PRESTOPUNDIT -- "must readings" says Nick Schutz

Nick Schulz (see above) reviews The New Atlantis: A Journal of Science and Technology. Snippet:

As Levin notes, taboos like incest "all seem to revolve around the avoidance of a deep violation or corruption. � Its rationale is not generally laid out in detail." But in today's modern liberal society, when men and women are "free to choose" (in Milton Friedman's immortal phrase), and when concrete "reasons" usually must be articulated to justify prohibiting free people from doing as they wish, an appeal to a vague sense of "corruption or violation" usually isn't enough. Corrupting or violating whom? And when "rationales" generally aren't "laid out in detail", it's difficult to articulate them in 20-second sound bites on The O'Reilly Factor, or in a sentence (as Rick Santorum discovered) to an AP reporter, or even in a speech before a hostile congressional committee.

"Modern liberal democracy," Levin writes, "� prides itself on its ability and willingness to discuss all public questions openly, and lay them out fully for debate before the democratic citizen. Modern democracy may have a greater sense than any of its predecessors of the importance of separating private and public affairs, but everything deemed public is, at least in principle, fully discussed and exposed. For good and bad, very few things are left implicit or unspoken in the life of a liberal democracy."

Conservatives' most effective emotional, intellectual and rhetorical weapons often take the form of appeals to tradition, to the sacred, to moral sensibilities over cold reasons, to inchoate senses of right and wrong, to the tried and true over the untried and new. Fairly or unfairly, then, political conservatives can be at a distinct disadvantage in defending their views in today's modern liberal democracies that favor the rigor and clarity of concrete reasons over the (by comparison) flabbiness of sentiment or intuition.

As the man says, must reading.

Roger Garrison has an important new paper on Overconsumption and Forced Saving
in the Mises-Hayek Theory of the Business Cycle. His abstract includes the following teaser:

unperceived-or only dimly perceived-shortcomings in F. A. Hayek's theorizing may help explain why Hayek was largely ineffective in responding to his critics and why he failed to produce a timely and effective critique of Keynes's General Theory.

Chile's Ten Step Program for Prosperity The flat tax works again. (via Paul Harvey, uberblogger)

Hayek and the Flat Tax. Hayek has a note on the history of the case against progressive taxation on p. 516 of The Constitution of Liberty. He notes that by 1950 there were hardly any economists still around who stood against progressive taxation "on principle" (Hayek lists only Mises & Lutz). The original "scientific" case for progressive taxation using the logic of marginal valuaion was made by Hayek's teacher, Friedrich Weiser. The arguments of Weiser, those also of Edgeworth, and additional political considerations all but swept the field among professional economists.

Hayek suggests that the (intellectual) tide against the case for progressive taxation began to turn only with the work of D. Wright in 1948 and most especially with that of W. Blum and H. Kalven, Jr. in a 1952 U. of Chicago Law Review article. Hayek's own case against progressive taxation comes down to three principle considerations: 1) progressive taxation is an arbitrary abridgement of an individual's right to equality before the law -- individuals are victimized by the political process without any boundary in justice upon confiscation, such as would be provided by the usual standard of equality before the law. 2) Progressive taxation "creates a state of things in which one class imposes on another burdens which it is not asked to share, and impels the State into vast schemes of extravagance, under the belief that the whole costs will be thrown upon others" (Hayek quoting W. Lecky) 3) progressive taxation leads to a violation of the principle of "equal pay for equal work" for non-salaried individuals, resulting in the perversity across the tax year that "the more the consumers value a man's services, the less worthwhile will it be for him to exert himself" (F. Hayek, 1960, p. 317).

Comments from folk familiar with the work of Wright, Democracy and Progress and Blum and Kalven, The Uneasy Case for Progressive Taxation, would be most welcome. More later.

Paul Volcker is dead, long live Ben Bernanke:

"There is no immediate threat of deflation in the U.S. economy," Fed Board Governor Ben Bernanke told reporters in Tokyo after a speech at an academic gathering. "The concern is that inflation may become uncomfortably low .. It's an issue of making sure that the inflation rate stays within an appropriate range," he said.

And Bernanke on Japan .. that old-time Keynesian snake oil will do it this time:

Bernanke said the BOJ should aim for reflation -- a period of rising prices above the long-term preferred rate of inflation that would eventually bring prices to where they would have been if there had been modest inflation in recent years. "A period of reflation would also likely provide a boost to profits and help to break the deflationary psychology among the public, which would be positive factors for asset prices as well," he said.

Bernanke's Japan speech gets catcalls from Institutional Economics. On the money quote:

The LDP old guard see reflation as their best chance of avoiding reform, which is why they too are so keen on monetary and fiscal stimulus. So Bernanke is keeping some pretty poor company.

It's the income mobility, stupid -- it's also the rising real income and affluence of those currently either "poor" or "middle class". Drezner has the data.

Ponnuru on Selgin on deflation. Money quote from Selgin:

One of the things that keeps coming up is this knife-edge view of deflation � [this idea that] you get to zero inflation slowly, then suddenly it drops like a cliff and you spiral down. The arguments . . . to sustain that image of things make some sense if the deflation is caused by a decline in purchasing power. They make absolutely no sense if what's causing prices to fall is a greater abundance of final goods. Prices can keep falling gently.

My first thought on Wolfowitz .. well spoken by Power Line

Paul Wolfowitz has no goddam business giving interviews to Vanity Fair or similar magazines. Just because liberals are now listing him as an influential "neoconservative" is no reason for Wolfowitz to go Hollywood. And no matter how much he may claim to have been misquoted, it is simply inexcusable for him to have said anything that could be translated as: "bureaucratic reasons" caused the administration to use weapons of mass destruction as the justification for attacking Iraq. We need minor functionaries like Wolfowitz to shut the hell up and do their jobs, not set out to become celebrities like David Stockman. In other words, if Vanity Fair calls for an interview, just say no.

Bill Kristol:

Tanenhaus has mischaracterized Wolfowitz's remarks .. Vanity Fair's publicists have mischaracterized Tanenhaus's mischaracterization, and .. Bush administration critics are now indulging in an orgy of righteous indignation that is dishonest in triplicate.

I watched Tanenhaus flat-out lie about about what Wolfowitz said on Fox News. The lie was too good not to "print" and sell. When good men and women have died in war, my stomach gets queezy at the sight of a reporter behaving like a dumpster rat.

Instapundit links to blogger fiskings of the FT story on gigantic projected US gov. deficits. $36 trillion of the $44 trillion in deficits is a shortfall in medicare taxes needed to pay the medical costs of the Bill Clinton generation. Powerline points out that the Bush tax cut constitutes .008 percent of the projected $44 trillion tax shortfall.

Jacob Sullum thinks about spam.

Deflation .. it's a good thing.

Dynamist Blog on the Manhattan Times:

If you are going to adopt a strategy to be a national newspaper, you must add the capabilities to be a national newspaper. That doesn't mean parachuting in reporters from Manhattan to interview a few natives and report back on their peculiar habits. It means having lots of well-staffed bureaus and, if necessary, credited stringers. It also means breaking out of a worldview that considers Manhattan normal and every other place weird. The truth is that the NYT is not a national newspaper. It is the New York Times (more accurately, The Manhattan South of Harlem Times). It assumes its readers have the prejudices of well-educated, affluent Manhattanites, and it staffs, writes, and edits accordingly .. As a friend of mine said when serving as a southern bureau chief for a real national newspaper, New York editors tend to want only stories about "racism or eating dirt." Out of L.A., they want wacky California stories and Hollywood. Out of the Midwest, they apparently want Heartland nostalgia.

Donald Devine, the vice-chair of the ACU is in the midst of a dustup with Rush Limbaugh and National Review. Devine seeks to pin his foes by claiming the mantle of Hayek:

National Review could not comprehend the most important modern insight about government, made by modern conservatism's icon and Nobel laureate, F.A. Hayek. He recognized that the principle reason for the ultimate failure of national central planning was the inability of the government to process widely disbursed, localized and situation-specific information effectively in complex social settings. The magazine could not understand why that limitation would also apply to the U.S. trying to administer a world empire.

The neo-cons are pseudo-cons, according to Jim Pinkerton. A snippet:

Once upon a time, conservatives opposed God-playing hubris. The Austrian-born economist Friedrich Hayek, for example, wrote a book titled "The Fatal Conceit." And what was that "fatal conceit"? It was the idea that "man is able to shape the world around him according to his wishes." Hayek was no enemy of progress - which is achieved, he argued, through the trial-and-error experiments of the marketplace. His criticism was aimed at central planning, which sought progress instead by overturning the hard-learned lessons of human nature.

To Hayek, the idea that experts in a marbled ministry could gather the information necessary to make good decisions was the most lethal of follies. And the same centralization that strangles economic growth, he maintained, also strangles free expression, eventually turning technocrats into tyrants.

Hayek's conservatism was based on caution and prudence. The new conservatism, often called "neoconservatism," is radically different; it should be called pseudo-conservatism. It's based on the profoundly hubristic unconservative idea of creating heaven on earth, of playing God. To be sure, the pseudocons proclaim the purest of motives, but they should be judged on their results, not their rhetoric.

How stupid are the folks at the NY Times? Well, this stupid.

The Capital Spectator worries that the virus may spread to America -- call it a deflation contagion.

The Flat Tax is working .. in Russia. (via BusinessPundit). My understanding is that Hayek was the first to advocate the flat tax. Is that right? The comments section is open. I'd like to hear some of the background on this from folks who know something about the history of the flat tax.

Winterspeak is blogging Thaler, Sunstein, and behavioral economics. Quotable:

When I spoke with Thaler, he was pretty adamant that pro-central planning arguments that draw on behavioral ec. were getting it wrong.

Institutional Economics weighs in on Krugman and the "liquidity trap":

I think the main problem with Krugman�s (non-populist) work on this issue is that he seems to have walked away from what was a promising attempt to give modern micro-foundations to the traditional Hicksian idea of a liquidity trap and reverted back to an IS-LM framework that it is hopelessly ill-equipped for the task. As Luskin has sometimes shown, the more popular renditions of his ideas leave much to be desired too.

Don't miss Arnold Kling on Krugman and the "statism trap". For a more technical treatment of some of the issues involved, see Dugger and Ubide (pdf file).

David Warsh contemplates the significance of "the Market Revolution" and its history for those "of the Left" .. and of a certain age. Some cuts:

the more my friends and I reflected on our own experience, the more the Left/Right distinction lost its capacity to illuminate what had happened to us. We still felt ourselves to be "of the Left" � we were egalitarian, socially liberal, seriously concerned about the environment.

Yet we were nearly as enthusiastic about the new reforms � stable money, deregulation, corporate restructuring, tax simplification, auctions, emissions-trading and the rest � as were any of our friends on the Right. So the shorthand we came to employ among ourselves was to speak of "the Market Revolution." It is hard to convey now how surprising it was to those of us who became involved ..

But then and now, it seems to me that one of the most illuminating pieces of work to appear in all those bewildering years was George Nash�s 1976 book The Conservative Intellectual Tradition in America Since 1945 ..

despite the fact that it began with an account of the publication in 1944 Hayek�s passionate defense of markets, The Road to Serfdom, Nash�s book left out for the most part the subsequent rise of market liberalism � and so completely missed the underpinnings of what would happen next. It wasn�t conservatism that conquered the world in the last quarter of the 20th century � it was capitalism.

I think of this because I have begun reading Jerry Z. Muller�s The Mind and the Market: Capitalism and Modern European Thought This is a remarkable book, fifteen years in the making. (Muller is a professor of history at the Catholic University of America in Washington D.C. [and a Hayek-Ler --g.r]) It seems to me to have the same clarifying effect today as did Nash�s book in its time. And like Nash�s book, it works at least partly by omission. It gives the same strong impression that something important has been left out ..

So what is it that has been omitted? In his final chapter, Muller raises the question of the status of non-market institutions � the family, the church, the university, the state, the Volk. Naturally, economic self-interest penetrates and sometimes pervades each sphere. The decision to have children has an economic dimension. So does the decision to go to join the army, to go to school, to give to charity, to make a new finding and communicate it to others, to pay taxes, to grant benefits.

Will these non-market institutions some day cease to exist altogether? Or linger on only in the most attenuated form? Will there be markets for everything and motives for nothing aside from the aggrandizement of the Self?

Somehow, I doubt it. Economists and other social thinkers only recently have turned their attention to these counterinstitutions, wherein preferences are determined and tastes are made. They are probably far more important than we think. I suspect that markets will turn out to be only half the story. For changes within these little understood non-market institutions can produce very powerful shifts in short periods of time between the opposing poles that Muller sees as characteristic of the modern age.

It's worth noting that Hayek was out ahead of the pack in emphasizing the importance of all of these "counter" institutions. It is also worth noting that folks like economist and Hayek-Ler Steve Horwitz are pursuing advance research on these topics within a broadly "Hayekian" framwork. See, for example, Steve's papers found here.

An important recent posting to the Hayek-L email list from economist Roger Garrison (more on Garrison here):

Fiona and Lanny are certainly correct to observe that low interest rates can cause home owners to refinance their mortgages and to spend the lump-sum gain on consumer goods. And they are correct to note that the policy-induced bout of consumer spending has been the only game in town since the 2001 downturn. Greenspan's continued monetary ease has served only to bolstered consumer spending.

They are dead wrong, however, as seeing this phenomenon―-especially in the contest of the post-boom economy--as contrary to the Austrian theory.

Even during the boom, consumption spending gets a boost. Mises repeatedly characterizes the credit-driven boom as a period of "malinvestment and overconsumption." The two effects follow straightforwardly from the familiar loanable-funds theory. When the interest rate is depressed below its natural level, investors invest more (moving down along the demand for loanable funds); and at the same time, savers save less―and hence consume more (moving down along the supply of loanable funds. This is what is meant when we say that credit expansion drives a wedge between saving and investment.

Richard Strigl, in his 1934 _Capital and Production_, recognizes the dual effect of artificially low interest rates in terms of the intertemporal structure of capital. The capital structure, he points out, is pulled at both ends against the middle (my phrasing, but very close to Strigl's). At the same time that longer-term projects are being undertaken, the resources needed for their completion are being depleted by increased consumption. This constellation of effects is what makes the subsequent downturn inevitable. Mises expressed these matters in his 1912 book in terms of the subsistence fund.

Only after my _Time and Money_ was in print did I realize―-with the help of Richard Ebeling-―that the notion of the Hayekian triangle being "pulled at both ends against the middle" was recognized in the interwar literature. Fritz Machlup, in a 1933 lecture, noted the salient difference between Hayek's rendition and Strigl's rendition in this regard. It is true that Hayek was not sensitised to the overconsumption aspect of the boom. At points, he even denied it-―in his attempt to make the concept of "forced saving" more acceptable to his critics. (In retrospect, we see that Hayek's "forced saving" really didn't refer to "saving" at all, but rather to a pattern of investment at odds with people's saving preferences. His "forced saving" was Mises's "malinvestment.")

In the post-boom period, a lot of the malinvested capital is being liquidated. In this environment, low interest rates will not inspire investors to undertake still more investment projects. This is an important part of the Austrian theory, and Greenspan's post-2001 experiments with successive interest-rate reductions have provided much evidence for it. The demand for investment funds has fallen precipitously―-not because of a Keynesian waning of the "animal spirits" but because of disruption of the production process caused by the prior credit expansion. The only component of spending left to be stimulated, then, is consumer spending.

The current circumstances also dramatize the dilemma that Hayek wrestled with over the years. In the post-boom period, the Federal Reserve is in a Catch-22 situation. If the Fed continues its cheap-credit policy, then the liquidation process is slowed and the resources needed to complete projects and to make the capital structure whole again are increasingly devoted to current consumption. If the Fed ends its cheap-credit policy, then the economy may well spiral down in a "secondary deflation." (This downward spiralling of income and expenditure was the only aspect of the whole episode that was on Keynes's radar screen. He thought it was triggered by an "autonomous" decrease in investment demand.)

I am continually puzzled as to why critics of the Austrian theory are so quick to accept some potted version of that theory and to see virtually every aspect of the current macroeconomic environment as evidence against it.

Roger W. Garrison
Hayek Visiting Fellow
London School of Economics

Garrison is responding to economist Fiona Maclachlan and Hayek biographer Lanny Ebenstein, who's earlier postings can be found here.

Could it be that political labels are simply matching accessories for underlying subcultural identities, rather than markers for important theoretical differences? Brink Lindsey investigates in the world of young "conservatives" and "libertarians".

Has Adam Michnik betrayed the left?

David Horowitz identifies one of the deeper crimes of the NY Times over the decades. Read the whole thing, but here's a money quote:

The Times is in hot water these days for protecting incompetent journalists who misreport the news. It should also be in the dock for years of libel against law enforcement officials and for endangering the lives of citizens by covering up the crimes of leftist thugs. The Panthers were gangsters who killed more than a dozen black citizens along with my friend Betty Van Patter. The murderers -- celebrated in the pages of the Times -- tour college campuses inciting new generations to hate their country and those of its citizens who are white. Articles like the one below, reinforce this homicidal incitement and will inexorably create future victims.

UPDATE: Sol Stern is also on the story. (via Instapundit)

Andrew Sullivan spots the Smoking Gun of institutionalized bad journalism at the NY Times:

One of the emails Mnookin unearths is particularly interesting. It shows that one reason many NYT scribes are mad at Raines and Bragg is that this scandal has severely dented the Times' ability to spin the news in a left-liberal direction while hiding behind the veil of the "paper of record." Once that reputation has been trashed, how can they keep that game up? They'll be seen as just another biased news outlet, if much bigger and better than many others. Here's the money quote from Tim Egan - yes the Tim Egan who lied on the front page about rising temperatures in Alaska:

"What will come of this infighting, cannibalism, and soul-searching? Hopefully, we'll go back to valuing what we have: people who care about the drift of this country, and are given the time and respect to tell it right."

Hmmm. What does he mean, "the drift of this country"? I think we know - it's headed rightward. And the job of the Times is not to give us all the news that's fit to print, but to haul it to the left.

Krugman and the "liquidity trap" debunked.

Is it art .. or is it crap? (via Hit & Run)

The editor of the LA Times thinks he can shake the Leftist bias out of the reporting of his (well) leftist reporters. Good luck Mr. Carroll!!

As America's most insufferable generation retires, America's deficit will be ..

roughly equivalent to 10 times the publicly held national debt, four years of US economic output or more than 94 per cent of all US household assets.

Rich Tucker explains why you don't have to be an economist to know that the Fed Gov's 20 billion dollar bailout of the states is a bad idea.

Luskin on the latest Krugman.

Robert Novak has the scoop on how the political class has screwed the taxpayers once again:

The General Accounting Office (GAO) estimates $20 billion to $30 billion in government costs for leasing 100 Boeing 767 tankers for six years, costing $12.2 billion to $22.4 billion more than simply modernizing existing KC-135E tankers.

As long as the principle role of government is to aim a gun at working Americans in order to shovel dollars to folks like Boeing, the whole idea that "taxcuts" have anything to do with helping the taxpayer in the long-run is just another cruel
joke which plays the voter as a sucker.

Alan Reynolds introduces a dose of good sense into the conversation on deflation and devaluation. Choice cut:

Given the forecasting record of the IMF, Fed and Krugman, when they start worrying about deflation, investors start betting on inflation. An executive at TIAA-CREF tells me their most popular fund is inflation-protected bonds, and gold is up about 16 percent over the past year. Deflation scares for the United States are quagmire quackery ..

TheAgitator points to some truly radical proposals for Africa -- coming from none other than the usually hopeless Nicholas Kristof:

note Kristof's bullet points for putting Africa on the road to recovery: Trade, not aid. Phase out agricultural subsidies and tariffs in the U.S. and Europe (you might add textiles to that, too). And, most certainly, allow foreign investment to get in on the ground floor in the Eritreas, Ethiopias and Malawis.

Throw in a radical push for sound property rights and de-statization, and you've got a program which might hope to throw back 50 years of LSE socialism on the African continent. Compare this with the increase in money aid for Africa proposed by Bush -- which Andrew Sullivan and Bob Geldof appear to think is somehow "radical". The dollar amounts may be funnelled in new directions (maybe even a better direction), but the dumping of money on Africa is nothing new -- in fact it has a long and sad history. Read the depressing story of Zimbabwe if you'd like.

TheAgitator asks a good, loaded question:

Why was Senator Ashcroft so sympathetic to the "states' rights" cause when it came to issues like the Confederacy and segregation, but when it comes whether or not a terminal cancer patient ought to be able to ease his pain with a marijuana cigarette, Attorney General Ashcroft can't let the states govern themselves?

Read the article. There's a lot more than merely pot behind this question.

Get your Instapundit fix here. Glenn's server is down, and in the mean time he's enjoying a bit of Blogger nostalgia at his backup site.

A gov. official accepting responsibility for gov. actions? Yes, it's true. Fed. Reserve Governor Ben Bernanke accepted Fed. responsibility for the economic slump -- not the current one, mind you -- but the little downturn we had some 70 years ago: "Let me end my talk by abusing slightly my status as an official representative of the Federal Reserve. I would like to say to Milton and Anna: Regarding the Great Depression. You're right, we did it." So spoke the Fed. Reserve Governor at Milton Friedman's 90's birthday party in Nov. Quoted in Frank Shostak's analysis of the "deflation" excuse for expanding the size of government and increasing the burden of inflation. Dont' miss Shostak's nice little chart mapping of the continued rapid expansion of the money supply. And there is this:

If Friedman's way of thinking is correct, why hasn't it worked in Japan, which for over a decade now has been struggling to stage a meaningful economic recovery? In fact according to the latest Bank of Japan report on the economy, the economy is continuing to deteriorate. The usual response from the adherents of monetary pumping is that the Bank of Japan (BOJ) has not done enough�it hasn't been pumping enough money. But how can this be, if in July 2001 the yearly rate of increase in monetary pumping, as depicted by the BOJ balance sheet, stood at over 44%? If one allows for lags from rises in monetary pumping to economic activity surely by now the Japanese economy should have been booming.

In truth, the Japanese episode is one further nail in the coffin of both Keynesian economics and Friedmanian economics. How many times do these theories need to be disproven in the court of real life before the economics profession accepts responsibility for teaching theoretically and empirically failed "science".

Victor Davis Hanson .. Unabomber suspect? Prof. Judith Hallett fingered Hanson as the Unabomber in reaction to his books on Greek warfare and the leftist academy. No wonder Hanson says, ''the university is a really rotten institution.'' From a Boston Globe profile.

As the curtain pulls back on America's newsrooms, Daniel Drezner wonders if we won't see some changes on the op-ed page:

It is common knowledge that op-eds and essays attributed to prominent people are usually not written by them, but rather by their minions/flunkies/research assistants (go to the chapter on intellectual life in David Brooks' inestimable BoBos in Paradise for the best description of this part of the knowledge economy). It will be interesting to see if more of these kinds of essays are now explicitly rather than implicitly co-authored.

John Hawkins explains the real dynamics of a blogosphere story

Shark Blog explains why the problem at the LA Times is bigger than Sheer.

Some sensible thoughts on bringing peace and liberalism to Iraq from America's Sec. of War, er, Defense. Among his points are these two important ones: "� Property claims. Mechanisms will be established to adjudicate property claims peacefully. � Favor market economy. Decisions will favor market systems, not Stalinist command systems, and activities that will begin to diversify the Iraqi economy beyond oil. The Coalition will encourage moves to privatize state-owned enterprises." And a little heads-up for the French and Germans "� Contracts--promoting Iraq's recovery. Whenever possible, contracts for work in Iraq will go to those who will use Iraqi workers and to countries that supported the Iraqi people's liberation."

Remembering the war dead.

Mickey Kaus is inside the sausage factory at the NY Times. Choice quote:

Conventional journalists sometimes sneer at blogs because there's no way for a reader to know whether what a random, unknown person says on his Web site is true. But it sounds as if the Times is not so different from a blog after all--what you are reading is really the work of random, unknown "legs" and stringers. ... P.S.: Of course, in other ways the Times and the typical blog are very different forms of jounalism. One obsessively reflects the personal biases, enthusiasms and grudges of a single individual. The other is just an online diary! ...

And Kaus links to this John McWhorter quote:

"It's a slam-dunk case. The Times values black writers more for their contribution to a headcount than for whether they are truly top-quality reporters, and for all of Raines' good intentions, the result is as dehumanizing as good old-fashioned racism was.''

Worth quoting -- To The Point on one of my earlier postings:

Prestopundit makes a point that I've been thinking about for a while. Essentially, blogging has given me a perspective from insiders I never could have gotten before. So it's not that the media is necessarily worse (though I do think that), but also that my access to information on how the media and political process works has dramatically expanded.

Calpundit is blogging the Sunday LA Times. Cheer up Calpundit -- the LA Times wants you to feel like that! And better luck with the berry pie!

Peter Berkowitz defends the good name of Leo Strauss.

Well, this is just crazy. Now some in the press are calling a real increase in prices (in the midst of real increases in productivity) nearly the same things as "an outright decline in prices". And white is black, war is peace, etc. .. (via Instapundit) (The story is about German "deflation". German productivity is up 1.8 percent, prices are up 0.7 percent. Folks, this is inflation. Do the math. Greater output per unit of input should mean lower prices. Only inflation could possibly be giving you higher prices in an environment with increased output per input.)

Jason Soon is blogging the work of Hayek-Ler Rafe Champion on Popper and Austrian economics. Rafe and I are working on setting up a date for a Hayek-L seminar on his Popper & economics paper. Soon has the links.

The NY Times on the Republican Party:

They have built their strength in the South by appealing to white resentment of civil rights policies, and sometimes by discouraging voting by blacks, as they did last year in Louisiana's Senate runoff, which the Democratic incumbent, Mary L. Landrieu, won anyway.. When it comes to hard-hitting campaign advertisements, they have used everything from Willie Horton's image to the suggestion that Senator Max Cleland, who lost both legs and an arm in Vietnam, was unconcerned about national security.

Of course, if truth matters at the NY Times -- which is always a legitimate question -- the Willie Horton ad was not a GOP ad. This is one of those mythologies created by the Left / the Press which are just too good not to be "true", but turn out to be true only in the NY Times sense.

Is it just me, or do these Timees really loathe -- I mean loathe -- red state Repubicans? The bile as good as drips off the page.

Jason Soon at Catallaxy Files has a note up giving out top blog awards. I'm too modest to mention any of the winners, but I must respond to Jason's now repeated complaint against the name of my blog -- it just ain't Hayekian enough he says. In honor of that complaint I've added one of my rejected blog titles to my current banner slogan -- "MEME-O-MATIC". So my response is .. it could have been worse!

Paul Krugman is back on his "liquidity trap" hobbyhorse. And he looks rather silly with that coonskin cap on.

John Makin of the AEI come out in favor of inflation. The great battle against inflation initiated in October of 1979 by Paul Volcker, has in Makin's view, properly come to an end. It looks like we are all Keynesians .. again. (Well, not me, but you already knew that). What next, stagflation? Then wage and price controls?

James Grant points to one giant pitfall in the Feds inflation strategy:

What ballasts the millennial U.S. monetary system is debt, and its weight is palpable. In the 1960s and 1970s total nonfinancial debt (corporate, government and individual) was around 140% of GDP. In the junk-bond revolution of the 1980s, the portion leapt to 180% and never looked back. Today it stands at 195%. The Fed lives in mortal fear of a system so debt-clogged that not even a 1% bond yield could coax overextended debtors to consume or invest. The purpose of the Fed's May 6 pronouncement is to roll out the welcome mat for growth--and, by way of a higher inflation rate, to lighten the burden of debt. But the dollar is the world's currency, and the non-U.S. portion of the world has a vote on dollar interest rates. Because the U.S. consumes much more than it produces and owes abroad much more than it owns abroad, torrents of dollars pour into the world's payment system. The holders of these dollars have Bloomberg terminals, too, and some fine day they might wake up and sell bonds. Who could blame them?

And the Fed is hard at work:

the Fed is creating credit. It is purchasing government securities with dollars it mints for the purpose. Through these purchases the Fed is bidding up bond prices and pressing down interest rates .. One year ago the Fed owned $582 billion of Treasury securities; today it holds $647 billion, 11% more. Not much in this slow-moving, post-bubble economy is growing at double digits..

OK, let see now. Bill Bennett doesn't write his own books. Rick Bragg doesn't write his own news stories. Hmmm .. could it be we've uncovered the secret of Instapundit at last!? Naahhhh.

Hayek-Ler and all-around nice person Virginia Postrel has a New York Times piece on deflation. I've got to go with my brain on this one and my brain tells me that Postrel is wrong about deflation. Consider. If you have growing productivity in a great many sectors in the economy -- and if the stock of money grows slower than this productivity increase, then you do have deflation. Your dollar does have a "general" higher worth. It buys more.

If more goods are being produced at lower cost across industry after industry, effectively you have a case were "the value of each dollar, regardless of how it is spent, is rising". And this is a good thing, and it does imply anything about unexpected changes in the value of money. When productivity goes up, a dollar should buy more -- you can expect it. What you have is perfectly benign deflation, using Fed gov Ben Bernanke's definition of deflation as, "a general decline in prices, with the emphasis on the word `general.'" Productivity increases are never exactly the same industry by industry, but a confluence of enough of them will give you what economists would call collectively a "general" increase in output -- with your non-inflated dollar buy much more "in general". Again, this is a good thing, and a completely harmless thing.

Now, it's easy to start talking mysterious talk about a phantom such as "the nominal prices of all goods and services", something which is "independent of underlying relative values". It is easy to take the next step, piling one phantom on top of another with talk of a change in the phantom entity "the overall price level". Of course, the substance behind the shadow is nothing but a collection of various relative prices, including various prices for money and credit. What Postrel goes on to say about the ill-effects of unexpected prices changes is true enough -- but none of this has any necessary connection with perfectly-to-be-expected increases in the purchasing power of a dollar in an economy with massive productivity increased coming from all side. (the numbers were given a week or two ago on this blog).

Postrel's article ends with supposed good news:

"[the] prospect [of Japanese style deflation] isn't likely in the United States. If anything, trends are moving in the opposite direction. The falling dollar raises the cost of goods, while the growing federal deficit creates inflationary pressures. "I've never known an economy � I doubt that there is one � that has a falling exchange rate and a large and rising deficit and that has deflation," said Allan Meltzer, an economist at Carnegie-Mellon University ..

If productivity increases mean greater output -- and we aren't seeing our dollar buy more, this can only mean that we are currently experiencing rip-roaring inflation in the form of a growing money supply .. and indications are that we will see only more and more of the same as far as the eye can see.

Radley Balko proudly wears the liberal label. I've been on board this wagon for some time now. Say it with me now .. "I'm a liberal". That didn't hurt, did it?

"Googlewash" and the blogosphere examined.

A new feature. I'd like to introduce some of the very talented folks who make up the Hayek-L email list. In these times of economic turbulence, let me begin with Roger Garrison, perhaps the best macroeconomist in the world. To get a sense of the flavor of the man and his work, two interviews here and here will take you gently into his macroeconomic world. More meaty stuff can be found in these articles and in the online chapters of Garrison's recent book Time and Money: The Macroeconomics of Capital Structure, which I've called the most significance book in macroeconomics published in the past 30 years. Garrison does a remarkable job in this book explaining Keynesian, monetarist and Hayekian economics -- with little riffs on many of the most recent variations on these. He uses metaphor with the best of them, the surest way to transmit understanding when skillfully executed. And because Garrison looks at macroeconomics from multiple angles, you get a better understanding of what the possibilities are in this difficult field -- and where the booby-traps are hidden. An added pleasure of Garrison's work is his abibing humor -- usually understated. Often this humor is used with telling effect against strategic targets -- if you miss the joke there's a chance you'll miss the argument against a position. Anyway, this is great stuff and Garrison is a pleasure. Oh, and don't miss his page of miscellany.

Remind me again why it's a good thing that the U.S. takes my money at gunpoint and sends it to the UN?

United Nations officials looked the other way as Saddam Hussein's regime skimmed $2 billion to $3 billion in bribes and kickbacks from the U.N. Oil-for-Food Program, said U.N. officials who told ABCNEWS they were powerless to stop the massive graft. An international investigation conducted by ABCNEWS found widespread corruption in the U.N. program, which helped Saddam build his fortune in U.S. currency. "Everybody knew it, and those who were in a position to do something about it, were not doing anything," said Benon Sevan, the executive director of the Office of Iraq Program.

James Moore (Harvard) reads Swift and comes up with a new battle plan for the Left's ongoing war against America:

As the United States government becomes more belligerent in using its power in the world, many people are longing for a �second superpower� that can keep the US in check. Indeed, many people desire a superpower that speaks for the interests of planetary society, for long-term well-being, and that encourages broad participation in the democratic process. Where can the world find such a second superpower? No nation or group of nations seems able to play this role, although the European Union sometimes seeks to, working in concert with a variety of institutions in the field of international law, including the United Nations. But even the common might of the European nations is barely a match for the current power of the United States."

Moore blogs the struggle over the "Second Superpower" meme here.

The New Liberals. Inexplicably, the New York Times calls them "conservatives".

the paradox was obvious: the administration's reaction to the Counterweight stories underlined the very point the editors were trying to make: namely, that the university, in its zeal to ameliorate any possible friction among students, is stifling the open, vigorous, nontimorous exchange of ideas. ''To me, it's sheltering and patronizing,'' Charles Mitchell says. ''I just believe with every fiber of my being that our speech code is wrong, and it has to go. It's completely against everything that this university ought to stand for.''

Tax and spend tweedle-dees and tweedle-dums:

State legislatures controlled by Republicans increased spending an average of 6.54% per year from 1997 to 2002, compared with 6.17% for legislatures run by Democrats. State spending rose slowest -- 6% annually -- when legislatures were split, and each party controlled one chamber. Inflation averaged 2.55% annually 1997-2002 .. Spending was higher when one party -- Republican or Democratic -- controlled the legislature and the governor's office, the analysis shows. States spent 14% less when Republicans and Democrats had to fight each other to pass a budget. The most frugal combination: a Republican legislature and a Democratic governor.

Keynes reigns in the Bush Whitehouse. Here is new CEA chief Gregory Mankiw from last weeks Senate hearings:

What we need to do is increase aggregate demand, increase spending to get rid of excess capacity and the high unemployment we now have.

The RINO's who control the U.S. gov. are up to the job -- spending your money like drunken .. well, politicians. It seems that Republicans and Republican economists have mastered every specious arguments ever advanced for increasing the control of your money by a very tiny group of people in the nation's capital.

Somehow I missed Hugh Hewitt's trashing of the Leftist only editorial policy of the news division of the LA Times.

D-squared trashes "conservatives", but sneaks in a rather understated punchline:

the quest of conservative thought throughout the ages has been "the search for a higher moral justification for selfishness". Some rightwingers are not hypocrites because they admit that their basic moral principle is "what I have, I keep". Some rightwingers are hypocrites because they pretend that "what I have, I keep" is always and everywhere the best way to express a general unparticularised love for all sentient things. Then there are the tricky cases where the rightwingers happen to be on the right side because we haven't yet discovered a better form of social organisation than private property for solving several important classes of optimisation problem.

And then there's this:

one of the biggest problems with the psychological politics of left and right is the need that people feel to think of themselves as not just having made what looks like on balance the best decision given the things they regard as important, but as morally good people themselves. People in general seem to be horribly uncomfortable with the idea that, by the standards they use to judge political situations, they themselves don't come out as moral heroes. At base, this is a fairly childish and decidedly illiberal attitude; childish because it demands a sort of moral perfection which everyone intellectually knows can't exist outside fairy stories (unless you count the way that parents appear to their children) and illiberal because it suggests that you're only prepared to have normal social interactions with people who pass your own personal moral examination (a rather prominent political philosopher has told me to my face on a couple of occasions that he regards me as morally beyond the pale because of the job I do; I've nonetheless been made to feel very welcome at his house).

D-squared, ever read Shelby Steele?

Brad DeLong confirms my belief that the primary role of the economist in government is to act as a kind of witch-doctor -- using make-believe "science" to give cover, comfort and confirmation to whatever decisions the Leader has already made. I.e. the economists job is to use fancy math and fake science to read chicken entrails and come up with the "forecast" that was required by political reality, not "science" or causal reality. Here is DeLong:

The hard-working Max Sawicky reports that the Bush Administration's forecasting "Troika"--the Council of Economic Advisors, the Treasury, and the Office of Management and Budget--are projecting that, with the president's proposed policies enacted, payroll employment in the United States will grow from 132,130,000 in July of 2003 to 137,640,000 by December 2004--a net increase of 5.51 million payroll jobs in eighteen months. Now the U.S. economy's level of employment has grown that rapidly twice--in 1977-1978, and again in 1983-1984 (with huge numbers of baby-boomers entering the labor force in the first case, and with an extraordinarily rapid 2.1 percentage-point decline in the labor force in the second). But those increases in employment came with 5.5% and 7.3% annual rates of increase in real GDP. No one is forecasting such rates of increase in real GDP over the next year and a half. [This is what must have happened]. Some high politician has reached down into the innards and guts of the forecasting process, and has said "employment in 2000 averaged 136.9 million. We cannot forecast that in December 2004--at the end of President Bush's first term--fewer Americans will be at work than in Clinton's last year. We cannot. We do have a history of Republican administration's economic forecasts being off in the gamma quadrant. The most famous example is the Larry Kudlow-Paul Craig Roberts-Murray Weidenbaum "rosy scenario" of 1981 that convinced Ronald Reagan that he really could cut taxes massively and still balance the budget, a rosy scenario forecast that was, as Marty Feldstein politely put it at the time, "not consistent with the tenor of Federal Reserve policy." But it's not alone: I remember the incoming Clinton administration looking at the last forecast made by Richard Darman of OMB, and howling with laughter.

It's a blogger vs. peacenik google battle. And the winner is .. The 'googlewash" meme has struck PrestoPundit.

a man who deemed Britain as much a threat as the Soviet Union, whose advisers included Soviet spies, and who once described a Siberian slave-labor camp as a "combination TVA and Hudson's Bay Company."

Know who it is? A hint -- he very nearly became President .. and his name will grace a visitors center in Hyde Park, NY.

Is the U. of Chicago edging ever Leftward? John Fund reports from the School of Law. Worth quoting:

And while the country is becoming more conservative, it seems that the law school's long resistance to trendy campus fashions is weakening. During the reunion, the heads of several legal clinics sponsored by the law school met with alumni. After a spokesman for the MacArthur Justice Center explained how it files appeals for convicted criminals in death penalty and drug cases, he was challenged by an alumnus who wondered if their time could be better spent. The student sheepishly admitted that most of the appeals were filed on hyper-technical grounds on behalf of "clearly guilty" defendants but that they presented a wonderful opportunity for students to practice law under the supervision of an attorney. The alumni I spoke to were clearly more interested in a university clinic designed to aid local entrepreneurs, supported by the Washington-based Institute for Justice.

Debra Saunders to Karl Rove -- hands off California. Choice cut:

L.A. County Supervisor Mike Antonovich complained recently that the county has becoming "an HMO for illegal immigrants."

Bruce Bartlett goes a bit over the top cheerleading for the tax cut bill. I agree that there can be few things more important than reducing disincentives on capital investment -- capital investment is the very foundation of our wealth. And, yes, we do want the day-traders on board the political bandwagon .. Anyway, here's Bartlett:

we will have a significant cut in taxes on corporate dividends, which will lower the cost of capital and give a huge boost to the stock market. Lower capital gains tax rates will greatly improve the investment climate and be a major stimulus to venture capital and other high-risk investments.

John Derbyshire on journalism. There is more than a bit of truth to this:

Bill Deedes, my old editor at the London Daily Telegraph, started working as a national-newspaper reporter in 1930 at age 17, after the Wall Street Crash wiped out his family's finances. Nowadays you need several years' worth of college degrees on your r�sum� before a big-city American newspaper will let you in the door. The main effect of all that education, of course, is to dull the mind and fill up its empty spaces with left-wing flapdoodle. Newspaper reporting isn't difficult work; an intelligent person can pick up the essentials in a few weeks on the job. To say such things out loud, though, is of course gross heresy in this over-educated, over-credentialed age.

Posted by Greg Ransom | Permalink

Here's what I thought after listening to the Chris Hedges' commencement address

such a speech needs to persuade. It needs to draw the audience close, make eye contact. Crack a joke, wax colloquial, opine a bit, then bring it all back to the grads. Pat them on the back, remind them that the process of learning has just begun, warn them against cant of any sort, and give them a closing that wraps this extraordinary day up in one sweet smart line they can take with them for the hard years to come.

What did he do? He cracked the mike, and said I have come to talk about war, and empire. You could just hear the shoulders sag: oh man. It's Mr. Big Wet Pillow fingering his Vietnamese worry-beads. As if we haven't heard this for the last four years.

As I've been saying for months here: it's not the dissent that bothers me - please! Dissent! Carp, snipe, poke, hammer away; that's essential. But there's a difference between "our failure to find WMD raises troubling questions about our prewar intelligence" and "Chimpy lied to get his hands on the oiiiilll." Hedges appeared to be one of those critics who presumed that everyone in the audience was an uncritical victim of cable-TV agitprop, and no one had ever paused to consider that war was harsh work. Everyone needed 50 ccs of RAW TRUTH, STAT to wake them from their comfy comas.

It's LILEKS - The Bleat of course, but that's what I thought too. Honest.

The decadence and corruption of the French business/government elite may be beyond anything anyone ever imagined.

A brilliant piece of economic analysis from Paul Kasriel:

The dollar is bound to depreciate. The rest of the world advances us approximately $1.5 billion a day. Private global investors are beginning to question how we will be able to pay them the interest and dividends on these advances. To see why they might now be concerned about this, consider two corporations. Corporation 1 uses the proceeds from its stock and bond sales to invest in plant and equipment and research and development. These investments increase the odds of it earning higher profits in the future. Corporation B uses the proceeds from its stock and bond sales to throw a party for its employees every Friday afternoon. Although Corporation B may have temporarily happier employees than Corporation 1, in the longer run, both Corporation B's stock and bond holders and employees will be unhappy because it will not see higher earnings growth. Investors will stop advancing funds to Corporation B if it continues to use those funds for employee parties. In effect, we are throwing parties with the $1.5 billion the rest of the world advances us each day in that we are using these funds to buy bigger cars, bigger houses, and cruise missiles. These purchases are not the stuff that will allow us to grow faster in the future. Moreover, Fed Chairman Greenspan has effectively said to investors in U.S. Treasury securities that he will do all in his power to insure that the coupon payments they receive will be worth less. That is, Greenspan has indicated that he will conduct U.S. monetary policy so as to increase the U.S. inflation rate. This is not exactly what the creditors to the world's largest net debtor want to hear. So, these creditors, at least the private ones, would be expected to cut back on their demand for U.S. dollar-denominated assets. This is the "necessary" part of the dollar's depreciation.

The "evil" part is that a depreciating dollar impoverishes Americans. A depreciating dollar means that we have to give up a greater quantity of goods and services to the rest of the world in order to get the same quantity of goods and services from them as before. A depreciating dollar means a decline in (or slower growth in) Americans' standard of living. In effect, we will be working harder but enjoying it less. So it goes.

What do Shi'ite Saudi's want? Well, among other things:

They want the kingdom to purge its educational textbooks of "vicious lies and slanderous claims" against Shi'ites. (Some books, often government-financed, claim that Shi'ism was "invented by a Jew as a means of splitting Islam" and accuse Shi'ites of practicing incest and cannibalism in secret.)

Neoconservatism -- Jonah Goldberg explains it all for you. Money quote:

The only remotely useful definition of neoconservatism today is "Whatever Bill Kristol thinks." [On the other hand] Bill Kristol is a brilliant man, but one could go crazy trying to extract a coherent ideology from his tactical movements within the Republican party.

I've always felt there must be a special place in hell for the ostensibly genial spinner E. J. Dionne Jr. There is something so smoothly dishonest about his kind of spin that it gives me a chill -- the kind of chalkboard chill that slightly stiff velvet can give you. Indeed, you might call Dionne the master of the velvet covered lie. Here is an example:

Kerry's speech underscores that the core divide in American politics now is not between liberals and conservatives, or between capitalists and socialists. It is between libertarians and communitarians. Libertarians believe that tax cuts are always better than government programs, that private striving and self-improvement are the central acts of American citizenship, and that where the government and the market are concerned, the government should almost always get out of the way. Communitarians also see the market as useful and private striving as essential. But they insist that preserving the individual freedom that makes both possible is a cooperative endeavor. Self-rule in a democracy demands not just private creativity but also public commitment. Government needs to assert itself when private markets fail, and when markets fail to serve the common good.

In philosophy, we call this stacking the deck, a combining of strawmen within a poverty of alternatives. This is arsenic passed off in sticky berry sirup, the kind which is meant to entice children. Only someone with a deeply splenetic soul would perpetrate such a thing. I know there are folks who will vouch that Dionne is a good, religious man, etc. But there is something mean in the spirit of someone who would go to such trouble to slip through a deep lie about his opponents, all served up in halloween candy for the kiddies.

Get out the (inflation) pump. Greenspan details Fed contingency plans for combating deflation.

The Saudi's look to be the Romanovs or the Hapsburgs of the 21st century:

Saudi Arabia may be the worst example in modern times of a corrupt and reactionary absolute monarchy whose rulers have great difficulty perceiving the depth of the crisis that faces them, as well as the way out of the crisis .. Saudi Arabia is ruled by an alliance of the Wahhabi sect, the official Islamic dispensation in the kingdom, with the house of Sa�ud. This alliance, which created the monarchy, is only 250 years old. And Wahhabi Islam is not traditional Islam. It is an extremely destructive, nihilistic, and radical form of Islam. Wahhabism preaches an ultra-Puritanical way of life. Meanwhile the Saudi elite swims in whisky. Wahhabism claims to be the purest form of Islam, while the Saudi monarchy depends on secular bayonets for its protection. These mixed signals, or, more bluntly, these forms of hypocrisy, have a deranging effect on Saudi society. But they are also the essential source of Islamist extremism and terrorism. To close the gap between Wahhabi blandishments and Saudi reality, and in a desperate attempt to recover their credibility � particularly in the 20 years since the emergence of Khomeini in Iran � the reactionary faction of the Saudi monarchy has financed terrorism and infiltration in Central Asia, Pakistan, Kashmir, the Balkans, Algeria, Egypt, Israel, Afghanistan, the Caucasus, the Philippines, Indonesia, and, finally, in the ultimate form of al-Qaida.

It should be a long wait before the NY Times whines again about dumb rich kids, college legacies and nepotism.

Margo Wilson has a helpful review of Matt Ridley's Nature via Nurture: Genes, Experience, & What Makes Us Human. Ridley has a real talent for getting across hard ideas using telling examples. In grad school i often argued something like the following in favor of evolutionary epistemology, and against Humean associationism. Because most philosophers have little interest in disciplines outside their own, what I ran into was deaf ears. Anyway, here is Ridley's telling example:

Another illustration of why nature and nurture are not opposites is provided by studies of how monkeys come to fear snakes. Naive laboratory-raised monkeys become fearful after witnessing another monkey's fearful reaction, even on videotape. However, they cannot be made to fear equally novel flowers by an identical manipulation. Ridley tells us about these experiments to show that learning is not arbitrary, but is somehow biased toward useful associations .. Arne �hman and colleagues in Sweden have used Pavlovian conditioning to demonstrate that people, too, can readily learn to fear snakes, but not flowers nor even modern dangerous objects such as electrical sockets. They have, furthermore, shown that this learning occurs even when brief exposures and "masking stimuli" leave the experimental subjects unaware that there ever was a picture of a snake. In this case, the origins of the fear are inaccessible to conscious knowledge, leaving the phobics (and their analysts) free to fabricate their histories.

Shark Blog is blogging the Bob Sheer scandal at the LA Times. And don't miss his Bob Sheer Carnard-o-Matic. This is also good, the white owned Seattle papers putting up a wall of uniformity on the Blair scandal. A sort of mini scandal in its own right. Haven't any of these white people read Shelby Steele? They may be in search of absolution, but these Seattle editors, like Howell Raines, have exposed themselves as owners of deeply racist mindsets -- who else but those with a deep-seeded race mentality would conduct themselves this way? Let's call it what it is, the new tokenism of the white racist Left.

Our Polish Allies. Joella is blogging for her mother, Judith Klinghoffer, while she travels in Europe.

My mother emailed me the following exchange between herself and a Polish journalist: When she asked him whether Poland is not alienating her new European allies by her recent pro-American stands, he answered, "Who should we trust? The Germans who attacked us twice in the last century or the French who betray everybody?"

John Tabin has a commencement watch going. Snippet:

Administrators justify these speeches -- and condemn the walk-outs and boos that they are now drawing -- by saying that its their job to "challenge" students- - but by an amazing coincidence, these "challenging" speakers sure tend to reflect the bias of the administration. Funny how that works.

Just don't make the mistake of "challenging" the power elite of the University. David Horowitz can tell you chapter and verse how the Leftist academic world will have no truck with those who would challenge the party line group think which substitutes for intellectual reflection among so many of those within the humanities and social sciences.

Hayek-Ler Richard Ebeling is named President of the Foundation for Economic Education.

Glenn Reynolds is all over the various media scandals. Lots of links. Lots of bad journalism. Go read.

It's always an eye-opener when an economist writes history (ever read Douglass North? You haven't? Well, why not?). Randy Holcombe has written a new history of America, From Liberty to Democracy: The Transformation of American Government. Holcombe is particularly interested in the period between 1890 and 1920, a period when America's traditional principles of liberal governance were replaced by new principles of democratic governance. Or, at least, that the case Holcombe is making. John Dinan has a review. Tidbit from Dinan:

Holcombe notes that a number of states have deviated at times from the normal practice of electing members of the House of representatives from single-member districts, and that general ticket representation and at-large representation were both used by several states as late as the 1960s.

Spam and the 0.00036 percent conversion rate. (Via Hit & Run, etc.)

Dog bites man. Commencement speakers are mostly Democrats and Leftists.

David Horowitz is looking for help on his Anti-Chomsky Reader for Encounter Books. David writes:

We are looking for authors to cover Chomsky's writings on the
following subjects: Latin America ("Turning the Tide"), East Timor,
the Global Economy and the War Against Terror (Iraq, the PLO, Chomsky's
peculiar definitions of terror etc.)

I'm guessing there's someone reading PrestoPundit who could cover at least one or two of these for David. Drop him a note at: dhorowitz@earthlink.net

BLOGIC 101. I teach logic. Here is a bit of blogic. If you've been close to a news story, you are aware of the logic of media truth: the nearer you are to a news story, the falser it is, the farther you are from a story, the truer the story seems. Enter the blogger. How the blog world works is like a Darwinian filter machine, a fast pace culling of expert judgments which take you point-blank up to the pertinent details of a news story. Take, for example, Instapundit's coverage of the 300 millimeter pistol story, the CNN assault weapon story, and the BBC Jessica Lynch story. Today we are getting an experience of journalism which in the past was the privilege only of those who had some specialized knowledge of the details of the story. In effect, we are getting a tour inside the sausage factory. It isn't pretty. We see a lot of scraps shoveled off the floor and into our news. We see journalists who think we should be eating soybeans or pork -- and stuff their journalism with this stuff -- when what we want is kosher beef. We see the guy who sells ad copy to the boss put in charge of the factory line. And we see con men with substance problems in charge of sausage content for reasons of politics -- both personal and politically correct. Blogging technology makes anyone with specialized knowledge an effective muckraker -- of the sausage factory which is CNN, The New York Times, The Miami Herald, the BBC. And that's your blogic lesson for the day.

Oliphant on the journalism scandal at the Miami Herald. Quotable quote:

Jose Santos was victimized, however, because the values of the tabloid have infected the entire journalism business. At the core, those essentially entertainment values embrace the fake drama of ''questions raised'' followed by ''questions answered.'' To us it's a two-day story; to the hapless target it's a nightmare. Jayson Blair is a profound embarrassment to all who came within spitting distance of him (including those of us in the Globe's bureau here where he ''worked'' before his Times scam. His victims were also his colleagues who enabled his perfidy by letting their own baggage (race included) get in the way of one of our most healthy traits -- skepticism. But the Santos story is more treacherous, because what happened to him could happen tomorrow -- to you.

Australia demands regime change in Zimbabwe.

The Club for Growth goes after RINOs -- Republicans in Name Only ..

Albert Einstein, now online. Read his original manuscripts, the majority of which have never been published.

Say welcome to a new member of the family, er, genius. Chimps is one of us, not one of them, DNA studies show.

The latest twist in the debate over how much DNA separates humans from chimpanzees suggests we are so closely related that chimps should not only be part of the same taxonomic family, but also the same genus.
The new study found that 99.4 percent of the most critical DNA sites are identical in the corresponding human and chimp genes. With that close a relationship, the two living chimp species belong in the genus Homo, says Morris Goodman of Wayne State University in Detroit .. Traditionally chimps are classified with the other great apes, gorillas and orangutans, in the family Pongidae, separated from the human family Hominidae. Within Hominidae, most paleoanthropologists now class virtually all hominid fossils in three genera, Homo, Australopithecus, or Ardipithecus. On the basis of the new study, Goodman would not only put modern humans and all fossils back to the human-chimp divergence into Homo, but would also include the common chimp (Pan troglodytes) and the bonobo (Pan paniscus).

Samizdata wants to know why true liberals have turned against intellectual property rights, and aims to get to the core of the matter. A taste from a long discussion:

Libertarians have an emotional commitment to property rights. They don't just believe in them as a reasoned, pragmatic response to certain identified problems, they - WE - feel in our gut that property is good. It is morally right that you should own stuff, and that when you own it you should be be able to do with it as you choose. If someone tries to interfere with your stuff or take it for themselves then it is not just morally justified for you to defend it, but we'll all have a sneaking admiration for you if you take the opportunity to convince the malefactor of the error of his ways while you're about it. All the rest - the empirical knowledge of the chaos of collectivism and the horrors of big-C Communism, the deep economic analysis of the price mechanism and the profit motive, the easily digestible stories of the "invisible hand" and the division of labour, and the highly indigestible praxeology of the Austrians and the intellectually respectable homegrown IEA -- all of that, it just goes to support and reinforce and justify an emotional commitment to the concept pf Property, which we know, in our gut, to be right anyway. Intellectual Property is qualitatively different to physical property (either land or chattels). If I take of your land or chattels then, to the extent that I have more, you have less. True property is a zero-sum game - not in value terms (when I have 2 cabbages, I have one more than I will eat before it goes mouldy, and exchanging my second cabbage for your second chicken probably creates new value), but certainly so in terms of my possessions: if you take my second cabbage, I cannot give it to my neighbour for his dinner. Free exchange adds to the sum of human happiness, but it doesn't break the Law of the Conservation of Energy. Misunderstanding what is and what is not a zero-sum gain when dealing in property (getting it precisely the wrong way around) is at the root of many failings of socialist economics. Intellectual Property works the other way around. If I upload my copy of The Matrix to you, it doesn't stop me then giving it to my neighbour, and his neighbour, and his neighbour, ad infinitum. Warner Bros doesn't lose anything it can sell, at least not in the same way that they do if I pinch the DVD from the counter at Woolworths.

And this wrap-up.

In conclusion, I believe that most people, and most libertarians, have decided in their hearts that they don't believe in Intellectual Property Rights. They are willing to accept them as a pragmatic implementation of an aspect of the moral position also protected by the law of contract (confidence), of fraudulent passing off (trademarks and design rights), and of libel (moral rights). They like the idea of the madcap inventor having some protection from Big Bad Manufacturer, and are scared that no patents equals no R&D; equally, people dislike corporate behemoth carving out large and incomprehensible monopolies, especially over things that sound like true necessities or simple facts of nature. But since patents really only feature in the world of business there is little that most individuals care or can do about them anyway. However copyright doesn't enjoy any of these defenses; there are no analogies with basic common law, and if ordinary citizens won't wear it then Copyright is doomed. To believe and choose to respect Copyright, personally, deeply, emotionally, you have to truly believe that an idea can indeed be Property. It is in the realm of Copyright where individuals, consumers, citizens are making their moral choice heard loud and clear. We can't even be bothered to be mad as hell; we're just not going to take it any more.

But the whole thing is worth reading.

Liberals gain, greens collapse in Belgian elections. A dogs & cats living together partnership between liberals and socialists will continue.

Brad DeLong has some intelligent things to say about the stupid things a U.S. Sec. of Treasury must say.

Company owners tell GSK's head and his corporate board to go to hell on his proposed golden parachute package. A rare win for the actual owners of a major corporation.

The liquidity trap .. myth. Someone send Krugman a memo, "The evidence is conclusive�Japan hasn't been caught in a liquidity trap", so writes newly minted Ph.D in economics Richard Johnsson, who's run the (Keynesian) numbers, decisively refuting Krugman's favorite hobby-horse of the last 10 years (hobby-horse -- a constructed child's toy for playing pretend).

The California madhouse.

The Free French forces are undertaking operations as we blog.

Lawrence Lessig's call for competition, free stuff, and better stuff. Snippet:

One general kind of competition that this [internet] platform will enable is competition between commercial and noncommercial content and innovation. A richer public domain, and more in the creative commons will mean more to choose among when creating or sharing or criticizing culture. Competitors hate competition. They will always work to increase barriers to entry. And they will use a string of silly excuses to increase the barriers to the free. We should resist these excuses. We should be fighting to preserve this competition. �How can you compete with free?� Jack Valenti asks, again and again? By making stuff better, again and again."

IMF is the latest stoking deflation fears, this time it's Germany, Japan, Hong Kong and Taiwan who are "at risk".

Update: The IMF report can be found here (pdf). The U.S. is not seen "at risk".

Californian democracy -- given good and hard:

The [California] state Assembly's dominant Democrats had a choice Thursday: help the thousands of small-business owners who have been clobbered by extortionate lawsuits or lawsuit threats under the state's broad unfair competition law, or stand with personal injury attorneys who are among the Democrats' most reliable campaign contributors ..

Tyndale: ''Thys ys my commaundement, that ye love togedder as I have loved you. Gretter love then this hath no man, then that a man bestowe his lyfe for his frendes.'' King James: ''This is my Commaundement, that ye loue one another, as I haue loued you. / Greater loue hath no man then this, that a man lay downe his life for his friends.'' From Hitchens review of God's Secretaries: Blessed Are the Phrasemakers.

Jason Soon has blogged some notes on liberalism and utilitarianism, Hayek and Rawls.

Will New York City ever recover? Robert Bartley on "the most efficient technique presently known to destroy a city -- except for bombing".

The Saudi Arabian social order .. more deeply pathological than you've heard -- America's political elite .. more deeply compromised by Saudi money than you ever imagined. A former CIA operative explains. (From his forthcoming book Sleeping with the Devil).

David Horowitz flags this bit of pith from Roger Scruton:

"A single theme runs through the humanities as they are taught in European and American universities: the illegitimacy of Western civilization, and the artificiality of the distinctions on which it has been based. All distinctions are "cultural," therefore "constructed," therefore "ideological" in the sense defined by Marx -- manufactured by the ruling classes in order to serve their interests and bolster their power. Western civilization is simply the record of that oppressive process, and the principal purpose of studying it is to deconstruct its claim to our membership. This is the core belief that a great many students in the humanities are required to ingest, preferably before they have the intellectual discipline to question it, or to set it against the literature that shows it to be untenable. To put the point in another way: the Enlightenment displaced theology from the heart of the curriculum in order to put the disinterested pursuit of truth in its place. Within a very short time, however, we find the university dominated by theology of another kind -- a godless theology to be sure, but no less insistent on unquestioning submission to doctrine, and no less strident in its pursuit of heretics,... The project is ... to sever young people from [their] historic loyalties..." Roger Scruton, The West an the Rest: Globalization and the Terrorist Threat, ISI Books, 2003 pp. 80-81.

Good news for mothers -- and their children. Children of seafish-eating moms-to-be show no harmful mercury effects. I'll have to tell my wife. She's dying to eat some swordfish.

Christopher Hitchens replies to Sidney Blumenthal.

A surprising bit of history I didn't know:

13 of the "Benevolent Empire" societies raised an estimated $2.8 million between 1816 and 1830, most of which went into financing internal improvements; this was two-thirds as much as the federal government spent on projects during the same period. And the Savings Bank of New York, created in 1819 by the Society for the Prevention of Pauperism, was the single biggest investor of funds for the construction of the Erie Canal, holding $475,000 "in Erie Canal debt, as opposed to the $40,000" of the second largest investor.

And something which surprised historian Forest McDonald:

the role of free blacks in reform movements was considerably greater than I had imagined. They were quite active in the campaign to end slavery; when the first issue of William Lloyd Garrison's Liberator rolled off the press in 1831, "three-quarters of its charter subscribers were African-Americans." Moreover, in the mob efforts to prevent the enforcement of the fugitive slave laws during the 1830s, blacks formed most of the mobs, though that is rarely mentioned in conventional accounts.

From McDonald's review of Kathleen McCarthy's American Creed: Philanthropy and the Rise of Civil Society

Brad DeLong is Fisking National Review for intellectual incompetence and bad manners towards one's betters. I'm with him to the extent that DeLong has identified poor arguments or the failure to provide any good arguments. But I'm against him if he thinks that Krugman or anyone else should be immune from intellectual scrutiny simply on the basis of "scholarly reputation". To begin with, the scholarly reputation of economics is itself deeply contested by folks with scholarly reputations as well earned as any DeLong and his associates can summon. And because the scientific status and reputation of economics itself is contested at the highest reaches and by the best minds among those thinking hard about what economics has or has not achieved -- so too must there be doubt about the credentials of those claiming authority under the banner of this not untroubled discipline. Economists seem to think they get a credentials pass because they play the "I'm smart" game so well when that game involves -- often rather empty -- math games. (Math games which professional mathematicians often view as 2nd or 3rd rate stuff on the "I'm smart" chart of academic mathematicians). What I would like to suggest is that anyone with the goods when it comes to solid arguments should go right ahead happily "trashing people", as DeLong puts it, "with much better scholarly reputations than theirs" -- as long as their solids arguments give them the full right to the Fisking. (This is what DeLong in fact says the National Review folks are really lacking -- good arguments). As any good philosopher will tell you, it's the arguments which count -- and as long as folks are able to make and judge those, they shouldn't be relying upon "scholarly reputations" to carry the day for them when their own arguments won't. Especially when these (pop econ) arguments are only connected somewhat tenuously to the specialized publish-or-perish stuff that gave them their scholarly bonafidies.

America's greatest wealth producing export -- money -- faces stiff competition from a currency that is gaining, not losing, value. An example of the problem:

From 1995 to 1999, according to Professor Ferguson's research, 53 percent of all corporate bonds were issued in dollars, and only 20 percent in the currencies of the 12 European countries that now use the euro. In the four years since the common currency began trading, however, 44 percent of new global bonds have been issued in euros, nearly equaling the 48 percent issued in dollars.

Ate my first Cameo� apple the other night. As the grandson of an apple grower I've always considered the red delicious apple God's most perfect food. How did they manage to improve perfection? Well, it looks and tastes like they've taken a red delicious and somehow made it tastier and a bit more complex. Family Farms Direct says this, "This is a new and upcoming variety that was discovered within the last decade in an orchard near Wenatchee, Washington. A chance seedling, the Cameo is believed to be a cross between Red and Golden Delicious apples". Evidently this cross was discovered sometime in the 1980's and the apple has been in grocery stores for only 3 or 4 years (perhaps not in your area). The apple even has its own marketing association. Wenatchee is one beautiful valley, the perfect place for growing -- and eating -- God's perfect food. I've gotten direct ship fruit from Wenatchee in the past from the Stemilt folks. Anyone who's lived in the state of Washington misses it.

Daniel Drexner suggests that the Demo part may be "incapable of competently discussing matters of grand strategy", and he's rooting for Dems aiming to reverse the pathology. And, no, this doesn't make Drezner a Demo, he assures us, just someone who cares about his country.

Lileks finds his inner Gibb.

Lawrence Lessig would like you to "help right the wrong of the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act". He actually makes it clear that this is important. I support freedom in markets and freedom in ideas. I don't support a corporate-politico kleptocracy. My own view is that the Bono act is plain-as-day unconstitutional. What little if any argument from economics there might be for this granting by the government of monopoly privilege is certainly outweighed by a host of other freedom interests and democratic governance issues.

The comments section is open. Weigh in if you'd like.

Meanwhile .. industrial production for export in China is up a whopping 28.8% from a year ago ..

Germany, the new sick man of Europe.

"If the issue is ethics, no one has less than Sidney Blumenthal." -- Money quote from Susan Estrich, wishing the Democrats could escape from the clutches of the Clintons and their friends.

NYPD's top 9/11 cop rides into .. Baghdad.

The world according to Leo Strauss?

He held that philosophy is dangerous because it brings into question the conventions on which civil order and the morality of society depend. This risks promoting a destructive nihilism .. He also argued that Platonic truth is too hard for people to bear, and that the classical appeal to "virtue" as the object of human endeavor is unattainable. Hence it has been necessary to tell lies to people about the nature of political reality. An elite recognizes the truth, however, and keeps it to itself. This gives it insight, and implicitly power that others do not possess. This obviously is an important element in Strauss's appeal to America's neoconservatives. The ostensibly hidden truth is that expediency works; there is no certain God to punish wrongdoing; and virtue is unattainable by most people. Machiavelli was right. There is a natural hierarchy of humans, and rulers must restrict free inquiry and exploit the mediocrity and vice of ordinary people so as to keep society in order. This is obviously a bleak and anti-utopian philosophy that goes against practically everything Americans want to believe. It contradicts the conventional wisdom of modern democratic society. It also contradicts the neoconservatives' own declared policy ambitions to make the Muslim world democratic and establish a new U.S.-led international order, which are blatantly utopian.

This is from an article in a Paris newspaper on the American "neoconservatives" in the Bush administration.

Speaking of double taxation, if people were serious about eliminating double taxation, wouldn't they eliminate the sales tax, properties taxes, and a host of other taxes levied when I use of my already taxed income? The George Bush tax revolution has a long way to go if this is suppose to be some sort of principled tax doctrine.

The Volokh Conspiracy is trashing the Senate tax bill -- and for good reason.

If you care what Francis Fukuyama has to say, read this. Virginia Postrel could tell you that this is far from the truth:

One of Bush's first speeches in 2001 was on stem-cell policy. Most politicians put forward a proposition and use arguments selectively to support it. Bush did the opposite. He presented both sides of the case in a balanced way, so carefully you didn't know which way he'd jump until the end. That's a sign of someone who's serious about getting it right, and about opening the debate.

And in the context of national strikes which have rocked France (and these sorts of things happen routinely in Europe), what to make of this?

The US is more individualist .. but also more disorderly. In the EU states have a higher degree of social solidarity ..

Well, it's nonsense, of course. Fukuyama has got to be the champion second-hand dealer in ideas of all time. He gets paid the big bucks for saying profound things like this:

The US is built on Lockean principles (derived from the British liberal philosopher John Locke). There�s a contract between state and people, and a belief in limited government. On the Continent their vision of the state owes more to (the French philosopher) Jean-Jacques Rousseau. They see the state as an expression of the �general will�.

While reading Fukuyama I always get the urge to scream, "Tell me something I don't know." It's like listening to the David Gergen of the college dorm philosophical bull session.

Former Hayek-L'er Brad DeLong knocks one out of the park on Cuba:

The hideously depressing thing is that Cuba under Battista--Cuba in 1957--was a developed country. Cuba in 1957 had lower infant mortality than France, Belgium, West Germany, Israel, Japan, Austria, Italy, Spain, and Portugal. Cuba in 1957 had doctors and nurses: as many doctors and nurses per capita as the Netherlands, and more than Britain or Finland. Cuba in 1957 had as many vehicles per capita as Uruguay, Italy, or Portugal. Cuba in 1957 had 45 TVs per 1000 people--fifth highest in the world. Cuba today has fewer telephones per capita than it had TVs in 1957.

You take a look at the standard Human Development Indicator variables--GDP per capita, infant mortality, education--and you try to throw together an HDI for Cuba in the late 1950s, and you come out in the range of Japan, Ireland, Italy, Spain, Israel. Today? Today the UN puts Cuba's HDI in the range of Lithuania, Trinidad, and Mexico. (And Carmelo Mesa-Lago thinks the UN's calculations are seriously flawed: that Cuba's right HDI peers today are places like China, Tunisia, Iran, and South Africa.)

Thus I don't understand lefties who talk about the achievements of the Cuban Revolution: "...to have better health care, housing, education, and general social relations than virtually all other comparably developed countries." Yes, Cuba today has a GDP per capita level roughly that of--is "comparably developed"--Bolivia or Honduras or Zimbabwe, but given where Cuba was in 1957 we ought to be talking about how it is as developed as Italy or Spain.

What is up with "progressives" flying off to their beloved Cuba? I don't get it. (Or is it just all about a submerged childhood quest for a dream palace of fantasies?)

Michael Dell says that his firm will start giving dividends if the tax on dividends is removed, but won't if is isn't (on Fox's Neil Cavuto show). What's that about?

Is this economics? I'm not sure. But it is an account of what Paul Glimcher is doing with monkeys and Berry Berry Fruit Juice. (Nothing illegal). The story is taken from Glimcher's Decisions, Uncertainty, and the Brain : The Science of Neuroeconomics

Elaine Pagels has a new book, this one a close study of the Gospel of Thomas and 50 other early Christian works. This is from a review in the Christian Science Monitor:

Pagels .. points out that the Gospel of John is the only one in the New Testament that actually promotes the idea of Jesus as God in human form, and she argues .. that it was written explicitly to counter the Gospel of Thomas, which said otherwise. Thomas's gospel, she writes, teaches "that God's light shines not only in Jesus but, potentially at least, in everyone ... and encourages the hearer ... to seek to know God through one's own divinely given capacity .. "

If you like this kind of stuff, Pagels is a great read, and what she has to say can be, er, revelatory. I found The Five Gospels marvelously interesting -- guess I'll have to order up Pagels when I've finished off the two history of religion books I have awaiting in the nightstand.

I wish someone had time to Fisk this piece of santimonious drivel from Martha Nussbaum on Grotius, Hobbes, Kant and international law. Didn't Benthem say something about "blather on stilts" -- well, maybe not, but he wasn't reading Nussbaum either. Can someone perhaps send a copy of this Nussbaum nonsense to Charles Krauthammer or Mona Charen?

The classic foreign policy debate in the later half of the 20th century was between cynically expedient "realpolitik" (think Kissinger) and hopelessly naive Wilsonian liberalism (think Carter). Narrow self-interested power seeking for its own sake vs. wishful thinking moral preening for its own sake. Of course, when America is its best self and most successful it unites its self interest with its best moral tradition -- that of liberty and the rule of law. And these things are a far cry from the phony U.N. "democracy" of "sovereign" tyrants and deeply corrupt elites. It was in America's self interest to bring true liberalism to Germany, Japan, France, Italy, etc. -- and we did this using both the force of arms and the force of ideas (Voice of America, etc.). Truman created peace in Europe -- Wilson did not.

Bush clearly understands that America's self-interest and her moral vision go hand-in-hand (and that these have nothing to do with European realpolitik or squishy leftist moral preening):

The advance of freedom is the surest strategy to undermine the appeal of terror in the world. Where freedom takes hold, hatred gives way to hope. When freedom takes hold, men and women turn to the peaceful pursuit of a better life. American values and American interests lead in the same direction: We stand for human liberty.

Clearly this muscular liberalism is the true liberalism of Grotius and Kant, and not the false "liberalism" of Thomas Hobbes. But something has happened to those of a certain age -- as if some part of their brain has been removed which makes it impossible for them to deal honestly with the deep insights of true liberalism. (And one more thing, Martha needs to read some Peter Bauer on the human disaster which is foreign aid -- even the IMF and the World Bank won't claim that their multi-billion dollar efforts have contributed any net good to humanity. And she also needs to look at the facts and results of private aid coming from private American citizens).

Debra Saunders on the logic of the California recall:

The latest Field poll found that two-thirds of state voters don't like the governor. And the mechanics work against him: On the very day voters go to the polls to vote up or down on Davis, they also vote on his possible replacement. By law, Davis can't run to replace himself.

Because the court struck down McCain-Feingold, Congressman Darrell Issa is now legally allowed to use his own substantial resources to help bankroll the recall. (Image that -- under McCain-Feingold it was illegal for Issa to use his free speech right in the campaign to let folks hear the case for recalling Gray Davis - something that's absolutely needed to save the state of California from complete fiscal meltdown.)

Major Hayek News. Edelman, Damasio, Searle, Margolis, Pickering, Posner, North, Searle, Caldwell, Feser, Hodgson, Witt, etc. all together, all discussing Dewey, Hayek and Embodied Cognition. WOW. Go here for the details.

Property rights in fisheries -- it's solved the overfishing problem in Iceland, as Hannes Gissurarson describes. (Gissurarson is a leading Hayek scholar). The Volokh Conspiracy links to another paper on the topic. So why isn't Greenpeace behind it? (Rhetorical flourish, not a quiz).

It's an "ugly campaign to destroy the image of France" says, well, France.

Andrew Sullivan's review of Sidney Blumenthal's new book has to be read to be believed. Sullivan's Blumenthal is a character out of the 1930's, an utterly unprincipled, almost crazed fanatic with ties of faith only to party and leader. Literally, a Goebels of the Clinton administration. Sullivan's description is loathsome and frightening:

"in some respects, he is completely out of his mind. Those jokes that no one else in the universe got; those pauses at the end of anecdotes, while he grinned and puffed and waited for you to assent to his latest impenetrable concoction; the sweet-natured way in which he assassinated characters who violated his sense of manifest destiny and the tenets of his secular religion .. The religion to which Sid subscribes is a strange one. His faith is not in the ideals of the Democratic Party. It�s not in the political philosophy of any one thinker .. He doesn�t pledge his allegiance to some noble conception of America, but rather a noble conception of how America should be governed. To be precise, he�s loyal to an institution, the Democratic Party. Fealty to that institution � and its success at all costs�is the only moral criterion I can find in Mr. Blumenthal�s writing .. Like all religious fanatics, Sid sees no distinction between religion and politics or, for that matter, between religion and life .."

Of course, the President had this man within his inner circle. This fact isn't lost on Sullivan: "The fact that the President and, more worryingly, his wife sought out this slightly nutty man as their confidant � a man whom they knew would never question them, never challenge them, never leave them � reveals the brittleness of their characters and the ruthlessness behind their sanctimony." But read the rest yourself.

King James -- "Now Elizabeth's full time came that she should be delivered, and she brought forth a son". New English -- "Now the time came for Elizabeth's child to be born, and she gave birth to a son". A new book is out on the making of the King James Bible. Read a review here.

Labor shocker. No to the Euro.

Daniel Pipes gives a primer on the Saudi family and the Wahhabi religion. Money quote:

In other words, the less fanatical version of Wahhabism triumphed over the more fanatical. The Saudi monarchs presided over a kingdom extreme by comparison with other Muslim countries but tame by Wahhabi standards.

The editors have set up a special e-mail address for readers to report falsehoods they discover in Jayson Blair articles. OK, but how about setting up one for Paul Krugman?

Ann Coulter -- line of the week. Ok, one more.

Instead of being a record of history .. Sulzberger has turned the paper into a sort of bulletin board for Manhattan liberals.

Soon after, the pair began trying to sell their technology to Web sites, including Infoseek, Excite and Yahoo. They found no takers ..

From the Forbes cover story on Google. I always love stories like this. Dyson couldn't find a taker for his new vacuum, etc. Google brought in $300 million last year and has been profitable for ninth consecutive quarters. I'm not sure what Infoseek or Excite are doing these days -- they're no longer even ranked in the Nielson NetRatings list of search engines.

Californians, prepare to give the death penalty to the car tax. And don't forget to recall Gray Davis. John and Ken are rallying the So-Cal drive-time troops.

Dow Jones, fanning the flame of deflation fears.

Is Daniel Drezner part of the cabal behind the invasion of Iraq?

I teach in the very same political science department where Leo Strauss taught and Paul Wolfowitz studied forty years ago. In 1994, I briefly worked with Abe Shulsky, one of the Straussians highlighted in the New Yorker article. Last night, I attended a talk that my overlord -- I mean, respected commentator William Kristol -- gave for the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations .. [more]

Those privy to the conspiracy have their theories.

With all due respect to Chairman Greenspan, his forecasting record is unenviable whether it comes to inflation (remember WIN buttons in late 1974?), to the economy (how long did it take him to figure out we were in a recession in 1990?), to personal recommendations (is Chuck Keating out of the pen yet?). So, when Greenspan starts to worry that inflation might be too low, I start to think that we may be near a bottom in inflation.

Paul Kasriel via Jeffrey Tucker. (Lots of good charts).

The IS/LM macroeconomic model should be history, but it isn't. Historians of economic thought chart the fate of the textbook Keynesian thinking of the 1950's which still dominates the imagination of the econobabblers -- the herd of economists, journalists, politicians, and Fed Board members who generate the idiot talk which passes for macroeconomic conversation in America. A highlight -- tracing the "liquidity trap" from Hicks to Krugman. The classic book on how the IS/LM model became "Keynesian economics" is David Laidler's, Fabricating the Keynesian Revolution, which was a the topic of perhaps the most successful Hayek-L email seminar ever.

We made war, not love. The latest on Neanderthal DNA evidence.

It's democracy vs. the mob -- in France, as Europe's cultural war against economic reality advances.

UPDATE: More on the economic contradictions of European culture.

A new use for the pay phone.

Sixteen of the missing tourists in the Algeria Sahara have been freed. Someone send Instapundit a note.

Deflation? What deflation? A group of Canadian economists weigh in.

You want a conventional wisdom primer on deflation? Robert Samuelson obliges.

Richard Posner gives a good Fisking to Michael Sandel on citizenship and America's proud and professional warriors. Posner's setup:

The most sweeping intellectual challenge to our reviving nineteenth-century liberalism comes not from the dwindling band of socialists, with their narrow focus on economic issues, or from the social or religious conservatives, with their narrow focus on abortion, homosexuality, religion, and a handful of other purely "social" issues, but from the communitarians.

How would you describe Paul Krugman. Unprofessional. Phony. Something of an ass? Neil Cavuto thinks so too.

UPDATE: Donald Luskin has Krugman's ragdoll bashed into tatters on Cavuto, interest rates and government controlled information (via Instapundit).

"Price stability doesn't mean zero inflation," so says San Francisco Federal Reserve President Robert Parry. The science of chicken entrails gets stranger and stranger.

More deflation hysteria, this time from Tony Blankely.

David Bernstein is backing off his Fisking of the Hapsburgs. Interesting. Elsewhere David wonders if being "one of the leading libertarian law professors in the country .. isn't a bit like .. being one of the leading Jewish athletes of all time".

Setup: "Lecturers and students from the University of Plymouth wanted to test the claim that an infinite number of monkeys given typewriters would create the works of The Bard. A single computer was placed in a monkey enclosure at Paignton Zoo to monitor the literary output of six primates."

Punchline1: "But after a month, the Sulawesi crested macaques had only succeeded in partially destroying the machine, using it as a lavatory, and mostly typing the letter "s".

Punchline2: "The project .. received �2,000 from the Arts Council." (The BBC via Hit & Run)

Most of the books and manuscripts of the Iraqi national library were safeguarded by Iraqi heros. 400,000 of these are stacked to the rafters in a mosque. The Boston Globe has the scoop.

More Spam Please!

Is it economics or some fun math? You decide.

Mathematician John Allen Paulos's new book A Mathematician Plays the Stock Market is out today.

The snake swallows its tail:

Harare (AP) - Zimbabwe lurched closer to economic collapse Friday as banks ran out of money, fuel and power shortages worsened, factories slowed production and pay phones were scrapped because calls have become too expensive for coins. The central bank was not able to print money because the heavily indebted government failed to give it enough hard currency to import special paper, ink and security seals, state radio reported Friday. (Via the Mises Econ Blog).

Posted by Greg Ransom | Permalink

This to me sounds like major news. Of course, it's not like it involves an East Coast country club and its lord only knows how old membership policy or anything.

Virginia Postrel has new stuff up.

His analysis of electricity deregulation in Britain and the botched privatisations in Russia in the 1990s lead him to the same conclusion: that markets cannot be imposed, but are instead the sum of evolution and adaptation. They thrive within a society's laws and cultural norms; without them they fail.

From a review of John Kay's The Truth About Markets: Their Genius, Their Limits, Their Follies.

Evidently Kay's assessment of the confused Becker/Chicago approach to "economics" is about the same as mine.

Dennis Miller, patriot.

Now this is the way to kick off a new blog:

January 02, 2002
Welcome to Happy Fun Pundit

The only blog chock-full of crunchy pundity goodness.

Okay, seriously. Let's talk about what this site is up to. First, our political affiliation: We are firmly in the conservative/libertarian wing of the building, but George Will kicked us downstairs for making too much noise, and Pat Buchanan upstairs drove us absolutely NUTS with that damned goose-stepping. So here we are in the basement of the conservative wing of politics, where we can make as much noise as we want and throw parties without waking up the old fuddies.

This site is dedicated to the idea that conservative/libertarian philosophy is not just correct, but fundamentally optimistic. It's impossible to believe in the rightness of free markets without believing that they will ultimately take us to a better world. And if the future looks bright, why are so many conservatives so damned sour all the time? If you really believe in free markets, you should have trouble keeping yourself from giggling inappropriately just thinking about what's coming. So call us O'Rourke, Dave Barry, South Park conservatives. We're here to spread the word, have some fun, and kick some well-deserved asses from time to time.

Read the rest here.

Dennis Prager has an interesting piece on his recent week long visit to Stanford. This line made me wince:

If you have gone from kindergarten to graduate school to teaching in college without serious time in the non-academic world, it takes a major effort to be an adult. Spending your entire life with minors is a recipe for permanent immaturity.

Jeffrey Tucker has been doing an amazing job at the Mises Institute. Check out his new Mises Economics Blog

Jason Soon is contemplating the relation between economics and Darwinian biology, and thinking about Paul Krugman's remarks on this matter. Let me do a little Fisking of Krugman here. Krugman is just wrong about what economics is about. Economics is not about individual behavior. Economics is about explaining something, a pattern, just like Darwinian biology is about explaining something, a special sort of pattern in our experience of the biological world (I'll reference some of my writings on this in a later post). This pattern is a social pattern. Smith had it right when he pointed us to an undesigned division of labor and social coordination of interactions which produced great riches. As Hayek points out, the "rationality hypothesis" is not essential to economics (and note well, it is twice false -- it is no hypothesis, and it doesn't define rationality).

If you pretend that Krugman is right about what economics is about, Alex Roseberg has done the hard work of showing how the maximization strategy of the "rationality hypothesis" economists and the maximization strategy of the population biologist are at base insuperably different, not the least because the economists are working within an intentional framework, while natural science is inherently non-intentional (for details see Rosenberg's Economics -- Mathematical Politics or Science of Diminishing Returns). Rosenberg is the sort of philosopher who knows the fundamentals of economics much better than most economists, and the fundamentals of Darwinian biology much better than most biologists (why? because most economists and biologists are either narrow mathemacians or they are narrowly empirically oriented -- they take for granted the background explanatory superstructure they usually think about only rather superficially. Also Roseberg is one of the smartest folks on the planet.)

Stephen King (not that Stephen King) finds our Keynesian Fed is having a problem keeping it up:

"The probability of an unwelcome substantial fall in inflation, though minor, exceeds that of a pickup in inflation from its already low level."

Well, who would have thought it? .. The Fed's policy statement last week suggests that inflation - rather than growth - is top of the policy agenda. But, unlike the 1970s and 1980s, the Federal Reserve will now be aiming to keep inflation up: America's central bank needs to find the monetary policy equivalent of Viagra .. Of course, the central bank can offset this .. problem in normal circumstances by lowering the interest rate. If the interest rate is also lower than expected, the debtor is back to square one. Yes, the real debt level is higher but the cost of servicing that debt - the interest payment - is lower. The two factors cancel each other out.

Or at least that would be true if interest rates were always able to fall. At very low interest rates, however, this might not be possible. If inflation is 2.5 per cent lower than expected and interest rates start off at 5 per cent, the central bank merely has to cut interest rates by 2.5 per cent. If, however, inflation is 2.5 per cent lower than expected and interest rates start off at 1.25 per cent - which is where they are in the US today - then it's simply impossible for the central bank to provide the necessary offset: nominal interest rates cannot fall below zero.

Because of this, the Federal Reserve finds itself in a bit of a quandary. America's central bank has spent the last two years trying to bring about a sustained recovery in economic growth. To a degree, it has been successful: consumer spending had, until recently, been quite buoyant and, in 2002, economic growth surprised on the upside. Despite all this, inflation - excluding the volatile food and energy components - has continued to ebb away, suggesting that, despite the pick up in economic activity in the first half of 2002, there is now an increasing risk of a downward debt-driven spiral. If inflation persistently surprises on the downside, real debt levels will persistently surprise on the upside. But if interest rates are already very low - as they are today - the Federal Reserve may no longer be in a position to bail out the economy via more and more interest rate cuts.

Indeed, it may be the case that the attempts to prevent deflation have, in reality, made the situation even worse. To understand this point, it's worth going back to the arguments of the Austrian economists who, in the 1920s, were all the rage but were then quietly forgotten about - apart from the free market revival that took place in the Thatcherite 1980s.

The Austrian view - proposed by Friedrich Hayek - was quite straightforward. The Austrians made three general points.

First, during bubbles, interest rates are too low because the central bank will not allow them to rise to a "market clearing" level (in America, the justification for keeping rates low in the late 1990s was partly based on the Asian crisis, Long Term Capital Management scandal and the Y2K fever).

Second, the low level of interest rates will give companies the impression that consumers prefer to save rather than spend (after all, the greater the supply of savings the lower the interest rate), thus companies should invest because it will appear that future demand will be higher than current demand.

Third, consumers themselves will take one look at the low level of interest rates and conclude that there is absolutely no point in saving from current income because returns are insignificant. So they spend. The net result is that, in the boom, there is too much demand and, at the point when the investment comes on stream, there is too little demand. Seven years of famine then follows seven years of feast.

A non-Austrian central bank will look at this situation and see a standard cyclical shortfall in demand. Concerned about this shortfall, it will decide to lower interest rates still further. Consumers carry on spending and, hopefully, companies carry on investing. But this simply defers, rather than cures, the problem. Indeed, the policy potentially makes the problem bigger: consumption will only remain strong if consumers can be persuaded to carry on borrowing. But this is very much a finite process. Either nominal incomes will be hit, thereby reducing the desire to borrow, or interest rates will fall to zero and, therefore, be unable to decline any further. In both cases, the consumer will eventually hit a brick wall, increasing the risks of a shortfall in demand and an undesirable further decline in inflation.

Could the Federal Reserve now be facing this Austrian problem? Two years ago, it cut interest rates with the intention of stimulating an economic recovery. But if interest rates were too low during the period of the boom, it becomes difficult to see why even lower interest rates can be part of any subsequent solution. Indeed, by creating more debt, the danger is that the ultimate deflationary impetus becomes even more unpleasant.

Ultimately, this is an issue about prevention and cure. Interest rate cuts are seen as a way of preventing deflation. But if inflation is still falling after interest rates have come down to something close to zero, policy makers have got a serious problem. The irony is that the policy used to prevent deflation - getting people to borrow on the back of low interest rates - becomes the very worst policy to use if deflation arrives in any case.

So, should we worry? The good news is that, unlike the Bank of Japan in the first half of the 1990s, the Federal Reserve has been quick to recognise the possibility of deflation and, therefore, should stand a better chance of coming up with either prevention or cure. The potential bad news is that the prevention polices pursued by the Federal Reserve are, according to Austrian arguments, doomed to failure. Low interest rates only make the problem worse: ultimately, time alone will provide a resolution to America's economic difficulties. On this basis, policy makers should aim only to minimise the pain of adjustment, not pretend that the pain can be removed altogether.

Stephen King is managing director of economics at HSBC (the global bank).

Brink Lindsey visists the WTO and comes up with a "connections" riff ala James Burke.

Perry de Havilland Fisks Iraqi blogger Salam Pax!

Jason Soon, the evolution of a blogger.

Spam, spam, spam, spammity spam!

Michael Barone hits home with a brilliant piece on Soft and Hard America. Snippet:

One of the peculiar features of our country is that we produce incompetent 18-year-olds and remarkably competent 30-year-olds. Americans at 18 typically score lower on standardized tests than 18-year-olds from other advanced countries. Watch them on their first few days working at McDonald's or behind the counter in chain drugstores, and it's obvious that they don't really know how to make change or keep the line moving. But by the time Americans are 30, they are the most competent people in the world. They produce a stronger and more vibrant private-sector economy; they produce scientific and technical advances that lead the world; they provide the world's best medical care; they create the strongest and most agile military the world has ever seen. And it's not just a few meritocrats at the top: American talent runs wide and deep.

Why? Because from the age of 6 to 18, our kids live mostly in what I call Soft America--the part of our society where there is little competition and accountability. In contrast, most Americans in the 12 years between ages 18 and 30 live mostly in Hard America--the part of American life subject to competition and accountability; the military trains under live fire. Soft America seeks to instill self-esteem. Hard America plays for keeps.

GO Hard America. (Via Volokh Conspiracy)

"The implications of his thesis are hideous" and his book is "filled with every fallacy known to the study of logic" ... Herman Finer, visiting professor of Government at Harvard on Hayek's The Road to Serfdom, June 5, 1945 in the Harvard Crimson. Over 100 years of the Crimson are now available on line. (Tip via Brad DeLong).

The problem? Publisher guidelines require that textbook, "passages may not show certain socially sensitive features of the world as it was or is. That includes prohibitions against depictions of mothers in the mid-19th-century West teaching their daughters to make quilts for their dowries because this characterizes females as soft and submissive; and against the story of Mary McLeod Bethune, who in the early 20th century raised money from wealthy whites to open a school for black girls, partly because the appeal to white philanthropists was judged to be patronizing. A story about a young blind man's heroic hike up Mount McKinley was rejected because it is considered biased to suggest that blind people can have a harder time doing particular tasks than sighted people."

The solution? "Eliminate the statewide textbooks adoption process, and substitute a competitive market, with school districts choosing their own books and materials. And let the sun shine in by compelling all states and publishers to reveal their bias guidelines and by placing on the Internet all the deliberations of bias and sensitivity panels, including what they reject."

Daniel Kevles on Diane Ravitch's The Language Police:How Pressure Groups Restrict What Students Learn. Read Chapter 1.

Remember how Americans returned to their lives after WWII, no longer satisfied with some of the injustices at home which they had helped erradicate abroad? Victor Hanson recently returned to his farm in Califorina after a year at the Naval Academy and has reflections of a similiar sort:

On a personal note, this column marks the end of my year-long tenure as Shifrin professor of military history at the U.S. Naval Academy, and a return to a rather isolated farm in Selma, California. My first memory upon arrival in Annapolis on August 8, 2002 � a time of Washington doom and gloom � was picking up a copy of Foreign Policy and reading the cover story, "The Incredible Shrinking Eagle. The End of Pax America," in which readers were assured by Immanuel Wallerstein that "Saddam Hussein's army is not that of the Taliban, and his internal military control is far more coherent. A U.S. invasion would necessarily involve a serious land force, one that would have to fight its way to Baghdad and would likely suffer significant casualties."

As an outsider, the most notable impressions I have had since arriving are the surprising degree of self-criticism of the U.S. military and its willingness to welcome both internal and outside audit � and thus its abject contrast with two equally formidable institutions, the media and the universities, which really are shrinking and have indeed suffered "significant casualties" to their reputations. Again, it is far easier to be a liberal in the supposedly authoritarian military than to be a moderate or conservative on a college campus; students are more likely to be segregated by race in the lounges and cafeterias of "progressive" universities than they are in the mess halls of aircraft carriers.

In the past year I have met midshipmen, Air Force cadets, colonels at the Army War College, officers in the Pentagon, air and naval crews at sea, reserve and retired officers, and a variety of civilian defense analysts. Very few were triumphalists about their singular victories in Afghanistan and Iraq; instead, they were eager to dissect past plans, identify lapses, and encourage candid criticism � both operational and ethical.

Rather different from all that are the New York and Washington press corps and the culture of most universities. Many elites in these two latter institutions have throughout this crisis revealed lapses in both ethics and common sense. There is a general lack of contrition (much less apology) by prominent columnists and talking heads about being so wrong so often in editorializing about the war. Partnerships with fascist regimes were embraced by major American networks � and at home, elite critics got into bed with pretty awful antiwar organizations whose true agenda went well beyond Iraq to involve subverting the very values of the United States.

The media needs to ask itself some tough questions about its own rules of engagement abroad, the use of bribe money, and the ethical and voluntary responsibility of its pundits and writers to account to their readers, when they have for so long consistently fed them nonsense and error. Universities, in turn, must ask themselves fundamental questions about tenure and teaching loads: Why does tuition consistently rise faster than inflation; why is free speech so often curbed and regulated; and why did so many prominent professors, during the past two years, in a time of war, say so many dreadful things about their own military � from general untruths about "millions" of starving, refugees, and dead to come, to the occasional provocateur applauding the destruction of the Pentagon and wishing for more Mogadishus?

All of the fundamental principles of economics tell us that if you produce more goods at less cost -- and the money supply increases less rapidly than productivity -- then prices should come down . And there is no reason to believe that this is not a good thing. Why then all the chicken little clucking over deflation? It makes no sense, certainly not any economic sense. (For a primer on deflation, see this article by Joe Salerno.)

Productivity last year was up 4.8 percent, the largest jump in productivity since 1950. If we had sound money, right now we should be seeing continually lower prices, not endlessly higher prices. It is only continued mismanagement of the money supply which gives us unceasing inflation -- and constant irrational swings in the interest rate.

"A humble man, an honest man -- a moralist, really -- he was always true to himself." -- Mrs. Kelly on her son, Michael Kelly. Read it all.

Google and the blogosphere help de-falsify another set of untrue memes spread by journalists and the college crowd (you know who you are).

"Everybody lies about gambling" -- this has got to be the next move in the defense of Bill Bennett, who says he's "come out pretty close to even" during his binges at the casino. Brad DeLong and Brendan Koerner do the math.

Randy Barnett reads Bill Bennett the riot act:

Bennett's behavior also reveals something more insidious than hypocrisy, though it is a very old tale. Those who argue most loudly that, were it not for state coercion, people would go to hell in a hand basket have long been suspected of speaking knowingly from introspection. Think Jimmy Swaggart. Bennett provides an even better example. Bennett has had three consumptive vices of which we know: cigarettes (which he had to give up to take the drug-czar position), gambling (which he now has to give up to preserve his viability on the lecture circuit as virtue authority) and, obviously, food. In his latest admissions he stresses that he broke no laws, which is also true of his consumption of nicotine and calories. Lucky him.

This only means that his vices do not carry the additional legal baggage that he would willingly impose on others with different vices. So suppose, instead of merely issuing a statement that he was through with gambling, he had to hire a big-time lawyer (other than his brother), and go to court in handcuffs like Robert Downey Jr. has had to do. Downey is a sad character, but why does he deserve the orange jumpsuit and jail-time for his admittedly self-destructive behavior and Bennett only our compassion and goodwill?

Perhaps Bennett (or Kurtz) would respond that, were Bennett's chosen vices illegal, the laws would have saved him from himself. But this incident proves only that, unless one prohibits all vices, which the virtue proponents like Bennett deny they favor, poor weak souls like Bennett will find some other legal pleasure to abuse. The only question is what happens to them when they are caught. For the average citizen smoking marijuana, they get the tender mercies of such places as the Circuit Court of Cook County where I used to prosecute real criminals. In California and elsewhere, they get both the Clinton and Bush justice departments prosecuting as felons sick people acting legally under state law.

Naturally, Bennett opposes medical-cannabis initiatives. In a 2001 Wall Street Journal essay he dismissed them "as little more than thinly veiled legalization efforts." So much for his compassion for the suffering of others, not to mention his ability to make morally relevant distinctions. Here is where Kurtz's defense of Bennett based on positive law unravels completely. In what universe does opposition to medical cannabis under sanction of state law and subject to state regulation create even close to the social harms caused by legal gambling? But Bennett is not interested in such nuances. He disregards the judgment of the electorate of at least eight states who voted to allow this practice. He knows better than the voters. Just ask him. He advocates punishing sick people and denying them access to physician-recommended medical cannabis just so other people do not get high.

Frankly, I just do not see the virtue in this position, much less the compassion Kurtz and Frum show Bennett, who has only to withstand a bit of the verbal abuse he dishes so well. All this is why some libertarians think this latest admission of Bennett's vices significant and worthy of criticism, not whitewash.

Posted by Greg Ransom | Permalink

The red-hot New York Post has a must read on the importance of the documents linking Western journalists and politicians to the sadistic killers of Iraq. Highlights:

Iraqi leaders who should have been treated as criminals got red-carpet reception in major capitals, including Washington, London, Paris and Moscow. Saddam was an honored guest in Jacques Chirac's private home in Correze at exactly the time that the Ba'ath was massacring thousands of political opponents in 1976. Tariq Aziz was always welcome whenever he dropped by for tea with the Pope in the Vatican. Nizar Hamdoun, one of Saddam's diplomatic minions, spent many weekends in Arkansas with then-Gov. Bill Clinton.

"Putting journalists and politicians on the payroll was a well-established policy," says Khalid Kishtaini, who worked for the Iraqi Cultural Office in London in the 1980s .. Saad al-Bazzaz, another writer who worked with Saddam before joining the opposition, confirms this: "The principle was that everyone could be bought, if the price was right," he says. " You would be surprised to know who was in Saddam's pay."

The documents' real value lies elsewhere: Properly studied, they would reveal how a large number of multinational companies (no doubt encouraged by major industrial nations) helped Saddam build his war machine. Who gave [Saddam] the heavy bombers that in 1983 destroyed Iran's main oil-export terminal at Kharg Island? Which European company sold him the chemicals he used to massacre 5,000 Kurdish men, women and children in Halabchah in 1988? .. Which French company built Saddam's palaces and bunker, and which German firm provided the surveillance and communication systems? What about the British companies that helped Saddam built his "supergun," "The Fist of Allah"?

Where would Burke stand on Bennettgate? And should we avoid inconsistency and hypocracy when we're dealing with moral arguments and ethical behavior. A blogger named John takes on Jonah Goldberg and other in-the-closet Straussian philosophers.

The first Marines have arrived home at Camp Pendelton.

James Lileks has been slandered by Hugh Hewitt. Cool. Just did my first Lileks link.

Agenda No. 1 in Iraq? De-Baathification. Agenda No. 1 in America? -- De-Falsification.

John Derbyshire has a provocative piece on the split within the Republican party between urban intellectuals and red state voters. The article is creating something of a stir in the blog world.

If you haven't followed Instapundit's link to this, here is more from the "Invisible Adjunct" on the politics of conversation within the humanities:

An English professor and a science reporter (an interesting combination, no?), Cassuto recounts his investigation into a "scandal involving allegedly fabricated data in some influential superconductivity experiments at Bell Labs." He found his interview subjects candid, helpful, and "shockingly courteous as I peered into an embarrassing event in their field." But more than courteous, Cassuto notes, the physicists he interviewed were "downright friendly."

Not surprisingly, the friendliness of the physicists prompts Cassuto to reflect on the unfriendliness of the humanists with whom he spends most of his time:

"It's no coincidence that 'softer' fields are notable for their social hierarchies. One of my former graduate students described a typical conference encounter: 'the glance at the name tag and the look away -- "Oh, you're nobody." A few years ago at a party, I approached a well-known member of my field, with whom I shared a mutual friend. He didn't even bother to reply after I introduced myself. I can still see his dismissive glance...
This is more than impoliteness. It's unfriendliness. Naturally, it's no absolute rule. I've certainly encountered generosity from colleagues over the years, but I find it significant that almost every humanist I've spoken to can easily summon up recollections of mean-spirited treatment at the hands of our own scholarly community."

Of course we might ask how typical were these physicists, and how representative was their attitude toward a reporter on a scandal in their field, to whom they would want to show their discipline in the best possible light? (though Cassuto would no doubt argue that in the case of a scandal in the humanities, the reporter would not be treated with such courtesy, candor and friendliness). Anyway, his description of the humanities strikes me as all too accurate. I can't resist relaying my own recollection -- not something that happened to me but something I merely observed (as an invisible adjunct, I am but a spectator, though not a very impartial one, I will have to admit):

A panel at a major conference, with mostly "big-name" historians proposing substantive historiographical revisions to the interpretative framework that governs an important area of inquiry. During the question-and-answer period, someone asked a question that challenged one of the bases of the proposed historiographical revision. He was clearly coming at it from a more "conservative" position, I thought I detected something Straussian, perhaps, in his approach. He was very articulate and obviously very smart. If his question seemed a little bit strange or unexpected, it was a pretty good question and not something to be dismissed. His name tag revealed that he was an assistant professor at a "third-tier" place that I had never heard of. Afterwards, I was speaking with historian A (a panelist, and a friend), who was soon joined by historian B (a "big-name" historian who had attended the session, and a friend of historian A). From this point on, I was basically an observer. Well, watch and learn (and you can learn a fair bit when you're invisible). The question of the questioner came up. "Is he?..." Is he what? Well, is he one of us? of course. Where did he study and who does he know? He's at a third-rate school that nobody has heard of, which probably makes him a nobody, but then again, nowadays, with the job market so dismal, you can't be quite sure. "Oh yeah, he's...he worked with [renowned and respected historian] at [major top-ten history department.]" So then. He's not a nobody after all, he is even potentially a somebody. What's interesting is that he asked a very smart and challenging question, a question that clearly irked, a question that could not simply be dismissed. And yet it might have been dismissed, and quite easily. The extent to which his question would or would not be dismissed depended not on the force of his question but on the prestige of his connections.

This type of thing does not make for good scholarly conversation. Especially since the corollary seems to be (well, I've certainly seen this happen often enough), if you have the status and prestige in your field, you can get away with saying dismissable things that won't be dismissed.

Clich� of the Day: Bill Bennett's The Book of Virtues is number two for the week at All Consuming, proving that "All publicity is good publicity" in today's celebrity driven culture.

But it's hard to top this.

Dennett was recently interviewed by Reason magazine. Here he dances around a discussion of Hayek's notion of cultural filtering intermediated by group success:

Reason: One of the arguments the social theorist Friedrich Hayek made is that cultures that have better rules tend to spread while cultures that have worse rules don�t, and one of the ways you find out whether something is good or bad is, pretty crudely, which cultures are winning over other cultures.

Dennett: This is a claim that I�m cautiously skeptical of. But if you couch it very carefully, I think there is something to it. Change the topic from moralities to, say, scientific theory. There�s no question, contrary to some of the blather you see, that good, coherent, true scientific theories in general tend to win out over second-rate, formless, incoherent theories. We�ve improved our understanding of the world over the years. The good theories spread. Bad theories don�t. Well, not always. Sometimes they get a foothold, and they�re sort of like diseases and they�re hard to eradicate, but those are the exceptions. I think it�s an uphill battle for falsehoods to get established.

Dennett's new book is Freedom Evolves.

Some sound reflections from Peter Roff on the transition to a sustainable liberal order in Iraq;

Those who will be dispensing advice to the post-war government must not repeat the mistakes U.S. advisers made in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Assisting the transitions as Soviet-style systems collapsed throughout Eastern Europe and Russia, they emphasized the need for expanding and securing political rights over the need to codify economic rights.

Friedrich Hayek, the Nobel Prize-winning Austrian economist, correctly recognized that the free-market capitalist system is the only one through which individuals can intelligently coordinate a society. The sudden appearance or even the imposition of political rights is not sufficient to guarantee peace, liberty or democracy.

"We have seen millions voting themselves into complete dependence on a tyrant," Hayek once wrote, adding that this led many of his generation to understand "that to choose one's government is not necessarily to secure freedom."

"The ideal of democracy rests on the belief that the view which will direct government emerges from an independent and spontaneous process. It requires, therefore, the existence of a large sphere independent of majority control in which the opinions of the individuals are formed," Hayek said.

The large independent sphere he describes can only be achieved where the right of citizens to acquire, amass and transfer property exists and is protected, hence the need for an emphasis on economic rights in a reborn Iraq.

As they say, read the whole thing.

Thomas Pynchon has a new introduction to George Orwell's 1984. A snippet:

What is clear from his letters and articles at the time he was working on 1984 is Orwell's despair over the postwar state of "socialism." .. Orwell seems to have been particularly annoyed with the widespread allegiance to Stalinism to be observed among the Left, in the face of overwhelming evidence of the evil nature of the regime. "For somewhat complex reasons," he wrote in March of 1948, early in the revision of the first draft of 1984 , "nearly the whole of the English left has been driven to accept the Russian regime as 'Socialist,' while silently recognising that its spirit and practice are quite alien to anything that is meant by 'Socialism' in this country. Hence there has arisen a sort of schizophrenic manner of thinking, in which words like 'democracy' can bear two irreconcilable meanings, and such things as concentration camps and mass deportations can be right and wrong simultaneously." We recognise this "sort of schizophrenic manner of thinking" as a source for one of the great achievements of this novel, one which has entered the everyday language of political discourse - the identification and analysis of doublethink.

I've always been convinced that this theme in Orwell was much inspired by his reading of Hayek's chapter eleven, "The End of Truth" in The Road to Serfdom. Orwell read and reviewed Hayek's book in 1944, during during the period in which he was writing 1984. The title of Pynchon's piece in the Guardian is "The Road to 1984". I've never seen a detailed scholarly investigation into this matter -- if only such work had any prospect of being done in our contemporary universities.

UPDATE: Amazingly, the Amazon.com Sales Rank for Hayek's The Road to Serfdom continues strong at # 1249. Even more amazingly, Orwell's 1984 is ranked # 382. And of course, there are other editions of both books which are selling other additional copies.

File this under "problems of liberalism":

She [Chua] holds .. that when impoverished ethnic majorities are empowered by the sudden introduction of full-blown democracy, they fall prey with discouraging regularity to demagogues who incite them against the often-conspicuous disparity of welfare and privilege between them and the small, exclusive ethnic minorities that just as regularly seize power over huge proportions of the wealth generated by free markets.

The remark is from a review of Amy Chua's new book World on Fire: How Exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability

UPDATE: Find more reviews of Chua's book here, here, here, and here. One more.

It seems that it's Cultural Imperialism from Canada which is degrading American culture:

More than 200 million Harlequin romance novels, a Canadian export, were sold in 1990; they account for two-fifths of mass-market paperback sales in the United States.

Who knew? A much needed debunking of dishonest propoganda equating globalization with "Americanization".

I like this detail:

It is a myth that globalization involves the imposition of Americanized uniformity, rather than an explosion of cultural exchange. For a start, many archetypal "American" products are not as all-American as they seem. Levi Strauss, a German immigrant, invented jeans by combining denim cloth (or "serge de N�mes," because it was traditionally woven in the French town) with Genes, a style of trousers worn by Genoese sailors. So Levi's jeans are in fact an American twist on a European hybrid.

Don't miss the Eyesore of the Month

Richard Epstein has an interesting little piece on Hayek and Orwell. Epstein's bottom line:

In a sense, the contest is between Hayek the tortoise and Orwell the hare. The hare gets most of the publicity; but in the long-run the tortoise supplies us with a more profound appreciation of what makes the commercial marketplace tick.

Also this:

Hayek was not able to offer any coherent theory of what a sensible government should do, or how it might improve the situation.

Unfortunately, Epstein doesn't go beyond a judgment here. My own is that Hayek offers a great deal on how to improve things (e.g. always make sure government programs have room for competitions of various sorts -- an example Hayek jumped on was the school vouchers idea). My guess is that Epstein is not going so much on actual indepth consideration of Hayek's particular ideas and proposals, but is going instead (mostly) on faded memories of the (mostly mistaken) impressions of a hot-in-the-blood rationalistic libertarian.

When Epstein says the following, he is (in my own well considered judgment) completely off-base:

Instead of explaining what sensible rules might determine the proper scope of government activities, Hayek, especially toward the end of his life, often lapsed into a mystical reverence in which he treated �spontaneous order� created by uncoordinated individuals, usually in commercial trades, as a complete alternative to government action.

This is simply the false "Hayek myth" that seems impossible to kill. Yet it's a sure bet that the easy myth will beat hard thinking and onerous research every time. Can you tell I'm a bit tired of the constant repetitions of Hayek myths like these?

An excellent article by Richard Ebeling on Mises and money policy. Once again, it looks like Hayek came to develop an idea whose kernel can be found earlier in Mises:

In essence, Mises was suggesting in 1919 what Friedrich Hayek proposed over fifty years later in the 1970s, that in place of and as an escape from their own government's monetary system and inflationary policies, people should be free to have a "choice in currency" of either gold or the use of any variety of alternative national currencies.

According to Ed Feulner, the internet is taking over the spot once taken by Hayek and friends:

The most exciting development .. has been the proliferation of computer power. In the past, conservatives had to rely on the writings from the great minds - Friedrich von Hayek and Russell Kirk and Milton Friedman - as the primary sources of great argument and solid facts. But for the last five or eight years, the previously restricted access to facts has been pried wide open. Now, most anybody with a personal computer and access to the internet finds cutting-edge theory and rich databases literally at their fingertips. They can personally review not just the arguments, but the actual numbers pertaining to those arguments.

The interviewer is Rush Limbaugh.

Dennett dissected. The book is titled Freedom Evolves. Something about morality, evolution and The Intentional Stance, i.e. Dennett brings it all together (he wishes).

My wife will love this.

Talk about folks with an uncontrollable vice. Andrew Sullivan has the story on those drunken sailors . er . Republicans who run the Federal government. If only we could return to the days when when Democrats were in control and Federal spending was 30% less than it is today. Here is Sullivan:

This is Daniels' and Bush's legacy: one of the most recklessly big spending administrations in recent history, higher deficits and mounting debt.

Play poker with Bill Bennett!

Payback for hypocracy can be a bitch. Might make for a useful moral tale -- one that will sell:

"What rankled a lot of people in Atlantic City and Las Vegas was that Bennett's organization, Empower America, opposes the expansion of casino gambling," Green says. Bennett's enemies in the casino were angered by "what they considered to be the hypocrisy between the public stance of his organization and his private gambling."

Veteran newsman Peter Collins attacks Peter Jennings for manipulating network news copy in order to make a favorable impression of communist rule in Nicaragua According to Collins:

"what Mr. Jennings wanted was for me to make a favorable pronouncement about the 10 years of the Sandinista revolution and he called me up, massaged my script in a way that I no longer recognized it"

One doesn't know what to say, or where to start. Read the whole article. There's more on the CNN scandal as well.

Virgina Postrel, call your office. It looks like Eric Cohen -- editor of the brand spanking New Atlantis -- may be one of those who have seen the future and are ready to become its enemy. Capitalism not conservative? Who would have thunk? Here is Cohen giving us that old and hackneyed chestnut, the choice between "economic conservatism" and "social conservatism":

Clearly, conservatives have won an important economic battle - the victory of markets over central economic planning, of enterprising individuals over the ideology of the commune. But a series of moral questions remain that all conservatives - and all Americans - must soberly confront and that ultimately will shape American society in the decades ahead: Is the spirit of the new capitalism a conservative spirit? Have the highest ideals of postwar American conservatism triumphed or only the economic skeleton of those ideals? Is conservatism about virtue or personal freedom - and what happens when these two competing ideals come into conflict? Is conservatism about preserving institutions and traditions that have long shaped men's souls or about technological progress and creative destruction?

Great mother of the poverty of alternatives, please help us.

The often anti-science "right" has a new journal devoted to issues of science and technology. The journal is published by the Ethics and Public Policy Center, a Washington based Christian think tank. There are a lot of important things to think about on these topics, and religous folks and conservatives are important voices to be heard on such matters. Let's only hope that closed-minded Ludditism doesn't come to rule the day at this new publication. A sneak peek at the contents of issue 1:

AGELESS BODIES, HAPPY SOULS
by Leon R. Kass
MILITARY TECHNOLOGY AND AMERICAN CULTURE
by Victor Davis Hanson
LIBERTY, PRIVACY, AND DNA DATABASES
by Christine Rosen
THE PARADOX OF CONSERVATIVE BIOETHICS
by Yuval Levin
BIOETHICS AND THE CHARACTER OF HUMAN LIFE
by Gilbert Meilaender
THE NEW POLITICS OF TECHNOLOGY
by Eric Cohen
THE FUTURE OF MEDICAL TECHNOLOGY
by Scott Gottlieb
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE AND HUMAN LIFE
by Charles T. Rubin
THE RISE AND FALL OF SOCIOBIOLOGY
by Peter A. Lawler

The fantasy of "a strong dollar policy" and other mythologies of monetary nationalism go up in smoke in the hands of two economists who debunk the idea that the U.S. Treasury has anything to do with maintaining the value of the dollar.

Linda Chavez nails Bill Bennett:

Bennett's first response to press reports of his high roller activities was uncharacteristically blas�. "I play fairly high stakes. I adhere to the law. I don't play the 'milk money.' I don't put my family at risk, and I don't owe anyone anything," he said when confronted with the allegation that he had a gambling problem. It was the kind of statement Bennett would have excoriated had it come from anyone else. Just three weeks ago, Bennett reportedly lost over $500,000 at the Bellagio hotel in Las Vegas, and last July, he lost $340,000 at an Atlantic City, N.J., casino, according to Green -- not exactly "the milk money" but appalling behavior nonetheless.
After two days of increasingly negative news stories, Bennett issued a statement saying: "It is true that I have gambled large sums of money. I have also complied with all laws on reporting wins and losses. Nevertheless, I have done too much gambling, and this is not an example I wish to set. My gambling days are over."
I wish he had said more. This was -- in one of Bennett's favorite expressions -- a "teachable moment." He had the opportunity to help others by revealing his own struggles to overcome destructive personal behavior. Instead he chose to treat gambling as if it were akin to talking with his mouth full, a bad habit he could quit any time he choses.

John Blundell comes out in favor of a free market in money. Blundell rather likes Hayek's utterly subversive thinking on the issue:

Friedrich Hayek, argued in Denationalise Money that the politicians and their agents, the central banks, should forfeit their monopoly. His assertion is that honesty or reputation would be tested daily on the exchanges.

We can see in half the nations of the world the local state monopoly currencies are little more than cruel jokes. People prefer to trade US dollars or possibly gold coins. In some territories the US dollar has displaced the central bank.

Inflation in the UK - how I wish it was termed "dilution" - is bobbing along just beneath 3 per cent. Far better than Edward Heath's 20 per cent but at our modest rate prices still double every 23 years. So, here is a huge disagreement in the centre of what we might call liberal thinking. Should the state have the power to coerce us and if so should it be forced to obey monetary rules? Gordon Brown's innovation of giving the Bank of England autonomy and inflation targets is something of a mirage.

If he reduces or raises taxes sharply the Bank of England has no levers. Despite the fanfares the euro has been less than a triumph. The quiet success on the Continental monetary scene is the Swiss franc. Opt-outs are important. They are a truth test.

I like and admire Milton Friedman. I hold his scholarship in awe. Yet there is a great curiosity that the leading disciple of the capitalist ideal has built his main reputation in advocating a state monopoly - even if it is urged to be plain-dealing and open in its policies.

Hayek's subversive arguments appear to me to be rather stronger. Professor Lawrence White of New York University and Professor Michael Fry of Brown University have published acute pieces of research which retrieve Scotland's lost memory of how banks can succeed as issuers of notes and coins. I doubt if a single MSP has read these studies or could even articulate the arguments.

I used to imagine private money would emerge as a response to monetary chaos. Now policy makers have recovered their continence inflation has lost much of its bite. Yet can you imagine any of the respectable representatives of the capitalist cause proclaiming they could easily supply a more trustworthy currency than the state? The great intellectual defeat of the socialist ideal is nearly complete but they still hold a few fortresses where alternatives are crushed.

I'm not suggesting central banks be abolished, only that they have to surrender their power to compel. There is a scandal so familiar we no longer see it as a scandal - that the civil service and public sector employees enjoy "index-linked" pensions; that is to say they can opt out of the inflation imposed on the rest of us.

Now the appreciation that inflation is purely a monetary disease is almost universally agreed we might be bold and see companies creating their own monies.

Students are smashing at the barracades of the Leftist power stucture ruling our college campuses. The LA Times reports.

"the envy zealots". Kind of has a ring to it.

Suzanne Fields has Castro's number, with a little help from Alan Kors & F.A. Hayek:

In a provocative essay building on F.A. Hayek, in the current journal of the Social Philosophy and Policy Foundation, Alan Kors, professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania, compares Marxism and socialism to Nazism and fascism. The concentration of power over all life in a centrally planned society, he writes, always attracts and rewards those who are the "morally worst," the most ruthless and the most submissive. Communist leaders don't come to power as a "necessary evil" in a transitional process toward an ideal goal. They exert absolute power for personal gain. Those who rebel are inevitably treated as Castro treats his dissenters.
"No cause, ever, in the history of all mankind," writes Mr. Kors, "has produced more cold-blooded tyrants, more slaughtered innocents, and more orphans than socialism with power."

In a provocative essay building on F.A. Hayek, in the current journal of the Social Philosophy and Policy Foundation, Alan Kors, professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania, compares Marxism and socialism to Nazism and fascism. The concentration of power over all life in a centrally planned society, he writes, always attracts and rewards those who are the "morally worst," the most ruthless and the most submissive. Communist leaders don't come to power as a "necessary evil" in a transitional process toward an ideal goal. They exert absolute power for personal gain. Those who rebel are inevitably treated as Castro treats his dissenters.
"No cause, ever, in the history of all mankind," writes Mr. Kors, "has produced more cold-blooded tyrants, more slaughtered innocents, and more orphans than socialism with power."

Paul Krugman -- hack or fraud? Alan Reynolds investigates.

The US Fed holds tight.

Virginia Postrel weighs in on the ethics of Bill Bennett's multi-million dollar gambling addiction, and points us to Bennett's wider pattern of moral failure:

I thought it was an ethical offense for a public intellectual with a Ph.D.--as opposed to, say, a professional athlete or even a presidential candidate--to use other anonymous twentysomethings to write "his" books and articles.

At this late date the the fellow-travelling New York Times is still giving us sentences like this:

During two years, McCarthy held sensational hearings into supposed Communist subversion and espionage in the Department of State . .

The full article is here

The New York Times is that wonderful paper which most famously covered up the Soviet show trials and the mass starvations in the Soviet Empire. The Times now seems to think that it can kill the past (and all of those murdered by communism) a second time by pretending such things as the Verona files never existed. Utterly disgusting. George Orwell call you office.

Perhaps Bill Bennett missed this article.

More on the Bennett flap from Marshall, Kinsley, Sullivan, Glassman, Tushnet, and Welborn.

The Mencken Society has a great web site devoted to H. L. Mencken and his work. The website includes a link to Keith Edwards' debunking of the new Teachout Mencken biography.

You can get Teachout's Mencken biography for a buck when you join the History Book Club, as I did over the weekend.
.

This is too good to be true.

Time to redo the chimps & humans, compare and contrast homework assignment:

The data call for some revision of the estimated genetic similarity between us and our closest relatives. Previously, human and chimp genetic sequences were quoted as being nearly 99% identical, with a difference of only a few DNA's letters. In fact, the similarity may be as low as 94-95%, says Todd Taylor of the RIKEN Genomic Sciences Center in Yokohama, Japan.

More here.

Court Upholds Fundamental Liberty Principles

The recent attempt by Congress to squelch free speech with McCain-Feingold "breaks faith with the fundamental principle - understood by our nation's Founding Generation, inscribed in the First Amendment and repeatedly reaffirmed by the United States Supreme Court - that `debate on public issues should be uninhibited, robust and wide-open,'" so says the Federal Bench. The judges went on to say that the McCain-Feingold law was "unconstitutional in virtually all of its particulars." More here. So not only do these folks whore away other people's property, they're ready, willing and happy to betray the most fundamental principles of our Constitutional sytem. Bastards.

Lady Thatcher looks back with pride .. and some satisfaction. Good for her. A tidbit from the interview:

"I take the greatest pride in the fact that by nineteen hundred and ninety Britain's reputation in the world had already been transformed.

"We were no longer the sick man of Europe."

Posted by Greg Ransom | Permalink

DayPop News

Find top news stories that bloggers are talking about at Daypop Top News Stories. DayPop also has a list of the top blogs on the internet here. The DayPop top 40 is down, due to a recent (non-political) purge.

If it quacks like a duck...

The Neo-Coms -- I like it!

The Future of Freedom

I've just ordered The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy by Newsweek International reporter Fareed Zakaria. The book adds lots of contemporary detail from around the world on Friedrich Hayek's theme that there is a world of difference between liberal democracy and, well, illiberal democracy. The book has been reviewed in The Wall Street Journal among others publications. For a list of reviews, click here.

Blogging 101

I set up this site with the help of Essential Blogging from O'Reilly. It makes a handy reference when things don't go quite right. The folks at Movabletype are authors of the section dealing with their software. If I can do it, you can too.