Hollowed out human shells

Kim Jong-Il’s Legacy

By Jeff Harding

In one week we lose a champion of liberty, Václav Havel, and that champion of tyranny, Kim Jong-Il. We should not fail to notice that the common denominator was communism. There are other despotic non-communist regimes in the world, but none as totalitarian as the communists. Not even Iran or other Muslim states can claim to be as oppressive, unless you are a woman of course. But women in Islamic societies tend to be victims of ancient customs rather than a new anti-female ideology imposed from the top down.

With the communists, the old joke goes, even the spies have spies.

Only fellow communists Joe Stalin and Mao Ze Dong could match Kim Jong-Il in totalitarian destruction of their citizenry. It is not known how many of their citizens each killed, mostly starved to death, but total obedience to the State, no matter how zany the policies, was required. It is interesting that each one of these guys were similar in personality: paranoid at heart, duplicitous in action, and hypocritical in their personal lives.

Mr. Kim’s citizenry are now weeping openly when they should be celebrating his death. How sick is that kind of a society? 

South Korean employees, who travel to the North each day via a heavily monitored road [to work in the big maquiladoras producing goods cheaply for South Korean companies], said in interviews on Wednesday that they are treating North Korean workers with kid gloves since the announcement of Mr. Kim’s death. Still, it’s not clear whether the workers’ expressions of grief are genuine.

“I saw quite a few people crying” on Monday, when Mr. Kim’s death was announced, said one South Korean manager. “I imagine there were people who really did feel sad, but there may have been others who had to act that way. North Koreans seem to be watching each other very closely, and they are quite careful: Some may have had to cry simply because they would have been out of place not to do so and would have been noticed.”

Maybe they fear the unknown. It must be crushingly difficult when you live in a gray world with no hope.

The discussion at my morning kaffeeklatsch was why people accept this kind of life and rule. I am not sure of the “why” but I am sure of the fact that it is a part of our human nature. A few can rule the many with fear, force, and intimidation. You can make people do and believe whatever you want if you do it “right.”

I am convinced that liberty is also a part of our human nature, perhaps the main part. It is a state of individual sovereignty as defined by Natural Law. You own you. Liberty is actually the preferred state of being for humans. It is the only state of being for humans that can simultaneously allow for the development of individual potential and create the greatest good for society as a whole. It is what I believe is our true “humanity.”

They call North Korea the Hermit Kingdom because of its isolation, poverty, and oppression. Mr. Kim has created a population of emotionally and physically stunted people by destroying their humanity. Another way to put it is that there are really no human beings living in North Korea. Rather they are hollowed out human shells. That is Mr. Kim’s achievement and legacy.

We are behind schedule

Politics and the English Language

By J. Orwell, 1946

Most people who bother with the matter at all, would admit that the English language is in a bad way, but it is generally assumed that we cannot by conscious action do anything about it. Our civilization is decadent and our language -- so the argument runs -- must inevitably share in the general collapse. It follows that any struggle against the abuse of language is a sentimental archaism, like preferring candles to electric light or hansom cabs to aeroplanes. Underneath this lies the half-conscious belief that language is a natural growth and not an instrument which we shape for our own purposes.

Now, it is clear that the decline of a language must ultimately have political and economic causes: it is not due simply to the bad influence of this or that individual writer. But an effect can become a cause, reinforcing the original cause and producing the same effect in an intensified form, and so on indefinitely. A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.

The point is that the process is reversible. Modern English, especially written English, is full of bad habits which spread by imitation and which can be avoided if one is willing to take the necessary trouble. If one gets rid of these habits one can think more clearly, and to think clearly is a necessary first step toward political regeneration: so that the fight against bad English is not frivolous and is not the exclusive concern of professional writers. I will come back to this presently, and I hope that by that time the meaning of what I have said here will have become clearer. Meanwhile, here are five specimens of the English language as it is now habitually written.

These five passages have not been picked out because they are especially bad -- I could have quoted far worse if I had chosen -- but because they illustrate various of the mental vices from which we now suffer. They are a little below the average, but are fairly representative examples. I number them so that I can refer back to them when necessary:

1. I am not, indeed, sure whether it is not true to say that the Milton who once seemed not unlike a seventeenth-century Shelley had not become, out of an experience ever more bitter in each year, more alien [sic] to the founder of that Jesuit sect which nothing could induce him to tolerate.

Professor Harold Laski (Essay in Freedom of Expression)

2. Above all, we cannot play ducks and drakes with a native battery of idioms which prescribes egregious collocations of vocables as the Basic put up with for tolerate, or put at a loss for bewilder .

Professor Lancelot Hogben (Interglossa)

3. On the one side we have the free personality: by definition it is not neurotic, for it has neither conflict nor dream. Its desires, such as they are, are transparent, for they are just what institutional approval keeps in the forefront of consciousness; another institutional pattern would alter their number and intensity; there is little in them that is natural, irreducible, or culturally dangerous. But on the other side, the social bond itself is nothing but the mutual reflection of these self-secure integrities. Recall the definition of love. Is not this the very picture of a small academic? Where is there a place in this hall of mirrors for either personality or fraternity?

Essay on psychology in Politics (New York)

4. All the "best people" from the gentlemen's clubs, and all the frantic fascist captains, united in common hatred of Socialism and bestial horror at the rising tide of the mass revolutionary movement, have turned to acts of provocation, to foul incendiarism, to medieval legends of poisoned wells, to legalize their own destruction of proletarian organizations, and rouse the agitated petty-bourgeoise to chauvinistic fervor on behalf of the fight against the revolutionary way out of the crisis.

Communist pamphlet

5. If a new spirit is to be infused into this old country, there is one thorny and contentious reform which must be tackled, and that is the humanization and galvanization of the B.B.C. Timidity here will bespeak canker and atrophy of the soul. The heart of Britain may be sound and of strong beat, for instance, but the British lion's roar at present is like that of Bottom in Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream -- as gentle as any sucking dove. A virile new Britain cannot continue indefinitely to be traduced in the eyes or rather ears, of the world by the effete languors of Langham Place, brazenly masquerading as "standard English." When the Voice of Britain is heard at nine o'clock, better far and infinitely less ludicrous to hear aitches honestly dropped than the present priggish, inflated, inhibited, school-ma'amish arch braying of blameless bashful mewing maidens!

Letter in Tribune

Each of these passages has faults of its own, but, quite apart from avoidable ugliness, two qualities are common to all of them. The first is staleness of imagery; the other is lack of precision. The writer either has a meaning and cannot express it, or he inadvertently says something else, or he is almost indifferent as to whether his words mean anything or not. This mixture of vagueness and sheer incompetence is the most marked characteristic of modern English prose, and especially of any kind of political writing. As soon as certain topics are raised, the concrete melts into the abstract and no one seems able to think of turns of speech that are not hackneyed: prose consists less and less of words chosen for the sake of their meaning, and more and more of phrases tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated henhouse. I list below, with notes and examples, various of the tricks by means of which the work of prose construction is habitually dodged:

Dying metaphors. A newly invented metaphor assists thought by evoking a visual image, while on the other hand a metaphor which is technically "dead" (e.g. iron resolution) has in effect reverted to being an ordinary word and can generally be used without loss of vividness. But in between these two classes there is a huge dump of worn-out metaphors which have lost all evocative power and are merely used because they save people the trouble of inventing phrases for themselves. Examples are: Ring the changes on, take up the cudgel for, toe the line, ride roughshod over, stand shoulder to shoulder with, play into the hands of, no axe to grind, grist to the mill, fishing in troubled waters, on the order of the day, Achilles' heel, swan song, hotbed. Many of these are used without knowledge of their meaning (what is a "rift," for instance?), and incompatible metaphors are frequently mixed, a sure sign that the writer is not interested in what he is saying. Some metaphors now current have been twisted out of their original meaning withouth those who use them even being aware of the fact. For example, toe the line is sometimes written as tow the line. Another example is the hammer and the anvil, now always used with the implication that the anvil gets the worst of it. In real life it is always the anvil that breaks the hammer, never the other way about: a writer who stopped to think what he was saying would avoid perverting the original phrase.

Operators or verbal false limbs. These save the trouble of picking out appropriate verbs and nouns, and at the same time pad each sentence with extra syllables which give it an appearance of symmetry. Characteristic phrases are render inoperative, militate against, make contact with, be subjected to, give rise to, give grounds for, have the effect of, play a leading part (role) in, make itself felt, take effect, exhibit a tendency to, serve the purpose of, etc., etc. The keynote is the elimination of simple verbs. Instead of being a single word, such as break, stop, spoil, mend, kill, a verb becomes a phrase, made up of a noun or adjective tacked on to some general-purpose verb such as prove, serve, form, play, render. In addition, the passive voice is wherever possible used in preference to the active, and noun constructions are used instead of gerunds (by examination of instead of by examining). The range of verbs is further cut down by means of the -ize and de- formations, and the banal statements are given an appearance of profundity by means of the not un- formation. Simple conjunctions and prepositions are replaced by such phrases as with respect to, having regard to, the fact that, by dint of, in view of, in the interests of, on the hypothesis that; and the ends of sentences are saved by anticlimax by such resounding commonplaces as greatly to be desired, cannot be left out of account, a development to be expected in the near future, deserving of serious consideration, brought to a satisfactory conclusion, and so on and so forth.

Pretentious diction. Words like phenomenon, element, individual (as noun), objective, categorical, effective, virtual, basic, primary, promote, constitute, exhibit, exploit, utilize, eliminate, liquidate, are used to dress up a simple statement and give an air of scientific impartiality to biased judgements. Adjectives like epoch-making, epic, historic, unforgettable, triumphant, age-old, inevitable, inexorable, veritable, are used to dignify the sordid process of international politics, while writing that aims at glorifying war usually takes on an archaic color, its characteristic words being: realm, throne, chariot, mailed fist, trident, sword, shield, buckler, banner, jackboot, clarion. Foreign words and expressions such as cul de sac, ancien regime, deus ex machina, mutatis mutandis, status quo, gleichschaltung, weltanschauung, are used to give an air of culture and elegance. Except for the useful abbreviations i.e., e.g., and etc., there is no real need for any of the hundreds of foreign phrases now current in the English language. Bad writers, and especially scientific, political, and sociological writers, are nearly always haunted by the notion that Latin or Greek words are grander than Saxon ones, and unnecessary words like expedite, ameliorate, predict, extraneous, deracinated, clandestine, subaqueous, and hundreds of others constantly gain ground from their Anglo-Saxon numbers.* The jargon peculiar to

Marxist writing (hyena, hangman, cannibal, petty bourgeois, these gentry, lackey, flunkey, mad dog, White Guard, etc.) consists largely of words translated from Russian, German, or French; but the normal way of coining a new word is to use Latin or Greek root with the appropriate affix and, where necessary, the size formation. It is often easier to make up words of this kind (deregionalize, impermissible, extramarital, non-fragmentary and so forth) than to think up the English words that will cover one's meaning. The result, in general, is an increase in slovenliness and vagueness.

The Therapeutic State

The Burden of Responsibility

By Thomas Szasz

Life is an unending series of choices and, therefore, “problems inThe Therapeutic State living.” Ordinary choices—what to have for breakfast—we ignore as trivial. Extraordinary choices—whether to kill ourselves (or worse)—we dismiss as the symptoms of mental illness. The profession of psychiatry rests on, and caters to, the ubiquitous human desire to avoid, evade, and deny the very possibility of morally “unthinkable” choices. We use the rhetoric of psychiatry to transform such choices into medical-technical problems and “solve” them by appropriate “medical treatments.” This is why deception and prevarication are intrinsic to the principles of psychiatry, and fraud and force are intrinsic to its practices.

We humans are choice-making animals. The freedom to make choices is both a blessing and a curse. Depending on age, temperament, information, and alternatives, some people experience the opportunity for choice as exhilarating, others as tormenting. Traditionally, it was one of the functions of religion to relieve people of choices. Today, psychiatry and the therapeutic state perform the same job.

Karl Jaspers (1883–1969)—the great twentieth-century German psychiatrist-turned-philosopher—understood this. But he identified only one part of this drama, the patient’s: “Generally formulated, we may say that these people [“neurotics”] are determined that events for which they are accountable and in which they are understandably concerned shall be taken as mere happenings, for which they are entirely irresponsible.” Psychiatrists were, and are, happy to play the other part, authenticating the person’s false self-definition as mental patient—medical object, not moral actor.

Lord Acton

There is important religious precedent for the authoritative declaration of falsehood as truth. In 1870, under the leadership of the legendary Pope Pius IX—Pio Nono, the longest-reigning and one of the most colorful popes in history—the Vatican declared the dogma of papal infallibility. This was anathema to Lord Acton (1834–1902), the most respected Catholic layman in Europe in his time. Alienated from the Church, Acton did not leave it; and, probably because he had not been ordained, he was not excommunicated. It was in the context of this moral conflict that, in 1887, in a letter to Bishop Mandell Creighton, Acton made his famous pronouncement:

“I cannot accept your canon that we are to judge Pope and King unlike other men, with a favorable 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 want of legal responsibility. Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

Most people who quote Lord Acton’s famous dictum today are unaware it refers to papal power and was made by a devout Catholic. In 1882 Acton, now alienated from his great teacher and lifelong friend, Father Johann Ignaz von Döllinger, who was excommunicated for opposing the infallibility doctrine, writes him:

“I came, very slowly and reluctantly indeed to the conclusion that they [the great Catholic notabilities] were dishonest. And I found out a special reason for their dishonesty in the desire to keep up the credit of authority in the Church. . . . When I got to understand history from the sources, especially from unpublished sources, the reason of all this became obvious. There was a conspiracy to deceive. . . . That men might believe the Pope it was resolved to make them believe that vice is virtue and falsehood truth.”

Acton regarded the claim of papal infallibility as evidence of intolerable religious arrogance and power. I regard psychiatric infallibility—the unfalsifiability and irrefutability of psychiatric diagnoses backed by mental-health laws—as evidence of intolerable psychiatric arrogance and power.

Acton thought “he witnessed the triumph of error in history.” Indeed, he had. Today, we witness a similar—but more ominous—triumph of error in medicine-psychiatry. In addition to persuading the public and the government that human problems are medical diseases, psychiatrists have succeeded in abolishing the concepts of responsibility, guilt, and innocence, and in replacing punishment with the irrefutable and ineradicable stigmata of psychiatric “diagnoses” and “treatments.” “Modern psychiatry,” I wrote in 1970, “dehumanize[s] man by denying . . . the existence, or even the possibility, of personal responsibility, central to the concept of man as moral agent.” It accomplishes that evil by treating responsibility, following Ambrose Bierce, as “a detachable burden easily shifted to the shoulders of God, Fate, Fortune, Luck or one’s neighbor.” In our day, it is not merely customary but, in matters that really count, mandatory to unload responsibility on Mental Illness (“he snapped,” “had a breakdown,” “battled his demons,” “was on drugs,” “went off prescribed medication,” and so forth).

In Acton’s day the separation of church and state was an established political practice in many countries. Hence, the Church’s moral failures and self-arrogated powers affected only persons who chose to be its adherents. Our predicament is more serious. We live at a time when the alliance of medicine-psychiatry and the state is taken for granted—viewed as an unalterable social fact and undoubted moral and social good. Everyone, regardless of personal choice, is affected, directly or indirectly, by the powers of the therapeutic state.

Psychiatry and the State

Given its limited legal-political powers, the Vatican could not have tried to purge the world of its critics, much less intimidate them into becoming its crypto-supporters. In contrast, in our day the alliance of psychiatry and the state has enabled pharmacracy to do just that. Its so-called critics—who call themselves “antipsychiatrists,” “critical psychiatrists,” “ethical psychiatrists,” and so on—oppose one or another psychiatric “diagnosis” or “treatment,” rarely even psychiatric coercion. But they all support the view that the misbehavior of individuals afflicted with/suffering from so-called mental illnesses ought not be regulated by the same rules as are the misbehaviors of individuals not so denominated: They recoil from defending an ethic based on personal responsibility for public actions (as distinct from private actions, called “thoughts”) and of every individual’s inalienable right to his or her life and death, lest they appear uncompassionate and, perish the thought, unscientific and illiberal (in the modern, statist sense of “liberal”). Thus they endorse—explicitly or by the assent of silence—psychiatry’s war on responsibility, epitomized by the wars on drugs, mental illness, and suicide and by the insanity defense.

“Truth,” said Thomas Jefferson, “will do well enough if left to shift for herself. She seldom has received much aid from the power of great men to whom she is rarely known and seldom welcome. She has no need of force to procure entrance into the minds of men. . . . It is error alone which needs the support of government.” Jefferson was right in applying this principle to religion: modern states should not (and for the most part do not) lend their coercive powers to the support of the clerical lies of priests. Nor should they lend their coercive powers to the support of the clinical lies of psychiatrists. As long as they do, serious persons ought not to take psychiatry seriously—except as a threat to reason, responsibility, and liberty.

The grandchildren of the Tatars

Failure to protect Egyptian historic sites could trigger foreign intervention, warn experts

Officials and citizens in Egypt are alarmed that documents and artifacts, including maps and books, are being damaged in protests.

by Mustafa Suleima, Al Arabiya Cairo

The fire that broke out in a Cairo library that houses thousands of rare documents raised concerns over the government’s and the army’s ability to protect historic sites at times of upheaval and drove several experts to warn of a possible intervention by foreign entities to preserve the heritage at risk.

Legal and archeological experts described failure to contain the fire that devoured large parts of the Scientific Complex in downtown Cairo and to rescue the priceless maps, manuscripts, and books kept inside as a disaster and warned that the possibility of similar acts of sabotage would make foreign intervention very likely. Haggag Ibrahim, deputy chairman of the Association for the Preservation of Heritage and member of the Higher Commission for Museums, labeled those involved in setting the Scientific Complex on fire “the new Tatars” who want to erase all aspects of culture in the country.

“Those are the grandchildren of the Tatars who burned the library of Baghdad when they invaded the Muslim world,” he told Al Arabiya. According to Ibrahim, UNESCO is now capable of placing historic sites in Egypt under international protection since Egyptians proved unable to do so themselves.

“Some countries like France might take this initiative.” Among the documents that were burned, Ibrahim said, were maps that delineate Egypt’s borders; the maps played an important role in liberating the city of Taba in the Sinai Peninsula from Israeli occupation. “There were also maps that date back to 1800 and a book written by French scientists during the French Campaign on Egypt, as well as maps of other countries,” he said. Egypt, Ibrahim warned, could be expelled from any international cultural forum now that this damage to priceless documents has taken place. Nasser Amin, legal expert and member of the National Council for Human Rights, differed. “The UNESCO doesn’t have the right to impose international protection on a sovereign country because one historic establishment was subjected to an act of sabotage,” he said. Amin explained that international protection on cultural heritage is imposed only if the country in which the sites are located is in a state of war or engaged in other types of armed conflict. “As for the maps, there are copies of them in other places.” 

A professor of archeology, Mamdouh al-Masry, held the Supreme Council for the Armed Forces (SCAF) accountable for failing to contain the fire and arrest the culprits. “How can the SCAF allow such farce to continue until the library is consumed by the flames? How come they did not arrest the saboteurs right away?” Masry said. Masry stressed that the right to protest is preserved for all citizens provided that no sabotage is involved and that work progress is not interrupted. He also objected to the way the sit-in was dealt with. “If protestors insisted on continuing their sit-in, there were several other ways to resolve the crisis other than resorting to violence.” 

The fact that the fire targeted the Scientific Complex and maps of Egypt’s borders in particular raises a lot of questions about a possible conspiracy, according to Masry. “Was setting the complex on fire intentional in order to eliminate evidence of the borders between Egypt and Israel? Is Israel up to something especially after the Islamist victory in parliamentary election?” he said. Egyptian archeology professor Ayman Hassan al-Dahshan agreed that a conspiracy is involved in the library fire. “Why did the military make sure they take photos of the fire minute by minute but did not make an effort to rescue the building and arrest the saboteurs?” 

Dahshan argued that the military council is either an accomplice in the act for some unknown reason or has lost control and is unable to control acts of sabotage and to distinguish between protestors and thugs. “In all cases, what happened to a library that houses the heritage of the most vital country in the Middle East is definitely meant to undermine the state.” Egyptian-American scientist and Nobel laureate Ahmed Zoweil called upon the “real revolutionaries” to withdraw from Tahrir Square and other surrounding areas in order to allow for a differentiation between protestors and thugs. “Those thugs work for internal and external forces that want to destroy Egypt,” he said in a live statement on the Egyptian independent satellite channel CBC. “In all cases, I call upon both the police and the army to stop using violence immediately,” he concluded.

The final EU coup d'etat

Video Explanation Of How The ESM Is Europe's Uber-TARP On Steroids

by Tyler Durden

Three years ago, Congress balked at the mere thought of giving Hank Paulson's (so lovingly portrayed in Andrew Ross Sorkin's straight to HBO Too Big To Fail) proposed TARP, which came in an "exhaustive" 3 page term sheet with limited bailout powers however with virtually unlimited waivers and supervision, and voted it down leading to one of the biggest market collapses in history. Curiously, a more careful look through Europe's €500 billion (oddly enough almost the same size as America's $700 billion TARP) European Stability Mechanism or ESM, reveals that in preparing the terms and conditions of the ESM, Europe may have laid precisely the same Easter Egg that Paulson did with TARP, but failed. Because at its core, the ESM is like a TARP... on steroids. It is a potentially unlimited liquidity conduit (only contingent on how much cash Germany wants to allocate to it - which in turn means how much cash Germany is willing to let the ECB print), with no supervisory checks and balances embedded, and even worse with no explicit or implicit liability clauses - in essence it is a carte blanche for its owners to do as they see fit without any form of regulation. As the following brief but must watch video explains, the ESM "is an organization that can sue us, but is immune from any forms of prosecution and whose managers enjoy the same immunity; there are no independent reviewers and no existing laws apply; governments can not take action against it? Europe's national budgets in the hands of one single unelected intergovernmental organization? Is that the future of Europe? Is that the new EU? A Europe devoid of sovereign democracies?" Ironically even America's feeble and corrupt Congress stopped a version of TARP that demanded far less from the taxpaying citizens. Yet somehow, Europe has completely let this one slip by. Is it simply to continue the illusion of the insolvent Walfare State for a continent habituated by zombifying socialism, or is Europe by now just too afraid and too tired to say anything against its eurocrat class? One thing is certain: when the people voluntarily give up on democracy, out of sheer laziness or any other reason, the historical outcomes are always all too tragic.

Athens Goes Detroit’s Way

Greece’s Government Announces It Is (Very) Short of Cash

Having gone to college near Detroit, Greece and Detroit have been in linked in my mind for two reasons.  One is that I was introduced to calamari in the district now known officially as Greek town Historic District in downtown Detroit.  The other comes from a tale that a college friend, who grew up in a commuting suburb of Detroit, told me.

He and his best friend were backpacking one summer through Greece.  They ended up stranded in the remote mountains one evening.  Somehow they found their way to a village.  The leader of the village happened to speak English.  After offering lodging, he asked them where they were from.  Now, these adventurous young men were in an isolated village, and this was decades ago.  Remote then was more remote than it is now.  They had no idea what this man knew of the outside world.  So they answered:  America.  Where in America, the elder wanted to know?  They figured most people had heard of NYC and L.A.  So they answered, a city between New York and Los Angeles.  The man wanted more information.  What city, he wanted to know.  A city called Detroit, they answered.  The man lit up:

-Detroit?  Do you know the Star deli?

It turned “everyone” knew the Star deli in downtown Detroit.  It was an unofficial landmark.

-My brother, he owns the Star deli.

That was then.  Movin’ on up, or so it appeared when, years later, Greece “qualified” to join the euro-zone.  They have this situation now, as reported by Ekathemerini:

A combination of a drop in bookings, increased expenses due to taxation and the ongoing decline of the quality of life in downtown Athens has led to the closure of 18 hotels in the area in 2011, according to data revealed by the Hellenic Chamber of Hotels (HCH) on Monday.

Meanwhile, at a joint press conference with Athens Mayor Giorgos Kaminis, HCH president Giorgos Tsakiris warned that unless the rising crime rate in central Athens is brought under control, more hotels will be forced to close down in 2012 as well.

Tsakiris attributed the decline in activity from domestic and foreign tourists to the «oversight and indifference» of the Citizens’ Protection Ministry in regards to burgeoning crime such as robberies, prostitution and drug dealing, saying that the authorities have allowed Athens to «fall prey to crime and transgressions of the law.”

Responding to concerns about the decline of the city center, Kaminis said that following his meeting with Prime Minister Lucas Papademos last Friday, the municipality is drafting a law «for the salvation of Athens,» stressing the need for better coordination between central government, and regional and local authorities, as «the municipality has the structures and the others have the funds» to rein in crime and improve conditions.

 Nothing to add except this if you think Greeks like to play by their own rules, from the same e-newpaper:

No Greek parliamentarian has assets in Swiss banks, according to a preliminary probe into the origin of wealth declarations submitted by 572 politicians for 2009 and posted online on Tuesday.

The so-called «pothen esches» forms — in which specific professional sectors are required to list the provenance of all of their assets so that the Finance Ministry can crosscheck depositors’ details with their earnings — were submitted by 300 active members of Parliament, 22 Euro MPs, 189 former MPs, eight extra-parliamentary ministers, 13 former Euro MPs, 27 finance managers for political parties and 13 former party economists. The details of the forms were also posted on the Greek Parliament’s website in a drive to bring more transparency to state finances.

The head of committee overseeing the inspection process, Vangelis Argyris said that none of the MPs declared assets in Swiss or any other foreign-based banks, adding that their declarations will be looked into in more detail and that «if anyone is found to have even 100 euros in a Swiss bank that is undeclared, they will be in breach of the law.”

“There is a process being carried out and we are expecting information from the Finance Ministry on whether there are MPs that have deposits in Swiss banks. Every ‘pothen esches’ remains open for the inspection committee and none will be closed until all the information has been crosschecked,» Argyris added. He also said that he has sent a letter to Finance Minister Evangelos Venizelos requesting information on any cash transfers that may have been made to Swiss banks by Greek politicians since 2009.

The preliminary investigation also found that 15 MPs declared a reduction in assets of 100,000 euros and above on average. Four of these justified the reduction by declaring real estate purchases, while the other 11 will be required to explain where the money went so that the committee can ascertain whether they have made cash transfers abroad.

As Greece continues to fail to meet expectations regarding its finances, this scenario is reminiscent of Lehman’s agonizing last days.  Its real estate assets were clearly overvalued on its books, and the company went from pillar to post trying to sell off assets or get more financial support from far-flung places. 

Not all is tragedy.  There is low comedy.  Here is a headline from the same day’s newspaper:  SDOE (Financial Crimes Squad) finds 100 mln euros of evasion; arrests same man twice.

But it gets better.  Here is the “best” headline “ever”, also from kathimerini:  Gov’t stops tax returns to everyone.

Let’s see The Onion top that one.

Currency devaluations must always be sprung as a surprise. 

From Laissez-Faire to Statism

Roman Law 

by Murray N. Rothbard

One of the most powerful influences in the legal and political thought and institutions of the Christian West during the Middle Ages was the Roman law, derived from the republic and empire of ancient Rome. Roman law classically developed in the 1st to the 3rd centuries AD. Private law developed the theory of the absolute right of private property and of freedom of trade and contract. While Roman public law theoretically allowed state interference in the life of the citizen, there was little such interference in the late republic and early empire.

Private-property rights and laissez-faire were therefore the fundamental heritage of the Roman law to later centuries, and much of it was adopted by countries of the Christian West. Though the Roman Empire collapsed in the 4th and 5th centuries, its legal heritage continued, as embodied in two great collections of the Roman law: influential in the West, the Theodosian Code, promulgated by the Emperor Theodosius in 438 AD, and, in the East, the great four-volume Corpus Juris Civilis, promulgated by the Byzantine Christian Emperor Justinian in the 530s.

Both collections emphasized strongly that the "just" price (justum pretium) was simply any price arrived at by free and voluntary bargaining between buyer and seller. Each man has the right to do what he wants with his property, and therefore has the right to make contracts to give away, buy, or sell such property; hence, whatever price is freely arrived at is "just."

Thus in the Corpus, several leading Roman jurists of the 3rd century quoted the early 2nd century jurist Pomponius in a classic expression of the morality of laissez-faire: "In buying and selling natural law permits the one party to buy for less and the other to sell for more than the thing is worth; thus each party is allowed to outwit the other"; and "it is naturally permitted to parties to circumvent each other in the price of buying and selling." The only problem here is the odd phrase, "the thing is worth," which assumes that there is some value other than free bargaining that expresses some "true worth," a phrase that would prove to be an unfortunate harbinger of the future.

More specifically, the Theodosian Code was crystal clear: any price set by free and voluntary bargaining is just and legitimate, the only exception being a contract made by children. Force or fraud, as infringements on property rights, were of course considered illegal. The code held explicitly that ignorance of the value of a good by either buyer or seller was insufficient ground for authorities to step in and rescind the voluntarily agreed contract.

The Theodosian Code was carried forward in Western Europe, e.g., the Visigothic law set forth in the 6th and 7th centuries, and the Bavarian law of the early 8th century. Bavarian law added the explicit provision that a buyer may not rescind a sale because he later decides that the agreed price was too high. This laissez-faire aspect of the Theodosian Code later became incorporated into Christian canon law by being included in the collection of "capitularies" (decrees) by St. Benedictus Diaconus in the 9th century AD.

While the Justinian Corpus, promulgated in the East, was equally devoted to laissez-faire, it included a minor element that was later to grow and justify attacks upon free bargaining. As part of the Justinian discussion of how courts can appraise property for payment of damages, the code mentioned that if a seller has sold his property for less than half "the just price," then he suffers "great loss" (laesio enormis), and the seller is then entitled either to get back the difference between the original price and the just price from the buyer, or else get his property back at that original price. This clause was apparently meant only to apply to real estate and to compensations for damages, where authorities must somehow assess the "true" price, and it had no influence on the laws of the next centuries. But it was to yield unfortunate effects in the future.

[An Austrian Perspective on the History of Economic Thought (1995)]

A room of one's own

Economic Independence: Bedrock of Freedom

By Wendy McElroy

In 1929 the English writer Virginia Woolf inserted a famous phrase into feminist history: “a room of one’s own.” The main theme of her extended essay by this name is that “a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction” or, more generally, to live according to her own convictions. She need a room with a lock — a safe and private place. In short, economic independence is the bedrock of all other freedoms.

Woolf was among the fortunate few who inherited money and so inherited her independence. The vast majority of women needed to earn it through sustained labor. Her elite status may explain why Woolf’s commentary missed a key factor defining the status of poor women surrounding them.

Although Woolf correctly denounced social prejudice as a barrier to women’s economic advancement, it was only when prejudice was embedded into law that women were consigned to the kitchen or unskilled labor. Whenever the law was weakened, poor women surged into rooms of their own.

Nevertheless, Woolf’s essay is honored as an early blast at patriarchy and an indictment of the unfettered marketplace. Instead of recognizing how regulation harms poor women, Woolf’s descendants have called for an ever more shackled marketplace.

What were the circumstances for English working women in 1929? A tug-of-war was occurring between the repeal of economic legislation and its imposition. The first led to greater opportunity for women; the second closed doors. Both phenomena sprang largely from the same cataclysmic event: World War I (1914-1918)

War Years

During the war years, an estimated two million women stepped out of the kitchen to fill the jobs vacated by enlisted men. Millicent Fawcett, president of the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies (1897-1918), declared, “The war revolutionised the industrial position of women — it found them serfs and left them free.”

After the war women’s economic status blurred, with many employers replacing women with returning men. Three factors ensured that women would remain in the workforce, however.

• Some women embraced their wider sphere and would not willingly retreat into economic shadows.
• Britain’s huge death and casualty rate in the war meant that abled bodied men were less available. Approximately 750,000 men died, with 2.5 million claiming disability.
• Many women faced a future as widows or spinsters responsible for their own sustenance.

British law reacted to women’s changing status in contradictory ways. The Sex Disqualification Removal Act of 1919 eliminated legal barriers to women in the civil service, courts and universities, thus recognizing their wider role. When this legal barrier was lifted, women surged forward. Carrie Morrison became the first female solicitor three years later. Overwhelmingly, however, the act benefited well-to-do women.

Although the civil service might have served as a stepping stone for all poor women, it became regulated at the urgent request of women themselves. Despite fewer employable men, Britain experienced the general unemployment brought by the Great Depression. Widows and spinsters wanted married women who sought the same jobs discriminated against. For example, in 1921 an estimated 102,000 female civil servants pushed forward a resolution to ban married women; it remained in force until 1946.

Over and over the preceding scenario replayed during the twentieth century. Laws were repealed and all women advanced; laws were passed and some women were set back.

Protection Equals Privilege

Even laws intended to protect women, like the civil service restriction, ended up privileging one class of women at the expense of another. This too has escaped the notice of Woolf’s descendants who have lobbied passionately for the restriction on free employment, from affirmative action to pay equity, from mandated quotas to paid maternity leave.

I’ve had reason to notice. I once needed a room of my own. And I know on a personal level how laws can harm those they intend to protect. I ran away from home at 16 years old because the streets were safer than my family. Unfortunately it was Canada in December and sleeping in a church with an open-door policy was a stop-gap measure at best. I needed a room with heat and a door that locked.

I was lucky because I was 16-years-old. Child labor laws designed to protect children from exploitation did not apply to me, and so I was able to get a minimum-wage job in a furniture store, filing years worth of boxed papers. If I had been “protected” either as a child or a female from being able to negotiate for less money than other applicants demanded, I would not have been able to to rent a room in a boardinghouse. Instead, I would have been “protected” into begging, stealing, dealing drugs, or sex work. Like most runaways, I would not have “turned myself” into the authorities known as social services.

What saved me was the ability to contract on my own terms so that I could buy a room with a lock and go on to build a life.

Phenomena of organized complexity

The Pretence of Knowledge

                 Lecture to the memory of Alfred Nobel, December 11, 1974

by Friedrich August von Hayek

The particular occasion of this lecture, combined with the chief practical problem which economists have to face today, have made the choice of its topic almost inevitable. On the one hand the still recent establishment of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Science marks a significant step in the process by which, in the opinion of the general public, economics has been conceded some of the dignity and prestige of the physical sciences. On the other hand, the economists are at this moment called upon to say how to extricate the free world from the serious threat of accelerating inflation which, it must be admitted, has been brought about by policies which the majority of economists recommended and even urged governments to pursue. We have indeed at the moment little cause for pride: as a profession we have made a mess of things.

It seems to me that this failure of the economists to guide policy more successfully is closely connected with their propensity to imitate as closely as possible the procedures of the brilliantly successful physical sciences - an attempt which in our field may lead to outright error. It is an approach which has come to be described as the "scientistic" attitude - an attitude which, as I defined it some thirty years ago, "is decidedly unscientific in the true sense of the word, since it involves a mechanical and uncritical application of habits of thought to fields different from those in which they have been formed."¹ I want today to begin by explaining how some of the gravest errors of recent economic policy are a direct consequence of this scientistic error.

The theory which has been guiding monetary and financial policy during the last thirty years, and which I contend is largely the product of such a mistaken conception of the proper scientific procedure, consists in the assertion that there exists a simple positive correlation between total employment and the size of the aggregate demand for goods and services; it leads to the belief that we can permanently assure full employment by maintaining total money expenditure at an appropriate level. Among the various theories advanced to account for extensive unemployment, this is probably the only one in support of which strong quantitative evidence can be adduced. I nevertheless regard it as fundamentally false, and to act upon it, as we now experience, as very harmful 

This brings me to the crucial issue. Unlike the position that exists in the physical sciences, in economics and other disciplines that deal with essentially complex phenomena, the aspects of the events to be accounted for about which we can get quantitative data are necessarily limited and may not include the important ones. While in the physical sciences it is generally assumed, probably with good reason, that any important factor which determines the observed events will itself be directly observable and measurable, in the study of such complex phenomena as the market, which depend on the actions of many individuals, all the circumstances which will determine the outcome of a process, for reasons which I shall explain later, will hardly ever be fully known or measurable. And while in the physical sciences the investigator will be able to measure what, on the basis of a prima facie theory, he thinks important, in the social sciences often that is treated as important which happens to be accessible to measurement. This is sometimes carried to the point where it is demanded that our theories must be formulated in such terms that they refer only to measurable magnitudes.

It can hardly be denied that such a demand quite arbitrarily limits the facts which are to be admitted as possible causes of the events which occur in the real world. This view, which is often quite naively accepted as required by scientific procedure, has some rather paradoxical consequences. We know: of course, with regard to the market and similar social structures, a great many facts which we cannot measure and on which indeed we have only some very imprecise and general information. And because the effects of these facts in any particular instance cannot be confirmed by quantitative evidence, they are simply disregarded by those sworn to admit only what they regard as scientific evidence: they thereupon happily proceed on the fiction that the factors which they can measure are the only ones that are relevant.

The correlation between aggregate demand and total employment, for instance, may only be approximate, but as it is the only one on which we have quantitative data, it is accepted as the only causal connection that counts. On this standard there may thus well exist better "scientific" evidence for a false theory, which will be accepted because it is more "scientific", than for a valid explanation, which is rejected because there is no sufficient quantitative evidence for it.

Let me illustrate this by a brief sketch of what I regard as the chief actual cause of extensive unemployment - an account which will also explain why such unemployment cannot be lastingly cured by the inflationary policies recommended by the now fashionable theory. This correct explanation appears to me to be the existence of discrepancies between the distribution of demand among the different goods and services and the allocation of labour and other resources among the production of those outputs. We possess a fairly good "qualitative" knowledge of the forces by which a correspondence between demand and supply in the different sectors of the economic system is brought about, of the conditions under which it will be achieved, and of the factors likely to prevent such an adjustment. The separate steps in the account of this process rely on facts of everyday experience, and few who take the trouble to follow the argument will question the validity of the factual assumptions, or the logical correctness of the conclusions drawn from them. We have indeed good reason to believe that unemployment indicates that the structure of relative prices and wages has been distorted (usually by monopolistic or governmental price fixing), and that to restore equality between the demand and the supply of labour in all sectors changes of relative prices and some transfers of labour will be necessary.

But when we are asked for quantitative evidence for the particular structure of prices and wages that would be required in order to assure a smooth continuous sale of the products and services offered, we must admit that we have no such information. We know, in other words, the general conditions in which what we call, somewhat misleadingly, an equilibrium will establish itself: but we never know what the particular prices or wages are which would exist if the market were to bring about such an equilibrium. We can merely say what the conditions are in which we can expect the market to establish prices and wages at which demand will equal supply. But we can never produce statistical information which would show how much the prevailing prices and wages deviate from those which would secure a continuous sale of the current supply of labour. Though this account of the causes of unemployment is an empirical theory, in the sense that it might be proved false, e.g. if, with a constant money supply, a general increase of wages did not lead to unemployment, it is certainly not the kind of theory which we could use to obtain specific numerical predictions concerning the rates of wages, or the distribution of labour, to be expected.

Why should we, however, in economics, have to plead ignorance of the sort of facts on which, in the case of a physical theory, a scientist would certainly be expected to give precise information? It is probably not surprising that those impressed by the example of the physical sciences should find this position very unsatisfactory and should insist on the standards of proof which they find there. The reason for this state of affairs is the fact, to which I have already briefly referred, that the social sciences, like much of biology but unlike most fields of the physical sciences, have to deal with structures of essential complexity, i.e. with structures whose characteristic properties can be exhibited only by models made up of relatively large numbers of variables. Competition, for instance, is a process which will produce certain results only if it proceeds among a fairly large number of acting persons.

In some fields, particularly where problems of a similar kind arise in the physical sciences, the difficulties can be overcome by using, instead of specific information about the individual elements, data about the relative frequency, or the probability, of the occurrence of the various distinctive properties of the elements. But this is true only where we have to deal with what has been called by Dr. Warren Weaver (formerly of the Rockefeller Foundation), with a distinction which ought to be much more widely understood, "phenomena of unorganized complexity," in contrast to those "phenomena of organized complexity" with which we have to deal in the social sciences.² Organized complexity here means that the character of the structures showing it depends not only on the properties of the individual elements of which they are composed, and the relative frequency with which they occur, but also on the manner in which the individual elements are connected with each other. In the explanation of the working of such structures we can for this reason not replace the information about the individual elements by statistical information, but require full information about each element if from our theory we are to derive specific predictions about individual events. Without such specific information about the individual elements we shall be confined to what on another occasion I have called mere pattern predictions - predictions of some of the general attributes of the structures that will form themselves, but not containing specific statements about the individual elements of which the structures will be made up.³

This is particularly true of our theories accounting for the determination of the systems of relative prices and wages that will form themselves on a wellfunctioning market. Into the determination of these prices and wages there will enter the effects of particular information possessed by every one of the participants in the market process - a sum of facts which in their totality cannot be known to the scientific observer, or to any other single brain. It is indeed the source of the superiority of the market order, and the reason why, when it is not suppressed by the powers of government, it regularly displaces other types of order, that in the resulting allocation of resources more of the knowledge of particular facts will be utilized which exists only dispersed among uncounted persons, than any one person can possess. But because we, the observing scientists, can thus never know all the determinants of such an order, and in consequence also cannot know at which particular structure of prices and wages demand would everywhere equal supply, we also cannot measure the deviations from that order; nor can we statistically test our theory that it is the deviations from that "equilibrium" system of prices and wages which make it impossible to sell some of the products and services at the prices at which they are offered.

Before I continue with my immediate concern, the effects of all this on the employment policies currently pursued, allow me to define more specifically the inherent limitations of our numerical knowledge which are so often overlooked. I want to do this to avoid giving the impression that I generally reject the mathematical method in economics. I regard it in fact as the great advantage of the mathematical technique that it allows us to describe, by means of algebraic equations, the general character of a pattern even where we are ignorant of the numerical values which will determine its particular manifestation. We could scarcely have achieved that comprehensive picture of the mutual interdependencies of the different events in a market without this algebraic technique. It has led to the illusion, however, that we can use this technique for the determination and prediction of the numerical values of those magnitudes; and this has led to a vain search for quantitative or numerical constants. This happened in spite of the fact that the modern founders of mathematical economics had no such illusions. It is true that their systems of equations describing the pattern of a market equilibrium are so framed that if we were able to fill in all the blanks of the abstract formulae, i.e. if we knew all the parameters of these equations, we could calculate the prices and quantities of all commodities and services sold. But, as Vilfredo Pareto, one of the founders of this theory, clearly stated, its purpose cannot be "to arrive at a numerical calculation of prices", because, as he said, it would be "absurd" to assume that we could ascertain all the data.⁴ Indeed, the chief point was already seen by those remarkable anticipators of modern economics, the Spanish schoolmen of the sixteenth century, who emphasized that what they called pretium mathematicum, the mathematical price, depended on so many particular circumstances that it could never be known to man but was known only to God.⁵ I sometimes wish that our mathematical economists would take this to heart. I must confess that I still doubt whether their search for measurable magnitudes has made significant contributions to ourtheoretical understanding of economic phenomena - as distinct from their value as a description of particular situations. Nor am I prepared to accept the excuse that this branch of research is still very young: Sir William Petty, the founder of econometrics, was after all a somewhat senior colleague of Sir Isaac Newton in the Royal Society!