This is more like it! Via Tim Worstall, may I direct the natural philosophers among you to study some exciting new research from xkcd, wisest of the sages of the internet:
“Is it possible to build a jetpack using downward firing machine guns?”
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Following the Rothbard talk I mentioned yesterday, here is another performance by a dead great guy, in this case Milton Friedman, supplied by Sam Bowman at the ASI blog. What a shame, as Rothbard so regularly noted, that Friedman didn’t include banking in his list of big businesses that the government should not be giving money and power to. I say dead. Thanks to their books, but now especially thanks to video and audio, and to the internet that now allows us all to choose what video and audio we will pay attention to, these great men live on. November 22nd, 2012 | 6 comments - (Comments are closed)
 I never argue. It’s other people who argue with me. – Roger Hewland, proprietor of Gramex, Lower Marsh, London. Overheard by me, this afternoon. November 21st, 2012 | 3 comments - (Comments are closed)
In a posting at Libertarian Home, Richard Carey quotes the late, great Murray Rothbard criticising Keynes. (And while I’m linking to Carey, see also this recent piece about libertarianism by Carey, which is very fine.) Better yet, Carey also supplies, as a mere comment added later to the Rothbard posting, a recording of a talk by Rothbard, in which Rothbard also lays into Keynes, way back in April 1989. The talk begins with these words:
And the talk ends (and yes I did listen also to everything in between) with these words.
Good knockabout stuff, then, and I greatly enjoyed it, despite the occasional pauses where Rothbard rootles around in his papers for his next bit of dirt. The performance lasts about forty minutes. But be clear that this is Rothbard in attack dog mode, not Rothbard the magisterial expounder of Austrianism. He surveys Keynes’s career and character, and he does whatever is the opposite of cherry picking. With regard to Keynes’s “will to power” and general belligerence towards anyone he disapproved of, I got more than a whiff of the feeling that it takes one to know one, so to speak. Rothbard had plenty of will to power himself, even if he never got a fraction as much of it as Keynes had from the start. In addition to his great theoretical works, Rothbard spent much of his life flailing about trying to build rather unconvincing political alliances, so that he could get some power, but it never worked. But give Rothbard time. Keynes wielded huge power in the short run, the short run being, as Rothard explains, the thing that Keynes cared about far more than he did about the long run. But I think it is at least reasonable to hope that in the longer run, say in about a hundred years time, Rothbard may be held in far higher esteem than Keynes. For Keynes also did more than his fair share of flailing, in his failed attempts at serious thinking about economics. If, in the long run, Keynes eventually becomes famous only for being utterly wrong, it would be the perfect posthumous punishment for him. If, on the other hand, Keynes is still held in high esteem in centuries to come, then heaven help the human species. We are in for very bad times. Besides which, I think that Rothbard is basically spot on, not only about the character and career of Keynes, but about the need for at least some of us to get nasty about such things. One of the signs that the Cold War was ending was when anti-Marxists started getting serious about what an immoral piece of shit Karl Marx was. Marx did not “mean well”. He yearned for social catastrophe of a sort that he knew would kill millions. He was not just wrong in the intellectual sense, he was wrong morally. He promised his Grand Theory of Everything, failed to produce it, but pretended for the rest of his life that he had produced it. This was not just a great mistake and a great folly. It was morally wrong, because intellectually corrupt. It was a Big Lie. Similar things can be said of Keynes, and Rothbard says them. Good for him. November 21st, 2012 | 10 comments - (Comments are closed)
Clearly someone does not have enough real work to do. November 21st, 2012 | 12 comments - (Comments are closed)
The Guardian wished to host a debate on the question ‘Is there a gay gene?’ In the spirit of modern scientific enquiry, the experts to whom the newspaper turned in order to examine this question were Julie Bindel, a freelance journalist and political activist, and Paul Burston a journalist and author of the novel The Gay Divorcee. I have little knowledge and no very strong opinion on the question. We will find out one day and I suspect the answer will be complex. No strong opinion, but I was gripped by their debate. Not because of their insights into genetics, obviously. Their examination of their own memories and feelings as gay people, though unable to provide an answer to the question of whether there is a gene for homsexuality, did at least provide two “survey responses”, so to speak, to the broad question of whether homosexuality is inborn or acquired, a question which might well be partly answerable by self examination by homosexuals. Correction, one survey response. Julie Bindel just said that people cannot remember being babies. I did not see the relevance of this. She also seemed to resent any attempt to have the question she was there to debate researched by anyone who might actually be able to answer it, judging by the scare quotes she put around “cause” and “condition” in the second paragraph of her article. (‘And despite the obsession of some scientists to find a “cause” for our “condition”…‘) She felt all that was her gig, I suppose. No, what really fascinated me about this debate was the the assumption shared by both that the way to determine what is true is to decide which hypothesis best advances their political goals. Even that was interpreted in a narrow, tactical sense, and in a shape determined by their opponents. Bindel writes,
Burston counters:
Proof by Aspiration. Disproof by Bad Company. Ms Bindel and Mr Burston may oppose each other, but both have understood the spirit of the age. November 20th, 2012 | 39 comments - (Comments are closed)
Many people are ignorant of many things. This is not surprising and entirely forgivable, given how much knowledge there is to be had, and how much of it is highly specialized. What is less forgivable is how people feel free to spout off and propose things without the slightest idea of the complexities they are dealing with. The French revolutionaries blithely imagined they could create a whole new society with its own rules, just by thinking it up. They ended with a bloodbath in a pigsty. November 19th, 2012 | 23 comments - (Comments are closed)
The problem I often see in left-libertarian writing is the sense that the world of freed markets would look dramatically different from what we have. For example, would large corporations like Walmart exist in a freed market? Left-libertarians are quick to argue no, pointing to the various ways in which the state explicitly and implicitly subsidizes them (e.g., eminent domain, tax breaks, an interstate highway system, and others). They are correct in pointing to those subsidies, and I certainly agree with them that the state should not be favoring particular firms or types of firms. However, to use that as evidence that the overall size of firms in a freed market would be smaller seems to be quite a leap. There are still substantial economies of scale in play here and even if firms had to bear the full costs of, say, finding a new location or transporting goods, I am skeptical that it would significantly dent those advantages. It often feels that desire to make common cause with leftist criticisms of large corporations, leads left-libertarians to say “oh yes, freed markets are the path to eliminating those guys.” Again, I am not so sure. The gains from operating at that scale, especially with consumer basics, are quite real, as are the benefits to consumers. (Hat/Tip, Econlog, which has other thoughts here.) I am all in favour of ending “corporate welfare” – for ALL sizes of firms; I think tariffs, subsidies, “soft loans”, eminent domain property land-grabs, huge extensions to intellectual property such as patents (I think some forms of IP are okay, the more clearly and narrowly defined), and so on, count as such welfare. But none of this means we have to make the error of automatically saying that small firms are somehow less bad than larger ones are. And remember that when a firm, even a brilliantly-run one with no government aid, gets large, that unless it is very lucky, its sheer size can reduce its nimbleness in responding to new challenges to its position. I don’t have the data to hand, but I read somewhere that of the firms in the Dow Jones Industrial Average in 1950, fewer than half are still there. So the next time you hear someone waxing indignant about WalMart or Tesco’s, bear that sort of thing in mind. November 19th, 2012 | 20 comments - (Comments are closed)
 I would recommend clicking on the picture for the large version, in order to read the house policy of the establishment for the use of firearms on the premises. My apologies for the poor quality of the picture. The light was dim, and I merely had a phone camera. I could have stolen the menu in order to get a better picture, I suppose, but I would not dream of violating the property rights of people of such obvious soundness. November 17th, 2012 | 43 comments - (Comments are closed)
The world’s creative activities can be placed along a line. At the good end of this line are the activities that politicians don’t care about, or even better, don’t even know about. The most important quality possessed by such activities is that politicians – by extension, most people – don’t consider them to be important, necessary, vital for the future of our children, etc., so they leave them alone. These things tend to be done well. And at the opposite end of the line, there are the things that politicians and most people do care about, like schools, hospitals, transport, banking, power supplies, broadcasting, and so forth. These things are done anywhere between rather and extremely badly. It is not that they are not now done at all by businessmen. But this is not enough to ensure excellence of output. If the politicians stand ready to be the buyers or lenders of last resort, to “ensure” that this or that is “always” done properly, that it (some scandal or catastrophe that would destroy a proper business) will “never happen again”, then relentless disappointment will ensue. Bad enterprises, instead of just being left to die, are endlessly and expensively fretted over, or worse, coerced into mad purposes that only politicians could dream of caring about, like trying to change (in politics speak: “fight”) the climate. Bad schools or hospitals or banks or power stations or TV channels, rather than just being closed or cannibalised by better ones, are inspected, given new targets and new public purposes, subjected to ever more regulations, asked about repeatedly in places like the House of Commons, and above all, of course, given more and more, and more, money. It would be tempting for a visitor from the planet Zog to suppose, then, that only trivialities will be done well by twenty first century humans. Luckily, however, both people and politicians have bad taste, and bad predictive powers. As a result, many things are considered to be trivial which are actually not, and they get done and done well. Also, things which are thought to be trivial but which later turn out to be hugely important, but because the politicians and most people at first reckoned them trivial, also get done well, or get done well until such time as the politicians start taking an interest. Alas, things at first considered trivial but later deemed important tend from then on to get done badly, but at least they got done in the first place. A good example of something which, as of now, is still considered so insignificant as to be beneath the attention of politicians is the computer keyboard. Computer keyboards have got steadily better and better throughout the last three decades, yet at no point in the story did politicians do any “ensuring” or “supporting” of computer keyboards or of the enterprises that designed and built and sold them, even as more and more politicians became familiar with using such things. No “framework” more complicated than criminal and patent law was imposed upon the enterprise of making computer keyboards. No government minister has particular responsibility for computer keyboards. Computer keyboards thus continue to be made very well, and better with each passing year. Yet who would now dare to say that computer keyboards are not important? Everyone who ever has anything to do with Samizdata has at least this in common, that they use a keyboard at least some of the time, and in lots of cases, surely for something like half of life when awake. For many a modern working citizen in the year 2012, the big difference – well, a (can you register the italicising of that one letter? – you can now) big difference – between misery and happiness, to update Dickens – the difference between repetitive stress syndrome and constant cursing on the one hand, and daily digital (in the literal bodily sense) bliss on the other hand (talk of metaphorical hands is all wrong in this connection but you surely get my point) – is a nice computer keyboard. → Continue reading: My new computer keyboard November 16th, 2012 | 19 comments - (Comments are closed)
Blaming the prince of the fools should not blind anyone to the vast confederacy of fools that made him their prince. – via Bernard Goldberg November 16th, 2012 | 17 comments - (Comments are closed)
Even if you haven’t any time for Conrad Black, recently released from a US jail after being convicted of corporate wrongdoings (there is something about the conviction that makes me smell a rat), this review, by Paul Johnson, of Black’s recent book contains a rousing assault on the darker side of the US legal system. Excerpt:
In my view, the plea-bargaining system is, as Johnson notes, one of the reasons why even the most Atlanticist Brit is concerned about the way in which the US-UK extradition arrangement tends to work unfairly against Brits who can be sent to the US without a, their case having to be shown to be worthwhile before a UK court and b, face the disgrace of the plea-bargaining system, which ends up with people settling for a criminal record rather than take their chances with a hideously expensive defence. By the way, here is a Canadian take on plea-bargaining. The Volokh Conspiracy had thoughts on this a while ago. Like and admire much of the US as I do, its legal system, and incarceration rate, is nothing to admire. By the way, it is good to see Johnson returning to some of his old fire in articles such as this. In his older years I suppose he has slowed down a bit. As a reminder of him at his best, I can recommend his Birth of The Modern. November 16th, 2012 | 30 comments - (Comments are closed)
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