Quote of the Day: Is War What Makes a President 'Great'?

“War is seen as a great challenge,” Bueno de Mesquita reflects, “so people don’t really question how we got into it unless it fails. All people like winning. Winning is a good thing. Therefore presidents who defeated the ‘evil enemy’—always demonized—are seen as heroic, and so are known as great presidents. That a president avoided getting into a big war is quickly forgotten.” 

This is from Ms. Eileen Reynolds from the article, Is War What Makes a President 'Great'? Published by the New York University September 23, 2016

From the behavioral perspective, such would be called as the survivorship bias.

Video: Why the Malignant Narcissist Are Dangerous!

Narcissism expert Ross Rosenberg explains why the malignant narcissist are the most dangerous of all narcissistic personality disorders (NPD). (hat tip Bob Wenzel's Target Liberty)

Malignant Narcissism - “NPD on steroids:”

- Stalin, Hitler, Castro, Mussolini, Saddam Hussein

- Paranoid, suspect deceit, doubt loyalty

- Defy, challenge & demean authority figures

- Aggressive and controlling

- Manipulatively cast themselves as victims

- Outwardly selfish and unapologetic

- Emotionally, physically and/or sexually abusive

- Reckless indifference (psychopathic tendencies)

- Grandiose:

- Fantasies of power

- Entitled

- Believe they have a special destiny in life

Interesting quote:

[5:56] Malignant narcissist…enjoys the idea of protecting people…protecting motherland…fatherland. But during their ascent to power they will kill, murder, hurt anyone who gets into their way…similar to a sociopath. Because their narcissistic urge is to get power and protect their legion of followers impels them to almost anything. And once in power the Malignant narcissist will maintain his/her power structure...

Video Roundtable Discussion: Why Do People Believe Stupid Things?

I saw this interesting video from Lew Rockwell Blog's Charles Burris who writes

Sit back and enjoy this rousing Boiling Frogs Post Roundtable discussion where James Corbett, Guillermo Jimenez and Sibel Edmonds ask (and attempt to answer) the vexing question of “why people believe stupid things?” Is it willful ignorance? Moral cowardice? Deference to authority figures’ palatable lies and tasty untruths? Intellectual sloth or cognitive laziness? Or is it a self-imposed mental imprisonment of not wanting to face the inconvenient and unpleasant reality outside their comfort zone matrix? So put on your critical thinking cap and join in the reflective conversation.

I may add: is it because of social desirability bias or groupthink? Is it because of the law of least effort? And or is it because of brainwashing?

Graphic of the Day: A Weapon Guide for the Uninformed

This is from Michael Ramirez of the Investor’s Business Daily (hat tip Lew Rockwell Blog)

By applying selective attention based on the media’s account (which serves as stimulus), supposedly intelligent people fall for the sensational.

Video: Gun Debate between Alex Jones and Piers Morgan; the Behavioral Perspective

Marquez-Pacquiao move over: Alex Jones of the Infowars.com and PrisonPlanet.TV and CNN’s Piers Morgan in an impassioned debate over gun control at the CNN  (hat tip: Bob Wenzel)

Video 1 

Video 2 

Many will be turned off by the mercurial stance of Mr Jones in handling the debate.

But from the behavioral point of view, the debating tactic employed by CNN’s Piers Morgan’s seems hinged on the devious ploy called the “power of suggestion” or the "priming effects". Mr. Morgan repeatedly attempts to oversimplify what truly has been a complex issue through the selective use of statistics or by framing the argument on specific instances. This is an example of a debate where people talk past each other.

Writes Daniel Kahneman in Thinking, Fast and Slow (p.128) “our behavior are influenced, much more than we know or want, by the environment of the moment”, such that priming makes the audience “susceptible to the biasing influence”(p.127).

In short, by anchoring the debate on issues of the moment, Mr. Morgan’s technique appeals to the emotions of the gullible audience.

How to deal with this negotiation or debating strategy?

Mr. Kahneman advices (p.126)

If you think the other side has made an outrageous proposal, you should not come back with an equally outrageous counteroffer, creating a gap that will be difficult to bridge…Instead you should make a scene, storm out or threaten to do so…

This seems exactly how Mr. Jones deftly eluded Mr. Morgan’s traps.

This debate reminds me of the chilling words of Germany's Adolf Hitler whose Nazism was responsible for the death of about 25 million people during World War II (including the Holocaust),

The most foolish mistake we could possibly make would be to allow the subject races to possess arms. History shows that all conquerors who have allowed the subject races to carry arms have prepared their own downfall by so doing. Indeed, I would go so far as to say that the supply of arms to the underdogs is a sine qua non for the overthrow of any sovereignty...

Quote of the Day: We are Pattern Seekers

We are pattern seekers, believers in a coherent world, in which regularities appear not by accident but as a result of mechanical causality or of someone’s intention. We do not expect to see regularity produced by a random process, and when we detect what appears to be a rule, we quickly reject the idea that the process is truly random. Random processes produce many sequences that convince people that the process is not random after all. You can see why assuming causality could have evolutionary advantages. It is part of the general vigilance that we have inherited from ancestors.

This is from 2002 Nobel laureate psychologist and professor Daniel Kahneman in his splendid book Thinking, Fast and Slow  p.115. 

While pattern seeking impulses had been necessary for the survival of our hunter gatherer ancestors, ignoring the role of luck and randomness in today's world extrapolates to perspectives detached from reality.

US Military Suicides at New Record High

Apparently US foreign imperial policies have been countenanced with an internal blowback (which I earlier called this as the enemy from within) through continuing record rates of military suicides. 

From PressTV

US troop suicides are still maintaining high levels despite years of tracking the effects of mental trauma on soldiers.

With 2012 coming to an end. US officials report that the Army and Navy are already reporting record numbers of suicides.

Similar record numbers are being recorded in the Air Force and Marine Corps--making 2012 the worst year for military suicides since diligent tracking began in 2001. The traumatic effects are war are lasting say experts.

As researchers study the causes of suicides in the military, doctors are evaluating the ratio of suicide rates and frequent deployments.

According to latest estimates, suicides are happening faster than the rate of one per day. Last week, suicides among active military personnel reached 323, breaking the Pentagon's previous high of 310 suicides set in 2009.

Wars have torturous psychological and emotional impact on individuals. Being distant from families can be part of such anguish. However more important is that of the trauma from combat violence. This can bring about the deeply rooted Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD); common symptoms of which are “combat fatigue” or “shell shock”, that may lead to depression and subsequent suicides. Otherwise, traumatic war experiences could morph into health issues which may exacerbate mental disease that also leads to risks of suicides.

Politicians hardly care about this though. As they relentlessly pursue interventionists policies that always leads to war. It’s not their lives at stake anyway. Besides, wars have always served as justifications for expanding political and economic control over society, which is why the incessant propaganda, abetted by the mainstream media, on nationalism.

As economist Dr. Antony Mueller recently commented,

Clausewitz wrote that war is politics with other means. I say that war is the quintessence of politics. All politics leads to war. War is the ultimate fulfillment of politics. In order to abolish war we must abolish politics. The question is how.

Libertarians are Thinkers, Not Feelers

Our adapted political ideology have not only been shaped by our life’s circumstances, orientation and other influences but importantly from our personality.

And from the psychological framework, libertarians are said to be thinkers and not impulsive and emotional chumps.

That’s according to a study cited by the prolific author Matthew Ridley at the Wall Street Journal

The study collated the results of 16 personality surveys and experiments completed by nearly 12,000 self-identified libertarians who visited YourMorals.org. The researchers compared the libertarians to tens of thousands of self-identified liberals and conservatives. It was hardly surprising that the team found that libertarians strongly value liberty, especially the "negative liberty" of freedom from interference by others. Given the philosophy of their heroes, from John Locke and John Stuart Mill to Ayn Rand and Ron Paul, it also comes as no surprise that libertarians are also individualistic, stressing the right and the need for people to stand on their own two feet, rather than the duty of others, or government, to care for people.

Perhaps more intriguingly, when libertarians reacted to moral dilemmas and in other tests, they displayed less emotion, less empathy and less disgust than either conservatives or liberals. They appeared to use "cold" calculation to reach utilitarian conclusions about whether (for instance) to save lives by sacrificing fewer lives. They reached correct, rather than intuitive, answers to math and logic problems, and they enjoyed "effortful and thoughtful cognitive tasks" more than others do.

The researchers found that libertarians had the most "masculine" psychological profile, while liberals had the most feminine, and these results held up even when they examined each gender separately, which "may explain why libertarianism appeals to men more than women."

All Americans value liberty, but libertarians seem to value it more. For social conservatives, liberty is often a means to the end of rolling back the welfare state, with its lax morals and redistributive taxation, so liberty can be infringed in the bedroom. For liberals, liberty is a way to extend rights to groups perceived to be oppressed, so liberty can be infringed in the boardroom. But for libertarians, liberty is an end in itself, trumping all other moral values.

Just a clarification: libertarianism is a political theory which according to Mr. Libertarian, Murray N. Rothbard is “an important subset of moral theory that deals with the proper role of violence in social life” and that while libertarians agree with Lord Acton "liberty is the highest political end", it is “not necessarily the highest end on everyone's personal scale of values”.  

In short, in terms of politics yes "liberty is an end", but politics is just one of the many aspects of a person’s life.

Has Communism been Shaped by Karl Marx’s Self-hatred?

Not to be accused of Tu Quoque “you too” fallacy, experience plays an important part in influencing our outlook and personal philosophy. Has self-hatred been the cornerstone of Karl Marx’s political philosophy known as Communism?

Here is an excerpt of the narration by Murray N. Rothbard of Karl Marx’s path to Marxism, (bold added)

Also prefiguring the man was a trait that Marx developed early in his youth and never relinquished: a shameless sponging on friends and relatives. Already in early 1837, Heinrich Marx, castigating his son Karl's wanton spending of the money of others, wrote to him that "on one point … you have wisely found fit to observe an aristocratic silence; I am referring to the paltry matter of money." Indeed, Marx took money from any source available: his father, mother, and throughout his adult life, his long-suffering friend and abject disciple, Friedrich Engels, all of whom fueled Marx's capacity for spending money like water.

An insatiable spender of other people's money, Marx continually complained about a shortage of financial means. While sponging on Engels, Marx perpetually complained to his friend that his largess was never enough. Thus, in 1868, Marx insisted that he could not make do on an annual income of less than £400-£500, a phenomenal sum considering that the upper tenth of Englishmen in that period were earning an average income of only £72 a year. Indeed, so profligate was Marx that he quickly ran through an inheritance from a German follower of £824 in 1864, as well as a gift of £350 from Engels in the same year.

In short, Marx was able to run through the munificent sum of almost £1200 in two years, and two years later accept another gift of £210 from Engels to pay off his newly accumulated debts. Finally, in 1868, Engels sold his share of the family cotton mill and settled upon Marx an annual "pension" of £350 from then on. Yet Marx's continual complaints about money did not abate.

As in the case of many other spongers and cadgers throughout history, Karl Marx affected a hatred and contempt for the very material resource he was so anxious to cadge and use so recklessly. The difference is that Marx created an entire philosophy around his own corrupt attitudes toward money. Man, he thundered, was in the grip of the "fetishism" of money. The problem was the existence of this evil thing, not the voluntarily adopted attitudes of some people toward it. Money Marx reviled as "the pander between … human life and the means of sustenance," the "universal whore." The Utopia of communism was a society where this scourge, money, would be abolished.

Karl Marx, the self-proclaimed enemy of the exploitation of man by man, not only exploited his devoted friend Friedrich Engels financially, but also psychologically. Thus, only three months after Marx's wife, Jenny von Westphalen, gave birth to his daughter Franziska in March 1851, their live-in maid, Helene ("Lenchen") Demuth, whom Marx had "inherited" from Jenny's aristocratic family, also gave birth to Marx's illegitimate son, Henry Frederick. Desperately anxious to keep up haute bourgeois conventions and to hold his marriage together, Karl never acknowledged his son, and, instead, persuaded Engels, a notorious womanizer, to proclaim the baby as his own. Both Marx and Engels treated the hapless Freddy extremely badly, Engels's presumed resentment at being so used providing him a rather better excuse. Marx boarded Freddy out continually, and never allowed him to visit his mother. As Fritz Raddatz, a biographer of Marx, declared, "if Henry Frederick Demuth was Karl Marx's son, the new mankind's Preacher lived an almost lifelong lie, and scorned, humiliated, and disowned his only surviving son." Engels, of course, picked up the tab for Freddy's education. Freddy was trained, however, to take his place in the working class, far from the lifestyle of his natural father, the quasi-aristocratic leader of the world's downtrodden revolutionary proletariat.

Marx's personal taste for the aristocracy was lifelong. As a young man, he attached himself to his neighbor, Jenny's father Baron Ludwig von Westphalen, and dedicated his doctoral thesis to the baron. Indeed, the snobbish proletarian communist always insisted that Jenny imprint "nee von Westphalen" on her calling card.

I suggest a read of the entire article which is rather short and includes Karl Marx’s supposed conversion to "militant atheism"

The point being; people who in good intentions believe that public welfare can be acquired through the collectivist route via communism or related socialist branches thereto, are in fact running contrary to their desires. A philosophy founded on seeming self-hatred or founded on base human instincts will not bring about prosperity but perdition through violence.

Proof of this has been the harrowing 20th century experiment where about 94 million people perished, according to the Black Book of Communism, out of the desire to achieve a utopian communist society. In other words, it took 94 million lives to prove a failed experiment and an unfulfilled utopia. Yet many are still out there preaching the same.

Why Not to Pay Heed to the Prophets of Ecological Apocalypse

Emotions based issues sell because people are emotional animals. Yet among all the emotions it is fear which is most powerful. That’s why horror movies sell, stock market crashes occur [where fear is a symptom and an accelerator of the market process], and that’s why many fall prey easily to "fear" based politics (e.g. climate change, peak resources and etc…).

Doomsayers sell or are popular also because of many people’s attachment to the Pessimism bias or the bias which exaggerates the likelihood of a negative outcome.

The profound Matthew Ridley writing at the Wired.com chronicles a list of prediction failures made by prophets of the apocalypse or Armageddon.

Ironically, despite the string of utter prediction failures; fear based issues remain in high demand. These have been evident in four fronts of social affairs, particularly in chemicals, diseases, people and resources. Mr. Ridley calls them the four horsemen of the apocalyptic promises

Here is an excerpt from the article.

Religious zealots hardly have a monopoly on apocalyptic thinking. Consider some of the environmental cataclysms that so many experts promised were inevitable. Best-selling economist Robert Heilbroner in 1974: “The outlook for man, I believe, is painful, difficult, perhaps desperate, and the hope that can be held out for his future prospects seem to be very slim indeed.” Or best-selling ecologist Paul Ehrlich in 1968: “The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s ["and 1980s" was added in a later edition] the world will undergo famines—hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked on now … nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate.” Or Jimmy Carter in a televised speech in 1977: “We could use up all of the proven reserves of oil in the entire world by the end of the next decade.”

Predictions of global famine and the end of oil in the 1970s proved just as wrong as end-of-the-world forecasts from millennialist priests. Yet there is no sign that experts are becoming more cautious about apocalyptic promises. If anything, the rhetoric has ramped up in recent years. Echoing the Mayan calendar folk, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists moved its Doomsday Clock one minute closer to midnight at the start of 2012, commenting: “The global community may be near a point of no return in efforts to prevent catastrophe from changes in Earth’s atmosphere.”

Over the five decades since the success of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring in 1962 and the four decades since the success of the Club of Rome’s The Limits to Growth in 1972, prophecies of doom on a colossal scale have become routine. Indeed, we seem to crave ever-more-frightening predictions—we are now, in writer Gary Alexander’s word, apocaholic. The past half century has brought us warnings of population explosions, global famines, plagues, water wars, oil exhaustion, mineral shortages, falling sperm counts, thinning ozone, acidifying rain, nuclear winters, Y2K bugs, mad cow epidemics, killer bees, sex-change fish, cell-phone-induced brain-cancer epidemics, and climate catastrophes.

So far all of these specters have turned out to be exaggerated. True, we have encountered obstacles, public-health emergencies, and even mass tragedies. But the promised Armageddons—the thresholds that cannot be uncrossed, the tipping points that cannot be untipped, the existential threats to Life as We Know It—have consistently failed to materialize. To see the full depth of our apocaholism, and to understand why we keep getting it so wrong, we need to consult the past 50 years of history.

The classic apocalypse has four horsemen, and our modern version follows that pattern, with the four riders being chemicals (DDT, CFCs, acid rain), diseases (bird flu, swine flu, SARS, AIDS, Ebola, mad cow disease), people (population, famine), and resources (oil, metals). Let’s visit them each in turn.

Read the rest here

Has the US Federal Reserve been Transparent?

The short and direct answer is NO.

The US Federal Reserve has even opted to defy their self-imposed policy.

Reports the Wall Street Journal

The Federal Reserve has pledged to be more transparent, but it is only willing to go so far.

The central bank normally releases comprehensive transcripts of its policy-making meetings five years after the sessions. But when news organizations requested transcripts of the meetings around the 2008 financial crisis, the Fed released redacted documents that revealed only pleasantries from the sessions and no substantive discussions.

In early March, the central bank published on its website 513 of about 7,000 pages of transcripts of the Federal Open Market Committee meetings from 2007 through 2010, according to a March 7 letter from FOMC Secretary William English that also was posted online.

The heavily redacted transcripts reflect who attended the meetings, reveal comments at the start and finish of the sessions, and transcribe some banter in between, but no talk about economics or policy. Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke is quoted calling the meetings to order, introducing staff presentations, honoring departing colleagues and adjourning the sessions for lunch.

The Fed isn't required under law to release details of its policy deliberations, but decided in 1993 to begin releasing nearly full transcripts of FOMC meetings after a five-year lag. That was in response to pressure from Congress on the central bank to be more open about its deliberations. Few major central banks release transcripts of their policy meetings.

When government engages in the picking of winners and losers or of the political or unilateral redistribution of scarce resources, contending interest groups who vie for these resources—and who don’t become the anointed—would always question the selection process. Thus, government choices would always be subjected to political controversies and conflicts that spawn social stress.

In addition, political agents do not want to be held accountable for the risks or unintended consequences from the decisions they make, or of the policies they impose. So opacity would be their default behavior.

SM Oliva formerly of the Mises Institute captures the essence of the innate non-transparency of governments.

“Transparency” is a buzzword associated with all sorts of good-government movements. But it’s something of a libertarian Trojan horse. No government can ever be transparent, for that would rob of it of its very substance. All monopoly government is predicated on the ability to actively mislead and misdirect the majority — the public — away from the truth, whether it’s political truth, economic truth, or personal truth. Even government attempts at transparency are themselves usually little more than misdirection by another name. One can be transparent in such a way as to satisfy most inquisitors while revealing nothing that compromises the basic pillars of the state.

Bottom line: Centralized political structures are inherently non-transparent.

And buzzwords of “transparency” or “independence” account for as political doublespeak or part of the communications campaign to sanitize reality.

Online Honesty

It is interesting to know that people seem to be more honest in an impersonal setting like the online environment

Explains another favorite author of mine, Matt Ridley at the Wall Street Journal (bold emphasis mine)

It is now well known that people are generally accurate and (sometimes embarrassingly) honest about their personalities when profiling themselves on social-networking sites. Patients are willing to be more open about psychiatric symptoms to an automated online doctor than a real one. Pollsters find that people give more honest answers to an online survey than to one conducted by phone.

But online honesty cuts both ways. Bloggers find that readers who comment on their posts are often harshly frank but that these same rude critics become polite if contacted directly. There's a curious pattern here that goes against old concerns over the threat of online dissembling. In fact, the mechanized medium of the Internet causes not concealment but disinhibition, giving us both confessional behavior and ugly brusqueness. When the medium is impersonal, people are prepared to be personal…

Deep in our psyches, the act of writing a furious online critique of someone's views does not feel like a confrontation, whereas telling them the same thing over the phone or face to face does. All the cues are missing that would warn us not to risk a revenge attack by being too frank.

The phenomenon has a name: the online disinhibition effect. John Suler of Rider University, who coined the phrase, points out that, online, the cues to status and hierarchy are also missing. Just like junior apes, junior people are reluctant to say what they really think to somebody with authority for fear of disapproval and punishment. "But online, in what feels like a peer relationship—with the appearances of 'authority' minimized—people are much more willing to speak out or misbehave."

Internet flaming and its benign equivalent, online honesty, are a surprise. Two decades ago, most people thought the anonymity of the online world would cause an epidemic of dishonesty, just as they thought it would lead to geeky social isolation. Then along came social networking, and the Internet not only turned social but became embarrassingly honest. The greatest perils most people perceive in their children's social networking are that they spend too much time being social and that they admit to things that will come back to haunt them when they apply for work

My comments:

Much of our actions seem to be guided by social signaling.

Popular impression about the effects of social networking have hardly been accurate.

I find this article very relevant. I find it easier to discuss or debate online, perhaps for the same reasons cited: cues to status and hierarchy become less of an influence.

But online honesty does have harmful effects too, deficiency in diplomatic expression especially against the powers that may lead to undesirable or even adverse personal consequence such as the arrests or incarceration of bloggers in South Korea or Cuba.

Imprudent social networking remarks (in Facebook or in Twitter) have also costs people jobs and personal relationships.

We Are All Africans: Exposing the Falsity of Nationalism

This 2007 article says that all human origin is from Africa.

From Reuters, (bold emphasis mine)

An analysis of thousands of skulls shows modern humans originated from a single point in Africa and finally lays to rest the idea of multiple origins, British scientists said on Wednesday.

Most researchers agree that mankind spread out of Africa starting about 50,000 years ago, quickly establishing Stone Age cultures throughout Europe, Asia and Australia.

But a minority have argued, using skull data, that divergent populations evolved independently in different areas.

The genetic evidence has always strongly supported the single origin theory, and now results from a study of more than 6,000 skulls held around the world in academic collections supports this case.

I am asking forgiveness in advance to those Christians who might think that this may seem as heresy: But I just can’t help deduce, based on these findings, that our version of genesis or Adam and Eve could have their roots as Africans.

But this is beside the point.

Regardless if we all came from Africa or not, the scientific finding only reveals what has been obvious—that we are all human beings.

This means that the conceptualization of “anti-foreign bias” or “nationalism” practiced and preached by many have all been premised on falsehoods, whether applied to trade, migration, investment, culture or etc…

Instead, nationalism or a form of groupthink (me against them mentality) has actually accounted for as mainly a political scarecrow meant to manipulate the ignorant and to advance the vested interests of certain political classes mostly by imposing controls which ultimately inhibits people’s freedom to act and produce.

As Ludwig von Mises wrote,

Interventionism generates economic nationalism, and economic nationalism generates bellicosity. If men and commodities are prevented from crossing the borderlines, why should not the armies try to pave the way for them?

Nationalism has been a pivotal force that has led to many devastating wars like the World war I with estimated deaths at 15-65 million and World War II (40-70 million)

And given that we are all one, there simply is no justification (science, philosophical, economic or political) to raise barriers to advance social civility based on voluntary cooperation from free trade.

Ludwig von Mises and Bettina Bien Greaves explains,

The market is that state of affairs under which I am giving something to you in order to receive something from you. I don't know how many of you have some inkling, or idea, of the Latin language, but in a Latin pronouncement 2,000 years ago already, there was the best description of the market — do ut des — I give in order that you should give. I contribute something in order that you should contribute something else. Out of this there developed human society, the market, peaceful cooperation of individuals. Social cooperation means the division of labor.

Is Social Cooperation A Product of Evolution?

Some people mistakenly think that social cooperation is merely a product of evolution.

They seem to forget that if evolution is about the “survival of the fittest” then men would always be at war perennially with each other. And societal advancement at current conditions would not have occurred as people would have lived off from each other through violence (war and plunder).

Yet there is no compelling reason for people to simply co-opt outside free trade. Altruism and or political submission (Social Darwinism) cannot be held as sustainable conditions for progress.

Murray Rothbard has seen through such Social Darwinist nonsense. He writes,

``For the Social Darwinist erroneously saw history and society through the peaceful, rose-colored glasses of infinitely slow, infinitely gradual social evolution. Ignoring the prime fact that no ruling caste in history has ever voluntarily surrendered its power, and that therefore Liberalism had to break through by means of a series of revolutions, the Social Darwinists looked forward peacefully and cheerfully to thousands of years of infinitely gradual evolution to the next supposedly inevitable stage of individualism.”

The only sustainable way for people to attain lasting social cooperation is via division of labor and specialization through voluntary exchange.

To quote Henry George, (bold emphasis mine)

Civilized nations, however, do not use their armies and fleets to open one another's ports to trade. What they use their armies and fleets for, is, when they quarrel, to close one another's ports. And their effort then is to prevent the carrying in of things even more than the bringing out of things—importing rather than exporting. For a people can be more quickly injured by preventing them from getting things than by preventing them from sending things away. Trade does not require force. Free trade consists simply in letting people buy and sell as they want to buy and sell. It is protection that requires force, for it consists in preventing people from doing what they want to do. Protective tariffs are as much applications of force as are blockading squadrons, and their object is the same—to prevent trade. The difference between the two is that blockading squadrons are a means whereby nations seek to prevent their enemies from trading; protective tariffs are a means whereby nations attempt to prevent their own people from trading. What protection teaches us, is to do to ourselves in time of peace what enemies seek to do to us in time of war.

And obviously deepening free trade around the world has caused greater access to more products at more affordable prices, which has led to longer lifespan (see above chart), more conveniences, diffusion of knowledge, advancement in technology that has increased connectivity and productivity.

Of course perhaps one of the unseen benefit has been the reduced scale of international wars.

In other words, free trade has raised the world’s standard of living (even if measured in per capita GDP).

Evolution cannot be the principal driver of societal advancement because man emerged from a hostile (predator-prey) environment.

And the nasty and belligerent experiences by our forebears seem to have been hardwired into people’s intuitive aversion to free exchange.

As Paul Rubin eloquently explains,

There are two aspects of our evolved psychology that help explain beliefs about trade. First, humans tend towards zero-sum thinking. That is, we do not intuitively understand the possibilities of economic growth or the benefits of trade in achieving it.

Our ancestors lived in a static world with little intertribal trade and virtually no technological advance. That is the world our minds understand. This doesn't mean that we can't grasp the crucial concept that trade benefits both parties to a transaction--but it does mean that we must learn it.

Positive-sum thinking doesn't come naturally. By analogy, we learn to speak with no teaching, but we must be taught to read. Understanding the mutual benefits of exchange is like reading, not speech.

Second, we evolved in a hostile world. Our ancestors engaged in constant conflict with neighbors, much like present-day chimpanzees. We developed strong in-group and out-group instincts, and for many aspects of behavior we still have such feelings.

These feelings are benign when applied to something like rooting for local sports teams, but are more harmful when applied to international trade. They are most harmful when they generate actual warfare. Yet the metaphor of a "trade war" shows how close to the surface harmful instincts are.

These two sets of beliefs interact to explain our natural (mis)understanding of trade. We believe that the number of jobs is fixed (a result of zero-sum thinking) and that as a result of trade these jobs go to foreigners, whom in a deep sense we view as enemies. Both beliefs are incorrect, but both are natural. And in many cases politicians are only too eager to capitalize on these beliefs to be re-elected.

In short, the anti-trade sentiment is rooted fundamentally from archaic or primitive martial instincts than from rational arguments based on people’s growing acceptance of trade as means to achieve social cooperation.

Awhile back, I recall a socialist colleague mentioned a popular axiom—that “money makes the world go around”.

I said that this misleads, because money isn’t wealth, but only a medium of exchange. And what makes wealth truly go around is trade. Without trade money is useless.

Aside from wealth, the deepening of trade also means people are learning to get past our evolutionary instincts of bellicosity, aggression and hostility.

Thus, free trade not only enriches society but also is the principal way to achieve lasting peace and order.

The Corrupting Influence of Political Power

Remember J. J. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings where “One Ring to rule the other Rings of Power” changed the behaviour of those who got hold of the powerful exotic ring by making them addicted to power.

Well, this has empirical basis.

According to Cato’s Julian Sanchez, (bold highlights mine)

The humor site Cracked rounds up some serious social science on the psychological effects of power and authority. The results are sobering—if not entirely surprising. When people in experimental environments were made to feel as though they were powerful—either by recalling actual instances for their lives or by being placed in simulated positions of power for a few hours—researchers found that they became less compassionate, less prone to take the perspective of others, more able to lie without feeling guilty about it, and more prone to consider themselves exempt from the rules and standards they righteously insist apply to others. What’s striking is how quickly and easily the experimenters elicited dramatic behavioral differences given that (unlike people who actively seek power) their “powerful” and control groups were randomly chosen.

Simply said, entities who acquire political power would most likely see a shift in perspectives and in attitudes. In short, ideology or platform becomes a secondary issue to ego.

And this is one reason why public image seems to be a foremost concern for politcos. Aside from the need to get re-elected they see popularity as feeding on their bloated self-esteem.

And applied to politics, this seems like a prominent reason why the public’s romanticized expectations of “changes” from new leadership usually ends up in frustration—the public fails to account for the risks of individual character shifts of the political leaders when assuming power.

Again Mr. Sanchez,

It’s useful to keep this in mind because, while the overwhelming lesson of the last half century of social psychology is that situational influences can easily swamp the effect of individual differences in character, our political rhetoric takes scant account of this. Political campaigns focus heavily on questions of “character”—which especially in the case of “outsider” campaigns should be of limited predictive value....The remedy is, invariably, to replace them in positions of power with better people from the other team. These social science results suggest that this is unlikely to work: The problem is power itself.

Lord Acton was right, "Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”