‘Equality’ in Education: France Mulls Banning Homework

Below is an example of policy absurdity employed by politicians in order to attain the charade of “equality”.

From Washington Post Blog (bold mine)

French President François Hollande has said he will end homework as part of a series of reforms to overhaul the country’s education system.

And the reason he wants to ban homework? 

He doesn’t think it is fair that some kids get help from their parents at home while children who come from disadvantaged families don’t. It’s an issue that goes well beyond France, and has been part of the reason that some Americans oppose homework too.

Hollande’s reform plans include increasing the number of teachers, moving the school week from four days to 4 1/2 days, overhauling the curriculum and taking steps to cut down on absenteeism.

“Education is priority,” Hollande was quoted as saying by France24.com at Paris’s Sorbonne University last week. “An education program is, by definition, a societal program. Work should be done at school, rather than at home,” as a way to ensure that students who have no help at home are not disadvantaged.

This is yet a neat example of the pretentious wisdom by politicians, on what for them is good for society, from which the interests of individuals are subordinated.

In reality, this represents a war on education in the guise of equality. Politicians clearly want to limit people's learning.

 

Yet there is one sure outcome from such daft measures: equality in ignorance. Yes, keeping people ignorant seems a great way to control them.

As French Jurist, Dalloy warned

When ignorance reigns in society and disorder in the minds of men, laws are multiplied, legislation is expected to do everything, and each fresh law being a fresh miscalculation, men are continually led to demand from it what can proceed only from themselves, from their own education and their own morality.

Doug Casey: Five Reasons Not to Vote

In Doug Casey’s weekly interview with Louis James (meant for the  consumption of regular readers and subscribers of Casey Research), the philosopher, anarchist and investing guru cites five reasons not to vote

First reason: Unethical Act

voting is an unethical act, in and of itself. That's because the state is pure, institutionalized coercion. If you believe that coercion is an improper way for people to relate to one another, then you shouldn't engage in a process that formalizes and guarantees the use of coercion.

Second reason: Compromised Privacy

Privacy. It compromises your privacy to vote. It gets your name added to a list government busybodies can make use of, like court clerks putting together lists of conscripts for jury duty. Unfortunately, this is not as important a reason as it used to be, because of the great proliferation of lists people are on anyway. Still, while it's true there's less privacy in our world today, in general, the less any government knows about you, the better off you are. This is, of course, why I've successfully refused to complete a census form for the last 40 years…

Third reason: Degrading Experience, lost productive time  

That would be because it's a degrading experience. The reason I say that is because registering to vote, and voting itself, usually involves taking productive time out of your day to go stand around in lines in government offices. You have to fill out forms and deal with petty bureaucrats. I know I can find much more enjoyable and productive things to do with my time, and I'm sure anyone reading this can as well.

Fourth reason: Voting Against Fear, two wrongs don't make a right

I'm convinced that most people don't vote for candidates they believe in, but against candidates they fear. But that's not how the guy who wins sees it; the more votes he gets, the more he thinks he's got a mandate to rule – even if all his votes are really just votes against his opponent. Some people justify this, saying it minimizes harm to vote for the lesser of two evils. That's nonsense, because it still leaves you voting for evil. The lesser of two evils is still evil.

Fifth reason: Your vote doesn’t count, the delusion of self worth

Your vote doesn't count. If I'd gotten to say that to the Donahue audience, they probably would have stoned me. People really like to believe that their individual votes count. Politicians like to say that every vote counts, because it gets everyone into busybody mode, makes voters complicit in their crimes. But statistically, any person's vote makes no more difference than a single grain of sand on a beach. Thinking their vote counts seems to give people who need it an inflated sense of self-worth.

Read the rest of the interview here

Has the Foiled Bombing of the New York Fed Been a Prank or False Flag?

A supposed attempt to "terrorize" Americans by "bombing" the New York Federal Reserve has been reported foiled.

From LA Times (bold mine) 

A 21-year-old Bangladeshi man who wanted to "destroy America" tried to detonate what he thought was a 1,000-pound bomb in front of the Federal Reserve Bank in Manhattan on Wednesday, but the explosive was a dud provided by agents as part of an FBI sting, authorities said. 

The FBI and New York police said Quazi Mohammad Rezwanul Ahsan Nafis, whom they described as an Al Qaeda loyalist, was arrested in a hotel room after several futile attempts to detonate the fake bomb by remote control. He was arraigned in federal court hours later on charges of attempting to use a weapon of mass destruction and attempting to provide material support to Al Qaeda.

"Attempting to destroy a landmark building and kill or maim untold numbers of innocent bystanders is about as serious as the imagination can conjure," said Mary Galligan, acting assistant director of the FBI in New York. She said there was no danger to the public because two "accomplices" were working with the FBI and because the purported bomb contained no explosives. 

Officials said that did not reduce the seriousness of the threat. 

 "He was arrested, but he clearly had the intent of creating mayhem," New York's police commissioner, Raymond Kelly, told reporters. Kelly said the alleged plot — one of more than a dozen thwarted in New York since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks — showed that the city remains "very much a coveted target" of terrorists. "We see this threat as being with us for a long time to come," he said. 

A 21-page complaint details months of alleged planning by Nafis, who entered the United States on a student visa in January but who allegedly told an informant that his true reason for coming to the country was to wage jihad, or holy war. Nafis settled into an apartment in the New York City borough of Queens and allegedly began trying to recruit militants, one of whom was an informant. 

Eventually, authorities say, Nafis also made contact with a second man, whom he believed to be a member of Al Qaeda. In reality, the man was an undercover FBI agent.  

"Bombing" of the NY FED with a dud or a fake bomb seems more like a prank than an act of terror. 

On the other hand, fingerprints of official involvement may even suggest of another possible false flag similar to the recent CIA double agent underwear bomber. The fugitive not only had relations with an FBI undercover agent but has been on the watchlist for months. 

One can't help draw the involvement of public officials in the understanding that many of the terror plots have been faked.

As Judge Andrew Napolitano explained in this video

 

In today's highly politicized world, one can't really know if events are for real, staged or that people have become paranoids.

Video: Global Entrepreneurship Week

The Kauffman Foundation of Entrepreneurship celebrates the "Global Entrepreneurship Week" with the following sketchbook video (unleashingideas.org)

Notable quote from Jonathan Ortmans:

Entrepreneurs might be the force for change in the country, to think beyond just economic change that they can actually make the world a better place.

Globalization of start up communities actually gives the world a much better chance at solving intractable challenges of the decades past…

The world needs more entrepreneurs

The capitalists-entrepreneurs represent as the sine qua non forces of progress of any society 

As the great Professor Ludwig von Mises wrote, 

The economic foundation of this bourgeois system is the market economy in which the consumer is sovereign. The consumer, i.e., everybody, determines by his buying or abstention from buying what should be produced, in what quantity and of what quality. The businessmen are forced by the instrumentality of profit and loss to obey the orders of the consumers. Only those enterprises can flourish that supply in the best possible and cheapest way those commodities and services which the buyers are most anxious to acquire. Those who fail to satisfy the public suffer losses and are finally forced to go out of business.

Unfortunately, the capitalists-entrepreneurs whom are the genuine heroes, has largely unappreciated by the politically brainwashed public, whom have been oriented or trained to see politics as saviors.  

Yet the deepening of the information age may change this, that's because this era will usher in the political economy of entrepreneurship.

Quote of the Day: Every Tax Reform is a Push for Higher Taxes

Every tax reform in my lifetime has actually been a push for higher taxes in one form or another. And there are still other ways to raise taxes besides raising taxes, reducing deductions, capping deductions, and closing loopholes. You can raise tariffs, increase user fees, enact quotas, inflate the money supply, or outright confiscate people’s property through police state tactics. All these methods suck resources from the private economy into the government.

The goal of every tax reform is to do this in the sneakiest way possible.

The media are no help in clarifying language. When a politician proposes a cut in taxes, the reporter imagines that he or she is a clever and hard-hitting journalist by shooting back: “How are you go to pay for that?” Nonsense. If the thief decides not to take your wallet, he shouldn’t be asked how he is going to pay for his failure to steal.

Of course, all of this is beside the point, really. The core problem is spending. If the government didn’t spend money, it wouldn’t need to tax anyone. The only real way to lower taxes over the long run is to cut spending, but again, this is not going to happen. Even those who talk about spending cuts are really talking about cutting the rate of increase in spending over five or 10 years in budget projections that have never panned out even one time in the history of the universe.

This is from Jeffrey Tucker publisher and executive editor at the Laissez Faire Books.

Let me add another 'sneaky' or furtive way to impose taxes has been to use pseudo-righteousness or moral uprightness as cover for government spending (e.g. Sin Taxes) 

And another thing, politicians often mistake treating tax revenues as a constant function of tax rates, i.e. increasing tax rates equals increase in tax revenues. They forget that people respond to incentives, such that higher tax rates may drive economic activities underground. This means political goals will not be met because of the unintended consequences from ignoring human action and pretentious wisdom.

Bastiat on the Pretentious Moralism of Mercantilism

Mercantilists operate on the dulcet sound bites that hardly stands on economic laws.

The great French classical liberal Frédéric Bastiat does another splendid demolition job on the supposed moral high grounds supposedly assumed by the mercantilists.

In reality free trade, and not protectionism, advances general social cooperation in society or what we may call as civilization.

Quoting Bastiat: [Mises Institute] (bold mine)

Among the arguments we hear adduced in favor of the restrictive regime we must not forget that which is founded on national independence.

"What should we do in case of war," it is said, "if we are placed at the mercy of England for iron and coal?"

English monopolists do not fail to cry out in their turn:

"What would become of Great Britain in case of war if she is dependent on France for provisions?"

One thing is overlooked, which is this: That the kind of dependence that results from exchange, from commercial transactions, is a reciprocal dependence. We cannot be dependent on the foreigner without the foreigner being dependent on us. Now, this is the very essence of society. To break up natural relations is not to place ourselves in a state of independence, but in a state of isolation.

Note this: A nation isolates itself looking forward to the possibility of war; but is not this very act of isolating itself the beginning of war? It renders war more easy, less burdensome, and, it may be, less unpopular. Let countries be permanent markets for each other's produce; let their reciprocal relations be such that they cannot be broken without inflicting on each other the double suffering of privation and a glut of commodities; and they will no longer stand in need of naval armaments, which ruin them, and overgrown armies, which crush them; the peace of the world will not then be compromised by the caprice of a Thiers or of a Palmerston; and war will disappear for want of what supports it, for want of resources, inducements, pretexts, and popular sympathy.

The short of this is that “when goods don’t cross borders armies will”. Promoting economic isolation is equivalent to promoting poverty and war.

So how can the advocacy of war be considered as moral?

Next mercantilists appeal to the emotion of the public, particularly to morality of material abstinence so as to justify political control over people’s economic activities.

Again Bastiat:

I am quite aware that I shall be reproached (it is the fashion of the day) with basing the fraternity of nations on men's personal interest — vile, prosaic self-interest. Better far, it may be thought, that it should have had its basis in charity, in love, even in a little self-abnegation, and that, interfering somewhat with men's material comforts, it should have had the merit of a generous sacrifice.

When shall we be done with these puerile declamations? When will hypocrisy be finally banished from science? When shall we cease to exhibit this nauseous contradiction between our professions and our practice? We hoot at and execrate personal interest; in other words, we denounce what is useful and good (for to say that all men are interested in anything is to say that the thing is good in itself), as if personal interest were not the necessary, eternal, and indestructible mainspring to which Providence has confided human perfectibility. Are we not represented as being all angels of disinterestedness? And does the thought never occur to those who say so that the public begins to see with disgust that this affected language disfigures the pages of those very writers who are most successful in filling their own pockets at the public expense? Oh! Affectation! Affectation! Thou are verily the besetting sin of our times!

What! Because material prosperity and peace are things correlative, because it has pleased God to establish this beautiful harmony in the moral world, am I not to admire, am I not to adore His ordinances, am I not to accept with gratitude laws that make justice the condition of happiness? You desire peace only in so far as it runs counter to material prosperity; and liberty is rejected because it does not impose sacrifices. If abnegation has indeed so many charms for you, why do you fail to practice it in private life? Society will be grateful to you, for someone, at least, will reap the fruit; but to desire to impose it upon mankind as a principle is the very height of absurdity, for the abnegation of all is the sacrifice of all, which is evil erected into a theory.

But, thank heaven, one can write or read many of these declamations without the world ceasing on that account to obey the social motive force, which leads us to shun evil and seek after good, and which, whether they like it or not, we must denominate personal interest.

After all, it is ironic enough to see sentiments of the most sublime self-denial invoked in support of spoliation itself. See to what this boasted disinterestedness tends! These men who are so fantastically delicate as not to desire peace itself, if it is founded on the vile interest of mankind, put their hand into the pockets of others, and especially of the poor.

For what article of the tariff protects the poor? Be pleased, gentlemen, to dispose of what belongs to yourselves as you think proper, but leave us the disposal of the fruit of our own toil, to use it or exchange it as we see best. Declaim on self-sacrifice as much as you choose, it is all very fine and very beautiful, but be at least consistent.

In reality, advocates of mercantilism hardly practice on what they preach. Since mercantilists believes that they have superior knowledge and the moral ascendancy over the rest, they feel that they are exempt from the rules they prefer or opt to impose on their constituency. They believe that if others ought to sacrifice or embrace abstemiousness, they are exempt.

Of course, alternatively, mercantilism is about political inequality and about special economic privileges accorded by the political class to a favored few (the network of friends and relatives and political allies).

In short, the obverse side of mercantilism is crony-state capitalism.

How then can the protection of the few, through political edicts, at the expense of society (where the populace are subjected to coercive restrictions on economic activities) be considered moral? 

Foreign Meddling, Not ‘War in the name of Islam’, Breeds Terror Redux

Back in May of 2011,  I pointed out of the ‘fallacy of composition’ used against Muslims, whom has been associated with 'terrorism', as justifications to advance imperialist-military agenda known as the “war on terror”.

In other words, the so-called religious war only serves as camouflage to advance US imperialist interests.

In the name of War on Terror, more innocent people are being slaughtered every year than the combined activities of the Al Qaeda.

 At the Lew Rockwell Blog, retired Professor Michael S. Rozeff has an expanded view on this. (bold mine)

I read that 23 percent of the world's population is Muslim, or 1.6 billion people. Whatever the number is, it's large. How many are terrorists out to terrorize westerners and push them out of areas they consider to be Muslim areas? How many are terrorists who attack other Muslims? How many are terrorists who attack people of other religions? One source says that Muslim attacks worldwide and against all targets, failed and successful, add up to 18,000 since 2001. This number is bound to be controversial and subject to error. If this involved 18,000 Muslims, that's a little over one-thousandth of one percent of Muslims who engaged in a terrorist or violent attempted attack or attack anywhere in the world.

How many Muslims have American forces killed since 2001? I've found a low-end estimate for 1990 to 2009, and it's 288,000. How many of these were Muslim terrorists? I can't find a tally so far. The number is very, very small relative to 288,000. The tally for drone strikes is 2-3,000 with a high proportion being innocent people. Drone strikes produce more terrorists than they kill, according to a former CIA official. 

What's my point? Same as always. The entire war on terror, or whatever name it now carries, should be stopped, abandoned, shut down, ended. By and large, it has done nothing but kill hundreds of thousands of innocent Muslims. Drones are relatively less destructive than ouright armed force attacks as in Iraq, but they too are killing innocents and alienating whole populations. Plus Obama has extended their use into all kinds of countries, thereby entangling the U.S. in future difficulties. Plus they are being run by the unaccountable and rogue CIA. 

Terrorism should be handled in a very different way. It should be handled more or less as something akin to crime but a few notches above that when it involves groups. Such groups are more like a Mafia, if they combine, or otherwise like street gangs, but gangs that have turned to intentional mayhem and destruction. Fighting terrorism does take some inter-state cooperation of domestic agencies tasked with identifying and apprehending terrorists.

Bottom line: Foreign meddling, and not religious conflict, has been the root cause of terrorism

Nobel Prize of Economics and the Penchant for Math Constants

The announcement of latest winners of the Nobel Prize in economics, particularly Alvin Roth and Lloyd Shapley seems a yawner.

Critiques Andrew Coulson at the Cato Institute Blog (bold mine)

As the Nobel organization’s website explains, the original algorithm was developed by Shapley and David Gale to optimally match pairs of individuals who could only each be matched with one other person. For instance, optimally marrying-off 10 men and 10 women based on their relative levels of interest in one another. Over the past decade, it has come to be used to match students to places in local public schools (by Roth).

The problem is that this approach to “school choice” correctly assumes that the better public schools have a fixed number of places and cannot expand to meet increased demand. So it’s about finding the least-awful allocation of students to a static set of schools—a process that does nothing to improve school quality.

Meanwhile, there is something called a “market” which not only allows consumers and producers to connect, it creates the freedoms and incentives necessary for the best providers to grow in response to rising demand and crowd-out the inferior ones. It also provides incentives for innovation and efficiency. But instead of advocating the use of market freedoms and incentives to improve education, some of our top economists are spending their skill and energy tinkering with the increasingly inefficient, pedagogically stagnant status quo.

Forehead… meet desk.

I am reminded of the great Professor Ludwig von Mises who rebuked mainstream economic practitioners for their penchant to falsely model human action into a subset of natural science.

Professor Mises (From Theory and History): (bold mine)

But it is not permissible to argue in an analogous way with regard to the quantities we observe in the field of human action. These quantities are manifestly variable. Changes occurring in them plainly affect the result of our actions. Every quantity that we can observe is a historical event, a fact which cannot be fully described without specifying the time and geographical point.

The econometrician is unable to disprove this fact, which cuts the ground from under his reasoning. He cannot help admitting that there are no "behavior constants." Nonetheless he wants to introduce some numbers, arbitrarily chosen on the basis of a historical fact, as "unknown behavior constants." The sole excuse he advances is that his hypotheses are "saying only that these unknown numbers remain reasonably constant through a period of years."  Now whether such a period of supposed constancy of a definite number is still lasting or whether a change in the number has already occurred can only be established later on. In retrospect it may be possible, although in rare cases only, to declare that over a (probably rather short) period an approximately stable ratio--which the econometrician chooses to call a "reasonably" constant ratio-prevailed between the numerical values of two factors. But this is something fundamentally different from the constants of physics. It is the assertion of a historical fact, not of a constant that can be resorted to in attempts to predict future events.

Well such so called ‘prestigious’ recognitions have seemingly been directed to the ideas and symbolisms (e.g. European Union as awardee for Peace) which promotes the interests of the establishment.

Survey: China a Marxist Country with Blossoming Capitalist Sentiment

It appears that the average Chinese has been more accommodative to capitalism than Americans.

From Bloomberg, (bold mine)

Survey respondents in the officially Marxist country were slightly more supportive of capitalism than people polled in the U.S. Seventy-four percent of Chinese surveyed said they either completely or mostly agreed with the statement that most people are better off in a free-market economy, compared with 67 percent of Americans.

More proof that the ongoing political struggle in China has been about the emergence of the politics of entrepreneurship or economic freedom.

US Debt at Record $16.19 Trillion!

US debt levels continues with its record streak.

Notes the Zero Hedge: (bold original) 

The number in question:$16,190,979,268,766.67, which is the closing number for total US public debt outstanding, which also happens to be a record closing all time high and an increase of $33 billion from yesterday courtesy of the settlement of last week's bond auctions. There is now $242 billion in debt left under the debt ceiling, which at the current recently slowed down pace of debt issuance, which is posed to pick up substantially again, will be exhausted in well under 2 months.

Remember: there is never such a thing as a free lunch. The benefit of this unrepayable debt and ruinous fiscal policy is precisely what the administration is taking benefit for, namely the soaring stock market. The offset, of course, is that as Reinhart and Rogoff never tire of showing, piling up well over 100% in public debt/GDP means that there is only one way out for the host country: either a hard default, or inflating the debt away.

As per economist Herb Stein’s Law: "If something cannot go on forever, it will stop”

Quote of the Day: The Right of the Individual’s Happiness

Now let me point out to you that we have not arrived simply at an abstract result, but that this question of liberty as against force will be found to enter into all the great questions of the day. It is the only one real and permanent dividing line between opinions. Whatever party names we may give ourselves, this is the question always waiting for an answer, Do you believe in force and authority, or do you believe in liberty? Hesitations, inconsistencies there may be—men shading off from each side into that third party which in critical and decisive times has become a proverb of weakness—but the two great masses of the thinking world are ever ranged on the one side or the other, supporters of authority, believers in liberty.

What, then, is the creed of liberty, and to what, in accepting it, are we committed? We have seen that there exists a great primary right that as men are placed here for happiness (we need not dispute as to the meaning of the term), so each man must be held to be the judge of his own happiness. No man, or body of men, has the right to wrest this judgment away from their fellow man. It is impossible to deny this, for no man can have rights over another man unless he first have rights over himself. He cannot possess the right to direct the happiness of another man, unless he possess rights to direct his own happiness: and if we grant him the latter right, this is at once fatal to the former right. Indeed to deny this right, or to abridge anything from it, is to reduce the moral world to complete disorder. Deny this right and you have no foundation left for rights of any kind—for justice, political freedom, or political equality—you have established the reign of force, and whatever gloss of civilization you may place over it, you have brought men once more to the “good old plan” on which our fathers stood.

(bold emphasis added) 

This excellent quote is from philosopher and individualist Auberon Edward Herbert in The Widest Possible Liberty written in January 1, 1885

China’s Online Gaming Revolution

I pointed out that the online gaming industry is a sunshine industry.

The recent milestone record of online players in mainland China seems to be confirming such trend.

From Shanghai Daily:

THE number of Chinese online game players has surged to a new high after the upgrading of China's broadband speed and Internet service, the world's major game maker said yesterday.

More younger players, especially students, are taking part in online games in China, Alex Tai, managing director of Blizzard China, said at the sideline of the world championship series of "StarCraft II" in Shanghai.

"China has developed a good environment for online games as many foreign games are introduced and also due to the fast development of broadband service," Tai said.

There are 120 million online game players in the country, up 4.6 percent from last year. The mainland has 538 million Internet users. The value of online games has hit 55.7 billion yuan (US$8.89 billion) on the mainland, up 20 percent annually, Analysys International said.

In Greece, Sales of Select Expired Goods Now Legal

In Greece, food shortages signified by food price escalation has prompted authorities to allow the sale of select “expired” foods.

From Voz Populi (translated via Google, hat tip zero hedge)

Greece will allow the sale of expired food at a price lower than the original, in a move that the government has not been able to justify but consumer groups have interpreted as evidence of their inability to stop the escalating cost of commodities. A ministerial decree just reviving an old regulation that authorizes supermarkets and grocery stores to sell food once the expiration date, Efe reported. "This regulation has existed for many years. And it is something that is allowed in the rest Europe. All I did was point out that these products must be sold at low prices. do not understand what is causing so much noise, "said Yorgos Moraitakis Efe, advisor to the Ministry of Development, Competition and Merchant Marine. The regulations exclude meat and dairy from the list of perishables that can be sold and sets a ceiling dates you can continue marketing.Thus, foods in which the expiration date is indicated by the day and the month, may continue on the shelf for another week. In the event that the "best before" only month and year point, the sale may be extended for one month, and in the event that the date indicated year alone, the sale date may be extended by one quarter.Though Moraitakis Efe declined to specify the reasons for this decision and merely noted that the legislation already existed, consumer groups and even government agencies have criticized the measure. "Virtually admit their inability to control prices," Efe reported Tsiafutis Victor Consumers Association 'Quality of Life', one of the oldest in Greece. 

Food Inflation 

In the Greece of the crisis, the wage and pension cuts and rising unemployment, food prices and commodities has not stopped rising.Between August 2011 and August 2012, the price of sugar shot up 15%, the eggs, 6.8% for butter by 3.2% and that of coffee, 5.9%, according to data from the Statistics Authority. "It is an immoral act," criticized Tsiafutis. "Instead of taking initiatives to control prices, allow the sale of food past the expiration date." Moreover, from the National Food Agency gets even concerned that the measure serves to something. "It is doubtful that these foods are to be sold at low prices, because the price control mechanisms have failed," said Yannis Mijas, president of this organization linked to the government. Indeed, the measure of how much states must be the initial price reduction, which is at the discretion of the merchant.To Mijas, selling expired food is also a moral dilemma, to divide consumers into two groups: those who can afford basic food and those who, because of poverty, "are forced to resort to dubious quality food."

Two observations from the above,

One, current events in Greece shows not of deflation but of stagflation.

Two, the result of inflationism has been bring about lower quality and or a deflation in value of goods and services that puts the consumers to higher risks. The above is an example of one of the immoral outcomes of inflationism

Chart of the Day: Global Warming Stopped 16 Years Ago

From the Daily Mail (hat tip Bob Wenzel)

The world stopped getting warmer almost 16 years ago, according to new data released last week.

The figures, which have triggered debate among climate scientists, reveal that from the beginning of 1997 until August 2012, there was no discernible rise in aggregate global temperatures.

This means that the ‘plateau’ or ‘pause’ in global warming has now lasted for about the same time as the previous period when temperatures rose, 1980 to 1996. Before that, temperatures had been stable or declining for about 40 years.

Exodus in Spain: More Foreign and Local Residents Emigrate

Early this year, I posted about the coming European diaspora. Current events seem to confirm on such trends as Spain continues to suffer from an exodus of foreign and local residents.

From ABC.es 

In the first nine months of the year have left Spain 420 150 people, of which 365,238 were foreigners and 54,912 Spanish, 37,539 more than in the same period in 2011, primarily for the Spanish emigration. 

Nationals who have left Spain increased by 21.6 per cent from the 45,161 who were between January and September 2011 to 54,912 this year, according to current population estimates published on Monday that the INE. The net migration-the difference between people coming and going, which was less than 137,628 people, of which 25 539 112 089 Spanish and foreign-and for the first time has been negative for the Spanish in all the Autonomous Communities.

As previously pointed out such dynamics are cumulative symptoms of the manifold policy failures in providing economic opportunities from the rampant interventionism by European governments such as Spain.

Graphic of the Day: When History Repeats….

This striking chart demonstrates why there have been patterns of similarities in history…

Writes Simon Black at the Sovereign Man (bold mine)

But it’s not just debt burdens that are problematic. ‘Rich’ countries in the West are also rapidly debasing their currencies, spawning tomes of regulatory impediments, restricting the freedoms of their citizens, aggressively expanding the powers of the state, and engaging in absurd military folly from Libya to the South China Sea.

Once again, this is not the first time history has seen such conditions. In our own lifetimes, we’ve seen the collapse of the Soviet Empire, the tragi-comical hyperinflation in Zimbabwe, and the unraveling of Argentina’s millennial crisis. Plus we can study what happened when empires from the past collapsed.

The conditions are nearly identical. Is our civilization so different that we are immune to the consequences?

Probably not. And the cycle that has befallen so many great powers before us– decline, collapse, turmoil, and reset– will likely happen in our time too.

But it’s not the end of the world. Not by a long shot.  It’s a complete reshuffling of the deck. A brand new game with brand new rules. And the old way of doing things (like printing money backed by nothing) will be resigned to history’s waste bin.

One of the things that we see frequently in history is that this transition occurs gradually, then very rapidly.

Think about the Soviet Union, which you may recall. One day, they were the greatest threat to the planet. The next day, the wall came down. It happened so quickly. It’s like what Hemingway said about bankruptcy– it happens slowly at first, then all at once.

Unfortunately we don’t know where we are along this path. And we won’t know until we’re over the cliff on the way down. Everything will feel normal until then.

The repetition of crises had been the outcome of the short term obsession of attaining political goals mostly through economic and political repression.

Thus it is equally nonsense to assert debt by itself creates all these troubles.

For instance this self-contradictory claim by populist analyst John Mauldin…

As an aside, it makes no difference how the debt was accumulated. The black holes of debt in Greece and in Argentina had completely different origins from those of Spain or Sweden or Canada (the latter two in the early '90s). The Spanish problem did not originate because of too much government spending; it developed because of a housing bubble of epic proportions. 17% of the working population was employed in the housing industry when it collapsed.

…who earlier admits that

Debt (leverage) can be a very good thing when used properly.

The reality is that debt can be distinguished through productive and consumptive activities where debts from consumption (welfare, government spending) and malinvestments (for instance convergence of interest rates and moral hazard from policies in the euro which brought about a bubble) have all been a result of interventionism or emanates from political policies that leads to business cycles or bubbles.

In a paper submitted to the classical liberal organization, the Mont Pelerin Society, which recently held a meeting in Prague, Terry College of Business University economics professor George Selgin gives a terse but insightful dynamic of the Euro crisis, (bold mine) 

Philip Bagus (2012) explains the particular course by which Greece was able to take the European Monetary Union hostage. Banks throughout the Eurozone, he says, bought Greek bonds in part because they knew that either the ECB or other Eurozone central banks would accept the collateral for loans. Thus a Greek default threatened, first, to do severe damage to Europe’s commercial banks, and then to damage the ECB insofar as it found itself holding Greek bonds taken as collateral for loans to troubled European banks.

In short, in a monetary union sovereign governments, like certain banks in single-nation central banking arrangements, can make themselves “too big to fail,” or rather “too big to default.” As Pedro Schwartz (2004, p. 136-9) noted some years before the Greek crisis: “[I]t is clear that the EU will not let any member state go bankrupt. The market therefore is sure that rogue states will be baled [sic] out, and so are the rogue states themselves. This moral hazard would increase the risk margin on a member state’s public debt and if pushed too could lead to an Argentinian sort of disaster.

Indeed, the moral hazard problem as it confronts a monetary union is all the worse precisely because sovereign governments, unlike commercial banks, can default without failing, that is, without ceasing to be going concerns. This ability makes their ransom demands all the more effective, by making the implied threats more credible. A commercial bank that tries to threaten a national central bank using the prospect of its own failure is like a suicide bomber, whereas a nation that tries to threaten a monetary union is more like a conventional kidnapper, who threatens to harm his innocent victim rather than himself.

Next, it is not debt alone, but rather attempts at the preservation of the status quo which has been founded on unsustainable political-economic premises through political and financial repression which makes conditions all the worst.

This means that the popularity of absolving culpability of those responsible for them, the “inattentiveness” to genuine conditions and or the cognitive fallacy of selective perception out of political bias or economic ideology signifies as principal reasons of the recurrence of patterns in history. 

This block excerpt from philosopher George Santayana gives as some useful lessons; from REASON IN COMMON SENSE Volume 1) [bold mine]

Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. 

In the first stage of life the mind is frivolous and easily distracted; it misses progress by failing in consecutiveness and persistence. This is the condition of children and barbarians, in whom instinct has learned nothing from experience. In a second stage men are docile to events, plastic to new habits and suggestions, yet able to graft them on original instincts, which they thus bring to fuller satisfaction. This is the plane of manhood and true progress. Last comes a stage when retentiveness is exhausted and all that happens is at once forgotten; a vain, because unpractical, repetition of the past takes the place of plasticity and fertile readaptation. In a moving world readaptation is the price of longevity. The hard shell, far from protecting the vital principle, condemns it to die down slowly and be gradually chilled; immortality in such a case must have been secured earlier, by giving birth to a generation plastic to the contemporary world and able to retain its lessons. Thus old age is as forgetful as youth, and more incorrigible; it displays the same inattentiveness to conditions; its memory becomes self-repeating and degenerates into an instinctive reaction, like a bird's chirp.

Quote of the Day: Currency Devaluation is a Subsidy to Cronies

currency devaluation is merely a transfer of wealth from all of a nation's citizens to politically favored industries, usually export industries. It is no different from giving a subsidy to any domestic producer. The subsidy is paid by all the citizens of the subsidizing country, not by the foreigners who buy the subsidized good. They get a bargain. 

Furthermore, devaluation does not make a nation more competitive. It does nothing to spur increased domestic saving or external capital investment, which lead to the increased application of capital per capita, the only sources of increased worker productivity and the only sources of increased real wages. Devaluation does not reveal the onerous, wealth-destroying effect of economic regulation, not does it reveal the true costs of the welfare state, which relies on high taxes to fund present consumption at the expense of future prosperity. What the state spends cannot be saved and invested, no matter how cheap the currency. 

This is from Patrick Barron at the Mises Institute who talks about bad economic prescriptions, by a recently awarded expert, on the European crisis. 

It is important to point out that even the major proponents or advocates of inflationism-devaluation recognize the baneful effects from such policies. 

The inflationist advocacy represents more about heuristics and oversimpflication of reality which has been masked as pretentious economic analysis (through the fixation to aggregate based statistical models). 

Nonetheless, the mainstream who subscribe to such snake oil nostrums have  been blinded or brainwashed by political ideology (where they see social solutions as only coming from the "moral authority" of government through the quackery of pseudo-science models) or have been duped by the propaganda or machinations from vested interest groups or wishes to attain social desirability through conformity with popular "feel good" talking points, or have been afflicted by sheer ignorance.

It takes sheer common sense and real world observations to debunk such fallacies, which ironically, in the world of politics have been uncommon.

Has the Atomic Bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki been about the Cold War?

In the US, many political insiders opposed the gruesome atomic bombing Nagasaki and Hiroshima in 1945, which slaughtered civilians conservatively estimated at 75,000 and 150,000 respectively, saw the bombing as unnecessary.

The Washington Blog enumerates them and further reveals of the real reason why this tragic event occurred: as psychological deterrent to the Soviet Union (hat tip Lew Rockwell.com) 

From the Washington’s Blog (all bold original)

History.com notes:

In the years since the two atomic bombs were dropped on Japan, a number of historians have suggested that the weapons had a two-pronged objective …. It has been suggested that the second objective was to demonstrate the new weapon of mass destruction to the Soviet Union. By August 1945, relations between the Soviet Union and the United States had deteriorated badly. The Potsdam Conference between U.S. President Harry S. Truman, Russian leader Joseph Stalin, and Winston Churchill (before being replaced by Clement Attlee) ended just four days before the bombing of Hiroshima. The meeting was marked by recriminations and suspicion between the Americans and Soviets. Russian armies were occupying most of Eastern Europe. Truman and many of his advisers hoped that the U.S. atomic monopoly might offer diplomatic leverage with the Soviets. In this fashion, the dropping of the atomic bomb on Japan can be seen as the first shot of the Cold War.

New Scientist reported in 2005:

The US decision to drop atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 was meant to kick-start the Cold War rather than end the Second World War, according to two nuclear historians who say they have new evidence backing the controversial theory.

Causing a fission reaction in several kilograms of uranium and plutonium and killing over 200,000 people 60 years ago was done more to impress the Soviet Union than to cow Japan, they say. And the US President who took the decision, Harry Truman, was culpable, they add.

“He knew he was beginning the process of annihilation of the species,” says Peter Kuznick, director of the Nuclear Studies Institute at American University in Washington DC, US. “It was not just a war crime; it was a crime against humanity.”

***

[The conventional explanation of using the bombs to end the war and save lives] is disputed by Kuznick and Mark Selden, a historian from Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, US.

***

New studies of the US, Japanese and Soviet diplomatic archives suggest that Truman’s main motive was to limit Soviet expansion in Asia, Kuznick claims. Japan surrendered because the Soviet Union began an invasion a few days after the Hiroshima bombing, not because of the atomic bombs themselves, he says.

According to an account by Walter Brown, assistant to then-US secretary of state James Byrnes, Truman agreed at a meeting three days before the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima that Japan was “looking for peace”. Truman was told by his army generals, Douglas Macarthur and Dwight Eisenhower, and his naval chief of staff, William Leahy, that there was no military need to use the bomb.

“Impressing Russia was more important than ending the war in Japan,” says Selden.

John Pilger points out:

The US secretary of war, Henry Stimson, told President Truman he was “fearful” that the US air force would have Japan so “bombed out” that the new weapon would not be able “to show its strength”. He later admitted that “no effort was made, and none was seriously considered, to achieve surrender merely in order not to have to use the bomb”. His foreign policy colleagues were eager “to browbeat the Russians with the bomb held rather ostentatiously on our hip”. General Leslie Groves, director of the Manhattan Project that made the bomb, testified: “There was never any illusion on my part that Russia was our enemy, and that the project was conducted on that basis.” The day after Hiroshima was obliterated, President Truman voiced his satisfaction with the “overwhelming success” of “the experiment”.

We’ll give the last word to University of Maryland professor of political economy – and former Legislative Director in the U.S. House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate, and Special Assistant in the Department of State – Gar Alperovitz:

Though most Americans are unaware of the fact, increasing numbers of historians now recognize the United States did not need to use the atomic bomb to end the war against Japan in 1945. Moreover, this essential judgment was expressed by the vast majority of top American military leaders in all three services in the years after the war ended: Army, Navy and Army Air Force. Nor was this the judgment of “liberals,” as is sometimes thought today. In fact, leading conservatives were far more outspoken in challenging the decision as unjustified and immoral than American liberals in the years following World War II.

***

Instead [of allowing other options to end the war, such as letting the Soviets attack Japan with ground forces], the United States rushed to use two atomic bombs at almost exactly the time that an August 8 Soviet attack had originally been scheduled: Hiroshima on August 6 and Nagasaki on August 9. The timing itself has obviously raised questions among many historians. The available evidence, though not conclusive, strongly suggests that the atomic bombs may well have been used in part because American leaders “preferred”—as Pulitzer Prize–winning historian Martin Sherwin has put it—to end the war with the bombs rather than the Soviet attack. Impressing the Soviets during the early diplomatic sparring that ultimately became the Cold War also appears likely to have been a significant factor.

***

The most illuminating perspective, however, comes from top World War II American military leaders. The conventional wisdom that the atomic bomb saved a million lives is so widespread that … most Americans haven’t paused to ponder something rather striking to anyone seriously concerned with the issue: Not only did most top U.S. military leaders think the bombings were unnecessary and unjustified, many were morally offended by what they regarded as the unnecessary destruction of Japanese cities and what were essentially noncombat populations. Moreover, they spoke about it quite openly and publicly.

***

Shortly before his death General George C. Marshall quietly defended the decision, but for the most part he is on record as repeatedly saying that it was not a military decision, but rather a political one.

Let me add this paper from Stanford University authored by Gene Hu 

There is considerable evidence that the American perspective on the Soviet Union and the diplomacy that occurred between the U.S. and the Soviet Union prior to these powers entering into a full-blown Cold War, was influenced by the advantage the Americans had because they had developed nuclear weapons technology. The development of such technology moreover, was dramatically and conclusively demonstrated when Truman dropped the bomb on Hiroshima, then Nagasaki. There was no doubt in the world’s mind that the technology was real and that whoever controlled it, wielded an incredible power. One is tempted to conclude that while the bombing of Hiroshima possibly ended the war with Japan in ways that may have spared both sides lives, it also conveniently served to inform the world of the Americans’ superior military might.

History is written by the victors.

Whether these bombings were due to “insistence on unconditional surrender that was the root of all evil” (Philosopher GEM Anscombe per historian Ralph Raico) or as political psy-war meant as deterrent against the fast expanding forces of the Soviet Union, the barbarism from the use of weapons of mass destruction makes those whom unleashed it war criminals.

To quote historian Ralph Raico 

The destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was a war crime worse than any that Japanese generals were executed for in Tokyo and Manila. If Harry Truman was not a war criminal, then no one ever was.

Quote of the Day: The Folly of Institutional Worship

The individual is king, and all these other things exist for the service of the king. It is a mere superstition to worship any institution, as an institution, and not to judge it by its effects upon the character and the interests of men. It is here that socialist and Catholic make the same grand mistake. They exalt the organization, which is in truth as mere dust under our feet; they debase the man, for whose sake the organization and all other earthly things exist. They posit a priori the claims of the external organization as supreme and transcending all profit and loss account, and they call upon men to sacrifice a large part of their higher nature for the sake of this organization. They both of them sacrifice man, the king, to the mere dead instrument that exists for man’s service.

(bold mine)

This excerpt is from writer, theorist, and 19th century individualist Auberon Edward Herbert in a splendid rejoinder against socialist J. A. Hobson in 1899. (libertarianism.org)

Cartoon of the Day: The Johari Window of Barack Obama

 

hat tip Lew Rockwell Blog