1% for Obama; 100% for Brother

Mr. Obama received 63mn votes, which would have been roughly similar for whatever candidate might have won. Is this a mandate?

US President is "the most important job in the world," said a Bloomberg article announcing the election result. The office surely does impact the entire world.

One problem with that is that it defies the job description utterly. I mean the original job description in the Constitution, the document that legally created the office of President. As the Founders roll over in their graves, the decisions of US Presidents impact the entire world, particularly those portions of it that, at any given time in recent history, no matter which party is in power, find US-launched or sponsored violent destruction raining down.

But how about the significance of those voting numbers? As I have been suggesting above, it all depends on your perspective. For example, the voting-age citizen population of the US is about 200mn. Therefore, about 68.5% of this group did not vote for the next US President; just 31.5% did. Indeed, only 20.6% of the entire population of the United States (305.5mn) voted for Mr. Obama. Thus, 79.4% of the US population did not, either by choice or by exclusion. Is the next President according to such a process their President? What power should he have over them, to make decisions on their behalf, to spend their resources and even lives?

And looking further afield, the global population is 6,734.9mn. This means that a scant 0.94% of people voted for the next occupant of this office.

Though I find political voting highly problematic ethically, I did vote yesterday too, in a way. The campaigning by many, many great candidates had been intense. But in the end, on economic voting day, the day of decision, the result was unanimous, as usual. What I voted for, incidentally, was a Brother HL-5280DW monochrome printer for my office.

One vote in favor; none against. 100%. As it should be.

"Successes" of intervention; the emotional challenge of looking at the truth

I found today's LRC podcast with Naomi Wolf, entitled America's Slow-Motion Fascist Coup, quite an important and insightful one. Besides the left-right crossover material and the quality and openness of the dialogue, two insights stood out.

First was the point by Lew Rockwell that government programs are actually generally successful from the point of view of the people who benefit from them: politicians, state employees, and their favored corporate and other special interests. This suggests a reformulation of Mises' perhaps too-generous doctrine that government interventions do not accomplish the objectives aimed at by their advocates. Such measures may not accomplish the stated objectives—the cover story of benefitting the public, the poor, etc.—but they do tend to accomplish the actual objectives—benefitting special interests, the power elite, corporate cronies, and the political and bureaucratic classes themselves.

The second point I found important was one that Ms. Wolf made several times: understanding what is really happening with the state can be emotionally challenging. I think this factor is key in explaining why so many people have a hard time really accepting deep insights about the nature of the state. Doing so can be emotionally unsettling. It can disrupt our basic sense of security to realize that figures who were supposed to be our childhood heroes cannot really be viewed so unambiguously. Our war heroes are revealed to have been fighting the wrong battles. Our police are enforcing unjust laws. Our judges are operating within bogus legal frameworks. Our schoolteachers are pushing state propaganda (knowingly or unknowingly) and only secondarily hopefully also teaching bits of real knowledge.

I came face to face with such an emotional challenge in a particularly difficult way a few months ago when my ongoing reading program took me through Professor Thomas J. DiLorenzo's two Lincoln books. The sheer vision of so much suffering, death, and destruction, accomplished by so much deceit, all to pull off a gigantic mercantilist rip-off, was certainly difficult to take in. All those "universal soldiers"—they believed; they killed; they died. But how many of them knew what it was really about? Now, to top it all off, generation after generation are still taught mountains of lies about what it was for.

If one really looks straight on at the reality of such things, it takes some emotional courage to just see—to realize that these are not nightmare images, but real pictures. Denial is a powerful force in the human psyche, and it works against people recognizing the sheer horrors that the state inflicts and the startling magnitude of the accumulated lies on which it is based. It takes time and effort to work through such realizations bit by bit; to pass through the initial reaction that "no, that couldn't be true."

From there, though, one has to switch back to the positive—what can we do?—and push forward with a contribution.

REVIEW | Law and Revolution II: Religion, law, and economic transformation

I just finished Law and Revolution II: The Impact of the Protestant Reformations on the Western Legal Tradition by Harold J. Berman (Harvard, 2003), published 20 years after Law and Revolution: The Formation of the Western Legal Tradition (Harvard, 1983).

The two Law and Revolution books are indispensable to the list of must-reads for becoming truly educated, taking oneself beyond the usual state-supportive propaganda found in textbooks and standard-issue academic output.

Berman is no ideologue, but he has great respect for the power of ideas. His agenda is to provide us with his best take on legal history based on a tremendous grasp of the historical and theoretical material. He also wants us to ask questions about where the Western Legal Tradition has come from and where it is going.

The level of depth, detail, clarity, and organization of this book is high. The author was a true teacher and clear researcher and thinker, and his deep knowledge of and reference to the original sources are both impressive and easy to follow. His conclusions are not merely things he wanted to say anyway; they are thoroughly informed by the patterns documented. He does not merely state his case; in good legal form, he makes his case.

The biggest takeaway for me was the power of ideas in shaping institutions. He argues that the German and English revolutions included comprehensive changes to legal philosophies, legal science, and substantive and procedural law (though all ultimately staying within the broad Western Legal Tradition) and that many of these changes were not only in harmony with the theological doctrines of the major Protestant reformations of the period, but were in some cases literally authored by some of the Protestant leaders, especially in the German case.

In contrast to Marxian and Weberian perspectives, Berman shows religious changes bringing about legal changes, which then ultimately brought about economic development to the extent that the changes enabled greater predictability and security of property and investments. Thus, Protestant "ideology" was not merely an "apology" for economic changes, but was among their driving forces. Also, Berman argues that the impact of Protestantism on economic law came not primarily from an alleged "individualism," as in Weber, but rather from the communitarian elements of Calvinist belief. For example, wide participation in subscriptions to the new format of the joint stock company was understood by many of the people actually engaged in it as form of mass action for the betterment of the world. This illustrates one of Berman's wider and refreshing (in modern academia) approaches: to take seriously what the people who were involved actually stated they were doing and what their own objectives were.

Another key point that I derived as I read was the degree to which these legal changes in the 16th and 17th centuries in Germany and England constituted the establishment of theocracies. Berman's own thesis is that much more than a "secularization" of the formerly spiritual jurisdictions, as many historians would have it, these periods were characterized by a "spiritualization of the secular." Indeed, the "secular" authorities took on, through their new laws and administrations, the religious tasks of enforcing religious morality and forwarding their view of what was needed in the secular world for the greater promotion of salvation, according to their Lutheran or Calvinist belief systems.

In the event, the felt need to have one state religion or another led to a couple of centuries of horrific religious warfare, with genocides, massacres, terrorism, the whole package. The idea of "toleration" during this period of the idea's early development was to grudgingly refrain from burning at the stake the adherents of a few approved select denominations, even though they were not the state religion at the time.

As I read, I connected the theocratic character of the legal changes of this era with the genesis of what I call do-gooder government, which thrives to this day. The Reformations provided strong impulses in the direction of using the powers of the state to "do good" for people, to try to make them be better in a particular religious context, to explicitly reform society in a religiously inspired image. [Update: For a brilliant sci-fi film treatment of do-gooder government in action, don't miss Serenity.]

I would add that while these religious changes certainly inspired legal changes, there would also still have been a certain process of selection of viewpoints. In other words, not just any set of new religious ideas, at least in their relation to state power, could have had the same influence. The princes had to take up these changes to some extent. I would submit that only those religious belief systems that would serve certain power interests, particularly those powers positioned to help incubate the systems while using them to their own advantage, could have been taken up in this particular story. Other ideas would have been ignored or worse.

In other words, though these were revolutions, the parasitic apparatus of the proto-state was doing some evolutionary selection of the ideologies leading the revolution. I do not take this to mean that these religious/legal innovators did not believe what they were teaching (in the way that cynical Marxians inevitably discount people's own accounts of their own motivations). Indeed, one of the disturbing things as I read Berman's accounts of original sources was sometimes the realization that these figures actually did deeply believe in many of the things they were writing! My point is rather a metaphorical application of the anthropic principle: the religious traditions that grew and survived also had to do so in the given power context. To become part of a new state religion, for example, a religious opinion would certainly have to be supportive of...well...the state. Just think of all those anti-state religions that were adopted as official state religions! (Well, Christianity, perhaps, but it had to shed its initial anti-state character well before it could serve as state religion).

As was the case in the first Law and Revolution book, Berman again notes numerous instances throughout Volume II in which the presence of legal competition of various kinds in Europe tended to improve the quality of legal procedure and content over time. For example, the competition for cases among the various courts in England, each with different sets of both substantive and procedural law; or the competition of German princes to hire a limited pool of qualified civil officials and judges, each of whom was free to work for any of the various German states.

There is so much detailed richness from the past in this book. So many personalities, legal cases, stories, come to life. It just has to be read to get the full effect. Don't miss it.

Who needs war and crime?

The military and the police of course. Bureau budgets must always be maintained and expanded.

"Legitimacy and need are problems for the military and police, particularly if 'peace' breaks out, and if crime declines. More generally, if social order overtakes social disorder in public perceptions, the military and police become less important. This poses an organizational challenge that has been partially solved by the mass media and popular culture myth-generating machine..."

David L. Altheide, Creating Fear: News and the Construction of Crisis, pp. 153-154.

REVIEW | Unstoppable Global Warming by Fred Singer and Dennis Avery

Unstoppable Global Warming: Every 1,500 Years is not just a book, but a massive review of the scientific literature, citing hundreds of studies from all over the world. And while the emphasis is squarely on the science, it also presents some evidence as to the structure and motivations behind the fear-mongering and power issues underpinning this topic.

For example, it presents evidence of intentional, or at least criminally negligent, presentations of data in some key studies and official reports, especially UN reports on climate change, that are then happily splashed across headlines to sell media. There is even evidence of political editing of key UN reports – after the scientists have signed off on them – that fundamentally change the findings (and this all came well before the Climategate emails came to light).

Executive summary of what the reviewed evidence suggests:

1) The Earth is in the upswing of a medium-term climate cycle. While there are many overlapping cycles of various durations, this one has been happening about every 1,500 years for at least the past hundreds of thousands of years, utterly independent of human activity, most likely fueled by a solar output cycle.

2) A great number of the individual surface temperature readings that show greater warming are flawed due to changes in the environments immediately around the temperature recording stations, mainly from urbanization (for example, the construction of heat reflecting parking lots next to recording stations).

3) Climate modeling using supercomputers is incredibly flawed and the results cannot be trusted. In some cases, there is circumstantial reason to believe that key modelling studies supporting the man-made global warming hypothesis are based on flawed data and characterized by the careful selection of only that data that supports the hypothesis and the ignoring of data that does not.

4) Hard measures of temperature change that are reliable, including satellite data, tree ring studies, ice core studies, and studies of the movement of tree lines up and down mountainsides show compelling evidence from all over the world that supports the 1,500-year cycle hypothesis, and either does not support, or strongly contradicts, the man-made climate change hypothesis.

5) The long-term data does indicate that carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has been correlated with changes in temperature. However, these temperature changes follow such changes in carbon dioxide rather than preceding them, and do so with a lag of several centuries.

6) Oceans are not going to flood, islands are not going to sink, and species are not going extinct as a result of human carbon emissions (each of these topics is treated in turn).

7) And in any case, warmer climates are better for most life forms, for food production, and for reducing the incidence of violent storms, compared to periods of cooling.

Unstoppable climate-change scare-mongering enables a massive power grab for the state. Legitimate, valid, scientific evidence has little to do with it. Selection and bias are rampant, as are misinterpretation and misreporting by both researchers and the media. However, if you are interested in considering some legitimate evidence for yourself, Avery and Singer offer a great opportunity to access some, with plenty of references for follow-up.

Prices should be falling

The long-term price level should be falling due to productivity growth. The fiat money monopolists' grand concern about how far inflation is above zero is silly. Keeping the price level flat is still a massive form of theft out of the pockets of every net positive holder of the state-mandated currency (other than some of the first recipients of new infusions). This is because the price level not only should not be rising, it should not be flat either. Indeed, it should be falling, as it did in terms of gold before the replacement of real money with paper monopoly tickets issued by state cronies.

The creation and near universal spread of the image that as long as inflation is not too far above zero, everything is fine, is a massive delusion, which masks a truly mind-boggling embezzlement racket. Even if central banks did manage zero inflation, the fact that prices were not falling with ongoing economic progress would indicate the ongoing degree of currency depreciation relative to the progress of the real economy.

What is "currency depreciation?" In the case of fiat money systems, it is embezzlement of the savings of every single person all the time everywhere. Rather than steal particular pieces of money, treasuries, central banks, and their cronies steal portions of the value of all the money that exists (leaving it all where it is in cash and deposits), and divert it into their very own newly printed notes and newly infused magical deposit credits for Wall Street. No mere private bandit could ever dream of running and maintaining such a crime syndicate.

What's the defense? A couple of possibilities. Own tangible assets (buildings, metals) and minimize holdings of fiat currency. Another—commonly adopted in the US, but not necessarily recommended—is to be in debt. Currency depreciation harms those with positive net cash and benefits those with negative net cash (the devaluation of a negative creates a double-negative and therefore a positive). No wonder there are so many in debt. Saving in fiat money is punished.

The gutting of economics as an anti-state force by fear of offending the powers

Why has economics, the most potent potential political force in history, become to most people an incomprehensible and seemingly pointless exercise, or the mysterious incantations of an anointed priesthood conversing with one another in their own secret language?

The following quotes from a recent biography of economist Ludwig Von Mises shed light on this question and also helped me more clearly understand why I chose not to continue in the academic economics track in the early 90s, and not to enter graduate school, but instead to continue studying on my own.

Even as an undergraduate, I was politely “guided” toward “more practical” directions than my study of classic treatises in Austrian economics in the Mengerian tradition onward, a discipline that is eminently comprehensible and offers clear policy prescriptions. Fortunately, the college culture was “free thinking” enough that I was able to continue on my course and still complete my degree (that’s why I had chosen the college to begin with, in fact).

The discussion below is about the 1920s (emphasis mine).

“Because of this ostracism of genuine economists, those who held (or hoped to hold) academic positions in political economy became eager to avoid any behavior that could offend the powers that be. The most innocent strategy was to understate one’s findings when they risked upsetting certain powerful social groups.”

“In a similar vein, an increasing number of young economists turned their attention to abstract and technical problems that did not have any political implications unwelcome to their employers. This helps explain the success of mathematical economics, econometrics, Keynesian economics, and game theory after WWII.”

“The transformation of economics into a self-absorbed technical discipline made it politically toothless. A mere ‘theory’ based on fictitious stipulations and therefore without scientifically valid implications for public policy was no threat to vested interests, and the champions of this theory did not have to fear reprisals. Clearly, this state of affairs suited the majority in the economics profession, both employers and employees. But it was disastrous for science, human liberty, and economic progress.”

Hülsmann (2007), Mises: The Last Knight of Liberalism, pp. 549-552.

The intellectual disease, and part of the inoculation

These quotes are by historian/biographers I have been reading on their respective subjects. The contrast is one of intellectual honesty, and the first contestant, Honest Abe, does not fare well, which is why his state-worshiping groupies have since felt the need to call him "honest." The second quote refers to economist Ludwig von Mises.

"What all this suggests is that the Hamilton/Clay/Lincoln agenda of government subsidies for road building and railroad corporations was wildly unpopular throughout the nation and had been an abysmal failure in every instance. None of these experiences seem to have phased Lincoln, however, for he continued to promote even bigger and more grandiose internal improvement projects throughout his political career."

DiLorenzo, T. J. (2003). The real Lincoln : a new look at Abraham Lincoln, his agenda, and an unnecessary war. New York :, Three Rivers Press, p. 83

"It is above all the story of a man who transformed himself in an uncompromising pursuit of the truth, of a man who adopted his ideas step by step, often against his initial inclinations."

—Hülsmann, J. G. (2007). Mises: The last knight of liberalism. Auburn, Ludwig von Mises Institute, p. xii.

Avoid and scurry: FactChecker's Ron Paul smear distracts from the real issues

The February 12, 2008 FactCheck.org article on Ron Paul by Joe Miller, entitled "Wrong Paul," given prominent link placement on Newsweek online, demonstrates the extent to which the mainstream media is desperate to avoid any discussion of Paul's actual message. Miller felt compelled to write an article on Paul, but in doing so, apparently had to struggle valiantly to find evidence of concepts and claims he thought suitable for belittling, while ignoring entirely the core messages of the campaign, along with most of the details behind the core messages. Avoid and scurry.

Whatever the validity of the claims in the article, it misses the entire forest and most of the trees to examine bug legs on the forest floor for signs of dirt. This calls into question for me the level of intellectual honesty involved in the creation of such a piece of writing.

I have yet to investigate some of the claims, though regarding the most substantive-looking one, I read some time ago the original article by Robert Higgs restating the actual annual impact of total defense spending upward to nearly $1trn, and found it convincing. For an excellent case study, read Higg's article, and then read Miller's account of it, and see which you find more informative.

Interestingly enough, Higgs is an economist and historian who is the leading expert on the history and mechanisms of government growth through crises, including wars. I suppose Miller did not realize this when he failed to mention even the name of Robert Higgs, let alone his expertise on the topic at hand. An odd move indeed for a "fact-checker."

While Miller discounts the idea of including, for example, the Department of Homeland Security, under "defense" spending, Higgs writes, "Since the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, many observers probably would agree that its budget ought to be included in any complete accounting of defense costs. After all, the homeland is what most of us want the government to defend in the first place."

And of course a share of interest on the national debt proportional to historical spending on "defense" versus other government spending should be included in the total cost of "defense" spending. What's the alternative to that? Imagine a company that claims to be doing well, but conveniently omits from its accounts the impact of massive amounts of money it borrowed to set up and run its business. Or imagine a guy who claims to have a healthy net worth, but who conveniently fails to include his massive credit card debts on his self-deceptive balance sheet, and the associated interest payments. That's fraud.

Miller's article with its prominent Newsweek placement, symbolizes for me a lack of willingness in the mainstream media to engage in or report on content-based discussion of the real issues, and a strong preference for anything that can distract from the content. Could the author instead dare to actually state the main issues Paul's campaign represents, the claims he makes about war, fiat money, bloated taxation, and the mechanisms by which the state expands and intrudes by amplifying and leveraging fear in the populace? If countering and critique are the author's aim, could he try to counter core claims rather than peripheral claims? Counter them with better content, by locating and reporting on better understandings of the core issues? Those core issues are barely acknowledged, let alone addressed.

Judging from comparisons such as between Higg's original article and the quality of Miller's take on it, perhaps such content-based capabilities are lacking. That would explain why one might resort to raising as many distractions as possible to the content with which one is unable to deal, to ignore and deflect the real issues the Paul campaign raises. These ignored issues are the same ones that are not supposed to be raised too clearly into public awareness (such as by gracing the pages of Newsweek in an honest, recognizable form), else too many people might start thinking about them, investigating, learning, and finally...understanding.

That is scary stuff for entrenched special interests of all kinds. Watch them scurry.