Science and Non-Science in Liberal Education

One in a hundred

By Harvey C. Mansfield

Allan Bloom in his famous book The Closing of the American Mind (1987), drawing on Max Weber, calls the “fundamental issue” of our time “the relation between reason, or science, and the human good.” I would say that in the university today the most obvious issue, reflecting directly the fundamental issue, is the relation between science and non-science. Let’s start from non-science as the residue of what is not science. Personally, I am not a scientist; I am a non-scientist; but what is that positively? This is the main question in today’s university, and the main question for liberal education: What is non-science? We see in the universities, among both faculties and students, that, in answering that question, science is confident and non-science is confused. That is the first impression, which I will try to make muddy by showing that science is not so confident and non-science not so confused. But let the confident party speak first.

The confidence of scientists arises from their knowing what they are doing and from their ability to say what science is. Science is progressive and exact. It is progressive in that it is always being revised, with new findings replacing what was once held to be knowledge. To be sure, what is held to be knowledge now will change, perhaps very soon. Is physics about atoms? No, today it is about the distance between atoms. Strict science is today’s science; there is no reason for scientists to study the past of their discipline, the history of science. That field is part of non-science, the history department, not of science. If Galileo were to return today, he would accept our science as improved, as more exact. “Exact” means “leaves no room for doubt.” What is most exact? Mathematics; so science today is mathematical. Galileo began modern mathematical science, but science is not sentimental about its founders; like everyone else at his time he got some things wrong, only less wrong than the others of his day.

Social science and the humanities vie for the territory of non-science, the former imitating science and always failing, the latter not imitating and not knowing quite why. Both are excluded from science, the humanities officially and social science by the unofficial rejection of true scientists. They are not exact, not progressive. In the words of the once-famous Harvard “Red Book”: “Goethe does not render Sophocles obsolete, nor does Descartes supersede Plato.” Today there just might be agreement that these four authors are worth studying, but why? Because they differ, and the differences are still worth studying. That means that in the humanities, scholars accept unresolved doubts, whereas mathematical scientists strive to resolve all doubt. Non-science is not progressive; we cannot throw away old ideas. The Federalist and Tocqueville’s Democracy in America are still the best books on American politics, though of course in need of intelligent updating.

Science students do well in non-science courses, but non-science students have difficulty in science courses. Slaves of exactness find it easier to adjust to the inexact, though they may be disdainful of it, than do those who think in the realm of the inexact when confronted with the exact. Non-science students usually need less demanding courses in which to satisfy their science requirements; science students in non-science, however, suffer mainly from their sense of superiority. Are science students smarter? Maybe so, but at least they are good at mathematics, which is the big difference between science and non-science. Social science tries to be progressive and exact but fails in both; it cannot predict: witness the spectacular failure of economics to predict the financial crisis of 2008.

Will the House of Saud pivot to China?

Losing my (petrodollar) religion

By Pepe Escobar 

The favorite geopolitical sport du jour is to deconstruct the reasons why the House of Saud - that marriage of hyper-absolute monarchy and Wahhabi fanatics - has gone completely bonkers, with the ineffable Bandar Bush in the frontline. 

They are terrified with the possibility that the 34-year Wall of Mistrust between Washington and Tehran finally tumbles down. They are terrified that those American infidels refused to fight "our" regime change war on Syria. They were horrified by (mild) criticism about hardcore repression in Bahrain (which was invaded by Saudi in 2011, by the way). They abhor the American worshipping of that weird deity - democracy - that allowed friendly tyrants in Tunisia and Egypt to be abandoned (Libya is different; King Abdullah had wanted Gaddafi snuffed since at least 2002). 

The House of Saud is so mad as hell at the Obama administration that even "all options" are supposed to be "on the table". Which begs the question; what if Riyadh is actually dreaming of pivoting to China? 

Beijing's self-described "socialism with market characteristics" badly needs Saudi oil; after all the House of Saud is already China's top supplier. King Abdullah looks East and what he sees is an aspiring superpower, flush with unlimited cash, which will never dream of interfering in Saudi internal affairs, not to mention contemplate toxic Arab Spring ideas. 

So picture the dying King Abdullah dreaming of a Riyadh-Beijing axis as his legacy - with the inbuilt added benefit of displacing mortal enemy Iran as a supreme matter of national security for the Chinese (although Beijing would certainly see it as the proverbial win-win situation, keen to buy even more oil from Saudi as it keeps buying more gas from Iran). 

Saudi Arabia produces roughly 10% of the global total, which stands at around 90 million barrels of oil a day. It is the world's top exporter, swing producer, and essential in influencing the price of oil - which remains very high not only because of Chinese and Indian demand but also due to ceaseless speculation. 

Riyadh is carefully observing the possibility of the US becoming energy self-sufficient because of fracking technology - dirty, nasty and causing devastating pollution. They are certainly factoring that even with the US producing http://www.allgov.com/news/top-stories/us-now-leads-the-world-in-oil-and-gas-production-131008?news=851336 more than Saudi - around 12 million barrels a day, including ethanol - it still needs to import no less than 6.7 million barrels of oil a day in 2013. The US will still need oil - Saudi oil - in the foreseeable future. 

If "all options" are really "on the table", the House of Saud may be mulling striking a decades-long deal with the energy-voracious Chinese, assuring supply for a certain price. But let's assume demand - especially from Asia - rises, as it will; the House of Saud knows the US may find itself in trouble, and graphically manifest its displeasure. 

The House of Saud also knows very well it is the solid anchor that keeps OPEC tied to the petrodollar system. Without Saudi Arabia the petrodollar is history. 

Welcome to the Barbershop

Europe’s Tottering Banks are 'Coming Clean'

by Pater Tenebrarum

Reuters reports that 'Europe prepares to come clean on hidden bank losses'. Prepares to come clean? You mean, they haven't come clean yet? And what 'hidden losses'? Readers may recall the farcical 'stress tests' by the European Banking Authority over the past few years, which evidently failed to uncover what the true state of the banking system was. We still recall that Dexia was given a clean bill of health as one of the 'best capitalized banks in Europe' a mere three months before it failed and had to be bailed out.

In addition, keep in mind that commercial banks in places like Spain and Italy have loaded up big time on the debt issued by their governments, so that the often invoked 'breaking of the nexus between banks and their sovereigns' has definitely not happened. The exact opposite has in fact occurred. Meanwhile, there seem to be a great many toxic assets still rotting in the closets where the skeletons are habitually kept. The Reuters report highlights what a gigantic farce this still is by noting that 'nobody knows how big the losses are': 

“Euro zone countries will consider on Monday how to pay for the repair of their broken banks after health checks next year that are expected to uncover problems that have festered since the financial crisis.

Nobody knows the true scale of potential losses at Europe's banks, but the International Monetary Fund hinted at the enormity of the problem this month, saying that Spanish and Italian banks face 230 billion euros ($310 billion) of losses alone on credit to companies in the next two years.

Yet five years after the United States demanded its big banks take on new capital to reassure investors, Europe is still struggling to impose order on its financial system, having given emergency aid to five countries. Finance ministers from the 17-nation currency area meeting in Luxembourg will tackle the issue of plugging holes expected to be revealed by the European Central Bank's health checks next year.

The Gathering Storm

Intellectual, moral and financial bankruptcy all go hand in hand

Doing more of what failed spectacularly will not save the day a second time, as the scale required to create yet more phantom collateral and more asset bubbles will collapse the system.

by Charles Hugh-Smith
The financial storm clouds are gathering, ominously darkening the horizon. Though the financial media and the organs of state propaganda continue forecasting blue skies of recovery and rising corporate profits, the factual evidence belies this rosy forecast: internal measures of financial and economic activity are weakening across the globe as the state-central bank solutions to all ills--massive increases in credit creation, leverage and deficit spending--have failed to address any of the structural causes of the 2008 Global Financial Meltdown.

This failure to address the causes of 2008 Global Financial Meltdown is disastrous in and of itself--but the status quo has magnified the coming disaster by scaling up the very causes of the 2008 Global Financial Meltdown: excessive credit expansion, misallocation of capital on a grand scale, an opaque shadow banking system constructed of excessive leverage and a dependence on phantom collateral, i.e. risks and assets that are systemically mispriced to skim stupendous profits for financiers, bankers and their political enablers.

This is what I have called doing more of what has failed spectacularly.

Extremes inevitably lead to collapse, but even the most distorted system has some feedback mechanisms that attempt to counter the momentum toward disaster. Just as the body will try to mitigate the negative consequences of a diet of greasy fast food, our grossly distorted financial and political systems still retain some modest feedback loops that attempt to mitigate rising risks.

These interactive forces make it impossible to predict the moment of collapse, even as systemic failure remains inevitable. Precisely when the heart of an obese, unfit person who eats nothing but fast food will give out cannot be predicted, but what can be predicted is the odds of systemic failure rise with every passing day.

Doing more of what has failed spectacularly--inflating new asset bubbles in housing, stocks and bonds via quantitative easing, obfuscating financial skimming operations with thousands of pages of new regulations, and so on--is the equivalent of pushing an obese, unfit person to run uphill. Rather than repair the system, doing more of what has failed further stresses the system.

But even if the financial system were cleansed of bad debt and phantom collateral, the status quo would remain only partially repaired. For it's not just the financial system that has reached the point of negative return: the entire economic foundation of the developed world--credit-dependent consumerism--is as bankrupt and broken as the financial system that fuels it.

The state's response to this economic endgame is depersonalized welfare, both corporate and individual. When favored sectors can't succeed in the open market, the state enforces cartel-capitalism that enriches the corporations at the expense of the citizenry. When the cartel-state economy no longer creates paying work for the citizenry, the state issues social welfare benefits, in effect paying people to stay home and amuse themselves.

This destroys both free enterprise on the corporate level and the source of individual and social meaning, i.e. the opportunity to contribute in a meaningful way to one's community, family and trade/skill.

The status quo is thus not just financially bankrupt--it is morally bankrupt as well.

The status quo is as intellectually bankrupt as it is financially bankrupt. Our leadership cannot conceive of any course of action other than central bank credit creation and expanding state control of the economy and social benefits, paid for with money borrowed from future generations.

Let's take a wild guess that the obese, unfit person won't make it up the second hill, never mind the third or fourth one.The status quo responded to the financial heart attack of 2008 by doing more of what had failed spectacularly. That injection of trillions of dollars, euros, yen, renminbi, quatloos, etc. revived the global financial system in the same way a shot of nitroglycerin resolves a life-threatening crisis: it doesn't fix the causes of the crisis, it simply gives the system some additional time.

The next global financial storm is already gathering on the horizon. Doing more of what failed spectacularly will not save the day a second time, as the scale required to create yet more phantom collateral and more asset bubbles will collapse the system.

Intellectual, moral and financial bankruptcy all go hand in hand. There isn't just one storm gathering on the horizon--there are three, each adding force and fury to the other two.

Hollande Finds Solution to Spying

Tax All Data Leaving the EU!

The forever befuddled looking French president Hollande, the most unpopular French president on record, has just found yet another thing he can tax.

by Pater Tenebrarum

Here comes another one from the 'you couldn't make this up' department, courtesy of the “welfare state incarnate” (h/t Gaspard Koenig), France's president Francois Hollande (Martin Armstrong pointed us to this bit of news in a recent post of his). The German business news magazine 'Wirtschaftswoche' has a story entitled “France's Answer to the NSA: Taxes on Emails Sent Abroad”.

No need to check your calendar. It is actually not April Fool's Day. As the article informs us: 

“France has the solution to intensive surveillance by US secret services: President Hollande plans to introduce a tax on data that are transferred abroad. Paris apparently regards this as the most effective method to end the spying.”

France wants to push through a tax on data transfers from the EU. Moreover, the EU is supposed to alter tax regulations for internet companies until spring 2014. These have to be taxed more heavily in the EU, France demands. The tax revenues are supposed to be distributed among EU member states.

The French minister of innovation Mrs. Fleur Pellerin has submitted the respective proposals to her ministerial colleagues in the EU according to a report by Tax News.”

The tax proposed by France is supposed to be gathered every time data are transferred via the internet from the EU to other parts of the world. It won't matter if data are transferred within the same company or to another company outside of the EU. The documents don't say how high this tax is supposed to be.

Due to current complicated tax rules, companies like Google or Amazon barely pay any taxes in most EU countries, in spite of making profits in the hundreds of millions there. Google pay its taxes in Ireland, where corporate taxes are relatively low.

NSA, CIA and FBI so far pay no taxes at all. Paris hopes that this measure will sap the notoriously tightfisted Americans' enthusiasm for spying.” 

The 'minister of innovation'? Admittedly, this is certainly an innovation in terms of finding new ways to milk the tax cows. However, one wonders how exactly is a tax on EU data transfers going to “sap the NSA's enthusiasm for spying”? Does Mr. Hollande think the NSA is going to apply for a tax number in Brussels?

Proposing this nonsense to the socialist brigade in Brussels is of course a good tactical move on Hollande's part – he hopes the greed of the other statists will allow him to introduce new taxes without running what's left of France's competitiveness completely into the ground, at least not compared to other  EU member countries. No doubt their mouths are already watering at the prospect of turning the tax screws by another notch. We have discussed the topic of tax loopholes previously, pointing out how important they actually are in 'allowing capitalism to breathe' as Ludwig von Mises put it. For readers not familiar with that particular post or the reasoning presented in it, here is the link: “The EU and Loopholes”.

Anyway, it sounds almost as though Mr. Hollande has now gone quite officially insane. The effort to keep control over data leaving the EU and then determining who exactly will have to be taxed for them is going to cost more than such a tax can ever raise, unless it is set at an astronomical level. This sounds a bit like the ugly sister of the financial transactions tax (and we didn't think it was even possible for that one to actually have an ugly sister).

The report at Wirtschaftswoche concludes by noting: 

“With the internet tax, France apparently wants to extend its policy of massive taxes on everyone and everything to the entire EU. This model has already failed in France itself though.” 

However, as we point out in our next article, Mr. Hollande's outrage over NSA spying is nothing but political theater anyway. It is part of an emerging pattern of governments trying to extend their control over the internet. The idea of taxing data transfers fits right in. 

The Big Cause

Trotskyites, Eugenicists, Malthusians and Lysenkoists are still going strong

By Jonathan Abbott

There is a type of person that needs to be part of a Big Cause. They cannot seem to accept the probability that they live in unexceptional times, that they themselves are thoroughly ordinary and will leave no lasting mark behind when they are gone. The number of individuals that substantially affect the course of history is vanishingly small and the mass of real progress takes place in tiny steps carried out by anonymous individuals. It is usually only in the collective total of our uncoordinated efforts that mankind as a whole advances in any way.

Some Big Causes do greatly benefit mankind (such as the programme to eradicate smallpox) but most, however well-intentioned initially, result in great harm. Many of the most damaging ones, for example fascism and communism, require another Big Cause to end them. Adherents to a particular Cause will necessarily not see it as just another campaign for progress, but as THE Big Cause, the movement that will change the historical paradigm and catapult humanity into a dazzling future.

Carrying out the personal actions prescribed by The Cause marks them out as one of the elect, and from then on no matter how commonplace other aspects of their life may be, they will have made their mark. They mattered.

This sort of belief is terribly seductive. As noted above, I do not think that all Big Causes are harmful, and I am not suggesting that only a bunch of no-hope losers would sign up for a Big Cause. However, for the most popular Big Causes of the twentieth century, this sort of optimistic, wishful thinking turned out to be a mere fairy tale. Indeed, the brutal and violent nature of the Big Causes of the previous century meant that only a sentiment-based, appeal to emotion Cause such as Climate Alarmism could arise in their wake.

Brave New World

Seems as though the normal times are never coming back

by Patrick J. Buchanan 

The first reports in early May of 1960 were that a U.S. weather plane, flying out of Turkey, had gone missing.

A silent Moscow knew better. After letting the Americans crawl out on a limb, expatiating on their cover story, Russia sawed it off.

Actually, said Nikita Khrushchev, we shot down a U.S. spy plane 1000 miles inside our country flying over a restricted zone.

We have the pilot, we have the camera, we have the pictures. We have the hollow silver dollar containing the poisoned-tipped needle CIA pilot Francis Gary Powers declined to use.

Two weeks later, Khrushchev used the U-2 incident and Ike’s refusal to apologize to dynamite the Paris summit and the gauzy Spirit of Camp David that had come out of his ten-day visit to the USA.

Eisenhower’s reciprocal trip to Russia was now dead.

A year later, President Kennedy would be berated by Khrushchev in Vienna. The Berlin Wall would go up. And Khrushchev would begin secretly to install nuclear missiles in Cuba, 90 miles from Key West.

Had there been no U-2 incident, would the history of the Cold War have been different? Perhaps.

Yet, while there were critics of launching Power’s U-2 flight so close to the summit, Americans understood the need for espionage. Like us, the Soviets were installing ballistic missiles, every single one of which could incinerate an American city.

Post 9/11, too, Americans accepted the necessity for the National Security Agency to retrieve and sift through phone calls and emails to keep us secure from terror attacks. Many have come to accept today’s risks of an invasion of their privacy—for greater security for their family.

And there remains a deposit of trust among Americans that the NSA, the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency are not only working for us, they are defending us.

How long Americans will continue to repose this trust, however, is starting to come into question.

Last week, we learned that a high official of the U.S. government turned 200 private phone numbers of 35 friendly foreign leaders, basically the Rolodex of the president, over to the NSA for tapping and taping.

A Fresh Look at the Parasitic Class

Political Extortion Racket

by Pater Tenebrarum

A little while ago we discussed 'crony capitalism' (as one of our readers helpfully pointed out, it would probably be better to call it crony socialism, so as to avoid sullying the term capitalism), contrasting the system in which we actually live with free market capitalism. It is highly unfortunate that the press continually gets away with characterizing the current system as a version of 'laissez faire' and blaming events like the 2008 crash on the (non-existent) free market.

We noted at the time that it is actually quite difficult to draw the line between lobbying that is aimed at obtaining privileges from the State or pushing it toward enacting regulations designed to keep competition at bay, and lobbying the aimed at averting legislation or regulations that could harm the business concerned – so to speak a legitimate form of self-defense. We wrote: 

“It is of course well known that large corporations lobby to obtain privileges from the State; however, in a way many also have little choice in the matter, since they may otherwise become the victims of regulations that could severely hamper their business. It is often difficult to tell where a legitimate attempt to ward off statist intrusion ends and crony capitalism begins. It is certainly a fuzzy line that is separating the two.”

It is clear though that whether lobbying serves to obtain privileges or to ward off harm, it is a result of the existence of the territorial force monopolist known as the State and intersects with the interests of those managing it. The parasitic class that is devoted to the 'organization of the political means for obtaining wealth' as Franz Oppenheimer characterized the State, isn't doing it just for fun.

It very rarely happens that the true nature of this parasitic class is openly discussed in the mainstream press, so we were quite surprised when we came across an op-ed by Peter Schweizer in the NYT entitled “Politicians' Extortion Racket”. Mr. Schweizer has decided to take a closer look at the other side of lobbying – i.e., not those paying the bribes (who are normally the main target of criticism) but those receiving them. Mr Schweizer writes: 

“We have long assumed that the infestation of special interest money in Washington is at the root of so much that ails our politics. But what if we’ve had it wrong? What if instead of being bribed by wealthy interests, politicians are engaged in a form of legal extortion designed to extract campaign contributions?

Consider this: of the thousands of bills introduced in Congress each year, only roughly 5 percent become law. Why do legislators bother proposing so many bills? What if many of those bills are written not to be passed but to pressure people into forking over cash? This is exactly what is happening. Politicians have developed a dizzying array of legislative tactics to bring in money.” 

Our betters

United Nations Death Panel

One of the most startling news stories of the season is the dispatch on page one of the New York Times warning that there might be too many Africans. This came in an account of a new forecast on world population issued by the United Nations, which is now projecting that a global population that the Times reports was “long expected to stabilize just above nine billion in the middle of the century” will “keep growing and may hit 10.1 billion by the year 2100.” It predicts that the population of Africa could triple in this century to 3.6 billion — “a sobering forecast for a continent already struggling to provide food and water for its people.”

What in the world does the Times have against the Africans? Population density on the African continent, after all, is, at 65 persons a square mile, one of the lowest on the planet, according to About.com, whose figure we cite because About is issued by another unit of the New York Times Company. It reports that South America has 73 people a square mile, Europe 134, and Asia 203. It makes one wonder why the Times would begrudge the Africans the prospects for growth that are reported by the United Nations. If the continent is “already struggling to provide food and water for its people,” after all, maybe the reason is that it has not too many people but too few.

The error in the Times story is an example of how even the most intelligent of analysts can get into trouble on the population story. One famous example was a dispatch issued in August 2001 by the magazine Nature, which published a forecast that the 21^st century would be the one in which the number of people on the planet would likely stop growing. The authors — Wolfgang Lutz, Warren Sanderson, and Sergei Scherboy — reckoned there was “around an 85% chance that the world’s population will stop growing before the end of the century.” The triumvirate concluded that “the prospect of an end to world population growth is welcome news for efforts towards sustainable development.”

Now the new report from the United Nations suggests that the prediction of Messrs. Lutz, Sanderson, and Scherboy was wrong and that population growth will not peak this century but will keep growing. The United Nations, like the writers for Nature, seems to be under the impression that this is bad news, not good. One can expect that the United Nations report will be used as grist for a vast campaign to increase funding for the population control — and that will lead to a feud between who gets the blessing of more people. Will it be the rich countries, whose populations are growing the slowest or, in the saddest cases, shrinking? Or will it be the poor countries of Africa and Asia who are racing to build their wealth by building their populations?

And who is going to decide which countries or continents get to have babies? If it’s going to be the United Nations, the way to think of the world body will be as a kind of global death panel. Who wants to sit on that board and try to allocate vast population control funds to see who be permitted, and who won’t, the luxury of large families? And why is this happening at all on a planet where, according to the New York Times’ About.com, 90% of the population lives on 10% of the land? The fact is that the religious sages figured out long ago that population growth is good. It doesn’t matter whether it is Africans or Americans or Europeans or Asians. The fear of population growth is a superstition of a secular age, and what an irony that it is one of the principle products of a United Nations that was supposed to bring the world together.  

Nassim Taleb on Fragility and Antifragility

The economy is more like a cat than a washing machine

By Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Several years before the financial crisis descended on us, I put forward the concept of “black swans”: large events that are both unexpected and highly consequential. We never see black swans coming, but when they do arrive, they profoundly shape our world: Think of World War I, 9/11, the Internet, the rise of Google .

In economic life and history more generally, just about everything of consequence comes from black swans; ordinary events have paltry effects in the long term. Still, through some mental bias, people think in hindsight that they “sort of” considered the possibility of such events; this gives them confidence in continuing to formulate predictions. But our tools for forecasting and risk measurement cannot begin to capture black swans. Indeed, our faith in these tools make it more likely that we will continue to take dangerous, uninformed risks.

Some made the mistake of thinking that I hoped to see us develop better methods for predicting black swans. Others asked if we should just give up and throw our hands in the air: If we could not measure the risks of potential blowups, what were we to do? The answer is simple: We should try to create institutions that won’t fall apart when we encounter black swans—or that might even gain from these unexpected events.

Fragility is the quality of things that are vulnerable to volatility. Take the coffee cup on your desk: It wants peace and quiet because it incurs more harm than benefit from random events. The opposite of fragile, therefore, isn’t robust or sturdy or resilient—things with these qualities are simply difficult to break.

To deal with black swans, we instead need things that gain from volatility, variability, stress and disorder. My (admittedly inelegant) term for this crucial quality is “antifragile.” The only existing expression remotely close to the concept of antifragility is what we derivatives traders call “long gamma,” to describe financial packages that benefit from market volatility. Crucially, both fragility and antifragility are measurable.

As a practical matter, emphasizing antifragility means that our private and public sectors should be able to thrive and improve in the face of disorder. By grasping the mechanisms of antifragility, we can make better decisions without the illusion of being able to predict the next big thing. We can navigate situations in which the unknown predominates and our understanding is limited.

Herewith are five policy rules that can help us to establish antifragility as a principle of our socioeconomic life.

Rule 1: Think of the economy as being more like a cat than a washing machine.

We are victims of the post-Enlightenment view that the world functions like a sophisticated machine, to be understood like a textbook engineering problem and run by wonks. In other words, like a home appliance, not like the human body. If this were so, our institutions would have no self-healing properties and would need someone to run and micromanage them, to protect their safety, because they cannot survive on their own.

Do Libertarians Have a Problem With Authority?

Not if they understand the difference between law and legislation

By ROBERT P. MURPHY

A silly episode on Facebook recently underscored one of the tensions in the liberty movement: many people are attracted to libertarianism because they simply don’t like rules. This attitude stands in contrast to conservatives who also disdain big government but who don’t reject authority per se — their problem is with illegitimate authority. Although many types of individuals are united in their opposition to military empire abroad, the drug war at home, and confiscatory taxation, their underlying philosophies of life are vastly different.

A debate on all these matters started innocuously enough. I had put up a frivolous Facebook post telling my “friends” (most of whom are fans of my economic and political writing) that my office phone number was only one digit removed from that of a local pizza shop, and that the people erroneously calling me were “lucky my alignment was Lawful Good.” This was a reference to the role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons, which has an elaborate scheme to classify the ethical and moral views of its characters.

I was surprised to receive a fair amount of pushback, with many people surprised that I had described myself as “lawful.” They thought this meant I endorsed the actions of the U.S. government and that I was letting others tell me how to live my life. How could someone who had written a booklet on “market anarchy” be placed in such a category?

Yet this objection is absurd on its face. In the first place, advocates of “anarcho-capitalism” in the tradition of economist and political theorist Murray Rothbard are forprivate provision of legal services. They aren’t against “law,” they are instead against the unjust and inefficient government monopoly of the judicial system. It is a cheap ploy for left-wing interventionists to accuse critics of the welfare state or of government schools of being “against poor people” or “against education.” Such criticism is obviously nonsense. But by the same token, it is wrong even for fans of someone like Murray Rothbard to assume he would be “against law.”

Nearing The End of Serfdom’s Road

There is hardly a soul left on Earth that experienced life without the gargantuan state

by James E. Miller

In France, Minister for Energy and Environment Delphine Batho recently proposed a light curfew to pertain to “in and outside shops, offices, and public buildings” between 1 a.m. and 7 a.m. beginning next July. Some merchants are up in arms as the rule adds to existing bans such as the forced closing of stores on Sunday and night shopping in general. If enacted, the illumination ban will quickly disperse Paris’s reputation as the “City of Light.”

France’s Commercial Council is criticizing the decision as being anti-business and economically damaging. However, the fact that these assumed defenders of free enterprise are surprised at such a proposal is the real puzzle. In a country run by a government that is happily bloodletting the productive capacity of the people through a hike on the income tax and a tax on financial transactions, this latest nanny-state resolve should be fully expected. It is not a power grab but a mere reassertion of the authority the central state has over the private affairs of society.

The “lights out” edict is just another piece of evidence of a disturbing truth: the road to serfdom is not ahead of the West; we have already reached its end.

Such a statement may be objected to as private property and a certain degree of freedom still exist in the West.  But this is these just a mirage. The property tax effectively nullifies the notion of private property. In many places, police brutes allow themselves into your home and on your land with little recourse possible. Billions of electronic correspondences are collected daily by the Federal Bureau of Investigation of the United States. In 1961, the United Nations released the Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs which has since served as a framework for drug prohibition in all major countries.

As William Grigg points out,

Drug prohibition is a subset of slavery – in both its philosophical premise (the denial of individual self-ownership) and its role in creating a huge and growing population of people in chains.

Ownership of one’s body and those resources to which it appropriates itself is no longer a respected law in Western society. Through years of indoctrination, it is accepted by the greater public that the individual is beholden to the state- not vice versa. Personal identity is now followed by a reference to the government. And blind patriotism is seen as a virtue instead of a demeaning attribute.

Why we must tolerate hate

Racist vandals, run-of-the-mill vandals and thought-crimes

by Wendy Kaminer 

In America, if you decorate your house with anti-Semitic slogans or your clothing with swastikas, you are engaging in protected speech. But paper your neighbour’s car with anti-Semitic bumper stickers and you are guilty of vandalism. Hate speech is constitutionally protected (as the Supreme Court confirmed most recently in Snyder v Phelps). Destruction or defacement of someone else’s property is legally prohibited.

Advocates of censoring ‘hate speech’ might say that we value property more than the elimination of bigotry. I’d say that we value speech, as well as property, more than inoffensiveness. Besides, protections of presumptively hateful speech are not absolute: a prohibited act, like assault or vandalism, accompanied by vicious expressions of bigotry, may constitute a hate crime under law.

Consider this recent incident at Wheaton College in Norton, Massachusetts: anti-Semitic graffiti was scrawled across the back door of the Jewish Life House, where four students reside. The student who discovered it, Molly Tobin, described herself as ‘shocked, angry, and terrified’, according to the Boston Globe. But students and faculty members have ‘come together’ in support of diversity, with a potluck and a Facebook campaign. Campus police are investigating the incident, and the school is offering a $1,000 reward for information about it.

Could the vandals in this case be prosecuted for a hate crime? Perhaps. Massachusetts law provides that assaulting someone or damaging her property with ‘intent to intimidate’ on the basis of race, colour or religion, among other characteristics, is punishable by a $5,000 fine and/or a maximum two-and-a-half-year prison sentence. Whether or not the graffiti on the door of the Jewish Life House was intentionally intimidating is a question of fact; but you can guess how it might be resolved.

The 4th Amendment is dead. The terrorists won.

Public Buses Adding Microphones To Record Conversations

By Mike Krieger

Believe it or not the article itself is actually a lot worse than even the title implies.  These microphones are in many cases being coupled with cameras in order to gain an even greater level of surveillance.  All with grants from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).  Now honestly, does anyone really think this is for Al Qaeda?  This is a great follow up to my piece from last week titled:  Coming to Your Car: Mandatory Black Boxes That Record Everything.

From Wired:

Transit authorities in cities across the country are quietly installing microphone-enabled surveillance systems on public buses that would give them the ability to record and store private conversations, according to documents obtained by a news outlet.

The systems are being installed in San Francisco, Baltimore, and other cities with funding from the Department of Homeland Security in some cases, according to the Daily, which obtained copies of contracts, procurement requests, specs and other documents.

The systems use cables or WiFi to pair audio conversations with camera images in order to produce synchronous recordings. Audio and video can be monitored in real-time.

Two Forces And Three Bears

Efforts to manage runaway hyper-complexity with more complexity are guaranteed to fail

by James H. Kunstler

In these climax years of industrial technocratic society, two opposing forces shape the destiny of government: the desperate effort to control everything versus the decline of the ability to carry out that effort. The result will be the loss of legitimacy and the collapse of government from the highest levels, moving downward until the real power to make anything work re-sets at a feasible and appropriate level — probably very local. This dynamic is seen very clearly in three spectacles du jour: the “national security” (spying) mess, government-sponsored accounting fraud in finance, and the ObamaCare rollout.

An Imagined Panacea for Economic Ills

A Collective Pining for More Inflation

by Pater Tenebrarum

The John Law school of economics remains alive and well. A recent article in the NYT informs us that “In Fed and Out, Many Now Think Inflation Helps” [sic].

A few excerpts: 

“Inflation is widely reviled as a kind of tax on modern life, but as Federal Reserve policy makers prepare to meet this week, there is growing concern inside and outside the Fed that inflation is not rising fast enough.

Some economists say more inflation is just what the American economy needs to escape from a half-decade of sluggish growth and high unemployment.

The Fed has worked for decades to suppress inflation, but economists, including Janet Yellen, President Obama’s nominee to lead the Fed starting next year, have long argued that a little inflation is particularly valuable when the economy is weak. Rising prices help companies increase profits; rising wages help borrowers repay debts. Inflation also encourages people and businesses to borrow money and spend it more quickly.

The Culture of Violence in the American West

The Not-So-Wild, Wild West

By Thomas J. DiLorenzo 

In a thorough review of the “West was violent” literature, Bruce Benson (1998) discovered that many historians simplyassume that violence was pervasive—even more so than in modern-day America—and then theorize about its likely causes. In addition, some authors assume that the West was very violent and then assert, as Joe Franz does, that “American violence today reflects our frontier heritage” (Franz 1969, qtd. in Benson 1998, 98). Thus, an allegedly violent and stateless society of the nineteenth century is blamed for at least some of the violence in the United States today.

In a book-length survey of the “West was violent” literature, historian Roger McGrath echoes Benson’s skepticism about this theory when he writes that “the frontier-was-violent authors are not, for the most part, attempting to prove that the frontier was violent. Rather, they assume that it was violent and then proffer explanations for that alleged violence” (1984, 270).

In contrast, an alternative literature based on actual history concludes that the civil society of the American West in the nineteenth century was not very violent. Eugene Hollon writes that the western frontier “was a far more civilized, more peaceful and safer place than American society today” (1974, x). Terry Anderson and P. J. Hill affirm that although “[t]he West . . . is perceived as a place of great chaos, with little respect for property or life,” their research “indicates that this was not the case; property rights were protected and civil order prevailed. Private agencies provided the necessary basis for an orderly society in which property was protected and conflicts were resolved” (1979, 10).

What were these private protective agencies? They were not governments because they did not have a legal monopoly on keeping order. Instead, they included such organizations as land clubs, cattlemen’s associations, mining camps, and wagon trains.