.

In fact, a surprisingly large number of economists choose to ignore the problem of America’s looming bankruptcy altogether; or claim there is something called a “structural deficit” (a highfalutin way of pretending that it cannot be fixed, and therefore doesn’t need fixing); or else—as is the case of the fools backing Modern Monetary Theory—they make the claim that all deficits are just debts the government owes itself, so therefore the American government cannot go broke, so therefore—and let’s ring out the QED—the fiscal over-indebtedness is actually not a problem because it doesn’t even actually exist! 

They really do claim that. And no, they are not high.

Of course, sovereign over-indebtedness does exist, and it is a problem—a terrible, life-or-death problem: As a lot of historians have pointed out, sovereign bankruptcy presages and ushers the collapse of great nations—often violent collapse. And this is something we want to avoid, no? 

Some schools of economic thought recognize that deficits are bad because they lead to bankruptcy, and that therefore fiscal budgets should be balanced so as to avoid them. But they do not explain why this is the case—they have no argument to explain why deficits happen in the first place. That these clever Austrians point to something that has happened before, and therefore infer that it will happen again if similar conditions are met is not an argument—it is an observation, like saying that the sun has risen countless times in the east, so it will likely rise again in the east tomorrow morning.

The Frivolity of Evil

Crying in the wilderness

by Theodore Dalrymple

When prisoners are released from prison, they often say that they have paid their debt to society. This is absurd, of course: crime is not a matter of double-entry bookkeeping. You cannot pay a debt by having caused even greater expense, nor can you pay in advance for a bank robbery by offering to serve a prison sentence before you commit it. Perhaps, metaphorically speaking, the slate is wiped clean once a prisoner is released from prison, but the debt is not paid off.

It would be just as absurd for me to say, on my imminent retirement after 14 years of my hospital and prison work, that I have paid my debt to society. I had the choice to do something more pleasing if I had wished, and I was paid, if not munificently, at least adequately. I chose the disagreeable neighborhood in which I practiced because, medically speaking, the poor are more interesting, at least to me, than the rich: their pathology is more florid, their need for attention greater. Their dilemmas, if cruder, seem to me more compelling, nearer to the fundamentals of human existence. No doubt I also felt my services would be more valuable there: in other words, that I had some kind of duty to perform. Perhaps for that reason, like the prisoner on his release, I feel I have paid my debt to society. Certainly, the work has taken a toll on me, and it is time to do something else. Someone else can do battle with the metastasizing social pathology of Great Britain, while I lead a life aesthetically more pleasing to me.

My work has caused me to become perhaps unhealthily preoccupied with the problem of evil. Why do people commit evil? What conditions allow it to flourish? How is it best prevented and, when necessary, suppressed? Each time I listen to a patient recounting the cruelty to which he or she has been subjected, or has committed (and I have listened to several such patients every day for 14 years), these questions revolve endlessly in my mind.

No doubt my previous experiences fostered my preoccupation with this problem. My mother was a refugee from Nazi Germany, and though she spoke very little of her life before she came to Britain, the mere fact that there was much of which she did not speak gave evil a ghostly presence in our household.

Later, I spent several years touring the world, often in places where atrocity had recently been, or still was being, committed. In Central America, I witnessed civil war fought between guerrilla groups intent on imposing totalitarian tyranny on their societies, opposed by armies that didn't scruple to resort to massacre. In Equatorial Guinea, the current dictator was the nephew and henchman of the last dictator, who had killed or driven into exile a third of the population, executing every last person who wore glasses or possessed a page of printed matter for being a disaffected or potentially disaffected intellectual. In Liberia, I visited a church in which more than 600 people had taken refuge and been slaughtered, possibly by the president himself (soon to be videotaped being tortured to death). The outlines of the bodies were still visible on the dried blood on the floor, and the long mound of the mass grave began only a few yards from the entrance. In North Korea I saw the acme of tyranny, millions of people in terrorized, abject obeisance to a personality cult whose object, the Great Leader Kim Il Sung, made the Sun King look like the personification of modesty.

The phase that launched a thousand bubbles

The Dysfunction Trilogy Part C

Bubbles last just as long as it takes for technical to become fundamentals. 

By Chan Akya

Helen of Troy had the face that launched a thousand ships while Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke and his compatriots have presided since 2007 over the economic phase that launched a thousand bubbles. 

In the previous two parts of this trilogy, the focus was on real-world businesses and pension planning that have been adversely affected by monetary policies over the past few years and particularly since 2009. 

Have these efforts at quantitative easing produced any tangible (positive) economic results at all - not that anyone would notice really. Key figures such as retail sales and capital investments still vastly lag levels seen before the crisis; and even the figures that look like improvements don't quite stack up when you look closer. 

For example, US non-farm payrolls for April showed an increase of 165,000 jobs against market expectations of 150,000 jobs for the period. However, once the average work hours were taken into account, payrolls were actually down - the quantum has been estimated from 300,000 to 500,000 based on the measure. 

What about the other major focus of Keynesian measures namely to propel inflation in Group of Seven economies with a view to increasing consumption and investment while cutting real debt burdens? Well, that hasn't panned out yet either. 

There is no inflation - at least in the way that it is popularly measured, nor have yields on Treasury Inflation-Protected Securities (TIPS) moved in any fashion that would suggest sticky, higher prices. This is because the fear of lower real returns and increased government debt (as suggested in the previous two articles) have pushed people to cut consumption even further and instead attempt to save money even if that means going for speculative investments. This is covered in the next section. 

Bubbles galore

So if the intended consequences of the Keynesian stimuli haven't panned out as per plan, what about the unintended consequences? Typically, when central banks fail in their policies, one would expect to see the following:

a. Asset bubbles

b. Rising systemic risk

Random correlations 

On the subject of asset bubbles, we don't have much to complain about with, at a minimum, stocks and real estate around the world moving sharply higher without any basic support from fundamentals. In the rest of the article, some details about the asset bubbles will follow. 

The issue of systemic risk is germane to any consideration of how central bank policies have panned out. With organic growth proving elusive even as intervention helped to obviate the need for taking significant balance sheet hits, banks as well as the shadow banking sector have plunged headlong into funding of highly risky transactions, be it US sub-prime mortgages (remember those? Apparently caused some crisis in our history) or highly leveraged investment mechanisms such as collateralized debt obligations and collateralized loan obligations (remember those?). 

Banks are once again at the forefront of risky investment strategies. Capital levels haven't risen to the extent required for the scale of assets in the pipeline, while falling margins have disallowed banks from recuperating their reserves. 

A key highlight of financial crises tends to be the emergence of random correlations - random in this case referring not so much to financial history but overall investment logic; but this also goes into the heart of rising systemic risk being mentioned above.

Bernanke stole your pension

The Dysfunction Trilogy Part B

By Chan Akya  

A core aspect of the logic of folk who support stimulus programs in the name of John Maynard Keynes is that government spending to offset private sector contraction remains a victimless crime. This is completely untrue, and understanding the actual costs of Keynesian machinations by studying real-world examples of dysfunction is important to unravel this pernicious logic. 

In the first part of this series, we considered the impact of random intervention in the shipping sector, in particular the role it has played to crush profits and imperil employment in the sector globally. 

In the second part of this series, we will look at conditions in the area of retirement planning and returns. The notion of stealthy wealth transfers is part of a longer debate that goes into the core aspects of the financial crisis; to a large extent many of the issues have been raised previously in these pages but perhaps more in passing than as the core focus. 

The core function of financial markets is to connect pools of savings with the people who need money for their immediate future. In demographic terms, this can be expressed as markets being the intermediary between older people with savings and young people who need to borrow to set up house, buy cars and other utilitarian requirements. 

Construct of pensions - a quick primer

This a quick primer, and not all the nuances are or even can be covered in such a short summary. First let's quickly recap the theory here, even if parts of it will appear unrealistic to many readers who have been hardened with real-world experiences over the past few years. 

The rate of return for these old people is meant to take into account two primary factors: the cost of money and the risks entailed. The cost of money is measured by one of two factors - either as the minimum rate of return on money that keeps its purchasing power constant; or as a cumulative measure of opportunity lost by renting it out without risk. 

Typically these two rates are close to the same, or in other words, returns on local government bonds are meant to offset the loss of purchasing power while preserving the principal. Instead of local government bonds, one could consider bank deposits as a suitable alternative. 

Real world impact: if you consider the historical depreciation in the value of money - purchasing power - across the Group of Seven nations, and the needs of a comfortable existence in future, then a realistic return rate on pension portfolios would range between 5% and 10%. Remember also that this rate needs to account for capital withdrawal once people actually retire. Once we remove the periods of overly high inflation as well as stagnation or deflation (that would be you, Japan) the base (minimum) rate works out to 6%. This is the realistic minimum rate that needs to be achieved on pension portfolios, but one could also consider it a weighted average of returns before people actually retire. 

Keynes stole your ship

Dysfunction Trilogy Part A

By Chan Akya

Despite mounting evidence of the dysfunction being caused by Keynesian policies, rhetoric in Europe and the United States is overwhelmingly turned against austerity. Over three articles, the author will examine specific examples of the dysfunction that has been caused by such government intervention, and the very real economic pain being caused as a result with the objective of dispelling the dangerous notion that higher government spending is a victimless crime.

Here is a quick quiz: name a global industry that is as old as antiquity, employs millions of people, withstood and indeed thrived with technological change but perhaps most importantly of all with diverse supply and demand dynamics is an industry that has never been cornered by any particular group for very long in history. 

If you thought the reference above was about shipping, well done. In contrast if you thought it was about prostitution, well then, time for a cold shower. 

The typical cycle of shipping is as old as history and has always been about two contrasting and virtually uncorrelated forces: firstly the interaction of operations with risk, and secondly the boom-bust cycle. Western readers will remember learning about the exploits of sea-faring Greeks and other Mediterranean peoples as merchants far and wide seeking to profit from trade with other countries. This continued into the times of Shakespeare (examples include the Merchant of Venice and settled into modern times as shipping became the moving force of global economies post World War II. The advent of standardized containers during the Korean War and thereafter proved a boon for global trade, and with it, improved the economic fortunes of all countries involved.

For these 70 years or so of modern shipping, at least five boom-bust cycles were visible as the effects of the cold war, the oil crisis, the emerging-market crisis in the '80s, Scandinavia's sovereign debt crisis in the '90s, and the decline in the industry in the first few years of this millennium.