Bootleggers and Baptists — The Rotten Core of Political Culture in Germany

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Often in history, religious fanatics (baptists) and criminals (bootleggers) form an alliance that may be unwitting, except when the two roles are played by one and the same person, as seems to be the case with this reporter of DER SPIEGEL, who diseminated lies about people with a plight while raking in donations to the invented victims for his personal gain.

This is the fundamental formula, by which Germany's myth makers take advantage of a population craving to be told lies.

The discovery of the journalist's misconduct is a blessing in disguise for the German media, it gives them a wonderful opportunity to convince the gullible and complicit public that this is an exception perpetrated by an unusual villain.

The fact of the matter is that the scandal signifies the rule in Germany rather than a rare exception.

The country is gripped by politico-religious fanaticism – politics and the media drive and are driven by the mania.

The German appetite for a creed of absolutes has been successfully rekindled and will not go away soon. Democracy and open-minded debate are at a steep discount. Germans want leaders, better still a leader, who leads them where the craze is pointing them.

No one cares when this leader overrides the constitution, demanding the destruction of national integrity. No one cares when the country does its best in just about every aspect that matters to fall behind the international competition.

There is a huge official, state-driven black (but seen as gold) market for subsidised myths such as global warming and the Energiewende. Worship and perpetuate these myths and you will be rewarded with the subsidies. This is how baptists and bootleggers hang together in Germany.

Unscientific Climate Policy

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Following up on this German post:

Leading media outlets like DER SPIEGEL are notoriously happy to discard the duties and rigours of professional journalism in favour of promoting their ideological preferences. 

This is how the German public is being shielded from the truth and politically biased instititions are encouraged to advance far reaching claims, presenting them as endorsed by the scientific consensus when these propositions are in fact unsupported, even contradicted, by scientific research.

Quoting from here:

Professor Bates examines some key aspects of the SR1.5 report. He assesses if the IPCC report exhibits a level of scientific rigour commensurate with the scale of its extremely costly and highly disruptive recommendation that carbon emissions be reduced to zero by mid-century.

The paper concludes that such a level of scientific rigour is not present in the report. Specifically, SR1.5 is deficient in scientific rigour in the following respects:

● It departs from the IPCC’s Fifth Assessment Report in conveying an increased sense of planetary emergency without giving rigorous scientific reasons for doing so.

● It fails to communicate to policymakers a considerable body of important observationally-based research evidence that has accumulated since the Fifth Assessment which reduces the sense of a looming emergency.

● It fails to communicate important information made public by climate modellers since the Fifth Assessment regarding the empirical tuning of models to achieve desired results.

The paper concludes that, in view of these deficiencies, the SR1.5 report does not merit being regarded by policymakers as a scientifically rigorous document.

“There is much recent observational and scientific evidence that the IPCC report has failed to include and which supports a more considered mitigation strategy than the extreme and unrealistic measures called for in the SR1.5 report,” said Prof Bates.

Über die unwissenschaftliche Klimapolitik

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Der Astrophysiker Peter Heller erklärt, warum die Klimapolitik unwissenschaftlich ist. Bitte lesen Sie diesen Artikel eines deutschen Wissenschaftlers, der den Mut hat, derartiges in einem Land zu schreiben, wo eine nüchterne faktengestützte Einschätzung der Klimadebatte mit erheblichen persönlichen Gefahren verbunden ist.

Die Klimapolitik ist nicht nur unwissenschaftlich, sie ist anti-wissenschaftlich, denn sie beruht auf der aktiven Bekämpfung und Unterdrückung unvoreingenommer wissenschaftlicher Forschung.

Lügen werden in diesem Land nicht nur vom SPIEGEL systematisch verbreitet, dessen politisch korrekter Betrug ist nur die Spitze des Eisbergs. Lügen und Unwahrheiten bilden die Basis vieler staatstragender Projekte, einschließlich der Energiewende und der Opferung des deutschen Nationalstaats am Altar einer Fehlkonstruktion namens EU.

Mehr hier.

Milton Friedman on Keynes, Intellectuals, and Private vs Public

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I have recently published the below video on Keynes' work and life. I had meant to make a number of remarks on the interview by Milton Friedman contained in it:

I.

His earlier remark (time marks 49:58 to 50:54) that Keynes was a child of the 1930s in that he occupied himself with the scourge of unemployment rather than inflation is a little odd, for unemployment was the great issue of the time, Keynes's analysis of the calamity is of the form of a general theory, i. e. just as relevant today as in his time, and, in fact, a much needed extension of classical and neoclassic economics both of which are lacking the notion of involuntary unemployment suggesting instead a self-regulating mechanism supposedly preventing involuntary unemployment that Keynes showed not to be working. 

Also, as Friedman expressly reminds us contradicting his insinuation that Keynes supposedly neglected inflation in favour of unemployment, Keynes was very much aware of the problems of inflation, while his General Theory does not represent an obstacle to avoiding or countering inflationary developments.

By contrast, Friedman's monetarism has ended up empirically refuted, as every central bank will acknowledge today. 

By contrast, Keynes' position that money is not neutral but the linchpin of "a monetary production economy" — an economy  whose real variables are decisively influenced by money — is recognised as pivotal by contemporary central banks.

II.

As for Milton Friedman's remarks between time marks 57:04 to 58:33, I have two things to remark:

Milton Friedman is one of many intellectuals of enormous political influence who condemn the enormous political influence of intellectuals (of a persuasion opposed to his).

Friedman comes up with the conservative-libertarian topos of public (bad) versus private (good), government (bad) versus private activities (good), cooperative voluntary and voluntary cooperation of individuals (good) versus collective compulsion  (bad).

There is no such categorical good and bad, to begin with. Private activities can have very bad consequences, while clearly certain forms of collectively organised action is exceedingly positive for the individual and their interaction within a community. Yes, the opposite is also true in many cases but this does not justify slanting the entire complex issue in one direction.

It may appear a more subtle consideration but it is nonetheless a fundamental and important one that  on a number of levels there simply is no sharp juxtaposition between public and private but a wholesome blending.

The modern conception of the private individual and her rights and actions is a category enclosed within notions of the public. It is not the opposite or counterpart of concepts of the public, but a set of nodes (of concepts describing private features) that interact with other such nodes (describing public features).

The modern private person is a public phenomenon on account of the fact that rights that used to be the privilege of a small subsection of the population are nowadays extended to every citizen, notably the right to participate in politics and the state and in the competition for (qualified and contestable as opposed to total) social and political dominance.

The private person is the person who is invited and welcome to make her contribution to the public discourse and the decisions derived from it. This is true both for issues that may concern only a small number of parties (say, two contesting parties) or the entire population. In principle, every public issue is open to challenge or discursive participation by a human being in her private capacity. And every private issue can be made subject of public deliberation. In both cases, of course, there are important procedural rules and limits designed to avoid inappropriate preponderance of the public impact on private concerns (e. g. erosion of individual rights) or an inordinate private impact on public concerns (e. g. monopoly issues).

In addition, especially when people interact with one another — as they do when participating in market activities —, there is no such thing as a purely private activity. Social interaction (as practised in the form of economic activities) is shot through with rules and regulations both of a formal and an informal kind. People are subjecting themselves to public conventions, constantly working them out at the margin or more broadly and more fundamentally. 

It is not possible to establish a market as a purely private activity. I cannot announce "my market" in which all rules accord with my discretion. Markets are by their very nature of a public nature, a compromise between countless contributions, sometimes reflecting private aspects to a larger, sometimes to a lesser extent. Frequently, private requests will already have internalised social demands/compromises, demonstrating that the need to accommodate the requirements of fellow humans is second nature for the private individual.

Ideologically it is easier to deal with simple dichotomies, practically we need to be more differentiating than the propagandist and more willing to recognise a multitude of interests some of which are easy and others harder to reconcile.

Public Choice — What Is Wrong With It?

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I have just chanced on a post containing a critical assessment of the theory of Public Choice. I have not yet read the article. Before I look at it, it might be fun to try to remember what I still know — after all these years — and how I feel about Public Choice today.

Personally, an intriguing exercise since it was my attempt to probe deeper into Public Choice that eventually undermined my confidence in libertarian ideas.

My memories are vague, though.

Actually, I had planned to give a lecture on Public Choice but cancelled the event by the end of 2012, I think, owing to a feeling that I had not enough of a command of the subject. It was a gut feeling that turned out to reveal a growing dissatisfaction with an approach that was too partial to be convincing.

As far as I remember — and I may be wrong — two aspects in particular bothered me about Public Choice (PuCh).

(1) PuCh seemed too eager and to spell out a foregone conclusion: the state is bad.

(2) PuCh seemed to reiterate its belief in the economy, free economic activity (whatever that actually is) as being the legitimate and best force to shape society — as opposed to politics and the state — by couching its analyses of collective decision making in terms of models based on the economic theory preferred by critics of "statism".

It was a prejudiced theory that built its bias into the premises from which it arrived its conclusions.

I suppose, what changed my fundamental view of the matter was the insight that any advanced society, especially one with a high degree of freedom, does require (a lot of) politics and the state, and that the criticism of these makes only sense against the backdrop of appreciating the indispensable positive role that politics and the state play in ensuring a free society.

So, let us see what is in

Steven Pressmann on Public Choice Theory.

Well, Presmann's conclusion is pretty similar to the one I would arrived at:

At bottom, the problem is that public choice begins with an ideological aversion to government and a religious worship of the market. This antigovernment ideology has blinded the entire public choice school. It has become the study of government failure, a set of assertions that governments are too big, and a criticism of all political decision-making. These biases keep public choice advocates from seeing the self-refuting and self-contradictory nature of its arguments. (Pressman 2004: 15–16).

Here is the analysis that I developed upon emancipating myself from Public Choice: The State and Politics. 

The "Left" Is the Establishment and They Are Disgusted with the Working Class

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Make sure to read the entire piece:

Nothing scares the Identity Politics Left quite like an actual working class uprising. Witnessing the furious unwashed masses operating out there on their own, with no decent human restraint whatsoever, Identity Politics Leftists feel a sudden overwhelming urge to analyze, categorize, organize, sanitize, and otherwise correct and control them. 

They can’t accept the fact that the actual, living, breathing working classes are messy, multiplicitous, inconsistent, and irreducible to any one ideology. Some of them are racists. Some are fascists. Others are communists, socialists, and anarchists. Many have no idea what they are, and don’t particularly care for any of these labels. This is what the actual working classes are … a big, contradictory collection of people who, in spite of all their differences, share one thing in common, that they are being screwed over by the ruling classes. I don’t know about you, but I consider myself one of them. 

Where we go from here is anyone’s guess.

See also:  " ... it is not an emporer but the people who are periodically made to go naked and hungry and insecure and discontented ..."

Ökonomie verstehen (3) – Sein oder Nichtsein – Über Spiegel und Gouvernanten

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Continued from here.

Jedes Lebewesen beschäftigt sich damit: – zum Beispiel das Kätzchen, das man vor einen Spiegel setzt – die Frage, was ist oder nicht ist. Das Kätzchen erschrickt, weil im Spiegel plötzlich ein anderes Kätzchen vor ihm auftaucht. Da IST etwas – eher unerwartet. Das Kätzchen schnuppert am Spiegel. Nichts. Das Kätzchen blickt hinter den auf dem Teppichboden gestellten und an die Wand angelehnten Spiegel. Nichts. Es entdeckt eine Seinsform, die ihm neu ist. Und nach weiteren Versuchen, der Sache auf den Grund zu gehen, hat sich ihre Theorie von dem, was ist, und, was nicht ist, verändert. 

Jedes Lebewesen ist ein Philosoph, denn es beschäftigt sich mit einem wichtigen Gebiet der Philosophie, der Ontologie, die sich dem Sein widmet. Wer überleben will, kommt nicht umhin, über Fragen der Existenz nachzudenken, um zu entscheiden, ob etwas existiert, vielleicht auch warum, unter welchen Umständen und mit welchen Konsequenzen. 

Räuber tun so als würden sie nicht existieren, um ihre Beute aus dem Hinterhalt anzugreifen. Beutetiere greifen zur Tarnung, damit Räuber ihre Existenz übersehen.

Die Ökonomie ist auch eine Ontologie, eine Lehre vom Sein, ein Handbuch, in dem wir nachschlagen können, was existiert und was nicht – und was wir infolgedessen, tun dürfen, sollen und müssen und was wir besser unterlassen.

Die Ökonomie greift massiv in unsere Psyche ein und in unser soziales Leben, indem sie uns verrät, was realistisch und gut ist, woran wir glauben sollten und wie wir uns untereinander zu verhalten haben.

Wir sollten uns den Spiegel, in dem sich die Realität der Ökonomie widerspiegelt, sehr genau ansehen. Denn wenn er uns täuscht, sind, kann es sein, dass aus uns andere Menschen werden als wir sie sein sollten und Gemeinschaften bilden, die schlechter sind, als sie es sein müssten.

Die Ökonomie kann wie eine sehr strenge Gouvernante sein, die uns fürs ganze Leben abrichtet, ohne dass wir den zwanghaften Gehorsam bemerken, zu dem sie uns verdammt hat.

Fragen Sie sich, welches Bild von Wirklichkeit zeichnet uns eine ökonomische Lehre, auf welcher Grundlage und mit welchem Recht? Wie überzeugend sind die Belege für ihre Gültigkeit, die uns die beobachtbare Welt liefert? Sind Sie bereit, sich auf Basis dieser Lehre vorschreiben zu lassen, was sie denken und tun dürfen, opfern und unterlassen müssen?

Je nachdem, welcher Ökonomie Sie Ihr Vertrauen schenken, werden sie bereit sein (oder eben nicht), Vollbeschäftigung für möglich und vordringlich anzusehen und glauben, der Staat könne jederzeit dafür sorgen, dass jeder von uns, der dies will, einen Arbeitsplatz hat. 

Je nach Ihrer ökonomischen Ontologie, Ihren Überzeugungen, welche wirtschaftlichen Zusammenhänge existieren oder nicht, werden Sie Staatsausgaben zur Ankurbelung der Wirtschaft begrüßen oder ablehnen. Sie werden Mythen auf dem Leim gehen oder nicht und Maßnahmen gut heißen mit schwerwiegenden Folgen, die viel Gutes bewirken können oder großen Schaden anrichten.

Kurzum: Die Ökonomen verfügen über große Macht, denn sie können Ihnen einreden, was sie sehen und was nicht. Überlassen Sie ihnen dieses Machtmittel nicht ungeprüft.

Science versus Censorship and Repression — A Murry Salby Lecture

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No words.

Totalitarians Know It All, Need No Demos, No Democracy

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Gavin Smith, Mr. Global Warming Scare, backed by the deep coffers of government, a closed front of partial media and the culturally dominant etiquette of political correctness, like all greens, despises democracy. 

With so much power behind him, he would be a fool to allow himself to be challenged by dissent from the unwashed masses. 

He exempts himself from the rigours of democracy and scientific discourse, puts in an autistic appearance at the studio and returns to his siloed world.

No need for democracy, no need for scientific debate, those who do not think like him are children not worthy to be spoken to: Gavin Smith knows it all — for things to be right, the world needs to act according to his perfect knowledge. An autistic, a narcissist, a totalitarian par excellence.

The media are like that, the politicians, the EU-bureaucracy is like that - a Kafkaesque clique trying to build its own people. 

But the French people begin to wake up.

Regulatory Limits - The Case of the International Maritime Organization (German Post)

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Aus einem Artikel, der die neue Gesetzeslage in Sachen Begrenzung des Schwefelgehalts bei Schiffstreibstoffen und ihre Auswirkung auf die internationale kommerzielle Schifffahrt beleuchtet – zusammenfassend hält der Artikel fest:

Dies ist wieder mal ein Beispiel für die Festlegung von Grenzwerten – die der Mehrheit der Bevölkerung gar nichts sagen – durch ferne und abgehobene Gremien. Ähnlich der Stickoxide durch die EU. Die Bombe ist erst geplatzt, als der Normalbürger von Fahrverboten betroffen war. Aktuell hat man gerade die Diskussion über „unverbindliche Empfehlungen“ der UNO auf einem ganz anderen Gebiet. Auch die IMO [International Maritome Organization]-Grenzwerte waren einst nicht bindend. Hier setzt die Kritik an den einschlägigen Industrieverbänden ein. In der Phantasiewelt der Linken [...] schreiben die Lobby-Verbände die Gesetze. In der Realität ist das mitnichten so. Sie stehen einer Mauer von – überwiegend ungebildeten, aber ideologisch gefestigten – Politikern, Bürokraten und Nicht-Regierungsorganisationen gegenüber. Allesamt Personen, die für die wirtschaftlichen Konsequenzen ihres Handelns in keiner Weise verantwortlich sind. Die meisten sind nicht einmal demokratisch legitimiert. Das Vehikel Umweltschutz hat sich inzwischen als eine Gefahr für alle Gesellschaften herausgebildet. Auf keinem Sektor sind so viele Scharlatane und Ideologen unterwegs. Mit der zunehmenden Abnahme naturwissenschaftlicher Kenntnisse in Deutschland wird eine notwendige Aufklärung über technisch-wirtschaftliche Abhängigkeiten immer schwieriger.
 

Quelle

The Most Basic Condition of Civilisation

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For what is the most basic condition of civilization, Hudson asks, other than societal organization that effects lasting “balance” by keeping “everybody above the break-even level”?

The source.

Faulty Mainstream "Science" — The Case of LNT versus Hormesis

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I support the conclusion expressed in the first sentence of the below excerpt. It is of the utmost importance that political opponents unite in recognising the crisis of science that they are culpable of having fostering.

Government and the constitutionally established political system must acknowledge and put to the forefront of their tasks the duty of government to protect science from political pressures and distortions.

The 2018 elections underscore the need for bipartisan efforts to address scientific frauds that promote and justify ever more stringent regulations – often to the great detriment of people, patients and society. 

In fact, world-renowned toxicology expert Dr. Edward Calabrese has now discovered and documented fraud behind the award of the 1946 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine. The prize was given to Hermann Muller for his claimed discovery that even small or infinitesimal amounts of radiation can cause cancer. It is the ridiculous assertion that there is no threshold below which any kind of radiation is safe. 

By contrast, toxicologists have long used actual experiments to establish dose response models and determine what exposure to various kinds of radiation (or chemicals) actually pose cancer (or other) risks for humans.  

Low doses are generally benign, they have found. In many cases, low doses even help animals and humans ward off disease, safeguard bodies against certain chemicals or diseases, or actually cure cancer and other diseases. Higher doses can cause problems, and therefore must be calculated and regulated.  

For example, via a process called hormesis, low levels of radon exposure can protect against cancer; 80 milligrams of aspirin are thought to prevent strokes; and trace amounts of selenium help our bodies counteract the harmful effects of mercury in our blood.  

However, despite this evidence, government agencies like the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency have followed Muller’s straight-line Linear No Threshold (LNT) model for decades. Besides giving rise to what many say are overly restrictive and even unnecessary regulations, the LNT model has actually harmed patients, by greatly precluding the use of radiation in curative medicine.

The source.

Donning a mummery of "science", political activists and political consumers are blocking the progress that genuine science leads to. Increasingly, society is losing its capability to exercise rational self-control. An unexpected outcome of unprecedented levels of wealth part of which is used to subsidise projects informed by magical thinking.

The Tax-Monetary Regime of the Modern State — Stationary Bandits and Refined Coercion

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The modern state emerges when roaming bandits turn into sedentary bandits. Instead of looting the sources of their wealth along their itinerary of nomadic robbery, they become territorial discovering a less destructive and more profitable form of exploitation. A refinement of coercion occurs. 

As we shall see further below, the modern monetary state belongs in this tradition of refined coercion. It exerts pressure on the population to exact tribute from it, nowadays predominantly by threats of persecution rather than manifest violence, of which the state, of course, is quite capable as everybody is aware of. 

The modern state has developed the advantages of benign suppression far beyond the attainments of the first stationary bandits, but as we shall see later on, in many ways it remains a robber of the people, an entity that utilises its monopoly of coercion to exploit its subjects. However that exploitation is part of a trade-off widely regarded as reasonable most of the time.

As I have written here in The State - (6) - [Draft]:

§ 29 - From Roaming Bandits to Stationary Bandits - The State's Advantage over Anarchy 

Nothing is worse than anarchy. The state is guaranteed a floor of attraction in that it is capable of saving people from anarchy. In Mancur Olson's theory of the state, anarchy is characterised by a world in which roaming bandits appear more or less regularly to raid and rob productive settlers. Under these conditions, the size and growth of distributable wealth is severely limited. There is little incentive to invest and produce goods, especially of a kind that is easily stolen. In fact, the roaming bandits and their victims are trapped in a sub-optimal equilibrium. Their forays are far less profitable than other forms of confiscating a society's wealth. The relationship between robbers and robbed could be improved to the advantage of both. How? 

If the roaming bandits become stationary bandits, if they settle among the victims of their raids they will inevitably develop a certain interest in improving the very conditions of production which is the spring of their wealth. Exploitation becomes more ample for the exploiter and less disadvantageous for the exploited. There is more left for both. As Olson puts it, the bandits develop "an encompassing interest" in the community from which they steal. Actually, the line between pilferage and exchange begins to blur, when the bandits take into consideration and even cater to some of the needs of the community. Being resident owners of a territorially delimited precinct of exploitation, it is in their self-interest to ensure peace and orderly conditions and provide a range of other public goods liable to make the task of ruling more tractable, efficient, and profitable. High levels of exploitation notwithstanding, compared to anarchy, under the regime of stationary bandits life is still better, allowing for greater efficiency, security, productive innovation and progress, however slim and slow. From the Neolithic revolution to the French revolution, the development of our civilisation takes place mostly in the presence of regimes of stationary bandits. 

The powers-that-be have good grounds to care for the common weal, in however limited and imperfect manner, while the governed populace also have reason to welcome a rule that limits the incidence of violence, robbery and utter arbitrariness. The improving qualitative leap from anarchy to stationary banditry is very large — which is the easier forgotten the more normal is becomes to live in a world pacified and rendered orderly by the state. Also, the population will tend to rank certain fundamental conveniences provided by the state, especially peace and security, higher than others that are lacking or being only deficiently provided for. On balance, even a rather imperfect state will enjoy support or acquiescence by the population, especially if there are avenues for gradual improvement and the voicing of grievances.

Power is the means, coercion the effect of that means. 

The modern stationary bandit exerts its (monopoly of) power and coercion by creating a new phenomenon that is generally dreaded, motivating people to escape it if only they can: unemployment. 

What is unemployment? It is the inability to secure the employment that yields income sufficient and acceptable to pay the state the tribute that it imposes on its citizens. 

Nowadays this tribute takes the form of taxes.

By demanding payment of taxes in a kind of money that only the state can issue, the state is capable of putting every citizen into a state of unemployment:

Think of the hut tax. The British demanded from the indigenous population of an African region to pay a tax on their huts on penalty of losing the hut. The tax was payable in the currency determined by the British. The Africans did not have that currency. They needed to get hold of it. They had to earn it. Not being in a position to earn income denominated in that currency meant people were unemployed — without work from which only they could uphold their livelihood.

Remember, only the state can issue that currency. If the state does not offer this money to its tax debtors, people are not only unemployed (without work that pays the kind of money needed to honour the tax liabilities that the stationary bandit imposes on the citizenry), they are criminals liable to lose their freedom. Taxes are a price one pays to remain free and unpunished. That is the nakedly coercive side of modern tributes called taxes.

Like any good old stationary bandit, the modern state uses its coercive power to extract wealth from its subjects. In order to avoid imprisonment or worse, people must offer the state something it wants. Goods, services, labour used by the state to pursue its purposes. In return, the providers of these inputs receive that very special kind of money issued by the state which is uniquely authorised to redeem the tax debts imposed on the population. Serving the state, they receive state money which they can use to pay for the right to remain free and unpunished.

Before the state can collect the tax tribute, it must first issue this very tribute, spend state money to reward those who are willing, or in fact, eager to provide the state with what it needs to function as a state.

The state spends before it can collect taxes. It does not tax in order to be able to spend. 

It creates money to make people depend on it.

It spends money into existence to reward those who provide the state with what it needs to accomplish its mandate.

It takes money from the rewarded and other users of the state's currency (i. e. it taxes them) to limit their claims on the output of the economy. To the extent that purchasing power is reduced through taxation, the part of the economic pie available to non-government agents is reduced, leaving more for the government to shop.

Money and taxes are the way in which the modern state organises exploitation.

Social Symmetries

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As the modern state evolved it was discovered that it is the form of government  which subjects itself to restrictions of its power that turns out to be most effective in terms of advancing the interests of its constituent population.

There is a social symmetry between the interests of the state and the interests of the population. To be most effective, the state must allow its clients to put restrictions on it. For the state to be powerful (in a way that is socially effective) it must accept the power of the people to restrict it.

A self-reinforcing social symmetry.

There seems to be a similar social symmetry involved in the way in which alpha animals are selected and supported by the population they belong to. They are required to make substantial contributions to the community, which goods they can only deliver if they conform to exacting social demands from those who they lead. While demonstrating superior (physical and charismatic, and even more importantly social) power they must balance their drive for dominance by restricting their behaviour so as to be able to provide their peer group with significant social benefits. They must be disciplined and strongly restrained (rather than self-aggrandising) to be able to make the requisite contributions. 

The truly powerful state is not the totalitarian state (which is always headed for burnout) but a state where power is plural, competitively controlled, and hence balanced. 

The successful alpha animal is not a bully but a social worker. 

Government Has to Spend Before It Can Tax or Borrow

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“Well, don’t we pay taxes and buy bonds so that the government can spend?” Well, you first have to ask yourself the question, “Where do you get the money to pay taxes and buy bonds?” And the answer is that we can’t get our hands on the currency until the national government spends it. Spending is the prior act in a fiat monetary system; taxing and borrowing are following acts. In effect, the government is only taxing what it has already spent, and it’s only borrowing back money that it has already spent. Once you start pursuing this logic, you realize that most of the propositions that are occupying the current debate around the world are based upon false premises.

The source.

Italian Truculence

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Writes Bill Mitchell here:

The Financial Times claims that if the European Commission (and the Finance Ministers) were to accept Italy’s new fiscal plan they: 

… would be condoning truculent behaviour and economically misguided objectives.

And that is why the Eurozone is so dysfunctional. Truculence is now defined in terms of trying to grow an economy that is already around 6 per cent smaller than it was 10 years ago.

CO2 Has No Role to Play in Determining Earth's Temperature

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It turns out that Earth's global temperature is independent of atmospheric composition. Thus, the sensitivity of climate to human-induced carbon emissions is virtually zero.

Interviewer: You were saying that you and [Dr.] Ned Nikolov have a new theory.  Can you tell us just a bit about that?

KZ: “Well, we actually call it a discovery.  And what we did is we took NASA data and we applied the engineering principle of dimensional analysis – Buckingham pi theorem for you engineers. And to make a long story short, we’ve had an unbelievable fit to the NASA data, where we’ve had an exponential regression line (an empirical equation, so to speak) that explains the temperature of all the planets across our solar system – that actually includes the Earth.   We can actually use planets other than the Earth.”

“And we can calculate Earth’s temperature without knowing anything else about Earth [other than its atmospheric pressure value and distance from the Sun]. . . within a degree Centigrade.  The amazing thing about that is [1] the Earth[‘s atmosphere] is [21%] oxygen and [78%] nitrogen, [2] Venus is [96.5%] carbon dioxide, [3] Mars is [95%] carbon dioxide, [4] Triton is [>99%] nitrogen, [5] Titan is [98.4%] nitrogen and [1.6%] methane . . .”

Interviewer: So you’re saying that actually carbon dioxide is not the driver [of planetary temperatures]?

KZ: “Carbon dioxide is just like any other gas.  Just like the ideal gas law, Boyle’s law, Charles’s law, Gay-Lussac’s law.  Carbon dioxide isn’t any different than any other gas in those laws.  And we’ve discovered that there’s a continuum across our solar system of the way atmosphere’s work: it’s strictly a function – the warmth that we experience – is due to two things: [1] distance from the Sun (which means how much solar energy we get), and [2] the amount of atmosphere we have, the atmospheric pressure that we experience here on the surface.”

Interviewer: And how was that [discovery] received?  Did you have the IPCC call you up and say “Wow, this is fantastic!”?

KZ: “We had to change our names to get the first paper [Volokin and Rellez, 2014] published.  It was returned [after the first attempt] because they knew who we were.  And the second time we published it we were required to pull it after they found out we had . . . [smiling] we spelled our names backwards.  It [spelling our names backwards] worked the first time, and it worked the second time [after we resubmitted it], but it was put on the internet before it was hard-copied.  A ‘climate denier’* from WattsUpWithThat [Willis Eschenbach] turned us in.  And so we experienced that, not only the so-called normal people, ‘warmists’, maybe . . . and a lot of ‘climate deniers’ do not like our work.  A lot of ‘climate deniers’ hold out for a little bit of a role with carbon dioxide.”

Interviewer: So in fact you’re saying there’s no opportunity for scientific inquiry anymore.

KZ: “Sure seems that way.  We’ve actually extended it now.  We’ve actually used some of the same principles to explain some of the past climate measurements that we’ve made here on Earth.  Same thing – pressure is the driver.  Pressure and the Sun.”

Complete Picture Politics

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I have posted this comment here:

Reich is making a very grave point — unconvincingly, though.

I do not trust the one-sided propagandists who talk about the problems of deregulation — which are in many ways severe —, but cut out the huge problems that are associated with regulation — assuming a posture often typical of the so-called left whereby all it takes for regulation to be ideal is that it is designed and implemented in accordance with their political goals.

This is what I call the left’s syndrome: once the left have taken power, they assume, the state’s policies can only be good.

The left’s myth of the state becoming unproblematic by virtue of its being controlled by the left is no better than the right’s myth of a self-regulating market order.

I trust only her who is capable of defending the good in regulation and deregulation and criticising the bad to be found in both.

Only yesterday I participated in a conference where a green politician assumed without compunction the left’s “Bonapartist” attitude described in the first paragraph above.

He proposed to get rid of democracy because he felt multi-party politics was not compliant with green policies. While at the same time demanding an industrial policy for Germany, he conceded that the Energiewende (turn to renewables) was failing/has failed — a policy that if it succeeded would have an effect on world temperature so small that it cannot be measured by modern instrumentation (not to mention that the theory of anthropogenic global warming is highly contested, increasingly so, while a mono-causal explanation of something as complex as climate is in itself already a strong indicator that something is amiss).

When I pointed out that the Energiewende is the most massive industrial policy that we have seen since II. WW, his answer was: yeah, but politics isn’t following our blueprint (which in itself is a steep claim), coming up with all kinds of ad hoc provisos that needed to be fulfilled, in his view, to resuscitate the White Elephant.

It never occurred to him that the comprehensive mix of bad regulation and bad deregulation in favour of Energiewende projects (largely driven by the green blueprint for industrial policy) was beginning to create a political backlash (just as politically correct suppression of unprejudiced science is beginning to get challenged) — even in green crazed Germany.

The inability to take a differentiating look at pros and cons leads to or is the result of one-sided dogmatism, the religious approach to politics.

Like a libertarian, this gentleman was eagerly demanding depoliticisation right, left, and centre (meaning: cut the people out, disempower democracy, cripple political competition, stunt democracy, let politically correct technocrats rule (a mythical self-regulating economy, in the case of libertarians)).

He had only an embarrassed smile for me when I pointed out that his cat was biting her own tail as nothing is more political than deciding what depoliticisation is to mean, how it is to be applied and who will be affected by it in what manner and which areas are to be exempted from it.

Marx and "Effective Reality" (Gramsci) — Marx' Socialism: A Raging Impossibility

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I left this comment here:

Like Nick Johnson and Geoffrey Hodgson, I acknowledge that Marx made important contributions to the social sciences including economics. After all he discovered the phenomenon of "effective demand" before Keynes (and anyone else? Possibly). 

Marx advertised capitalism as a progressive force, a feature of Marxism largely and tragically underappreciated by its adepts. 

Bill Warren deals with this aspect in his "Imperialism: Pioneer of Capitalism." 

John Sender and Sheila Smith in their "The Development of Capitalism in Africa" demonstrate how paying attention to "effective reality" (Gramsci) requires a detailed and unprejudiced look at capitalist social relations as they actually unfold, in order to be able to correctly conceptualise and implement progressive policies rather than merely paying lip-service to politically sterile ideological stereotypes. 

Temperamentally, Marx was not equipped to take this approach. 

My first reaction on reading Hodgson above was of a somewhat skeptical nature. I did not like the destiny-argument. However, ultimately Hodgson is right: as substantial an analyst Marx may have been with regard to contemporary politics and social issues, his visions of socialism/communism were lacking any of that analytic rigour and sense of reality, being purely Utopian, mere products of fantasy and faith. 

It appears that a strong component of pure faith is indispensable for any movement to become radically totalitarian. Marx and Engels certainly provided that component. 

In contemplating the future, ever the idealistic Hegelian dreamer, Marx got carried away with his metaphysics of preordained history, when he should have remained down to earth and look for feasible improvements for the working class and the capitalist system.
Social democracy did this job for him. 

Marx was psychologically incapable of giving up his implacable hatred of capitalism and seek compromises in recognition of the insurmountable constraints and the huge positive potential presented by "effective reality". 

Marx was the source and the leader and the authentic saint of a socialist/communist movement based on Utopian faith and inexhaustible hatred for any form of reality that did not resemble Marx's figments of socialist/communist society. 

At the end of the day, Marx was not a materialist at all, but a religious type, preferring the lure and exhilaration of the total, the ultimate, the perfect to dealing with sober, pedestrian and messy "effective reality". 

Marx left socialism/communism without a home in reality—a raging impossibility. And rage it did.