The freedom movement and those who have voted for and supported the current status quo might reconsider history. George W. Bush failed many who supported him and seemed even worse to many who opposed him. He was elected as a "compassionate conservative", but failed to live up to either the term "compassionate" or "conservative". He disappointed many who oppose bureaucracy and big government. He disappointed Americans because of his arrogance, his inarticulate failure to adequately plan two wars, his managerial failure with respect to Hurricane Katrina, and his ongoing support for the military industrial complex, specifically including the decision to massively subsidize Wall Street.
President Bush likely had hoped to (a) retain his social conservative base, (b) win over non-affiliated voters through his "compassion" and (c) retain many of his big government conservative backers. It turned out that non-affiliated voters were offended by his support for the military-industrial complex. Also, there are fewer big government conservatives than he, Newt Gingrich and the American Enterprise Institute thought.
In the end Mr. Bush was left with the backing of social conservatives, and even these left him because of his unabashed interest in providing preferences to Wall Street and the military industrial complex. A rather ironic ending to the career of a "compassionate conservative". But he has that rugged masculine Texan look, and so his appeal to socially conservative women and some Lincoln Log Republicans, probably about 15 or 20 percent of the public, likely did not wane.
Bush's failure led to a reaction. However, the nature of the reaction speaks to a failure of American politics, and it needs fixing. A Republican victory next year and in three years will not be enough. More imagination is needed. The nation needs to be re-created. Otherwise, the current cycle of corrupt Republicans followed by ideologically dogmatic Democrats will continue until the nation, once the greatest in the world, collapses.
America needs to move on, and ought to think about how. The Obama reaction makes clear that fixation on rigid goals and simple-minded ideological commitment to centralized authority are destructive and will not work.
President Obama represents the extreme left in the European sense, which won the White House for the first time since Theodore (R-NY) and Franklin (D-NY) Roosevelt. Like the Roosevelts, Obama and his followers and associates retain a feudalistic belief that progress is accomplished through power and violence.Mr. Obama's willingness to lie to his followers about his commitment to the War in Afghanistan and the War in Iraq illustrates the nature of his character. He is committed to the idea that the central government ought to compel radical change and equity through the cap and trade act, institution of an inferior, mandatory medical plan and ever more extensive and ever more rigid regulation of the economy.
The Democrats and Mr. Obama attempted to use a considerable degree of guilt in electing the first African American to the White House. Mr. Obama's opponents have been routinely accused of racism. My own blog, a relatively small piece of the world, was taken down. The Wall Street-backed Democratic Party media resounded Mr. Obama's trumpet, accusing all who disagreed of deviance and reaction. Not once did the Democratic Party networks or Fox discuss the imbalance in Wall Street's financial contributions to the candidates: 2:1 in favor of Obama.
Mainstream, middle-of-the-road Americans ought not to feel fear, hatred or even contempt for President Obama. As president and as an individual he deserves our respect. Rather, we ought to blame ourselves, for President Obama's education, his collectivism, his feudalistic commitment to government violence and to power are the products of his education. Republicans have sat quietly while the American education system, and the higher education system, have been hijacked by ideological extremists, collectivists who argue for backward, primitive tribalism, socialism, instead of the system that created American economic progress. The ideology behind Mr. Obama created his figure. The economic interests that he has subsidized control his breadth. The individual is not to be blamed.
America is in the grip of special interests, Wall Street and the military industrial complex, to a degree heretofore unknown. The twin headed hydra of corrupt, big government Republicans and of feudalistic Democrats will continue until Americans say "no". But in contrast to Americans in the day of the Whiskey Rebellion in Pennsylvania, Americans have become a timid, conformist lot. They have lost their guts. They are lazy and they are piggish.
Those who ought to be the best hanker after rewards from the Wall Street complex. The extent of social control exercised by the feudalistic power structure that aims to further collectivize the nation will increase until Americans take steps to regain their fortitude.
Americans who wish to reverse the institutionalized corruption need to start by reforming themselves and thinking small. They need to reunite with their roots and their like minded fellow Americans instead of seeking to indulge in credit card debt and bank loans. They need to reduce their egos. They need to spend time on politics instead of watching television or in other diversions. The original arguments for the eight hour day involved the claim that Americans needed more time to contribute to politics and the public good. Instead, Americans became fixated on consumerism.
Americans are not special because of who they are. They are special because they received a gift. The gift was given to them by men of wisdom, the founding fathers and their successors, Andrew Jackson, Grover Cleveland and others. They were entrusted to protect the freedom that the founders had won and created, and instead, just as Esau sold his birthright to Isaac, Americans sold their birthright for a credit card, an ignorantly written government regulation, and a social security card. Excessive self indulgence, fear, lack of courage, lack of prudence, lack of respect for others and willingness to treat others, such as Chinese workers, unjustly have contributed to the malaise. In other words, a fundamental self indulgence and lack of ethics due to smugness and ego have contributed.
The first step to move on is to look at how our own behavior has contributed to Obama's election. Then to ask ourselves how we can take a few steps to turn things around. Those who demonstrated in the tea parties have taken a few already, and need to ask how can they build organizations that will enable them to take that many more.
Tuesday, December 8, 2009
Sunday, December 6, 2009
Karl R. Popper on Socrates
I wonder how many "progressives", economists and social scientists fit Popper's depiction of Socrates' measure of scientific knowledge and intellectual integrity:
"Socrates was a moralist and an enthusiast. He was the type of man who would criticize any form of government for its shortcomings(and indeed, such criticism would be necessary and useful for any government, although it is possible only under a democracy) but he recognized the importance of being loyal to the laws of the state. As it happened, he spent his life largely under a democratic form of government, and as a good democrat he found it his duty to expose the incompetence and windbaggery of some of the democratic leaders of his time. At the same time, he opposed any form of tyranny; and if we consider his courageous behaviour under the Thirty Tyrants then we have no reason to assume that his criticism of the democratic leaders was inspired by anything like anti-democratic leanings. It is not unlikely that he demanded (like Plato) that the best should rule, which would have meant, in his view, the wisest or those who knew something about justice. But we must remember that by justice he meant equalitarian* justice...and that he was not only an equalitarian but also an individualist--perhaps the greatest apostle of an individualist ethics of all time. And we should realize that, if he demanded that the wisest men should rule, he clearly stressed that he did not mean the learned men; in fact, he was sceptical of all professional learnedness, whether it was that of the philosophers of the past or of the learned men of his own generation, the Sophists. The wisdom he meant was of a different kind. It was simply the realization: how little do I know! Those who did not know this, he taught, knew nothing at all. (This is the true scientific spirit. Some people still think, as Plato did when he had established himself as a learned Pythagorean sage, that Socrates' agnostic attitude must be explained by the lack of success of the science of his day But this only shows that they do not understand this spirit, and that they are still possessed by the pre-Socratic magical attitude towards science, and towards the scientist, whom they consider as a glorified shaman, as wise, learned, initiated. They judge him by the amount of knowledge in his possession instead of taking, with Socrates, his awareness of what he does not know as a measure of his scientific level as well as of his intellectual honesty.)"
----Karl R. Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies, pp. 128-9.
*Popper uses the term "equalitarian" to refer to equality before the law, isonomy, as opposed to Plato's "totalitarian" justice, whereby Plato identified the just with the good of the state.
"Socrates was a moralist and an enthusiast. He was the type of man who would criticize any form of government for its shortcomings(and indeed, such criticism would be necessary and useful for any government, although it is possible only under a democracy) but he recognized the importance of being loyal to the laws of the state. As it happened, he spent his life largely under a democratic form of government, and as a good democrat he found it his duty to expose the incompetence and windbaggery of some of the democratic leaders of his time. At the same time, he opposed any form of tyranny; and if we consider his courageous behaviour under the Thirty Tyrants then we have no reason to assume that his criticism of the democratic leaders was inspired by anything like anti-democratic leanings. It is not unlikely that he demanded (like Plato) that the best should rule, which would have meant, in his view, the wisest or those who knew something about justice. But we must remember that by justice he meant equalitarian* justice...and that he was not only an equalitarian but also an individualist--perhaps the greatest apostle of an individualist ethics of all time. And we should realize that, if he demanded that the wisest men should rule, he clearly stressed that he did not mean the learned men; in fact, he was sceptical of all professional learnedness, whether it was that of the philosophers of the past or of the learned men of his own generation, the Sophists. The wisdom he meant was of a different kind. It was simply the realization: how little do I know! Those who did not know this, he taught, knew nothing at all. (This is the true scientific spirit. Some people still think, as Plato did when he had established himself as a learned Pythagorean sage, that Socrates' agnostic attitude must be explained by the lack of success of the science of his day But this only shows that they do not understand this spirit, and that they are still possessed by the pre-Socratic magical attitude towards science, and towards the scientist, whom they consider as a glorified shaman, as wise, learned, initiated. They judge him by the amount of knowledge in his possession instead of taking, with Socrates, his awareness of what he does not know as a measure of his scientific level as well as of his intellectual honesty.)"
----Karl R. Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies, pp. 128-9.
*Popper uses the term "equalitarian" to refer to equality before the law, isonomy, as opposed to Plato's "totalitarian" justice, whereby Plato identified the just with the good of the state.
Saturday, December 5, 2009
Democrats: the Party of Selfishness, Greed
The "Progressive" Republicans and Democrats, the parties of Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Barack Obama, have created a system where each aims to steal from each. This system has crystallized most completely in New York State, where the Service Employees' International Union has formed a one million strong unit whose aim is to expand the public sector to create ever greater numbers of unproductive government jobs. New York's economy is no longer founded on productive economic work but rather on the Wall Street bubble economy, which depends on government extraction of wealth from the rest of the world via the Federal Reserve Bank and the Bush-Obama bailout.
The way the Progressive Republicans and Democrats accomplish the wealth extraction is that the Fed deposits monetary reserves in the money center banking system, which is empowered to lend a larger amount (up to six or seven times as much) to the public. The first borrowers are Wall Street banks and hedge funds. The increased monetary reserves push down interest rates and push up the stock market, as has recently occurred. Wall Street benefits. The money circulates, and the poor pay higher prices. Propagandists for Wall Street such as William Greider in his book Secrets of the Temple deny this mechanical process, claiming that inflation affects all neutrally. That is also the claim of university economists. A moment's reflection makes clear that this is impossible. Most of the money is lent to hedge funds, for corporate takeovers, the carry trade and real estate speculation. By the time the money circulates through the economy, its purchasing power has diminished. Only fools would claim otherwise.
Perhaps no phenomena better testifies to the authoritarian greed of the Democratic Party and the "Progressive" Republicans than the bailout, which some have predicted will eventually amount to as much as $24 trillion. All of the advocates of remedying "income inequality" among the Democrats and the "Progressive Republicans" supported this massive transfer to the wealthy in unison.
The Democrats are a party of school teachers who do not educate but demand higher salaries; unions whose workers expect make work jobs; government employees who produce nothing but demand large raises; trial attorneys whose work cripples the economy but lobby for laws that protect their privileges; and on and on.
Karl Popper makes the point in his book Open Society and Its Enemies that, 2,500 years ago, Plato intentionally confused the debate concerning individualism versus collectivism. Plato was a communist who believed in tight state control of every aspect of human existence. To defend this claim, he equated selfishness and individualism. He claimed that collectivism, violent control of humanity, was justice.
The Democrats are very much in the Platonic tradition. Their advocacy of extremist versions of environmental regulation that would impose high costs on homeowners via the cap and trade provision is only the beginning. In upstate New York, Congressman Maurice Hinchey has proposed a plan to turn the Hudson Valley into a federal park. The extent of regulation in a federal park under the regulatory authority of the cap and trade administrator is potentially crushing. The very people who will potentially be forced to leave their homes because of cap and trade continue to applaud Mr. Obama.
The way the Progressive Republicans and Democrats accomplish the wealth extraction is that the Fed deposits monetary reserves in the money center banking system, which is empowered to lend a larger amount (up to six or seven times as much) to the public. The first borrowers are Wall Street banks and hedge funds. The increased monetary reserves push down interest rates and push up the stock market, as has recently occurred. Wall Street benefits. The money circulates, and the poor pay higher prices. Propagandists for Wall Street such as William Greider in his book Secrets of the Temple deny this mechanical process, claiming that inflation affects all neutrally. That is also the claim of university economists. A moment's reflection makes clear that this is impossible. Most of the money is lent to hedge funds, for corporate takeovers, the carry trade and real estate speculation. By the time the money circulates through the economy, its purchasing power has diminished. Only fools would claim otherwise.
Perhaps no phenomena better testifies to the authoritarian greed of the Democratic Party and the "Progressive" Republicans than the bailout, which some have predicted will eventually amount to as much as $24 trillion. All of the advocates of remedying "income inequality" among the Democrats and the "Progressive Republicans" supported this massive transfer to the wealthy in unison.
The Democrats are a party of school teachers who do not educate but demand higher salaries; unions whose workers expect make work jobs; government employees who produce nothing but demand large raises; trial attorneys whose work cripples the economy but lobby for laws that protect their privileges; and on and on.
Karl Popper makes the point in his book Open Society and Its Enemies that, 2,500 years ago, Plato intentionally confused the debate concerning individualism versus collectivism. Plato was a communist who believed in tight state control of every aspect of human existence. To defend this claim, he equated selfishness and individualism. He claimed that collectivism, violent control of humanity, was justice.
The Democrats are very much in the Platonic tradition. Their advocacy of extremist versions of environmental regulation that would impose high costs on homeowners via the cap and trade provision is only the beginning. In upstate New York, Congressman Maurice Hinchey has proposed a plan to turn the Hudson Valley into a federal park. The extent of regulation in a federal park under the regulatory authority of the cap and trade administrator is potentially crushing. The very people who will potentially be forced to leave their homes because of cap and trade continue to applaud Mr. Obama.
Friday, December 4, 2009
Question for Steve Forbes
Sharon Gitelle of the Forbes Blog Network sent the following:
Re: The Forbes Network: December 11th interactive call: Steve Forbes
Dear Mitchell,
Please join us for an interactive call with Steve Forbes, on Friday, December 11th at 3 PM Eastern time for a discussion about his new book called How Capitalism Will Save Us. (To learn more about this book please click here: http://bit.ly/WT2Um )
The expected duration of the call is 45 minutes.
Steve Forbes will be answering your questions about capitalism—please submit your question(s) to me by e-mail by Wednesday, December 9th. You will be notified by me if your question has been selected prior to the call.
My response:
Here is my question for Steve Forbes, Sharon.
In the 1870s an investment bank, Jay Cooke and Co., failed. In many respects it was similar to Citigroup and other of the Wall Street firms in that it had been heavily subsidized by the federal government throughout its life but was so incompetently run that it failed despite the large subsidies. In the case of Jay Cooke, the subsidy resulted in part from its involvement with the Civil War greenbacks (like Henry Paulson, one of its representatives, if I recall Salmon P. Chase, had been been appointed to be Secretary of treasury). In the case of Wall Street and the money center banks today, the government subsidy has taken the form of access to large amounts of artificially created money. That is, until the socialist Bush-Obama bailout, where cash was simply handed to the incompetently run American financial institutions.
In the aftermath of the Civil War, despite the subsidies it had received, Jay Cooke failed in tandem with the crash of 1873. No one was foolish or gullible enough to believe that sustaining Cooke would have helped the economy. That would have been a fool's fantasy. Following Cooke's failure and the crash there was a depression. The depression and crash were associated with the federal government's retiring of the greenbacks and deflation. During this continual deflation there were three depressions. However, real wages grew at a much faster pace than they have since 1970. Moreover, innovation occurred at a much faster pace than at any time in the history of the world, culminating with the creation of the concepts of television and radio by Nikola Tesla in 1897 and numerous inventions that were so vibrant that they continued to subsidize the American economy through the 20th century, a century of dramatically slowed creativity.
At the same time, real wages rose at an uneven clip, roughly two percent per year, more or less until the founding of the Federal Reserve Bank in 1913. As David Ames Wells points out in Recent Economic Changes (1889) the innovation and real growth of the economy was astonishing. What Wells mistakenly calls "overproduction" (see diatribe in Hazlitt's Economics in One Lesson) resulted from the dramatic innovation, as Wells points out. Of course, corporations, banks and Wall Street disliked the intense competition and deflation, which led to declining profits and hard work, but American workers saw their wages grow rapidly, as Wells pointed out.
Since the abolition of the gold standard in 1971, real wages of American workers have grown 2% over the 40 years. That's 2% in total over 40 years. In contrast, during the deflation of the late nineteenth century, real wages rose 2% per year. Yet, today's all-thumbs economics establishment claims that deflation is a major threat. It is, of course, to the banks who provide economists with endowed chairs, but it is not to workers who wish to raise their living standards. Workers did much better under deflation from 1865 to 1913 than they have under inflation from 1970 to 2009.
Thus, the 1873 failure of the major investment bank in America and the contraction of the money supply, deflation, left American workers much better off but Wall Street and corporate America less profitable. This was the period of freest markets in American history, the closest to what might be called a libertarian economy. Of course, Wall Street and the money center banks, then like now, opposed libertarianism and free market capitalism, preferring the socialist pattern that Alexander Hamilton and the Federalists advocated (Hamilton was indeed a socialist and advocated a government owned manufacturing firm that would establish American manufacturing).
Forbes has supported the bailout of Wall Street. In addition, you have echoed the all-thumbs economics establishment's obsessive fear of deflation. When I say "all-thumbs" I mean all-thumbs as far as the public is concerned, not all-thumbs as far as the government-subsidized banking interests are concerned. Politically the economists are wise servants of power.
Forbes has been on the bailout bandwagon. The bailout does not reflect libertarian or pro-free market sentiments, but sentiments in favor of the subsidization of a specific sector of the American economy through state intervention, Wall Street and banking. As I wrote to one of your columnists, and contrary to your philosophy, a libertarian America would need Wall Street as much as I need lung cancer.
Thus, it would seem that Forbes has taken not so much a free market position, but a crony capitalist or socialist position, closer to Hamiltonian Federalism, or fascism than to libertarianism, the idea that markets should be governed by a non-judgmental, objective legal standard.
Can you reconcile Forbes's position on the bailout with the views of Presidents Andrew Jackson and Grover Cleveland?
Best wishes,
Mitchell Langbert
Sharon's reply:
Great. Thank you!
Re: The Forbes Network: December 11th interactive call: Steve Forbes
Dear Mitchell,
Please join us for an interactive call with Steve Forbes, on Friday, December 11th at 3 PM Eastern time for a discussion about his new book called How Capitalism Will Save Us. (To learn more about this book please click here: http://bit.ly/WT2Um )
The expected duration of the call is 45 minutes.
Steve Forbes will be answering your questions about capitalism—please submit your question(s) to me by e-mail by Wednesday, December 9th. You will be notified by me if your question has been selected prior to the call.
My response:
Here is my question for Steve Forbes, Sharon.
In the 1870s an investment bank, Jay Cooke and Co., failed. In many respects it was similar to Citigroup and other of the Wall Street firms in that it had been heavily subsidized by the federal government throughout its life but was so incompetently run that it failed despite the large subsidies. In the case of Jay Cooke, the subsidy resulted in part from its involvement with the Civil War greenbacks (like Henry Paulson, one of its representatives, if I recall Salmon P. Chase, had been been appointed to be Secretary of treasury). In the case of Wall Street and the money center banks today, the government subsidy has taken the form of access to large amounts of artificially created money. That is, until the socialist Bush-Obama bailout, where cash was simply handed to the incompetently run American financial institutions.
In the aftermath of the Civil War, despite the subsidies it had received, Jay Cooke failed in tandem with the crash of 1873. No one was foolish or gullible enough to believe that sustaining Cooke would have helped the economy. That would have been a fool's fantasy. Following Cooke's failure and the crash there was a depression. The depression and crash were associated with the federal government's retiring of the greenbacks and deflation. During this continual deflation there were three depressions. However, real wages grew at a much faster pace than they have since 1970. Moreover, innovation occurred at a much faster pace than at any time in the history of the world, culminating with the creation of the concepts of television and radio by Nikola Tesla in 1897 and numerous inventions that were so vibrant that they continued to subsidize the American economy through the 20th century, a century of dramatically slowed creativity.
At the same time, real wages rose at an uneven clip, roughly two percent per year, more or less until the founding of the Federal Reserve Bank in 1913. As David Ames Wells points out in Recent Economic Changes (1889) the innovation and real growth of the economy was astonishing. What Wells mistakenly calls "overproduction" (see diatribe in Hazlitt's Economics in One Lesson) resulted from the dramatic innovation, as Wells points out. Of course, corporations, banks and Wall Street disliked the intense competition and deflation, which led to declining profits and hard work, but American workers saw their wages grow rapidly, as Wells pointed out.
Since the abolition of the gold standard in 1971, real wages of American workers have grown 2% over the 40 years. That's 2% in total over 40 years. In contrast, during the deflation of the late nineteenth century, real wages rose 2% per year. Yet, today's all-thumbs economics establishment claims that deflation is a major threat. It is, of course, to the banks who provide economists with endowed chairs, but it is not to workers who wish to raise their living standards. Workers did much better under deflation from 1865 to 1913 than they have under inflation from 1970 to 2009.
Thus, the 1873 failure of the major investment bank in America and the contraction of the money supply, deflation, left American workers much better off but Wall Street and corporate America less profitable. This was the period of freest markets in American history, the closest to what might be called a libertarian economy. Of course, Wall Street and the money center banks, then like now, opposed libertarianism and free market capitalism, preferring the socialist pattern that Alexander Hamilton and the Federalists advocated (Hamilton was indeed a socialist and advocated a government owned manufacturing firm that would establish American manufacturing).
Forbes has supported the bailout of Wall Street. In addition, you have echoed the all-thumbs economics establishment's obsessive fear of deflation. When I say "all-thumbs" I mean all-thumbs as far as the public is concerned, not all-thumbs as far as the government-subsidized banking interests are concerned. Politically the economists are wise servants of power.
Forbes has been on the bailout bandwagon. The bailout does not reflect libertarian or pro-free market sentiments, but sentiments in favor of the subsidization of a specific sector of the American economy through state intervention, Wall Street and banking. As I wrote to one of your columnists, and contrary to your philosophy, a libertarian America would need Wall Street as much as I need lung cancer.
Thus, it would seem that Forbes has taken not so much a free market position, but a crony capitalist or socialist position, closer to Hamiltonian Federalism, or fascism than to libertarianism, the idea that markets should be governed by a non-judgmental, objective legal standard.
Can you reconcile Forbes's position on the bailout with the views of Presidents Andrew Jackson and Grover Cleveland?
Best wishes,
Mitchell Langbert
Sharon's reply:
Great. Thank you!
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