"The time has come to move toward freeing all the people in the Middle East, thereby making the whole world safer."

"Iran under the mullahs is a totalitarian dictatorship, like Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia, and communist North Korea. Dictatorships, by their nature, have no claim to sovereignty.

"Iran’s mullahs, ayatollahs, and other varieties of witch doctors are a cross between a horde of fanatics and a criminal gang. To speak of their enslavement of their own populace as if it had a particle of legitimacy means the rulers have the right to subjugate and terrorise those caught in its jaws. Such relativism does to morality what jihadists did to the World Trade Center on 9/11.

"As one Iranian escapee asked on social media: Why is it, do you think, that there are no Iranians in the West protesting Israel’s attack? The absence of protests by Iranian refugees tells you all you need to know about the nature of the Iranian regime. ...

"Dictatorships do not recognise any rights of their enslaved subjects. They cannot, therefore, claim some 'right to rule.' ...

"Once we cease to think in collective terms, the principle becomes clear: among fully free countries, it does not matter which one has jurisdiction over the area in which you live. Your life and happiness depend on your rights being protected, not violated, by whichever government has jurisdiction.

"Whether or not one lives under the jurisdiction of a rights-protecting government, not the colours of the flag one lives under, is the life-or-death issue. ...

"The time has come to move toward freeing all the people in the Middle East, thereby making the whole world safer. The time has come to end the Islamic Regime in Iran."

~ Harry Binswanger from his post 'Why not end the Iranian dictatorship?'

That said ...

"Iran [is] a country that is vaster, more populous, and significantly more complex than Iraq. ...

"Should Israel continue on its current trajectory, including the targeting of the Islamic Republic’s civilian and energy infrastructure, it will break the Iranian state. But the Israelis are neither capable of, nor inclined to, pick up the pieces afterward. Rather, they will 'internationalise' the problem.. ...

"Optimists may note that Iran isn’t Iraq — an ethno-sectarian hodge-podge cobbled together within artificially drawn borders. Unlike Iraq, Iran’s ethnic constituents have long related organically as Iranians.

"But while this is true, even this innate coherence couldn’t ease the deeper struggle: the difficulty of rebuilding order in a context of profound, culturally ingrained tension between state and society. ..."

~ Sohrab Ahmari from his post 'The regime change maniacs are back'

Still, Iranians deserve better. Much better. And so does everyone the mullahs and their proxies have terrorised since 1979.

PS: A few Iranian and related folk I follow on Twitter...

Masih Alinejad

𝗡𝗶𝗼𝗵 𝗕𝗲𝗿𝗴 ♛ ✡︎

Kareem Rifai

mersedeh_eye

Elica Le Bon الیکا‌ ل بن

Ali Safavi

Alireza Jafarzadeh

Nasser Sharif

Hamid Azimi

Nasrin Saifi

NCRI-FAC

People's Mojahedin Organization of Iran (PMOI/MEK)

Theft

If you're wont to cast an eye down my blog's sidebar there, to keep tabs on my Google Pageviews over the the last 30 days,  then you're possibly wondering how the hell my regular 70-100,000 views has rocketed up to 760,000 (and counting).

Is it that I've suddenly become immensely popular?

Nice idea, but no. Something else is going on.

I don't know for sure, but I have a theory. It's related to those posts that, according to the blogger software, are the most popular this month.

Now, Libertarian Sus's posts are nothing if not entertaining, but she hasn't written here since 2009. Equally, Julian Pistorius hasn't stood for Libertarianz in Mt Albert since 2009. And the debate about the Pike River mine being open-cast takes us way back to 2010.

So what's going on? 

It's not because readers are beating a computer path to those allegedly wildly popular posts, good as they are. It's because computers are cutting a track there. I think what's going on is related to AI. Specifically, I reckon it's AI bots "scraping" this site to hoover up text for one or other Large Language Model.

In other words, my words will become theirs. That is: they're being stolen.

It's not just this blog either, it seems to be every blog using the Blogger software (which, if you weren't aware, is a Google service). So for instance—looking around just the local blogosphere—Lindsay Mitchells blog, which is criminally under-visited, has also leapt from its regular 30-50,000 pageviews (as assessed by Google) to more than triple that. Eric Crampton's Offsetting Behaviour seems to have a similar thing happening. And although Liberty Scott doesn't have a Pageview counter on his front page, I reckon if he looked under the hood he'd find something similar: i.e., that Google et al are stealing our words to sell them as their own.

And there's bugger all we can do about it.

"The Crown may be party to the Treaty, but its cost is widely disbursed to you and me, ordinary Kiwis."

"The Treaty process, currently unbounded in scope and duration, has been artificially propped up by a widespread illusion: that the Crown's capacity is infinite, and that every new round of obligations—whether in co-governance models, cultural consultancies, or environmental concessions—can be sustained indefinitely because the burden is shared silently by non-Crown actors. Citizens pay the consulting fees, councils interpret planning law through cultural lenses, engineers and teachers undergo training, businesses fund dual-language signage, and ratepayers finance Treaty-based infrastructure conditions. The Crown may be party to the Treaty, but its cost is widely disbursed to you and me, ordinary Kiwis.
    "In the 2020s, this model still functions because few question it. The Crown, in effect, outsources its obligations—not through explicit legislative transfer, but by institutional habit and moral framing. But when the public begins to refuse this arrangement, to assert that Treaty duties are not theirs to bear, the load returns to where it lawfully belongs. In that moment, iwi will see the Crown as it is: a finite entity, not a metaphysical benefactor."

~ Zoran Rakovic from his post 'When the Crown Stands Alone'

... and it's Bloomsday!

Marilyn catches up on Molly's breathless soliloquy in Joyce's Ulysses

 ... and of course, it's Bloomsday! June 16, the day Leopold Bloom famously and fictionally wandered across Dublin to rediscover life and love.

All the events of which are (somehow) modelled on the ten-year trip back from Troy taken in legend by Odysseus, yet somehow all taking place in Dublin the day and evening of 16th June 1904, as seen mostly through the eyes and interior monologue of Joyce’s greatest creation, Leopold Bloom.

Hence, Bloomsday.

"What people really want to do on Bloomsday is dress up, read aloud and drink lots of Guinness," says the manager of Dublin's James Joyce Centre. Nothing wrong with that. Just like Bloom himself, who enters a Dublin pub "blue mouldy for the want of that pint."

We know how he felt entering yonder establishment 'cos his interior monologue is most of the script. Bloom is a fellow whose interior monologue is easy to enjoy.

There are Bloomsday celebrations every year from Montreal to Buenos Aires, even "Bloomsday breakfasts" featuring Bloom's favourite, "grilled mutton kidneys which gave to his palate a fine tang of faintly scented urine.” Nice if you like that sort of thing.

James Joyce once said his novel Ulysses was meant to provide a picture of Dublin so complete that if the city suddenly disappeared, it could be reconstructed through the book. But Joyce said many things, only some of them seriously.

Ninety years after its first appearance (and seventy after its last ban), Joyce’s novel still divides opinion. Even among folk I admire. Ayn Rand enthusiast Harry Binswanger, for example, dismisses it as “trash.” "The book," he says, "is practically impossible to read — the reason for its snob appeal."

Joyce's style [alternates] between gibbering wordplay ("mellow yellow smellow") and ponderous, woozy abstractions ("tentative velation"), the style conforming to Plato's dichotomy between perceptual concretes and ineffable abstractions.

And yet it seems to me he's missing something -- not least the joy. (Maybe he needs to spend more time drinking Guinness in the company of Irishmen? Not a bad policy anyway, I find.)

Embracing the joy and wordplay (and helping to explain much of it) another of my favourite novelists, Anthony Burgess, reckons Joyce wrote the book “not just to rival classical achievement, but to contain it.” Not to

 dismiss romanticism but to extend it. Not to give meat to cloistered pedants and “bloody owls,” but to entertain, to enhance life, to give joy… 

    Ulysses is a great comic novel.. it is part of a total, cosmic laughter that takes in drains, love, politics, and the deathless gods, and feels guilty about nothing. Joyce…accepts the world as it is and relishes man’s creations (why, otherwise, glorify and art or science in every chapter except the last?). 

It is ultimately an affirmative journey around the traps (the book ends with a "yes"-- a whole exhilarating series of them). Burgess maintains Joyce offers us a challenge, and as Ulysses’s Molly Bloom asserts at the end of the novel, part of being fully aware, fully alive, is saying “yes” to that challenge:

When we have read Joyce and absorbed even one iota of his substance, neither literature nor life can ever be quite the same again. We shall be finding an embarrassing joy in the commonplace, seeing the most defiled city as a figure of heaven, and assuming, against all odds, a hardly supportable optimism.

He's right you know.

It’s not a quick read. But nor should you want to hurry. (Think of it, if you like, as an Infinite Jest but for adults.) One reader recounts the challenge:

I first started reading Ulysses in the late 1990s, as an undergraduate at University College Dublin. It seemed so vast to me, like something I'd never be able to crack. There it was with its sepia and green cover, with an image depicting the River Liffey. It was almost as if its size and physicality were mocking my love for the instant gratification provided by frivolous computer games (and my comically short attention span).
    But I dived in. I read it with expert annotations, read it with friends, read it alone, gave up, started again, laughed, cried, and then gave up once more. It became like a friend, though. One I felt I partially understood, and yet would probably never fully know. To this day, I have not read it through over a continuous period. Instead, I have digested it in parts over about five years.

Take the advice and Dive In! You won't regret it. Ulysses is nine-hundred pages of brawling, sprawling, fabulous, crapulous, life-giving reflection and rambunctiousness. Like that reader above, I've only twice read it straight through, but mostly in parts at a time, enjoying their relation to the whole. And like Atlas Shrugged, I look forward to enjoying reading, re-reading and thinking about it for the rest of my life. (I don't see that I need to choose between them.)

Enjoy!

[Pics from Robert Berry's graphic novel Ulysses Seen]

"Politics is the art of announcing what is going to work, then never explaining why it didn’t."

"During those 35 years, I worked under 11 different Prime Ministers, some more memorable than others. ....
    "Looking back it seems that politics is the art of announcing what is going to work, then never explaining why it didn’t."

~ cartoonist Garrick Tremain from his post 'Reminiscing ...'

Let’s call ‘taxing the rich’ what it really is: Theft

Picture of New Zealand's richest man. Guaranteed a reaction
 against his success by a certain sort of commentator ...

EVERY SO OFTEN A PIECE of dross comes over my monitor that just cries out to be fisked. Like this rant against the latest NBR Rich List by someone called Dr Neal Curtis. His piece argues that "as society groans under the weight of wealth inequality" (can you hear the groans, readers?) there should be a "different slogan to ‘tax the rich'." The one he favours: "reclaim the wealth'."

Yes, he's an ultra-redistributionist. Aka, a thief. Walter Williams knows the type:

Dr Curtis's piece is of course a reaction to publication of the NBR Rich List, which without fail gets a certain sort of person to hyperventilate.

Dr Curtis is that sort of person.

And this screed vomiting forth at Newsroom is the result.

Dr Curtis, by the way, is said by his bio to be "a comics scholar and critical theorist with wide-ranging interests." Lead item on his Areas of Expertise is: Comics. So let's just call him Mr Curtis.

MR CURTIS BGINS: THIS Government, he says, is "gutting government departments and cutting public services."

I wish this were true instead of comical. (Spending is now higher under Nicola Willis than under Grant Robertson. Full-time employees under the Luxon Government was 64,222 when elected, and is now 63,238. There have been cuts, it's true, but none anywhere near as big as I would hope.)

But his beginning is only a drive-by to pass off his credentials. Three paragraphs in we get to the meat. So it's here that I'll begin my fisking.

MR CURTIS: [There are] three central assumptions of current economic dogma that those who question are branded as ‘radical leftists.’ These assumptions are underpinned by the beliefs that wealth trickles down; deregulation is good for business; and the state should stay out of the market and everything should be privatised.

Should I cry "strawman" this early in the piece? Each of these pieces of alleged dogma is both fly-blown and overblown. No-one outside a piss-poor public-choice lecture would anyone say everything should be privatised. (Courts? Police? Army?) And no-one anywhere advocates so-called "trickle-down." His point here is not to make sense, however, it's simply to damn the rich so he can later advocate their being eaten.

So he ploughs on regardless, challenging each of the assertions he's just straw-manned. Like his logic, let's looks at each of them in reverse.

MR CURTIS: ...the state has always been an economic entrepreneur funding all kinds of technological innovation, such as the internet, but this often goes unreported in the dominant economic journalism.

"Always" is doing a lot of work here. There's a reason so much government entrepreneurialism goes unreported in any economic journalism: it's because it's so rare. Sure, the government defence project ARPANET linking dozens of people was transformed into something that now links five billion. But that wasn't a Ministry of Doing Shit that did that. It was private entrepreneurs who turned the great idea into a GREAT IDEA. 

MR CURTIS: ... seen from a purely corporate perspective deregulation is no doubt a path to profit. However, it is also socially disastrous as costs of deregulation are outsourced via public bailouts following financial crises, for example, that are directly caused by the rolling back of legislation designed to safeguard the wider economy.

Without going too much further than this one paragraph (though we can if you wish), let us agree that there is more than one kind of deregulation. There is the kind that mandates safety and (may) safeguard the wider economy. There is regulation that protects intellectual and real property, and that allows for the enforcement of contracts. And then there is regulation about how curved a banana should be, or how far apart hairdressing salon seats should be. You'll notice how carefully Mr Curtis conflates these. And why.

MR CURTIS: ... wealth, especially when given away in tax cuts, does not trickle down. It stays at the top. Ever-increasing wealth inequality as measured by the Gini coefficient or any study of income trends show this.

Now, it's Mr Curtis who insists this to be economic dogma, i.e., that wealth "trickles down." Yet the author of Basic Economics,  Thomas Sowell, insists that there is no-one anywhere outside a lunatic asylum or a comics convention who holds it to be true, let alone as dogma.

Years ago [writes Sowell, I] challenged anybody to quote any economist outside of an insane asylum who had ever advocated this “trickle-down” theory. Some readers said that somebody said that somebody else had advocated a “trickle-down” policy. They could never name that somebody else and quote them, though.

[Mr Curtis] is by no means the first [person] to denounce this nonexistent theory. Back in 2008, presidential candidate Barack Obama attacked what he called “an economic philosophy” that “says we should give more and more to those with the most and hope that prosperity trickles down to everyone else.”

Let’s do something completely unexpected: Let’s stop and think. Why would anyone advocate that we “give” something to A in hopes that it would trickle down to B? Why in the world would any sane person not give it to B and cut out the middleman? All this is moot, however, because there was no trickle-down theory about giving something to anybody in the first place. 

Sowell wrote a whole book exposing the nonsense of those who believe this trickle-down fantasy. [It's free, you can DOWNLOAD IT HERE.] And as I've pointed out myself on occasion, if there is a trickle-down system in operation it's the one whereby large gobs of your own money are taken from you by government, and trickled back down to you in the form of favours, and subsidies and social welfare for working families and the like.

There is an argument however for having capitalists keep their own capital, however— an economic argument, as well as the strictly-speaking moral argument that it's their goddamn money. Mr Curtis et al would like to think that if the "one percent's" capital were not stripped from them it would perhaps be baked into pies or used to light cigars—or would be emptied into money bins so that, like Scrooge McDuck, the owner of capital can spend his time rolling around in it.

This is truly a comic-book version of reality that only one ignorant of the division of labour could hold. 

Because, as George Reisman explains,  the vast majority of the wealth owned by the so-called “one-percent” is not held in the form of chocolate bars or champagne bottles or pies, but in the form of the capital goods and equipment that produce the consumer goods on which we (and Mr Curtis) all depend—capital goods that only come to represent wealth to the extent they are used to produce the goods and services people, in their capacity as consumers, really want. Per-Olof Samuelsson observes: 

"The productive rich (think Rockefeller, Carnegie, Ford, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, etcetera, etcetera) actually flood the rest of us with wealth (and themselves become wealthy in the process). Taxing or expropriating them simply means to dam this flood. And this may make it appear 'trickle-down'— because governments and politicians will only allow a small portion of this wealth to trickle down to us; the rest of it lands in their own pockets."

Many of the wealthiest people on earth hold their wealth in the form of a financial asset, like stock in a successful company. And the very wealthiest have no time to swim in cartoon-style money bins because they're also successfully running these companies.

[Mr Curtis and his readers] have no awareness of this, because they see the world through an intellectual lens that is inappropriate to life under capitalism and its market economy. They see a world, still present in some places, and present everywhere a few centuries ago, of self-sufficient farm families, each producing for its own consumption and having no essential connection to markets.
    In such a world, if one sees a farmer’s field, or his barn, or plough, or draft animals, and asks who do these means of production serve, the answer is the farmer and his family, and no one else. In such a world, apart from the receipt of occasional charity from the owners, those who are not owners of means of production cannot benefit from means of production unless and until they themselves somehow become owners of means of production. They cannot benefit from other people’s means of production except by inheriting them or by seizing them.

But in the modern world (at least, to the extent that the so-called “one-percent” are not simply milking government subsidies and bailouts, which is how so many seem to think business should work), all of us benefit from the private ownership of their means of production whoever owns them—just as long as the owners are left free to produce and innovate. We all get the benefit of their production, both as buyers of the products of those means of production, but also as sellers of labour employed to work with those means of production.

The wealth of the capitalists, in other words, is the source both of the supply of products that non-owners of the means of production buy and of the demand for the labour that non-owners of the means of production sell. It follows that the larger the number and greater the wealth of the capitalists, the greater is both the supply of products and the demand for labor, and thus the lower are prices and the higher are wages, i.e., the higher is the standard of living of everyone. Nothing is more to the self-interest of the average person than to live in a society that is filled with multi-billionaire capitalists and their corporations, all busy using their vast wealth to produce the products he buys and to compete for the labour he sells.
    Nevertheless, the world [Mr Curtis and his readers] yearn for is a world from which the billionaire capitalists and their corporations have been banished, replaced by small, poor producers, who would not be significantly richer than they themselves are, which is to say, impoverished. They expect that in a world of such producers, producers who lack the capital required to produce very much of anything, let alone carry on the mass production of the technologically advanced products of modern capitalism, they will somehow be economically better off than they are now. Obviously, [they] could not be more deluded.

AND IT'S NOW, WITH HIS three dogmas exposed, that we can see Mr Curtis's error more plainly. Like many who are branded as "radical leftists," not only is there an inherent wish to damn the rich, all of them, there is also a paucity of understanding of how the deserving rich got that way. 

Yes, there is more than one way to get rich. One may pull favours and subsidies from government, as cronies all try to, or one may be the government and sell Shitcoins (as one particularly egregious entity is currently doing). Or one may sit tight and rely on central banks inflating monetary assets (what is often called the Cantillon Effect, after the eighteenth-century ex-banker who called attention to this phenomenon of long-term capital consumption). But neither of those examples is any more than short-term, and no amount of short-term skimming is going to get you to the top of even a New Zealand rich list.

Even in this small pond, it does take an entrepreneur risking his or her own capital to really roll in the big returns.

Mr Curtis would like you to conflate all three, as he proceeds to draw his conclusion.

But first, his corollary: that it is government spending that makes us all rich. Mr Curtis phrases it this way.

MR CURTIS: All this [leaving capital in the hands of its owners] results in top-heavy, financially starved economies as governments continually try to make the wealth giveaways fit into a budget by stripping support for public services or selling off public assets at knockdown prices. ...
    The fact that the global economic outlook as well as specific national economies remain so fragile and unstable ... is surely enough evidence that the principle of continually moving wealth upwards doesn’t work...

He really does think that money in the hands of government grows economies, whereas money in the hands of those who made it simply squanders it. 

It's deluded.

And sure enough, having made his three points of alleged dogma, and delivered his corollary, he gets to start eating his meat. 

MR CURTIS: Just as there is no economic justification for structuring an economy in which only the very wealthy are the true beneficiaries, there is also no moral justification.... As our society is placed under increased stresses and strains beneath the extreme weight of amassed, socially useless wealth that sits with a very small class of people, there have been increased calls to tax the rich.

Mr Curtis is, of course, in favour. And now, bringing together what passes for his argument, is his payoff:

MR CURTIS: Instead of a call to ‘tax the rich’, the call should be to ‘reclaim the wealth’. I believe this phrase more adequately represents the request to return a greater share of what was commonly created. It is also a call to give back even just a small amount of what was taken through the design of an economy knowingly and carefully organised to purposefully benefit the few.

You can see his own dogma peering out from under his comical version of how an economic system works:

"Commonly created."

"Give back."

"Reclaim."

One question should be enough to puncture the deceit, and with it we return to Walter Williams at the top of this post. The question is: Who created this wealth?

Nick Mowbray is an almost perfect example here. 

The wealth represented by Mr Mowbray's Zuru Toys quite literally did not exist before Mr Mowbray created Zuru's toys. Pre-Mowbray, there was a pile of stuff. Post-Mowbray and his identification of the value to human beings to be delivered by his toys, there's enough value in them to make him this county's richest man.

I know that can be hard to get your head around, but there it is. Value, in the economic sense, is in the eye of the consumer. Consumers' "vote" every day, with their own hard-earned money on their devices, for Zuru's toys creates a socially-objective price for Mr Mowbray's offerings, and allows him to grow his capital. Which he can then use to create more toys, which creates more capital, which .....

All going well, especially if you like children's toys, that's a life-enhancing spiral that costs no-one else anything.

LET'S NOT BOTHER TOO MUCH to investigate further into the mind of someone who would despise that.

Let's ask instead only what they're trying to achieve. For. Mr Curtis, here's his payoff here, he hopes (now with an added noteto identify his errors:

MR CURTIS: As our society is placed under increased stresses and strains beneath the extreme weight of amassed, socially useless wealth [sic] that sits with a very small class of people, there have been increased calls to tax the rich.

I love the use of the passive verb: "there have been calls..." instead of "I and my colleagues have been demanding..." 

MR CURTIS: In keeping with the dogma [sic], conservative supporters have made tax a dirty word [I wish! -Ed.]. Rather than tax being an individual or corporate contribution to the maintenance of a functioning society, the corporatist right has over the past four decades tried to make it a synonym for theft [I wish - Ed.]. The idea that taxing the rich is really a form of theft also makes it easy for the dogmatists [sic] to present the call as a form of envy; a petty resentment of the successful.

And isn't it envy? Envy, for example, that one person making toys that delight people will earn more in his lifetime than someone with pretensions to intelligence making his living from analysing comic books and posting snide articles on a web page. The envy fair oozes out this piece, and other similar rants by the usual suspects.

MR CURTIS: Instead of a call to ‘tax the rich’, the call should be to ‘reclaim the wealth.

Ah. Here we go: an all-but explicit claim from the mire that "you didn't build that." Which in the next sentence is made explicit:

MR CURTIS: I believe this phrase more adequately represents the request to return a greater share of what was commonly created.

So, in what will no doubt be a surprise to Messrs Mowbray, Hart et al, everybody created the toys for which the world is clamouring, the companies made more efficient, the plastics that store food better, the films that folk queue up for ... We all did it, he claims.

In the end, after all the verbage, that's his major claim. That we made it—an absurdity—so therefore we should keep it. A nonsense.

It is also a call to give back [sic] even just a small amount of what was taken [sic] through the design of an economy knowingly and carefully organised to purposefully benefit the few.

The irony is that, if Mr Curtis lifted his head from his comic books and looked properly at the world around him and at the division-of-labour system that allows even sad sacks like himself to survive and even flourish, he'd understand that (even imperfectly) it already is benefitting all of us.

If there's one benefit of watching a US president tearing down everything that made his own country prosperous, it's that his many political enemies are slowly discovering this truth.  

Many are discovering anew that it is actually poverty that is mankind’s natural state, that it is past wealth production (not redistribution) that has been rescuing people from poverty worldwide in ever-expanding numbers—the great (but almost unheard) story of our era that allows today's worker more easily-available health, wealth, and luxuries than even a king enjoyed in all previous centuries—and that efforts to simply legislate higher wages by law amounts to little more than a “loot and plunder” approach to economics.

The fundamental policy tools of statist politicians [explains George Reisman] are clubs, guns, and prisons... What allows statist politicians to conceal the fact that they’re thugs is the belief that they have a special account with Santa Claus. As though Santa Claus, rather than extortion, were the source of the funds extorted by the politicians.
The statist politicians and the leftist “intellectuals” dismiss the teachings of sound economics by calling it “trickle down.” They do not allow themselves to see that their theory of economics is the loot and plunder theory.

Some have realised and reconsidered. I invite Mr Curtis to consider it too.

PS: Mr and Mrs Marx were at least fully aware of how envy towards the rich is a psychological problem, not an philosophical—or economic—one. Writing to their "embittered" son after yet another tantrum at the world, Heinrich Marx said:

Frankly speaking, my dear Karl, I do not like this modern word, which all weaklings use to cloak their feelings when they quarrel with the world because they do not possess, without labour or trouble, well-furnished palaces with vast sums of money and elegant carriages. This embitterment disgusts me and you are the last person from whom I would expect it. What grounds can you have for it? Has not everything smiled on you ever since your cradle? Has not nature endowed you with magnificent talents? Have not your parents lavished affection on you? Have you ever up to now been unable to satisfy your reasonable wishes? And have you not carried away in the most incomprehensible fashion the heart of a girl whom thousands envy you? Yet the first untoward event, the first disappointed wish, evokes embitterment! Is that strength? Is that a manly character?

Is it? 

'Hazy' is the lager of craft beers

Expensive lager.

It needs to be said.

"Hazy" is the lager of craft beers.

Now, hear me out.

As my friends will tell you, I've been an annoyingly enthusiastic advocate for craft beers since I was fortunately introduced in my comments section to their existence by the gentlemen Stu McKinlay and the late lamented Neil Miller. Just as they promised, I was introduced to "a flavour explosion," to beer tasting of real hops, to the delightful bitterness of the hop balanced against the malt of the mash ...

Sorry, I just had to dash to the fridge.

So ... we did get what craft beer promised, and for two decades we've been rolling in it: we've had beer with dry hops, with wet hops, hopped beer with single hops, with blended hops ... and when it all comes together ...

Flavour!

Taste! 

Hops!

And now, after two decades of exploring the outer boundaries of flavour in a pint glass, we've been fobbed off instead with another bride—with a bland sickly sweetish concoction called a Hazy.

It's there left behind in your fridge after a party. It's there taking over every craft-beer bar, where beer with real flavour now struggles to be found among the ciders, alcoholic lemonades, and a welter of assorted Hazys. And it's all the 'craft beer' you'll ever get offered in those other excuses for a bar.

It's what happens to pioneering in every field: The tree breaks clear of the forest, and the fungus creeps out to reclaim it.

Hazy is a fungus.

An abomination.

It's the beer lager drinkers drink now there's less lager around to be found. "I'll have a Hazy," your friend says, who'd really prefer something ever closer to the sugar fields. But this is what he gets.

Why are they so popular: " Because, says a trendsetter's website, they are "less bitter and offer lovely sweetness that’s liked by everyone." Their "fruity, juicy profile is approachable even to non-beer drinkers." And they all taste the bloody same. So non-beer drinkers can drink them to feel included, even if what they really want is an ice cream. And real beer drinkers are elbowed out to somewhere less convivial.

But you're not paying lager prices to drink this dross. You're paying real money to drink slops.

You're paying good money to drink expensive lager, while good beer with real flavour is discarded out the back of the beer menu.

We need to rebel!

Bring back the flavour.

Bring back the hops!

Beer. Real beer.

Less with more

 The OECD measured New Zealand's recent productivity growth against the OECD average.

We're not even average.

... aaaand here, by comparison, is New Zealand's growth in employment:

That's the measure of how many more folk it took to do that little bit more.

So we've had decent growth.

Just not in productivity.

Is this a measure of how much we're restrained here by regulation and the incessant whine of the grey ones in our ear?

A lack of capital?

Or is it something wrong with our nous?

What do you think ... ?

[Hat tip Eric Crampton]

* Yep, construction is an outlier. I'm not sure how productivity is measured here, but I imagine that's a reflection of how many more townhouses and apartments have been built in recent years, as opposed to stand-alone dwellings.

"Government immigration restrictions are how tyranny will come to modern America."

Two weeks ago Cato's Alex Nowrasteh debated comedian Dave Smith at NY's Soho Forum on the resolution “Government restrictions on the immigration of peaceful and healthy people make sense from a libertarian standpoint, especially in present-day America."

Alex was on the negative side.

He began by arguing that government immigration restrictions are how tyranny will come to America.

As he says below, "I didn't expect it to happen so quickly."

CLICK to watch (15 min.)

Adrian Orr. Worthless shit.

Money is no longer backed by gold. It's now backed only by debt, by public trust—and by the promises and integrity of its issuers.

In New Zealand, money is backed above all by the promises and integrity of the Reserve Bank of New Zealand.

So it's crucial that the public trust in the Bank is earned, and continues to be earned every day.

Not a trivial thing.

Which is why the spectacular departure of the Reserve Bank Governor in March in what looked like a fit of pique was so disquieting.

Even more disturbing was the abject silence and duplicitous announcements since from the Bank about the reasons for his departure.

Those reasons were revealed this week. Just days after lying, again, to the Parliament, he walked in a fit of pique because he wasn't given an extra few billion to continue expanding his empire.

Adrian Orr. In a field of shitty New Zealand bureaucrats, he has to be the most worthless shit of all.

"The riches of successful entrepreneurs is not the cause of anybody's poverty"

"The riches of successful entrepreneurs is not the cause of anybody's poverty; it is the consequence of the fact that the consumers are better supplied than they would have been in the absence of the entrepreneur's efforts."

~ Ludwig von Mises from his 1952 collection Planning for Freedom, and sixteen other Essays and Addresses 

"Resentment is at work when one so hates somebody for his more favourable circumstances that one is prepared to bear heavy losses if only the hated one might also come to harm. Many of those who attack capitalism know very well that their situation under any other economic system will be less favourable."

~ Ludwig von Mises, from his 1962 book Liberalism: In the Classical Tradition

"Trump might see several advantages to engineering a dramatic showdown in a city and state run by his political enemies."

"President Trump has deployed the National Guard, along with several hundred marines, to Los Angeles — despite the objections of California Governor Gavin Newsom. ... the first time a president has invoked this authority since Lyndon Johnson sent them in to protect civil rights protesters in Alabama in 1965... The circumstances in Trump’s case are dramatically different, and it’s far from clear that his decision meets the legal standard for federalising Guard troops. ... The protests over the weekend weren’t even particularly large, numbering in the hundreds, rather than the thousands, most of whom were demonstrating peacefully. ...Trump’s response was unprecedented in recent American history. ...

"Trump might see several advantages to engineering a dramatic showdown in a city and state run by his political enemies.

"He also probably wants to posture for his base as a tough and decisive leader. ... The incentive to pander to his base might be particularly strong in this case because the underlying issue is immigration. ... but his administration has struggled to deport anything like th[e millions promised] By sending the marines to Los Angeles to stop protesters from blocking ICE vans, perhaps Trump is seeking to symbolically compensate for the gap between rhetoric and reality.

"There are other plausible explanations which are far more disturbing. Is Trump hoping that inflaming tensions will provoke a violent response from Angelenos extreme enough to justify seizing further emergency powers? Or could it be a trial balloon: an opportunity for Trump to gauge how much authoritarianism he can get away? That would fit the pattern of the rest of his second term, during which he has sent deportees to a prison in El Salvador without trial, and ignored a judge’s explicit order to turn back deportation flights that were already in the air. ...

"Something similar might be going on here. While senior White House aide Stephen Miller has explicitly used the word 'insurrection' to describe events in Los Angeles, Trump has so far stopped short of using the i-word. ...Even so, this sets a precedent: that marines can be sent to sites of domestic unrest. And this might make the public and the press a bit less rattled if Trump ever does invoke the Insurrection Act in the future.

"Trump, though, tends to act on impulse. Few presidents have been lessconsistent in their decision making: administration officials and advisors come and go, the President’s moods change, and everyone has to scramble to keep up. But while he fumbles in the dark, acting on instinct, many of those instincts are deeply authoritarian. Testing how far he can push the limits of presidential power is par for the course."

~ Ben Burgis from his op-ed 'Trump is testing Los Angeles'

"A movement that changed a country." Peacefully.

It's been risible watching statists here struggling over recent months to get their heads around the Atlas Network think tank—and what exactly think tanks do.

What troubles them most perhaps is the word "think" in the description. Many have forgotten how to.

Nonetheless, to help them understand, the think tank Students for Liberty sets out to explain what they do. 

They begin by asking: "Why is the President of Argentina wearing THIS pin while announcing major policy changes?"

The story goes back to 1945, when a war hero wanted to save his country—and a Nobel Prize winner told him to forget about politics.

This isn't just about a pin. It's about how ideas travel from university classrooms to presidential palaces. And why every student needs to understand this journey—because you're living through it right now.

In 1945, World War II just ended. F.A. Hayek, teaching at the London School of Economics, meets Antony Fisher—a combat aviator and war hero. Fisher had read Hayek's The Road to Serfdom and was terrified about Britain's socialist direction. "I want to enter politics," Fisher declared.

Hayek stopped him cold. "The political battle isn't won in the political arena," he explained. "It's fought—and ultimately won—by intellectuals." Politicians follow public opinion. But intellectuals? They shape it. 

 

Fisher listened. Instead of running for political office, he founded the UK's Institute of Economic Affairs. For decades, IEA scholars published papers, hosted debates, and educated a generation about free markets. The result? Britain elected Margaret Thatcher. 

 

Legend has it that in her first Cabinet meeting, Thatcher slammed down Hayek's book Constitution of Liberty—published by the IEA—and declared: "This is what we believe!" Ideas had become policy. Intellectuals had changed a nation. 

This wasn't an accident. Hayek had studied how ideas spread. It's like a pyramid:

        Scholars develop ideas ...

                ... Intellectuals* spread them 

                        ... Media amplifies them

                                ... Politicians adopt them

Every revolution starts at the top of that pyramid.

[* Note that the bar for "intellectual" here is clearly set very low.] 

Now look at American universities today (and this is fairly universal everywhere):  

X Professors teaching government as the solution to everything  

X Students defending socialism (70% of Gen Z consider voting socialist)  

X 53% of graduates feel unqualified for jobs in their field  

X Ideology of resentment toward achievement

 The pyramid is working—just not for liberty.

This is why Students For Liberty exists. 

Our Local Coordinators host events, educate peers, and develop as leaders worldwide. 

In 2024 alone: 3,881 events reaching 150,000+ people. 

One person who helped SFL in Argentina? An economist named Javier Milei.

Milei didn't just wear our pin—he partnered with us. 

He attended our events, explained our mission on TV, and mentored pro-liberty students across Argentina. 

Why? Because he understood: to change politics, you first have to change culture. 

 

Take Ethan Yang. Started with "no leadership experience, no professional skills. Just a small libertarian club that met in the basement of our dining hall." 

As a Students for Liberty coordinator, his Freedom of Information Act request helped halt the Biden administration's social-media censorship. The case reached the Supreme Court.

A federal judge called the Biden Administration's collusion with/threats to Big Tech "the most massive attack against free speech in US history." 

Stopped by one student. One request. Supreme Court case. 

That's the power of the pyramid when it works for liberty. 

 

Here's what every student needs to understand: 

You're not just getting a degree. 

You're being shaped by ideas that will define the next fifty years. 

The question isn't whether ideas will spread from campus—it's which ideas will spread.

Milton Friedman explains the point: "Our basic function is to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive until the politically impossible becomes the politically inevitable." 

Before Milei became president, he was attending SFL events. 

That pin? It represents a movement that changed a country.

Tired of feeling outnumbered, silenced, or lost in campus groupthink? 

The College Survival Kit is your first step into this global movement. 

Learn how real change begins—with students who refuse to stay silent: DOWNLOAD YOURS HERE. 

TRENDWWATCH: The Collapse of the (Existing) Knowledge System.

"Would you believe me if I told you that the biggest news story of our century is happening right now—but is never mentioned in the press?

"That sounds crazy, doesn’t it?

"But that is often the case when a bold new worldview appears. ... We are living through a situation like that right now. ... a total shift—like the magnetic poles reversing. But it doesn’t even have a name—not yet.

"So let’s give it one.

"Let’s call it: The Collapse of the Knowledge System. ... The knowledge structure that has dominated everything for our entire lifetime—and for our parents and grandparents—is collapsing. And it’s taking place everywhere, all at once. ... Let me list ten signs of this collapse. 

(1) Scientific studies don't replicate. ... [and]  fake studies get cited more often than reliable ones. ...

(2) Public distrust of experts has reached an intensity never seen before. ...

(3) The career path for knowledge workers is breaking down—and many only have unpaid student loans to show for their years of training and preparation. ... Art history majors now have an easier time finding a job than computer engineers. ...

(4) Funding for science and tech research is disappearing in every sphere and sector. ... corporations that fund their own research programs are now investing in AI data centers, not scientists. ...

(5) Universities have lost their prestige, and have made enemies of their core constituencies. ...

(6) Plagiarism is getting exposed at all levels from students to corporations—and all the way to Harvard's president. But the authorities just take it for granted. ... It’s even embedded in the dominant technologies and institutions. ... 

(7) AI is imposed everywhere as the new expert system. But when it hallucinates and generates ridiculous responses, the authorities (again) take this for granted. ... And they never, ever apologise. ... 

(8) Science and technology are increasingly used to manipulate and exploit, not serve ... [and we] now see actual degradation in every sphere of technology. ... 

(9) Scandals are everywhere in the knowledge economy (Theranos, Sam Bankman-Fried, collapsing meme coins, COVID, etc). ... nobody is shocked anymore. They lost trust in knowledge tech industries long ago. ... 

(10) We hear constant bickering about “fake science”—from all political and ideological stances. Nobody talks about “true science” ...

"Let me point out that despite all the manipulations, hallucinations, abuses, and dysfunctional excesses of the digital life…

"…Despite all of these, symphonies sound as majestic as ever. Philosophy is more necessary than ever. Paintings are still glorious. Great architecture does not collapse. Nature warms the heart. As do poems and epics and myths.

"Jazz still swings. Heroes still prevail. The soul is stirred. And one lover still reaches for another.

"I’m not sure what exactly will replace the cold, dying knowledge system. But I suspect it will recognize the value of these things. And will prevail for that very reason. ...

"I’m not suggesting that you can replace tech with a poem. But tech now desparately needs what can only be provided by the humanities and human values.

"The new knowledge system will be built on these human values. Technology will be forced to serve it—or it will get locked into a losing battle with the new 'softer and gentler' knowledge system."

~ Ted Gioia from his post 'The Ten Warning Signs'

Seymour's Bill is frightening the luvvies so much they can't read

DAVID SEYMOUR'S REMARKABLY TEPID Regulatory Standards Bill is getting frightened and bewildered luvvies to put down their lattes and type indignant emails to their MPs.

Fuel for many of this outraged commentariat (Anne Salmond was the first; Brian Easton is the latest) is provided by a book-length screed by one Quinn Slobodian called Hayek's Bastards, "The premise of Quinn Slobodian’s new book," says the bookplate, "is that authoritarian right-wing populism is a mutated version of classical liberal economics." A version labelled "neoliberalism" by its opponents.

A counter-intuitive thesis to be sure, So I checked on some actual classical liberals to see what they thought of the book. (Pointless asking Trump followers, since we know none of them can read. Or "neoliberals," none of whom actually exist.)

Phil Magness, an economic historian  who most recently convinced over 150 economists and scholars to sign a declaration opposing Trump's economically harmful, constitutionally dubious tariff policies, wonders aloud at the absurdity of the book's central thesis. Which is Slobodian's apparent conviction "that Trumpism traces its intellectual origins to the Austrian economists Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises." This would undoubtedly astonish all three. 

Slobodian's attempts to link the three suffers, Magness says wryly, "from a lack of clear evidence for the parentage. Undeterred, Slobodian supplies the links by making them up."

As they say, if you have to lie to make up your criticisms, it suggests you probably don't have any.

Slobodian of course relies on the fact that few if any of his credulous readers will bother to actually read Hayek or Mises. (Easton for one would benefit hugely from the experience.) But if you want a candid study of how to quote somebody to say the precise opposite of what they say — in this case Mises quoting others to denounce their racial prejudice is used to suggest their vile views are his own — then Magness's review is a good place to start. 

This is not even sleight of hand. It's a conjurer simply assuming his audience are too dumb to notice. "Deliberate deception" is how another commentator describes it. It's a consistent pattern. Here's Slobodian in 2015, for example, showing how to get Mises to support something he was writing to oppose:

Slobodian demonstrates his pattern of ripping quotes from their
context to give the opposite impression of an author's intention.

It's complete dishonesty: a "scurrilous  ... slipshod attempt to taint and tarnish the reputation of one of the leading economists of the 20th century, and one of the most consistent and outspoken defenders of the classical liberal ideal of political, social and economic liberty and the free society," says Misesian Richard Ebeling in his response to the deception.

We live at a time when one of the worst accusations that can be thrown at someone is the charge of “racist.” Have that word tied to your name and it not only results in moral condemnation, it potentially throws into discredit almost anything and everything that person has said or done. That makes it a serious matter when an individual never identified with such racist views or values has that accusation attached to them. ... The actual facts show this is a fundamentally baseless accusation that attempts to taint and tarnish the reputation of one of the leading economists of the 20th century ...

[O]ne of the most embarrassing observations that can made about an author’s work [is] being slipshod scholarship. Professor Slobodian has 93 footnotes in his article. Over 50 of them reference Mises’s writings or correspondence. Looking them up, I found many instances in which the page reference to a paraphrase of a passage or a quote in one of Mises’s works was not to be found where Professor Slobodian indicated it to be.

In some instances, this was not simply being off a page or two; the page referenced turned out to be in a portion of one of Mises’s works that had nothing to do with the theme or idea that Professor Slobodian was referring to....

In addition, there are instances in which Professor Slobodian asserts or implies views or states of mind held by Mises at some point in time. But the footnoted reference sometimes refers to some other scholar’s work that when looked up did not refer to or imply anything about Ludwig von Mises. For example, at one point (p. 4), Professor Slobodian says, “But for Mises, a war had shaken him the most. Japan’s defeat of Russia in 1905 brought about a non-white power into the elite white club of empires. The event resonated with the rhetoric of the ‘yellow peril’ widespread at the turn of the century, understood as both a racial demographic and commercial threat.” And he footnotes a[nother author's] work about Asian intellectuals in the period before the First World War.

Professor Slobodian then says, “Mises’s response was different but no less radical,” and then references how Mises [allegedly] saw the economic significance of increased global competition from Asia ... The juxtapositioning of these two ideas, one following the other, easily creates the impression that Mises, while having a “different” response, was part of the group worried about a “yellow peril.

There is nothing to suggest in Mises’s writings actually referenced that he held or expressed any such race-based fear in the wake of the Japanese victory over Russia. But the implication is easily left in the reader’s mind.

Slobodian is fundamentally dishonest.

Christopher Snowdon has more:

The first two chapters find Slobodian searching for hints of racial prejudice in the work of Hayek and Mises. For the former, the best he can manage is a reference to ‘the Christian West’ in a 1984 speech. For the latter, who may well have been Austria’s least racist man in the 1930s, it is an even greater challenge. 

Slobodian revives two articles he wrote about the lifelong supporter of open borders in 2019 that have been heavily criticised by Phillip W. Magness and Amelia Janaskie for ‘inverting Mises’s meaning in a light that erroneously casts him as sympathetic to racism or colonialism.’ 

One does not need to be an expert on Mises to see that Slobodian is guilty of selective quotation. One only needs to read the whole paragraph from which the quote is taken. For example, Mises is quoted as writing in 1944: ‘There are few white men who would not shudder at the picture of many millions of black or yellow people living in their own countries.’ Slobodian puts this in a context that implies that Mises shared this revulsion and cites it as evidence that Mises had ‘partially legitimised closed borders for nonwhite migrants as a near-permanent feature of the world order.’ But the very next sentence of Mises’ text reads: ‘The elaboration of a system making for harmonious coexistence and peaceful economic and political cooperation among the various races is a task to be accomplished by coming generations.’ It should be obvious that Mises was not endorsing the prejudices of the majority, but merely acknowledging the existence of such prejudices and hoping that they could be overcome.

And here's Slobodian's problem, and the reason he must so transparently mis-quote: "There is simply no through-line from Mises or Hayek to the alt-right." 

By referring to right-wing populists of the present day as Hayek’s illegitimate offspring (‘bastards’) Slobodian allows himself a certain amount of wriggle room, but if a student believes the exact opposite of the teacher, can he really be portrayed as a follower?

The fatal flaw in this book is that Slobodian has clearly started with his conclusion and worked backwards. An author who was interested in writing about the roots of the current wave of right-wing populism would start with the right-wing populists and study their words and deeds.

Which is what Misesian Jeffrey Tucker did many moons before Slobodian even thought about slithering into print — "the most important political book in recent memory" is what my own reviewer called it.

BUT THIS BRIEF GLIMPSE  into a fetid authorial swamp was not just to alert you to a shitty book from an author too incompetent to even formulate real arguments. It's to show you how bereft of clothing are the nakedly insubstantial objections to Seymour's bill, that so many rest their objections on a ad-hominem without even a home. As Richard Ebeling says so tellingly in a recent article, "“Progressives” Blame F. A. Hayek for Everything They Dislike."

That so many of these "progressive" objections to a fairly unobjectionable Bill rest unthinkingly on Slobodian's animus and deception — for a historian used to checking sources, Anne Salmond's was an example of one of the most dishhonest — suggests the same thing said of Slobodian's book could be said about the objections to the Bill: if you have to lie to make your arguments, then perhaps you don't really have any.

I only wish they were right that it is something they need to be scared about.

"Owners with clearly defined and secure property rights have a strong incentive to care for their land."

"Our dairy farmers are constantly heckled for all manner of environmental ills despite a record unsurpassed anywhere in the world. We focus on minutiae of little consequence instead of extolling the amazing, rich environmental and social value that exists in rural New Zealand. Our total carbon footprint, despite food-miles, is away ahead of the nearest rival.

"Our farmers have set aside and now manage diligently 190,000 hectares of covenanted land under the Queen Elizabeth ll National Trust. That’s an area far bigger than most of our national parks. Riparian planting, steep slope planting, protection of waterways, enhanced wetlands, boosts to diversity increase each year at a surprising rate. Farmers are spending huge numbers of hours working in catchment groups, river care groups, land care groups.

"We need to gather this knowledge, these commitments, this mass of stewardship, this admiration of the family farm, this enhancement of the fabric of our rural communities, and “sell” it to the world’s consumers who have a growing love affair with such noble developments. It is not just empty PR from the Comms team – it's potentially high value marketing that captures hearts and minds as well as wallets.

"We are missing the exciting opportunity to tell the world what a uniquely beautiful and environmentally sound place our food and fibre comes from. We have an amazing story to tell."

~ Owen Jennings from his post 'Keep Those Brands' [emphasis added]

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"Private property rights do not just protect us; they provide the strongest possible protection for the environment" - NOT PC