Now I’ve always found this juxtaposition between these two positions, often given by the same folks, deeply ironic.
Look. I’m not “christian,” in the sense that I don’t attend a Christian Church, I haven’t “allowed Christ into my heart,” whatever that means. And I’m not about to say that all Christians are good people. I’ve met plenty of good people who are not Christian; I’ve met some real assholes who were Christian. And I’ve met more than plenty of people who hide behind their faith (regardless of their faith or belief system)–Christians and non-Christians alike. Because assholes are, well, assholes.
(Though I confess there is something egregious about a person who uses their “faith”, regardless of what that faith is, as a weapon to attack others rather than as a rule set to help in their own personal self-evolution. That also, by the way, equally applies to non-Christians, leftists, feminists and the like.)
However, all reasonable belief systems have tools which help us become better people. That’s what a system of morality does: it defines a system of behavior which helps guide us to making better decisions.
And in the case of Christian morality, one of those tools are the seven virtues:
Chastity, to be virtuous and pure of “lust” in all its forms.
Temperance, to practice moderation and self-restraint.
Charity, or “agapé”–the love of others that motivates us to help one another.
Patience, to endure difficult circumstances and tolerate provocation without responding in anger.
Kindness, acting in an ethical way, with a pleasant disposition and with concern and consideration for others.
Humility, the liberation of self from pride or haughtiness, and the recognition that one is part of something “greater.”
And in the process of discarding Christianity as an ancient relic of an ancient day, we’ve tossed out the tools Christianity gave us to help us become better people.
Without that anchor–perhaps reinterpreted for the modern era–to help us become better, then what is left?
Political correctness replaces kindness and temperance by attempting to give us a bunch of ad-hoc rules, but without a reason why we should or should not avoid certain topics of conversation.
Phrases like “toxic masculinity” attempt to diagnose certain specific problems but without giving us any rules for resolving the problem other than guys, stop being a bunch of shits.
We hear about victimization, about racism, about the toxic effects of modern politics–a lot of diagnosing “the problem,” and a lot of lecturing us about how aweful we are. Worse, we see the effects of so-called social justice which attempts to shift the blame for individual failure onto social groups. Thus, “white privilege”, which blames the failure of racist individuals on the people who are not being discriminated against. Thus, again, the phrase “toxic masculinity”–which shifts the blame of a handful of individuals onto all men.
I find it deeply ironic that a lot of folks on the left seem wont to complain about all the failures of society–having just discarded one of the biggest tools in Western Civilization used to fight these failures.
I’m not arguing we need to turn to Christianity to solve the problems of injustice, bad behavior and assholishness in the world. After all, I confessed above that I’m not a Christian myself.
But we’ve tossed the baby out with the bathwater.
And so long as the left keep disregarding or ignoring the tools which we’ve traditionally used to help us become better people, frameworks we’ve developed for individual self-evolution, we will continue to see the very sins of society the left keep lecturing us about.
Something I read recently was the idea that the Left in the United States actually lives in a state of fear.
Which seems like a strange idea to me.
I do have worries. I worry if the freelance contract I’m working on will help pay the bills. I worry about my weight. I worry about the direction things are going in the world.
But fear? I don’t live in fear. I’m not afraid of the horrors of the world. I’m not afraid of groups of people doing nasty things–because I trust that society as a whole won’t listen to them. I’m not afraid of political movements–because I trust the political pendulum to swing the other way, as it has for 230 years. I’m not afraid that somehow the world will become a meaner place because so far it’s gotten consistently better: personal political and economic freedom have all been on the constant rise in the United States, wealth has increased around the world, and the percentage of people in the world living in abject poverty, without clean water, nutritious food and solid shelter is smaller today than it has ever in my lifetime.
So this idea of living in fear is foreign to me.
But once it was pointed out to me–well, now, I can’t help but see the fear on the Left everywhere I look:
Annual warning. Be careful traveling from April 15-21. Various kinds of fascists focus on this period for special nastiness. Yes, statisticians are skeptical. Still, eyes open. Have courage. Citizens are mighty beings.
Yes, statisticians think there is nothing to be afraid of–but still, be afraid. And “have courage”: face your fear.
But of course, white nationalism is on the rise everywhere, and by not living in a proper state of fear, President Trump is actually allowing white nationalists to run roughshod over good people.
All those rich people with their rich stuff controlling rich things: they’re destroying our democracy. And things are getting worse–far worse, so be afraid. (Nevermind that a century ago the wealthy were so powerful J.P. Morgan actually bailed out the United States government.)
I can go on and on.
But once you realize what to look for, it’s unmistakeable: the Left live in fear.
Fear of people who don’t think like them. Fear of the powerful. Fear of inequality. Fear of the environment.
And the language of the Left is full of fear and facing that fear: that we must “have courage” against fear. That we must “hope” things get better. That we must look beyond logic–because logic lies. What counts is that we come together as a group, find solace in a world full of fears, full of destruction and hateful, powerful forces aligned against us. That we must huddle in the faint light against the darkness, the monsters and the forces of destruction–and hope against fear.
Wear those brave little ribbons, wave those brave little protest signs, have courage against the inevitable, mind-numbing, soul-crushing fear. And maybe, if enough people are afraid enough, they’ll rise up and start taking some action.
Frankly, to me, this is insane.
By fearing everything you can’t rationally evaluate; all you can do is react. Instead of evaluating your chances of having a run-in with a white nationalist with a gun, you live in fear you’re about to be struck dead–regardless of the fact that your chances of being stuck by lighting are actually higher.
And this is no way to live.
It does, however, explain why so many on the Left don’t seem to listen to appeals to logic.
Because arguments about top-down or bottom-up decision making, or observations about increasing respect of individualism or the successes of minorities, women, and members of the LGBT community to make gains in equality, or observations about the rising wealth enjoyed by all in this country–all of this is cold comfort in a world so full of fear all we can do is huddle with those who are like us, have courage and hope for the best: hope for the revolution which will finally destroy all the things we fear.
I just saw a post go by arguing that the German NAZI party was somehow not “socialist.” That while they did have the “socialist” name in the party name–that was done to attract voters, and had no real impact on German’s economic policies. No; instead, we’re told that the NAZIs weren’t socialist because, well, they were racist and their political policies were terrible and they had all these concentration camps–and “real socialists” care about all people and are fuzzy and adorable and just want to help.
I’ve heard similar arguments elsewhere.
The Soviet Union was not socialist, despite calling themselves the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, because they weren’t caring enough and discriminated against certain types of people and the called themselves “Communists” and engaged in wars. Venezuela was not socialist because despite passing policies which controlled corporations and set price targets and nationalized various industries left and right–well, they clearly don’t care enough because their President is an asshole or something, and people are starving.
And besides, many of these places did not practice “true Socialism” (whatever that is), they practiced cartelism or fascism or crony corporatism or a thousand other terms which describe the government or collective ownership or control of the means of production–but isn’t really the collective ownership or control of the means of production in the way “true Socialism” requires.
And if you dig into some of the more esoteric discussions in Socialist circles, the amount of meaningless gobbledygook piles up miles high. Buried in there somewhere you find discussions of artisan guilds and collective oversight of workers and occupational autonomy. You’ll find a whole host of obscure philosopher’s names from the 18th through the 20th century and you even find idealists who think increasing computational power will lead us to better real-time management of peer-to-peer relations. And you’ll find tons of anarcho-whatevers floating around, like anarcho-syndicalism, or the idea that society is best organized by worker self-management without hierarchical control.
So let’s find ourselves a philosophical loadstone to get us out of the weeds, shall we?
In this case, let’s simply characterize economic decision making broadly into two categories. I know that most modern economies (including the United States) have a mix of both–and often you see features of both types of decision making across the economic spectrum. But these two broad categories will help us categorize our thinking and, hopefully, cut through the fog of bullshit.
There is “top-down” decision making–where decision making is concentrated at “the top” for some definition of “top”. And there is “bottom-up” decision making, where decisions are distributed to “the bottom” rather than concentrated upwards.
A concrete example is in order to show what I mean.
Suppose I want to buy bread, because I’m hungry. So I go to a store which sells bread.
In a top-down decision making system, the type of bread that is available and its price has been determined in advance by a central decision making entity. (What that entity is is immaterial to this discussion.) There perhaps are only three types of bread–perhaps they’re made by a single company, perhaps they’re made by three cooperating companies. But the price is set–and I buy my bread.
In a bottom-up decision making system, the type of bread that is available and its price has also been set by the time I arrive at the store–but what type of bread and its price has been determined by multiple, competing entities. Those entities are not cooperating but in competition with each other–each vying for my money. But again, the price is set, and I buy my bread.
Cooperation verses competition.
Top-down verses bottom-up.
Now here’s the interesting part. When decisions are made top-down–inevitably politics will get involved. It doesn’t matter if the decision of what sort of bread we have available to us was made by a Venezuelan strong-man dictator, or an anarcho-syndicalist worker’s cooperative. A decision as to what sort of bread to produce must be made, out of thousands of possible breads that can be produced.
And that requires politics.
Why?
Well, fundamentally, if all decisions as to the type of bread to be sold is driven from the top-down, and if there is no competition, there can be no price discovery. Multiple competing products (using different manufacturing techniques and different ingredients, slowly improved over time by workers interested in getting a bigger share of the market) can’t exist, since by definition in a top-down system, the companies are cooperating and collectively have all the market share.
And without price discovery, driven by price signaling (since any entity with 100% of the market inevitably destroys price signals, which require competition to develop), there is no other means to determine product manufacturing and pricing other than political considerations.
By contrast, in a bottom-up system where companies must compete for the consumer’s dollar–price signals abound. Perhaps your marketplace competitor discovered that they can make more money by selling specialized whole grain breads. Or perhaps your competitor discovered a way to redesign their bread-baking ovens so as to reduce the cost of a loaf of bread. Or perhaps your competitor has discovered that they can make more money by using all non-GMO ingredients.
How will you discover this? Through price signaling–which is a polite way of saying suddenly your bread isn’t selling at the store, and you’re losing money. “Price signaling” is the economic term for “someone is swinging a clue stick at your head, saying DO SOMETHING!”
And it’s stressful for you. Now you have to figure out how to outwit your competitors. Perhaps you need to switch to non-GMO ingredients yourself. Perhaps you need to find a cheaper way to make your bread. Perhaps you position yourself in the market as being the ‘cheap’ option for consumers as your competitor takes the ‘luxury bread’ market.
Or perhaps you can’t figure it out–your competitor has you dead to rights. And so you run out of money, go bankrupt: your workers quit and work for your competitor, your factory sold off at auction to pay your outstanding debts.
But in a bottom-up system, it’s economics, not politics, which drives your decision making processes.
So: top-down systems are cooperative systems where decisions are made by politics.
And bottom-up systems are competitive systems where decisions are made through economics.
Now one of the major criticisms of bottom-up systems driven by economic decision-making processes is that they are motivated by “greed.” Our movies and TV shows are full of paeans against “greed”; the most well known being from the movie “Wall Street” from 1987 where a smarmy bastard Gordon Gekko (played by Michael Douglas) lectures a room full of regulators that “greed is good”, reflecting many of the arguments that have been made by supporters of free-market capitalism, just before he goes off and breaks the law.
And having concluded that capitalism is motivated by greed: “a selfish and excessive desire for more of something (such as money) than is needed”–we’ve concluded that capitalism itself is broken, and there must be a better way.
The problem is this: who doesn’t act in our own self-interest?
Milton Friedman said it best in his interview with Phil Donahue:
What is greed?
Of course none of us are greedy; it’s always the other fellow who is greedy. (audience laughter)
The world runs on individuals pursuing their separate interests.
This is important to remember. As Adam Smith put it in “The Theory of Moral Sentiments:”
The administration of the great system of the universe … the care of the universal happiness of all rational and sensible beings, is the business of God and not of man. To man is allotted a much humbler department, but one much more suitable to the weakness of his powers, and to the narrowness of his comprehension: the care of his own happiness, of that of his family, his friends, his country…. But though we are … endowed with a very strong desire of those ends, it has been entrusted to the slow and uncertain determinations of our reason to find out the proper means of bringing them about. Nature has directed us to the greater part of these by original and immediate instincts. Hunger, thirst, the passion which unites the two sexes, and the dread of pain, prompt us to apply those means for their own sakes, and without any consideration of their tendency to those beneficent ends which the great Director of nature intended to produce by them.
In other words, we are incapable of seeing beyond our own self-interests–but the world has been arranged so that as long as we can all pursue our own self-interests, the world will act as if lead by an “invisible hand”–which is Adam Smith’s allusion to the hand of God.
So let’s dispense with this idea of “greed,” as it requires me, acting in my own self-interest, to judge you, as you act in your own self-interest, and question your consumption habits.
It’s not to say we cannot diagnose right from wrong: clearly it’s wrong to take something that belongs to someone else. It’s wrong to cheat. It’s wrong to treat people unfairly. It’s wrong to abuse other people.
But to tell someone what they have, assuming it was gained through their own efforts (and not through lying, cheating or stealing) is to judge them for their efforts. It’s to tell them their efforts is wrong. It’s to tell the painter he shouldn’t paint beautiful paintings or the writer to stop writing such excellent poetry. It’s to hobble the world because you don’t like the fact that someone else has a talent they have expressed in the world.
It’s to make life a little meaner, because you don’t like that someone else has talents you do not share.
So let’s review.
Top-down systems are cooperative systems are politically motivated systems.
Bottom-up systems are competitive systems are economically motivated systems.
And throughout the world we see top-down, cooperative and politically motivated systems fail left and right. Why?
Because of something I observed earlier about the nature of cooperative systems. They destroy price signaling and price discovery.
Instead, top-down systems impose political pressure to establish pricing and product manufacturing techniques.
And these will inevitably fail for the simple reason that, by destroying price signaling, you will inevitably have storages and economic collapse because the world is an unpredictable place and one which, fundamentally, cannot be controlled by political pressure.
And because cooperative systems destroy the multiple redundancies that inevitably evolve as multiple companies seek to compete against each other, there is no margin for error.
Price signals help smooth the ride when there are economic shocks, in the same way shock absorbers in your car smooth the ride when you hit a patch of bumpy roads. By allowing prices to swing upwards when there is a shortage, there is both a clear signal to consumers that they may wish to rethink their purchases (either by buying less, substitution with a good the consumer thinks is equivalent, or by rethinking other purchases so they can spend more).
For example, you love apples, and you eat an apple a day. But one day you go to the grocery store and, unbeknownst to you, there was a horrible apple worm infestation which destroyed half the apple crops. If prices then go up to reflect this fact, you can decide “sure, I’ll pay twice as much for apples.” Or “gosh, perhaps peaches will work equally well.” Or even “you know, I really don’t need to buy frozen TV dinners; I’ll buy the raw ingredients and save some money for my apples.”
But without price signals, what happens? Well, what we’ve seen in general (and what we saw in Venezuela) is political pressure to keep prices low. (Remember: today we may bad-mouth Venezeulan President Maduro as a strongman dictator–but he was swept into power on promises to keep the price food low so the poor could eat well. A promise, by the way, he actually kept until the economy collapsed.)
And when prices are low–what happens? Well, as a consumer you just bop on down to the store, unaware of the apple shortage. So you buy your apples–but there aren’t as many available. Or perhaps the store runs out.
In essence, without a signal to indicate a shortage, consumers keep on consuming right up until we run out of stuff.
Then comes rationing, long lines, the hope against hope that there will be any apples.
And look at this on the producer side. Without price signals–without apple growers suddenly getting more for their failed crops–apple growers wind up being paid less for their overall crops. Meaning if you only produce a thousand bushels of apples instead of two thousand–but you’re paid the same price per bushel, you get half the money you were expecting.
Money that you would use to spray pesticides to get rid of the infection. Money you would use to maintain your trees. Money you would use to get ready for next year’s crops. Money you would use to pay next year’s apple pickers.
And without higher prices there is no signal to other farmers that perhaps they may want to think about planting more apple trees. There is no way producers know, in other words, how to adjust their outputs–and no way for them to have the money necessary to continue to produce their outputs.
Eventually, without money, total apple supplies dwindle. There are no new competitors to replace them–remember: top-down systems are cooperative, not competitive. And while governments can help subsidize apple growers in the face of economic disaster–governments themselves only have so much resources at their disposal. Enough economic disasters without any margins of error built into the economy (thanks to a lack of competition), and eventually the lights go out,people starve, and sometimes even resort to cannibalism.
And while I’m picking on Venezuela here, we also saw this towards the end of the USSR, and we’ve seen echos of this in places like Cuba and Cambodia and Ethiopia.
Further, notice what I did not say. I did not say that socialism fails, though I’ve used socialism as an example. I did not say that communism fails, though other examples in the prior sentence described themselves as communist.
I said top-down systems fail, because economic cooperation destroys price signaling. And this leads to economic failure as economic decisions are replaced by political decision making.
Go back to Milton Friedman’s video above. People pursue our individual separate interests, because that is all we know how to do. If that self-interest is arranged through a system of competition so that people are forced to cater to consumers, then we see redundant and parallel products that buffer us from failure: all the non-GMO bread ingredients are wiped out by some strange disease, yet all the consumer sees is that his favorite brand of bread is no longer available, and he has the hard decisions of eating bread with GMO-based ingredients or buying something else entirely. Meanwhile, non-GMO ingredients go up in price–signaling entrepreneurial farmers to figure out a way to plant and deliver non-GMO ingredients in the future.
And all without top-down cooperation by politically motivated groups.
So tl;dr: top-down systems are cooperative systems and politically motivated. Cooperative systems lack the competition that leads to people making better products and to having a multitude of products to choose from. This creates thinner margins, which have the potential to lead to economic failure.
And make no mistake: crop failures happen all the time in the United States. We’ve seen oranges fail in Florida and corn yields drop in the midwest and shortages of beef and chicken going back decades.
But did people starve in the United States? No; we just paid more for certain things, and changed our eating habits to accommodate those higher prices. Meanwhile competing farmers worked harder to produce the products we wanted–so the following year, the lack of oranges or chicken became a distant memory of a minor inconvenience.
This is why the discussion to if the NAZI party was socialist or “corporate cartelists” is an entirely moot discussion.
Both systems involve top-down organization of the economy at the hands of a central decision-making body. And it’s why both systems are similar to anarcho-syndicalism and Italy’s dabbling with fascism: decision making in all of these systems are pushed to the top, where they are divorced from price signals. Cooperation amongst organizations (either because they’re controlled by the government, by a workers’ committee or by a cartel or a fascist cooperative) means less effort to improve products to cater to the consumer–since there are no pesky competitive organizations to second-guess.
Margins of error are lost, and eventually systems fail–and lack the ability to recover.
It’s also, if you’ve been following along, the problem with monopolies and large corporations–which also suffer from top-down management.
But unlike government-run top-down systems, in a properly functioning bottom-up economic system with competition, large corporations can fail without destroying the entire house of cards.
So long as there is competition, in other words, it doesn’t matter if the CEO of an AT&T or a General Motors or a General Electric screws the pooch. There will always be a competitor ready to eat their lunch when these large corporations–some dating back a century or more–collapse in failure and ruin.
But cooperative systems–when they fail, there is no-one waiting in the wings to take over.
Governments cannot be easily replaced with competitive governments. (Well, they can, but this is called “invasion” and “overthrow”–and generally they create worse problems than the bankruptcy of a Sears.)
And this distinction: that top-down systems involve cooperation and use politically motivated decision making, while bottom-up systems involve competition and use economically motivated decision making, that should be at the bottom of our philosophical stack.
So when someone starts babbling away about the writings of Grün and Püttmann, and how “you don’t understand what Democratic Socialism involves”–all you have to do is wade through the bullshit and ask yourself the following questions:
Are the people who control the means of production competing or cooperating? And can a new person or group easily enter the market as a competitor?
And:
When companies compete under this hypothetical system, do they compete for consumer dollars? Or political favoratism?
And if the person you’re arguing with evades those questions, it’s because they’re either a moron, or because they’re trying to pull the wool over your eyes.
I’m seeing a lot of articles go by my feed complaining about “MMT” or “Modern Monetary Theory.” When I first read the Mises article on the topic I thought someone had blown a gasket: that someone had forgotten the single most important fundamental of monetary theory. But apparently this is a feature, and not a bug, regarding “MMT.”
That became more clear when I read a similar article on Oppenheimer Funds, which gives a little more history surrounding “MMT.” A quick trip confirmed that Modern Monetary Theory is in fact it’s own thing–and not just “monetary theory” with a little refinement. (In fact, it’s described as a variation of Chartalism, or the idea that “money originated with states’ attempts to direct economic activity rather than as a spontaneous solution to the problems with barter or as a means with which to tokenize debt.”
So this isn’t just “refining what the Fed has been doing for a hundred years.” This is something completely new–radically new–with a blah and boring name attached, in order to slip it under the radar.
And here’s where MMT falls apart, in a nutshell.
First, it is true that modern fiat currency only has value because we have to pay taxes in the stuff.
(This fits entirely within the MMT model.)
However, the value money has is not in its intrinsic value or in its state-dictated value. That is entirely by definition, since ‘fiat’ currency is currency that has no intrinsic value.
Now we think in dollars (in the United States) because dollars is a useful barter token. Today, five dollars will buy you coffee at a Starbucks at an airport. However, the intrinsic value of five dollars is not fixed as one coffee at a Starbucks at an airport. Years ago you could have bought the same coffee for a couple of dollars–and decades ago, you could have bought coffee at a diner for a nickle.
Inflation, in other words, disproves that dollar has an intrinsic value.
So if a dollar has no intrinsic value–and years from now, that same coffee at Starbucks may cost you ten dollars–how does a dollar get it’s value?
Simple.
Money is a commodity, just like all other commodities.
Now it’s entirely possible to use a different commodity to barter with than U.S. Dollars–such as Bitcoin or gold or silver. And it is possible to simply trade: I could trade a Starbucks owner four coffees for an inexpensive backpack. But it’s easier, instead, to facilitate trade by using a common commodity like dollars–and it’s easier to do our taxes as well, rather than trying to figure out what 1/4th of a backpack is in terms of taxes.
“But, Bill, how can money be a commodity? It’s money!”
This is where inflation comes into play. Suppose in all the world we only have a hundred coffees, and we have $500 in money to trade for that coffee. On the whole, each coffee would be worth $5. As a coffee brewer I can give you a coffee and on average get $5 in exchange; as a consumer I can on average trade $5 for a coffee.
Now, suddenly, unexpectedly, another $500 shows up in circulation.
Did the number of coffees in our universe suddenly double as a result of this windfall? No. There’s still only a hundred coffees. The value of the dollar as compared to coffees has declined–because we have more dollars than we have coffees.
This declining value of a dollar is reflected in inflation: suddenly each coffee costs $10, not $5.
This is a rather simplistic way of showing something quite complicated–but the model holds: if suddenly the number of dollars in the country were to double, we wouldn’t suddenly double the wealth.
Remember: fiat currency has no intrinsic value. This is by definition.
It only has value in that we can trade it for something that has worth: a coffee, a computer, a house, a car, clothes, a diamond ring, the next great novel, a cool painting.
Doubling the dollars doesn’t double the wealth. It simply makes dollars worth half as much–or rather, triggers 100% inflation–and in this way money acts just like any other commodity, even gold.
Where MMT falls down is that it presumes wealth is a State-dictated thing, created by the existence of “fiat currency,” which, by its very definition, has no value.
But wealth–that is, the value of the things we desire–is not a State-dictated mandate. We don’t value a house because the State passed a law, nor do we value food because the State made a law saying we have to eat.
Instead, wealth is something created *separately*–and created before our eyes each time a cup of coffee is brewed at Starbucks, when a house is built, when food is grown, when clothes are sewn, when a house is built, when an author writes a great book, when a painter paints art.
Wealth is in the things we desire.
And you can’t suddenly make more of what we desire by flooding the market with dollars.
If you read my last large article on monetary theory and why debt discussions in the United States are incredibly dishonest, you’d see that the proper metric for understanding if the market has been flooded by too much money is inflation.
This indicates that there is room for printing more money (or, for the Federal Reserve to unload all its reserve balances accumulated since 2008 as a result of the housing market crash).
But this does not give self-professed Socialists Democrats in this country a license to print money.
In other words, while it is true that most discussions of the debt are dishonest, because it’s just attempts at scoring political points–this does not mean Socialists cannot just print money willy-nilly thinking “MMT” will make it all work out okay.
In fact, this is an extremely dangerous idea–thinking we can print our way to wealth.
Wealth is created, as I said before, in building houses, growing food, writing books, painting works of art, and doing thousands and thousands of other things we value. Printing money does not, however, create wealth. It simply triggers inflation–and it runs the risk of putting the country into a spiral of hyperinflation seen elsewhere in places like Germany, Zimbabwe and Venezuela.
This research systematically mapped the relationship between political ideology and receptivity to pseudo-profound bullshit—that is, obscure sentences constructed to impress others rather than convey truth. Among Swedish adults (N = 985), bullshit receptivity was (a) robustly positively associated with socially conservative (vs. liberal) self-placement, resistance to change, and particularly binding moral intuitions (loyalty, authority, purity); (b) associated with centrism on preference for equality and even leftism (when controlling for other aspects of ideology) on economic ideology self-placement; and (c) lowest among right-of-center social liberal voters and highest among left-wing green voters.
My read: if you have no philosophical stack–no underlying moral or ethical assumptions about how the world works which inform the rest of your thinking–then it’s easy to be persuaded by profound-sounding bullshit.
At the bottom of my own philosophical stack is the ethical presupposition that all men and women are created equal; that because we are created with reason, individual decision making is profoundly important; that we only have the right to prevent others from their own path in the name of our own self-defense (for a broadly understood idea of ‘self-defense’); and that our relative success in life, properly understood, is as much an accident of circumstance as it is a reflection of our own capabilities. (The “there but with the grace of God go I” postulate.)
Those are the filters I run everything through. And if you want to write my posts and essays for me, you could: just read a little philosophy, study a little economics, deeply engrain those four ideas above until they’re second nature, and mix in a healthy dose of sarcasm and humor.
“I think what we have to do, and I will be doing it, is to do a better job maybe in explaining what we mean by socialism — democratic socialism. Obviously, my right-wing colleagues here want to paint that as authoritarianism and communism and Venezuela, and that’s nonsense.
“What I mean by democratic socialism is that I want a vibrant democracy. I find it interesting that people who criticize me are busy actively involved in voter suppression trying to keep people of color or low-income people from voting, because they don’t want a vibrant democracy. I do.
“Second of all, what it means, Rachel, is that in the wealthiest country in the history of the world we can provide a decent standard of living for all about people. That’s just the reality. That’s not Utopian dreaming; that is a reality. Health care for all can be done and we can save money in doing it. We can have a minimum wage which is a living wage, and I’m delighted to see that you know, right now, five states already passed fifteen dollars an hour minimum wage. The House of Representatives is gonna do it. We have got to do that.”
The problem with “democratic” Socialism is something the Left in this country should be able to intuit–but sadly don’t: sometimes you’re the party who wins the argument. And sometimes the other folks vote in President Donald Trump.
So when economic institutions are run by consensus rather than economic institutions being forced to cater to fickle customers–there will always be a large minority of customers who are as unhappy as the Left is today with our Democratically elected President.
Our government is already “democratic”–yet this doesn’t stop our government from doing incredibly stupid things. And we’re supposed to turn over the entire economy to this same government?
The reason why Socialism fails is not because it’s not sufficiently “democratic” enough. Socialism fails because it creates a single point of failure: centralized command and control of the economy.
Through a free market, price signaling (which is a way of signaling what customers want) allows multiple suppliers to make individual decisions about the products they plan to offer and how they plan to make those products. But when decision making is pushed up to a central authority–such as a government oversight bureau–price signaling falls to the wayside. Instead of giving customers what they want, governments tell corporations what to give to customers. And like the Left who is unhappy about the 2016 Presidential Elections, some customers don’t get what they want.
Instead they get what the government tells them the should have.
If you don’t think this description–that the Government should tell us what we can consume, rather than having corporations guess what we want by providing a variety of products–doesn’t apply to Bernie Sanders, remember his famous, but rather telling quote:
You can’t just continue growth for the sake of growth in a world in which we are struggling with climate change and all kinds of environmental problems. All right? You don’t necessarily need a choice of 23 underarm spray deodorants or of 18 different pairs of sneakers when children are hungry in this country.
But there is a rather natural result of companies (made up of and employing thousands of people) competing for your dollars.
And when they do: when companies are forced to compete for your dollars, by appealing to your desires and to your convenience, this is the natural result:
The thing is, though, one of the attacks against Capitalism by “Democratic Socialists” of all breeds, is this very excess. What many of us see as a feature, Socialists see as a bug: all that bread, just sitting there, waiting to be consumed, is somehow “proof” of either Capitalism’s waste, the excesses which are destroying our planet, or it’s proof of Capitalism’s “excesses”–the fact that the bread just sits there, when there are people who are going hungry.
These arguments was just used by an editoralist in the Guardian to argue we must end capitalism:
We need to fundamentally re-evaluate our relationship to ownership, work and capital.
The sad part, however, is that for most socialists, while they see the excess bread waiting at the store for someone to buy it as a sign of failure–they can’t envision a world where they themselves don’t have access to such a large selection of bread.
Which is what the Party leaders of the former Soviet Union did: they created two classes of stores–one for themselves and other Party leaders where there were plentiful supplies for the Party elite, and one where there were constant shortages as various 5 year plans were being “tweaked” to properly account for supply and demand constraints whose signals had been destroyed by decades of central planning.
Of course, Socialists of all stripes believe “fixing” the problem of oversupply (but perhaps limiting oversupply to an important few, ‘natch) will help the planet. Because we don’t need 23 different brands of underarm deodorant and 18 different pairs of sneakers when children are going hungry and the planet is on the brink of collapse, right?
And if a few people wind up with a temporary shortage–well, next year, with computers, we’ll somehow do better…
I remarked once elsewhere that I believed that people who call themselves “Socailists” are stupid and they hate people.
This was not just a vapid ad-hominem attack.
I believe self-described “Socialists” of all striped are willfully ignorant because they deny all this reality: they deny that the fundamental problem with “Socialism” is that it centralizes decision-making power to a handful of people who make production decisions through political, rather than economic, decision making tools. And by denying economic signals, they ultimately destroy the feedback loops that make the economy stable.
This is why things failed in Venezuela, by the way. Not because Venezuela was authoritarian (though it takes a degree of authoritarianism to tell farmers what to grow and at what price to sell their goods, and it takes a degree of authoritarianism to tell store keepers what price to charge and how much to stock).
But because Venezuela made it impossible for farmers and store keepers to do their job in an efficient manner.
And had Venezuela been run by a strongman dictator, a central committee of economists, an democratically elected board of governors, or by an on-line nation-wide plebiscite where everyone got to participate and vote–the results would have been exactly the same. Because the decision making process in all of those cases was removed from the economic forces which should motivate those decisions.
As an aside, if you’ve been following along, the smarter of you should be saying “yeah, but doesn’t this happen with large corporations?”
And you’d be exactly right. Large corporations often become inefficient because a central suite of corporate leaders decide what products to produce and at what price point to sell them at. Corporate leaders then can become fixated on providing the same products in the same way–even when market tastes or market forces demand they change–as Circuit City did, denying the rise of on-line retail of electronics, right up to the point of bankruptcy when hundreds of stores closed nation-wide.
Which is why it’s imperative that corporations which become inefficient be allowed to go bankrupt rather than limping along on government life support, such as Obama’s bailing out of General Motors. The resources General Motors would have lost in a bankruptcy hearing don’t get burned to the ground; they get purchased by other corporations who may be able to put them to better use.
Imagine the world today if Tesla had picked up a couple of functioning GM car factory plants back in 2008. It’s not unreasonable to assume we’d be farther along towards the all-electric utopia the Left keep asking for, had a Leftist President not interfered with the economy.
For a free market to function, you need two things: things governments often try to prevent. You need robust competition, such as the rise of Amazon destroying Circuit City’s business model. And you need to allow old, outdated companies to fail.
The answer to a rich billionaire is a thousand entrepreneurs pecking away at that billionaire’s business.
I also said that Socialist “hate people.”
The reason for that goes right to the heart of the “you don’t need 23 different kinds of deodorant and 18 different kinds of sneakers” remark, without considering why these things exist.
Each of these different products are, in a sense, like the bread waiting for customers: each brand, each variation, are all attempts to constantly figure out what consumers want. And we don’t all want the same thing. Me: I want a roll-on deodorant (rather than an aerosol), because my armpits don’t get that sweaty. And I want an unscented brand, because I’m sensitive to perfumes.
But if we were to decide by some sort of central committee the one brand that is allowed to be in the marketplace–because supposedly all that time and effort thousands of workers are engaged in trying to come up with a different brand that may appeal to consumers is better spent elsewhere–which brand should we have? Bernie Sander’s favorite brand? Will it be an aerosol antiperspirant which can dry out my arm pits, leading them to hurt? Will it be an “Old Spice” scented deodorant which can make me physically nauseous?
You may not want any one of the other 22 brands of deodorant in the store. But someone does. And when you eliminate them, aren’t you taking away someone else’s choice?
And never mind that conservatives actually understand liberal ideology better than liberals understand conservative ideology. Which is a trivially obvious conclusion, when you realize that left-wing ideology is taught in our schools and parroted on our television shows and news programs, in a country where “Das Kapital” is more likely to be read in college than “The Conservative Mind.” For most thoughtful conservatives (really, classical liberals subscribing to a brand of liberalism before “progressives” stole the term), we had to find our own way out of the weeds, guided by some references to Adam Smith and John Locke half-remembered in passing from a class on American History in high school.
I’d love to have that honest debate about socialism, not a one-way “conversation” where we are lectured to by our betters, and told by those with an agenda how their definition of “Socialism” has never been tried before because of some slippery definition that is full of double-speak and gobbledygook.
Let’s have that honest discussion, with people who know the difference between Milton Friedman and John Keynes, who understand what David Hume was trying to do and why Adam Smith’s “The Welfare of Nations” is more a book about morality than it is a primer on economics. Let’s talk about John Mill’s ideas about the use of forceable action against others.
Whether one is talking about public debt, gross debt, or any other accounting term to describe this ocean of red ink, there’s an undeniable truth: It’s bad.
(Rolls eyes.)
No it’s not.
Paying back $1 trillion at a pace of $1 per second would take 31,688 years.
Scaremongering.
The debt is the primary engine by which we create fiat currency in our economy. Paying down the debt would restrict the amount of monetary supply in the economy–and each time we’ve done this in earnest we’ve triggered a recession.
Further, we’ve never paid off the debt. Instead, we’ve outgrown it. Meaning the times when the Debt to GDP ratio have declined substantially (the only honest number to look at here, not absolute numbers or how many seconds it would take to pay off the debt if we did it at a snails pace), it was because the economy grew, not because the debt was paid off.
Interest alone is crushing, getting worse
No it’s not. In fact, the amount the Federal Government is paying in interest payments to service the debt, as a ratio of interest payments to budget outlay, is lower than it has been since the 1950’s.
Percentage Federal Budget spent on servicing the National Debt
“Debts and lies are generally mixed together.” – Francois Rabelais
Yep. Sadly, the folks lying (and not understanding how all this work) are often not the ones we think.
So my earlier post is ever-green: here I lay out why debt is good, why we’d almost have to invest government debt if we didn’t have it, and why when you want to look at if any country with a fiat-currency is printing too much currency, you want to look at the inflation rate.
The recently released 737 MAX8 Emergency Airworthiness Directive directs pilots how to deal with a known issue, but it does nothing to address the systems issues with the AOA system.
MCAS (Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System) is implemented on the 737 MAX to enhance pitch characteristics with flaps UP and at elevated angles of attack. The MCAS function commands nose down stabilizer to enhance pitch characteristics during steep turns with elevated load factors and during flaps up flight at airspeeds approaching stall. MCAS is activated without pilot input and only operates in manual, flaps up flight. The system is designed to allow the flight crew to use column trim switch or stabilizer aisle stand cutout switches to override MCAS input. The function is commanded by the Flight Control computer using input data from sensors and other airplane systems.
The MCAS function becomes active when the airplane Angle of Attack exceeds a threshold based on airspeed and altitude. Stabilizer incremental commands are limited to 2.5 degrees and are provided at a rate of 0.27 degrees per second. The magnitude of the stabilizer input is lower at high Mach number and greater at low Mach numbers. The function is reset once angle of attack falls below the Angle of Attack threshold or if manual stabilizer commands are provided by the flight crew. If the original elevated AOA condition persists, the MCAS function commands another incremental stabilizer nose down command according to current aircraft Mach number at actuation.
This description is not currently in the 737 Flight Manual Part 2, nor the Boeing FCOM, though it will be added to them soon. This communication highlights that an entire system is not described in our Flight Manual. This system is now the subject of an AD.
I think it is unconscionable that a manufacturer, the FAA, and the airlines would have pilots flying an airplane without adequately training, or even providing available resources and sufficient documentation to understand the highly complex systems that differentiate this aircraft from prior models. The fact that this airplane requires such jury rigging to fly is a red flag. Now we know the systems employed are error prone–even if the pilots aren’t sure what those systems are, what redundancies are in place, and failure modes.
I am left to wonder: what else don’t I know? The Flight Manual is inadequate and almost criminally insufficient. All airlines that operate the MAX must insist that Boeing incorporate ALL systems in their manuals.
“This description is not currently in the 737 Flight Manual Part 2, nor the Boeing FCOM, though it will be added to them soon. This communication highlights that an entire system is not described in our Flight Manual.”
Fuck.
I mean, fuck.
Realize if something is not in the Pilot’s Operating Handbook, it had be because it doesn’t fucking exist. If it’s attached to the aircraft–it had better be in the POH.
Certainly something that affects the flight performance and maneuvering characteristics of the aircraft had better be in the god-damned POH.
And in this case, an entire subsystem–the one that appears to be at fault in two catastrophic failures which resulted in everyone on-board dying–was not in the POH.
I know a lot of people have been pillaring President Trump for his tweet talking about the complexity of aircraft–and I suspect he talked to the pilots who fly him around, asked their opinion, and relayed that in his tweet.
And while it’s easy to pile on here–the President has a very serious point here.
And that is we’re increasingly making the world more and more complex–to the point where cognitive overload (a serious problem as far as the FAA is concerned) can crop up at nearly any time.
But this: not even providing a manual for a system which takes control of the flying of an aircraft when the autopilot is engaged?
I just read an essay from someone (I won’t link it here) who made the argument that arguing that Israel should not exist is not an anti-semitic statement.
First, some context.
Most nation-states around the world essentially are comprised of a people sharing a common heritage and a common language who have established a government protecting a territory in order to protect that common heritage and language.
Thus, France is for the French. Italy is for Italians. And being Polish or French or Swedish suggests a long common heritage, shared values, a common language and a common history.
For us Americans this can seem a little strange at first, given that ours is a large nation of 327 million immigrants, children of immigrants and native peoples from all over the world. But ours is a rare exception to the rule of nation-states: ours is a country founded on a philosophical principle (of self-governance), emanating from a national creed, that immortal declaration of the equality of man:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
While our adherence to these immortal words have been imperfect at best–slavery and discrimination mar that record–ours is a nation forever striving towards the perfection of these words in the world. And it is why any immigrant can come to America and become American by virtue of citizenship alone–because to us, those immortal words are more important than heritage or culture or religion.
Most of the world, however, nations exist to protect a homogeneous people sharing common cultural, language and religious values.
And some countries can be rather adamant about that protection: France, for example, has gone after all outward signs of religious belief–specifically attacking muslims wearing hijabs, and even going so far as to force a burkini-wearing muslim woman to strip on the beach.
The United States has survived multiple substantial cultural shifts during our history. For example, salsa has replaced ketchup as the most common condiment, a reflection of the growing cultural influence of Latin-Americans. Certainly something as minor as wearing a burkini on a beach would barely raise eyebrows amongst the vast majority of Americans.
But in France, any cultural shift–such as muslims wearing hijabs–represents an existential threat to the French. Thus, the crackdown.
So here’s the thing.
If you believe Israel does not have the right to exist, the question is “why?”
If your argument is that Israel does not have the right to exist because it exists for the Jews–then do you also believe France does not have the right to exist?
If you can answer “yes” to both–because you believe any nation-state which is devoted to the protection of a single people with a common heritage and culture does not have the right to exist–well, then, you’ve pretty much condemned most nation-states around the world today.
If your argument is that there are other peoples who do not have nation-states–well, you’re confusing “de-facto” and “de-jure” right to exist: just because a group (like, say, the Kurds of northern Iraq and southern Turkey) does not have a nation-state does not mean they have no right to a nation-state.
But if your argument is that Israel doesn’t have the right to exist, but France does–then the next question is “what makes Israel special?”
That is, what is special about the Jews which mean they have no right to their own nation-state, while the French do have that right?
These are arguments, by the way, which cannot be answered by appeals to history. After all, modern Poland has existed about as long as modern Israel. Further, we can see groups being discriminated against in modern day France, and we’ve seen groups discriminated against and even exiled historically in Spain and in other parts of Europe. And you cannot answer this by appeals to force: Israel spends quite a bit on its military guaranteeing its existence in a hostile geopolitical environment where its neighbors declared war on Israel before the ink declaring Israel’s formation was dry.
And there’s the problem. Most people who are claiming Israel has no right to exist–who claim, in other words to be anti-zionist–cannot answer the questions above. They have given those questions no thought whatsoever.
Instead, somehow Israel is “special”. Zionism is somehow a deadly philosophy–after all, it has its own name, while the national impulse of the French to protect their borders has no similar name, despite having similar roots. (Frenchism?)
And when you say “the Jews don’t deserve something because there is something about the Jews which make them different as a people than the French or the Swiss or the Polish”–well, that distinguishing a single group for separate negative treatment because of some supposed intrinsic property has a name.
Anti-semitism.
So the next time you think Israel does not have the right to exist–think deeply on that idea.
And try to answer the questions above: what makes Israel special that means it has no right to exist while France or Poland or Spain or the Netherlands do have that right? Is it the modern incarnation of Israel–or do you think the Jews have no right to a nation-state in and around Jerusalem at any time in the future, where there are deep historic Jewish ties? Is it the animosity Israel has with its neighbors? And does that mean animosity should give neighbors of a country the right to veto the existence of a country? (Does that mean Ireland has no right to exist because Great Britain would rather unite the entire of the British Isles?) Is it the failure of neighboring Palestinians–despite being given numerous chances–to form their own nation state? Then should Iraq and Turkey have the right to exist because neighboring Kurds don’t have their own nation-state? Should Spain be dissolved because Catalonians are seeking their own nation-state?
Or, somewhere deep inside, do you think there is just something about those “pesky” Jews that’s the problem, with all their supposed money influencing the halls of Congress and supposedly controlling our media?
Because if you can’t honestly frame the questions and answer them consistently and coherently, correctly understanding not just the modern context but the historic and cultural contexts as well, you’re probably an anti-semite who has fed at the trough of anti-semitism for so long you don’t realize it.
Remember: admitting to yourself that you have a problem is the first step in your recovery.
The view that billionaires are “hoarding” wealth at the expense of the rest of society is becoming increasingly more common. Critics paint this picture of billionaires with Scrooge McDuckian vaults where they swim around in a sea of money. Their perception is that billionaires are hiding this money away without regard for the rest of us. But this perception is not true. Whether it’s through investment, consumption, or philanthropy, the vast majority of wealth billionaires hold is anything but stagnant.
The essay is a good one, but it misses an extremely important point about wealth–something that many on the Left and the Right increasingly miss.
And that is, there are three different types of “wealth”, though we often conflate the three and assign it a single dollar number.
The first type of wealth is deferred consumption.
This is the type of wealth most of us are familiar with, and when we hear about Bill Gate’s billions it’s where our minds go.
Deferred consumption wealth is essentially the money you park in your savings account or your checking account. It’s money you’ve passively invested in the stock market; it’s money you’re ‘saving’ for a rainy day or for your retirement.
It’s money that you could have spent on consumption: money you could have used to buy a car or a series of expensive dinners–but instead of consuming it now, you’ve elected to wait to consume it tomorrow.
But that is not the only kind of wealth out there, rolled up into a single “net worth” dollar amount.
The second type of wealth is productive wealth.
When we think about “wealth” in third-world countries, we are not talking about some person in some poor part of Africa having a banking account. Instead, we talk about a sewing machine that can be used to make clothes. A plough which can be used to turn a field. A smart phone that can be used to access knowledge.
Productive wealth is both working capital and tools that are used in working–in allowing someone to make something which ultimately allows them to maintain or even increase their lifestyle.
Your desktop computer, if you write software for a living, is productive wealth. The house over your head, if you own a house, is ‘productive’ in the sense that it is ‘wealth’ that has a purpose and isn’t just the first type of deferred consumption. Your car allows you to get to work more easily than using public transportation. The tools in your truck, if you’re a carpenter, is vital to your profession.
And productive wealth can be money as well: capital used to buy goods for resale if you run a store, or can be used to buy land in order to build homes if you’re a home builder.
The key here, however, is that “productive wealth” is not “deferred consumption.” It is a tool you use in your work to make a living. It allows you to sew clothing or plough a field or write an iPhone application.
And while here in the United States–one of the wealthiest nations on Earth–most of us are familiar with deferred consumption than we are with productive wealth, in poorer areas of the world, the wealth is productive. The sewing machine may make the difference between if a woman in a poor country eats and has a job, or starves without a job.
The third type of wealth is corporate control.
Bill Gate’s billions are not in a checking account, nor are they in a gigantic vault full of gold coins.
His billions are tied up in his ownership of Microsoft Corporation.
Or rather, Bill Gates does not have billions of dollars. Bill Gates owns a chunk of Microsoft–a corporation he founded–that is worth billions of dollars.
And the same can be said of all billionaires: they don’t actually have a checking account with billions of dollars in it. Instead, they have ownership (and, as a result, stockholder control) in large publicly traded companies which, for many of those billionaires, they helped to found.
And unlike deferred consumption, these people cannot simply write a check for everything they have, as you or I could (theoretically) do if we were to close out our savings, checking and investment accounts. If Bill Gates were to attempt to sell his holdings in Microsoft all at once–because he owns so much of it, he would only see pennies on the dollar as his sale in Microsoft would tank the stock price and, ultimately, destroy the company he founded.
Costing thousands their jobs in the process.
It’s why, by the way, Elizabeth Warren’s proposal for a 2% tax on the wealth of billionaires is a mistake. Because Bill Gates would be forced each year to sell a 2% stake in Microsoft in order to pay that tax–or turn over ownership of Microsoft, 2% at a time, to the Federal Government.
Warren Buffet would be forced to sell off 2% of his stake in Berkshire Hathaway.
And in many cases these billionaires would be forced to give up control of the companies they founded–to whom? Who would buy that stock so they could make their tax payments on time?
The Chinese?
So long as we conflate these three types of wealth: deferred consumption (or savings), productive wealth (also colloquially known as the “means of production”–that is, the tools used by people to make a living), and wealth tied up in corporate control, our debates over the 1% will be forever broken.
Fuzzy little things that I find interesting. 