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A year ago today I posted Discussion Point XXXVI
Come, take your bows, or your lumps, and predict anew. The fat lady has not yet sung. November 3rd, 2012 | 14 comments - (Comments are closed)
 Assuming that global warming really is happening, and really is caused by man, the rich will get off nearly scot free, as usual. Ain’t that great! The reason that it truly is good news for all humanity is that, whereas we have scarcely an inkling as to how to stop global warming, and our efforts to change human behaviour so as to mitigate it show an unbroken record of failure in all aspects save that of making new pretexts for tyranny, we do now know how to end poverty. Hell, we’ve done it, in the rich world. Clue’s in the name. If you are poor in the rich world, and are annoyed at me for saying this, do feel free to write in and complain. Email in, I mean, on your personal computer using your broadband connection or the one provided for free in a public library. Hell, we’ve got halfway to doing it in great swathes of what was once the poor world. Last month I read about some Parisian hotel developer who caused outrage when he said his exclusive new hotel wouldn’t be open to Chinese tourists. Then he backtracked in a hurry and said “he was referring to ‘mass tourism’ when he used the phrase ‘Chinese tourists’.” Yes, I know hundreds of millions of Chinese are still poor, but think of how far we have come when a snob thinks of the Chinese when he denigrates ‘mass tourism’. Think of how far we have come when the outrage is expressed by Chinese internet users. Hell, but hell on earth is getting less hellish by the day. There is harder evidence for this than my little anecdote above. Look up worldwide life expectancy statistics. This despite the mad folly of the economic policy of practically every government in the world. We have got so stonkingly, gobsmackingly, tingle-down-your-leggingly good at poverty reduction over the last few decades that we can even do it with socialism round our necks. Just think what we could achieve without that millstone. We could exterminate the poor as a class. Would that not be agreeable? Quote me on that, you global warming activists who divide your time between Copenhagen and New York; I find the poor tiresome and would rather not have them around any more. I’d rather have all the Chinese, and all the Indians, and all the Africans getting rich and flying to London to take pictures of each other in front of London landmarks, in rotation if need be. It might cause a bit of global warming. Never mind, we rich folk can live with that. November 2nd, 2012 | 5 comments - (Comments are closed)
Here:
On the contrary, this is not the dream, it is the nightmare. This bug, if it really can “create” 24-karat gold nuggets, or can in the future be persuaded to, might destroy gold as a meaningful replacement for the deranged fiat currencies now ruining all out lives. A commenter tries to reassure us about the cost of this process, but his misspelling of “affect” does not inspire me with much confidence:
Well maybe for a while, but technology these days is notoriously prone to plunge in cost with the passing of time. The good news is that this bug doesn’t, like a government creating fiat money, create gold out of thin air. It creates it out of gold chloride. I presume that gold chloride is very roughly as rare as gold itself, as in similar order of magnitude rare. Heaven help the global economy if it is not rare. According to this Gizmodo piece, gold chloride costs “Less than gold, but still plenty”. Please, make it so. As to the future, please, let no very large stashes of gold or gold chloride be found on nearby planets or asteroids. Thank you Instapundit. Or not as the case may be. October 7th, 2012 | 44 comments - (Comments are closed)
Incoming from Jamie Whyte:
Relevant bit of the Radio Times (Monday October 8th):  Internet info from the BBC:
Indeed. October 4th, 2012 | 23 comments - (Comments are closed)
I’m now watching a video of Hans Sennholz, produced by the Foundation for Economic Education. Sennholz is talking about the Great Depression, arguing that freedom didn’t fail, politics failed, and that “if we repeat these government polices there is going to be another Great Depression”. I’m typing while he talks, but that is the gist of it. Until now, Sennholz was just a name to me. Now he is a name, a face, a voice, an attitude. And a prophet. This video was made (or should I say this film was shot?) on February 29th (!) 1988. I was steered towards it by Richard Carey (whom I SQotDed earlier this week) of Libertarian Home, to whom thanks. The First World War use to be called The Great War. Soon, The Great Depression is likely also to become known by a different title, which also includes the word “First”. September 28th, 2012 | 16 comments - (Comments are closed)
What we are dealing with is a documentary formula, into which Hayek’s life and work has been stuffed. The particular formula is the one they use for pioneering scientists who discover bacteria or something like that, and the need is to stress just how isolated and way-out the fellow was considered by everybody else. That might be fine for doing the mathematician who cracked Fermat’s Last Theorem, and may lend itself to atmospheric long-shots of the presenter walking through empty courtyards and along echoing corridors, but Friedrich Hayek was not a man working alone, and his ideas built on the ideas of other earlier and contemporary economists. I kept waiting for the name Ludwig von Mises to crop up, and it never did. It’s kind of hard to discuss Hayek’s early years in Vienna without once mentioning Mises. The final straw came when the presenter described his work at the Institute of Business Cycle Research which was founded with Mises at the Chamber of Commerce where Mises worked, and where he held his legendary seminars, which Hayek attended, and even then she could not bear to utter Mises’ name. The following is far from a perfect analogy, but it’s like watching a documentary about Mark Antony with no mention of Caesar. – Richard Carey is unimpressed by part two of the BBC series ‘Masters of Money’, featuring the work of F. A. Hayek. Part one was about Keynes. Part three will be about Marx. I know. What the hell kind of “master of money” was Karl Marx? Carey’s sentiments exactly. I considered recycling Carey’s entire posting, which is not a whole lot longer than the above excerpt, to include in particular what he says about Marx, and also about the BBC. But it is no part of my intention to have anyone here ignoring Libertarian Home, where this posting appears. Do please go there, and read the whole thing. Or just go there anyway. September 26th, 2012 | 8 comments - (Comments are closed)
“It is easier to search for your own solutions to your own problems than to those of others. Most of the recent success stories are countries that not get a lot of foreign aid and did not spend a lot of time in IMF programs, two of the indicators of the recent indicator of the White Man’s burden…Most of the recent disasters are just the opposite – tons of foreign aid and much time spent in IMF constraints. This of course involves some reverse causality….the disasters were getting IMF assistance and foreign aid because they were disasters, while the IMF and the donors bypassed success stories because those countries didn’t need the help. This does not prove that foreign assistance causes disaster, but it does show that outlandish success is very much possible without Western tutelage, while repeated treatments don’t seem to stem the tide of disaster in the failures. Most of the recent success in the world economy is happening in Eastern and southern Asia, not as a result of some global plan to end poverty but for homegrown reasons.” The White Man’s Burden, pages 345-346, by William Easterly (2006). Easterly is a US-based economics professor and has been a senior economist at the World Bank, as well as a columnist and regular commentator. His book, which despite the title is anything but a piece of Western triumphalism, is an example of a man who is prepared to discard ideas, however seemingly noble, if the results don’t stack up. And it is a book that ought to be compulsory reading for Britain’s coalition government as it continues to pour billions into overseas aid, despite the questionable results and even more questionable assumptions behind it. For far too long, the late writer and economist, Peter Bauer, was, like John the Baptist, a “voice crying in the wilderness” when it came to government aid programmes. Let’s hope more people wake up to the nonsense that a lot of so-called “aid” actually is. September 23rd, 2012 | 7 comments - (Comments are closed)
Together with other central banks, the ECB is flooding the market, posing the question not only about how the ECB will get its money back, but also how the excess liquidity created can be absorbed globally. It can’t be solved by pressing a button. If the global economy stabilises, the potential for inflation has grown enormously September 22nd, 2012 | 4 comments - (Comments are closed)
Detlev Schlichter’s latest posting – Stimulus, to infinity and beyond – is up. Beginning:
End:
Nothing to add to that myself. Other than: do what I am about to do, which is to read the whole thing. September 15th, 2012 | 12 comments - (Comments are closed)
Economic wisdom from a rather surprising place:
The headline above the article that the above paragraphs come from reads: Frequent Bridge Collapses Help Boost China’s GDP. My thanks to Sean Corrigan of the Cobden Centre for sending out the multi-recipient email that told me about this story. September 13th, 2012 | 11 comments - (Comments are closed)
I wish more people had the commonsense of this man:
This are remarks, reported by Bloomberg, of a man called Mark Cuban, who owns a US basketball team. He could have pointed the finger at the various Facebook honchos, or blamed the fiasco of the Facebook IPO on the Nasdaq, or some eeeevil Wall Street bankers, or some-such, but he didn’t. He knew that buying shares in a newly listed firm is risky; it is particularly risky in such a relatively novel field as social media where the revenue model is not always very clear to discern. The FB share debacle is a million miles away from the sort of loss that happened because of, say, a Ponzi fraudster such as Madoff, or the like. FB put itself up in the public market; a lot of people said how splendid this was going to be, and some rich people got richer, some lost a lot of money, and others have broken even. That’s how it is. September 7th, 2012 | 7 comments - (Comments are closed)
And he returns to find the state of the world slightly worse. Things were, of course, pretty bad to begin with, so that’s like Hell being slightly hotter.
Calling Mitt Romney. Don’t worry about losing. Worry about winning. August 27th, 2012 | 16 comments - (Comments are closed)
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