Ludwig Von Mises on Anarchism

“There are people who call government an evil, although a necessary evil. However, what is needed in order to attain a definite end must not be called an evil ... . Government may even be called the most beneficial of all earthly institutions as without it no peaceful human cooperation, no civilization and no moral life would be possible.” 

~ from Economic Freedom and Interventionism, p. 57.

"Anarchism misunderstands the real nature of man." 

~ from Liberalism, pp. 36-7.

“Liberalism differs radically from anarchism. It has nothing in common with the absurd illusions of the anarchists ... . Liberalism is not so foolish as to aim at the abolition of the state.” 

~ from Omnipotent Government, p. 48.

"[Anarchists are' shallow-minded, dull, [and suffer from] illusions and self-deception.” 

~ from The Ultimate Foundation of Economic Science, pp. 98-9

"I am not an 'enemy of the state' any more than I can be called an enemy of sulphuric acid because I am of the opinion that, useful though it may be for many purposes, it is not suitable either for drinking or for washing one's hands." 

~ from Liberalism, p. 38

Hat tip Stephen Hicks

"The right has to invent preposterous stories, in order to justify an anti-immigrant pogrom." [updated[

"'Anyone who is in the United States illegally is subject to deportation,' he declared during his campaign, pledging to restore the notorious Eisenhower-era program Operation Wetback, which rounded up Mexicans and ejected them from the country.
    "Since assuming office, Trump has doubled down on his calls to build a wall on the southern border. He has tried to ban travel from several Muslim-majority countries, backed a plan to slash family-based immigration, and demanded 'extreme vetting' of all foreigners.
    "[T]he most insidious weapon in Trump's anti-immigration arsenal is 'interior enforcement.' ... It involves cleansing the country of the 11 million unauthorised aliens settled inside America by targeting them wherever they live or work. ...
    "There is no way for the government to conduct the policy equivalent of drone strikes and cleanly remove millions of immigrants from the midst of America without major collateral damage to everyone's rights. Interior enforcement is more like carpet bombing; its effectiveness depends on decimating Americans' liberties."

~ Shikha Dalmia from her post 'How Immigration Crackdowns Screw Up Americans' Lives'

UPDATE:

But, but, it's really straightforward to navigate the snakes and ladders of immigration. I find it really "amusing" ...  

Arsehole. 

Kawanatanga katoa > tino rangatiratanga

"'There’s no doubt that both Māori and Pākehā in 1840 understood tino rangatiratanga to be a bigger deal than kāwanatanga” [says an idiot called Hooton]. However whilst this is undoubtedly the modernist position on how we should interpret the Treaty, the historical evidence suggests something very different.
    "Article One of the Treaty states that the chiefs agreed to 'give absolutely to the Queen of England forever, the complete Government (Kāwanatanga katoa) over their land' ...
    "[T]hat little word katoa ... is rarely mentioned. But it means complete, all-encompassing, totally, without exception. It’s no wonder [that in 1840] it focussed the minds of the chiefs on the issue of Crown authority. ...
    "Nowhere in the historical records do we find any indication that either the chiefs or the Pākehā protagonists understood anything other than that Kāwanatanga katoa meant the Crown was being established as the pre-eminent governing authority in the land. ...
    "'Te Kawenata Hou' (the 'Māori New Testament') ... would have had significant influence on how the chiefs understood the Treaty. ... In 'Te Kawenata Hou' the term rangatira is a general term for leadership. In contrast kawana is a very specific term used to denote governors who represent the authority of kings. To use [the] example of Pilate – as the kawana (governor) he represented the sovereignty of the Roman empire in Jerusalem. He had the authority to tax and to execute judgement. The local Jewish leaders who wanted Jesus crucified had to get his permission. Those leaders are described in Te Kawenata Hou as rangatira. From this the chiefs at Waitangi would have quickly understood what was being proposed in the Treaty. And it certainly did not involve them retaining 'absolute sovereignty'."

~ Ewen McQueen from his post 'Kāwanatanga katoa was the fundamental question at Waitangi'

"So why are energy policies of leading Western countries afflicted by magical thinking and irrationality?"

"What leads a country to begin winding down domestic oil and gas production while promoting the use of imported wood – a wasteful and inefficient fuel — for power generation?
    "What leads policymakers to shut down a nation’s last and still-functional coal generating power plant after almost 150 years of using coal and within months arrive at a situation where blackout prevention notices have to be issued to its power generators?
    "The UK is by no means the only Western country to go down this perverse path of deindustrialisation and national economic suicide. 

    "So why are energy policies of leading Western countries afflicted by magical thinking and irrationality? [Because] The Western World is in a hypnotic trance from 30 years of relentless propaganda pushing climate alarmism."

~ Tilak Doshi from his post 'The Irrationality of Western Energy Policies'

Do we really want "efficient and effective government"?

"This [claim] blanks out the most important question about government: the question of what it should be doing in the first place! "Should the government should censor speech, or ban abortions, or eliminate carbon emissions, or the movement of goods and people on which our prosperity depends? These are not questions of efficiency or effectiveness. And indeed when a government is doing things that are destructive, it is better that it does them ineffectively. ...
    "There’s no such thing as doing a bad thing well; there’s just doing it more or less effectively, and when the goal is bad, it’s better that one be ineffective at bringing it about. ...
    "The context of present politics is that much of what both parties want to accomplish is wrong and destructive. And in such a context it’s foolish and immoral to think about who will be more efficient or effective in a way that’s agnostic about their ends."

~ Greg Salmieri, in answer to Lex Friedman

 

"Happiness is a state of non-contradictory joy ... "

"Happiness is not to be achieved at the command of emotional whims. Happiness is not the satisfaction of whatever irrational wishes you might blindly attempt to indulge. Happiness is a state of non-contradictory joy—a joy without penalty or guilt, a joy that does not clash with any of your values and does not work for your own destruction, not the joy of escaping from your mind, but of using your mind’s fullest power, not the joy of faking reality, but of achieving values that are real, not the joy of a drunkard, but of a producer. Happiness is possible only to a rational man, the man who desires nothing but rational goals, seeks nothing but rational values and finds his joy in nothing but rational actions."

~ Ayn Rand, from 'Galt’s Speech' in her 1957 novel Atlas Shrugged. Hat tip psychologist Jean Moroney — who "chews" the paragraph sentence by sentence in her latest blog post. There's a lot packed in there, she reckons. "When I re-read this paragraph," she says, "I felt like it had taken me 30 years to understand it in detail, and I still had more to learn from it." You too, probably.

Why Johnny isn't Reading [updated]

We all know that many students emerge from universities knowing less than they did when they entered; graduating with heads full of random, un-integrated bites of information, and arguments they’re aware (deep down) they’ve never really mastered. 

We know you can leave today's universities without every having heard of the giants of your own field; that you can be given an economics degree having never read (or read of) Adam Smith; or an architecture degree without ever getting to grips with Frank Lloyd Wright; or a philosophy degree without ever even encountering, or wrestling with Aristotle.

But it gets worse. More and more young people "just don’t want to read books any more: they seem to lack either the will or the attention span."

"If you’ve been teaching at the [university]  level for a number of years," says the Atlantic in a long piece on the distressing development, "and your teaching involves reading books, you’ll have noticed the phenomenon." I have. Even fourteen years ago it was evident.

Economist George Reisman used to reckon that graduates in any discipline should really emerge possessing 

the essential content of well over a hundred major books on mathematics, science, history, literature, and philosophy, and do so in a form that is well organised and integrated, so that he can apply this internalised body of knowledge to his perception of everything in the world around him. He should be in a position to enlarge his knowledge of any subject and to express his thoughts on any subject clearly and logically, both verbally and in writing. Yet, as the result of the mis-education provided today, it is now much more often the case that college graduates fulfil the Romantic ideal of being ‘simple, uneducated men.’” [Emphasis mine.]

This is everywhere. As the Atlantic recounts, 

students now seem bewildered by the thought of finishing multiple books a semester. .... Many students no longer arrive at [university]—even at highly selective, elite [universities]—prepared to read books.

The Spectator and Daily Skeptic tell a similar tale. The problem starts even earlier than university.

[A] student told [one uni lecturer] that, at her public high school, she had never been required to read an entire book. She had been assigned excerpts, poetry, and news articles, but not a single book cover to cover.

Hard to study literature if you've never read a book. And can't. 

Twenty years ago, Dames’s classes had no problem engaging in sophisticated discussions of Pride and Prejudice one week and Crime and Punishment the next. Now his students tell him up front that the reading load feels impossible. It’s not just the frenetic pace; they struggle to attend to small details while keeping track of the overall plot.

The result:

Students arrive on campus with a narrower vocabulary and less understanding of language than they used to have. ...; students “shutting down” when confronted with ideas they don’t understand; they’re less able to persist through a challenging text than they used to be. Daniel Shore, the chair of [one] English department, told me that his students have trouble staying focused on even a sonnet.

A sonnet is only fourteen lines!

The problem is said to be the internet.

Teenagers are constantly tempted by their devices, which inhibits their preparation for the rigors of college coursework—then they get to college, and the distractions keep flowing. “It’s changed expectations about what’s worthy of attention,” Daniel Willingham, a psychologist at UVA, told me. “Being bored has become unnatural.” Reading books, even for pleasure, can’t compete with TikTok, Instagram, YouTube. In 1976, about 40 percent of high-school seniors said they had read at least six books for fun in the previous year, compared with 11.5 percent who hadn’t read any. By 2022, those percentages had flipped.

But "teenagers are not bothering with the internet either."

They don’t want to know that much to actually initiate a question of the internet. If pushed, they might ask Alexa at home but they hardly go to the bother of typing out a question.
    And this, I have finally worked, out is the reason for teenagers’ disinterest in the possibilities of the internet: the current generation of children are passive users, not active ones. They look at their phones and entertainment is presented to them via their specific feeds: reems and reems of the stuff on Snap or TikTok. Teenagers have no need to actively look for anything, as everything has already been perfectly curated for their specific needs (generally beauty for girls, fitness and jokes for boys – disappointing but there it is). Internet use is a bit like reading a magazine of old, someone else has done all the hard work for you and all you have to do is sit back and scroll. ... 

[F]or the vast majority of children, the internet is as ignored and unvisited as the libraries and bookshops of old.

 So perhaps the problem is not that regular whipping boy. Perhaps the problem is that generations of children — teachers of the teachers of the teachers of today's teachers — have been taught dis-integrated knowledge; that facts are negotiable; that the author is dead; that creators are hegemonic; and that the oceans are boiling and colonial settlement is necessarily genocidal. The hierarchy of knowledge is routinely ignored (or entirely unknown), and teachers increasingly see themselves as agents of social and political change instead of what they once were: teachers. 

Is it then any surprise, after decades of this intellectual rot emanating from philosophy departments and then teachers colleges — a result of the long 'progressive' march through the institutions —that we're not overwhelmingly seeing strong, healthy, confident, independent and knowledgeable young folk, but too many who can't write, can't read, and can't think? 

How to solve this?

Start by burning to the ground the teachers colleges from whence this poison emanates. (Or at least close them). And insist that teachers know their goddamn subject. Philosopher Leonard Peikoff is a strong advocate of this policy to fix Why Johnny Can't Think:

There is no rational purpose to these institutions (and so they do little but disseminate poisonous ideas). Teaching is not a skill acquired through years of classes; it is not improved by the study of “psychology” or “methodology” or any of the rest of the stuff the schools of education offer. Teaching requires only the obvious: motivation, common sense, experience, a few good books or courses on technique, and, above all, a knowledge of the material being taught. Teachers must be masters of their subject; this — not a degree in education — is what school boards should demand as a condition of employment.
    This one change would dramatically improve the schools. If experts in subject matter were setting the terms in the classroom, some significant content would have to reach the students, even given today’s dominant philosophy. In addition, the basket cases who know only the Newspeak of their education professors would be out of a job, which would be another big improvement.
    This reform, of course, would be resisted to the end by today’s educational establishment, and could hardly be achieved nationally without a philosophic change in the country. But it gives us a starting point to rally around that pertains specifically to the field of education. If you are a parent or a teacher or merely a concerned taxpayer, you can start the battle for quality in education by demanding loudly — even in today’s corrupt climate — that the teachers your school employs know what they are talking about, and then talk about it.
    “If a nation expects to be ignorant and free . . .” wrote Thomas Jefferson, “it expects what never was and never will be.” 
    Let us fight to make our schools once again bastions of knowledge. Then no dictator can rise among us by counting, like Big Brother in 1984, on the enshrinement of ignorance.
    And then we may once again have a human future ahead of us.

 UPDATE:

At least one youngster is fighting back. On the tech front, at least.

And one school. On the philosophical front.

"Though it's tempting to [always] blame the government for getting in the way of business, there's a lot about Kiwi business that is about getting in the way of itself."

"[T]hough it's tempting to [always] blame the government for getting in the way of business, there's a lot about Kiwi business that is about getting in the way of itself. ... The Mood of the Boardroom Survey & recent remarks by some of this nation's CEOs reflect on the (dubious) quality of New Zealand's boardrooms more than anything else. Namely that most are woke & weak. ...
    "NZ's Big Corporate CEOs will not themselves push productivity-enhancing reforms in their own firms ... They'd prefer, instead, to be Mr Nice Person. Look at the qualifications of many of them - the typical one being in Accounting. Other than that, its law. Lawyers often get on Boards because Kiwi firms want someone to help with compliance - not a person with imagination about where the future of the company should be. ...
    "Before the Productivity Commission was de-commissioned, it identified lack of 'managerial capability' as a contributor to our low productivity. ... Many of our CEOs & Boardrooms are not capable. ... The staff can't make up for a boss who is the wrong boss. ... "

~ Robert McCulloch from his post '"The Mood" of NZ's (Weak and Inbred) Boardrooms reflects on their own ineffectiveness, which has cut productivity, not on our MPs' quality'

Young men are resenting being resented

 

"Young men seem to be motivated, not so much by a specific issue, but by their resentment of the current culture. If true, the upcoming elections will express the 'Breitbart Doctrine,' named after the late conservative journalist Andrew Breitbart. This doctrine states 'politics is downstream from culture.' To change the politics of a society, you must change its culture because politics originates from culture which, in turn, originates from the values of individuals who constitute society. Simply stated, if a person’s values and culture are transformed, his politics transforms accordingly.
    "The culture surrounding young men is dramatically different from that of their fathers, and the change has not been kind. The Brookings Institute notes, 'Young men increasingly feel as though they have been experiencing discrimination.' For decades now, prominent voices of political correctness, which is now called social justice, have blamed men as a gender class for a long slate of social wrongs. And, for young men, the past few decades constitute all of their lives. This means they have heard about their collective guilt since birth, and it would be natural for them to feel resentful for being castigated as a class for social wrongs. Such young men are reportedly turning to Donald Trump as a symbol of more traditional and proud manhood. ... [!]"

   "Women need healthy and well-adjusted men to be life partners, loving family members, friends, good neighbours, co-workers, and the peaceful strangers you pass on the street. The last thing women need is to live beside a generation of resentful men who act on their resentment, especially if the feeling is justified."

~ Wendy McElroy from her post 'Ignore The New Power Demographic at Your Own Risk: Young Male Voters'

UPDATED: "The richest 20 per cent of the world’s countries are now around 30 times richer than the poorest 20 per cent. Why? Differences in a society’s institutions."

"The richest 20 per cent of the world’s countries are now around 30 times richer than the poorest 20 per cent. Moreover, the income gap between the richest and poorest countries is persistent; although the poorest countries have become richer, they are not catching up with the most prosperous. ... Why? ... [D]ifferences in a society’s institutions. ...
    Europeans’ colonis[ed] large parts of the globe. One important explanation for the current differences in prosperity is the political and economic systems that the colonisers introduced, or chose to retain, from the sixteenth century onwards. The laureates demonstrated that this led to a reversal of fortune. The places that were, relatively speaking, the richest at their time of colonisation are now among the poorest. ...
    "In [these] colonies, the purpose was to exploit the indigenous population and extract natural resources to benefit the colonisers. In other cases [however], the colonisers built inclusive political and economic systems for the long-term benefit of European settlers. ... [These] settler colonies – needed to have inclusive economic institutions that incentivised settlers to work hard and invest in their new homeland. In turn, this led to demands for political rights that gave them a share of the profits. Of course, the early European colonies were not what we would now call democracies but, compared to the densely populated colonies to which few Europeans moved, the settler colonies provided considerably more extensive political rights. ...
    "[T]hese initial differences in colonial institutions are an important explanation for the vast differences in prosperity that we see today. ...
    "[This year's Nobel laureates in economics] have uncovered a clear chain of causality. [Mercantilist] institutions that were created to exploit the masses are bad for long-run growth, while ones that establish fundamental economic freedoms and the rule of law are good for it."

~ from the 'Popular Information' released by the Nobel Prize Committee, awarding this year's Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel 2024 to Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson and James A. Robinson. [Hat tip Conversable Economist]

UPDATE: Not everyone's happy that the Prize has gone to what economist Deirdre McCloskey calls "a B+ statist": 

McCloskey of course has her own answer to what caused the prosperity that Acemoglu et al ascribe to good institutions: a cultural change before the Industrial Revolution she calls the "bourgeois revolution." Her ideas are debated here. For what it's worth, I'm in agreement with the great Joel Mokyr who says, "Ideas mattered, but so too did institutions."

"Remember, remember, this fifth of November, Fake electors, insurrection, and plot."

 

Not that I'm voting in the US elections on November 5th — and probably wouldn't if I could — but here are seven reasons not to vote for Orange Man, laid out in The Case Against Donald Trump (Part 1). Seven! Count 'em. Precised by this pithy poetry:

Remember, remember, this fifth of November, 

Fake electors, insurrection, and plot. 

I know of no reason, the sixth of January 

Should ever be forgot.

The 'poem' 's author, Rob Tracinski, reckons "Donald Trump is unfit for the presidency on about seven different levels."

No, seriously, when I began to jot down my notes for the case against him, I identified seven major issues, any one of which would be sufficient reason to vote against him:

1. January 6, 
2. his current threats against democracy, 
3. his hostility to Ukraine, 
4. his disastrous proposals on tariffs and mass deportations, 
5. his method of thinking (or lack thereof), 
6. his unrelenting series of con-man schemes, and 
7. his repellent personality.

But, but, Kamala Harris ...

Look, the thing that most recommends her for the presidency is simply that she is not Donald Trump—and to appreciate what a compelling motive that is, we first have to survey the full scope of his threat to the country.

Read on to begin that survey. It is truly repellent.

Socialists once argued that socialism was superior to capitalism because it would deliver a higher standard of living and more consumer goods. When it became abundantly clear that this was bollocks, the socialists shifted their arguments and began to claim that socialism—while perhaps economically inferior—was superior morally and philosophically. And thus was born the post-modern denial of that outrageous success in human progress, and environmentalists' objection to it. 

Stephen Hicks writes about this in his 2004 book Explaining Postmodernism. Ludwig Von Mises was on to this a half-century before when he penned his short book The Anti-Capitalist Mentality, explaining why the intellectuals of his day so loathed the free market.... 

The Noneconomic Objections to Capitalism

by Ludwig Von Mises

1. The Argument of Happiness

Critics level two charges against capitalism: First, they say, that the possession of a motor car, a television set, and a refrigerator does not make a man happy. Secondly, they complain that there are still people who own none of these gadgets. Both propositions are correct, but neither casts blame upon the capitalistic system of social cooperation.

People do not toil and trouble in order to attain perfect happiness, but in order to remove as much as possible some felt uneasiness and thus to become happier than they were before. A man who buys a television set thereby gives evidence to the effect that he thinks that the possession of this contrivance will increase his well-being and make him more content than he was without it. If it were otherwise, he would not have bought it. The task of the doctor is not to make the patient happy, but to remove his pain and to put him in better shape for the pursuit of the main concern of every living being, the fight against all factors pernicious to his life and ease.

It may be true that there are among Buddhist mendicants, living on alms in dirt and penury, some who feel perfectly happy and do not envy any nabob. However, it is a fact that for the immense majority of people such a life would appear unbearable. To them the impulse toward ceaselessly aiming at the improvement of the external conditions of existence is inwrought. ... One of the most remarkable achievements of capitalism is the drop in infant mortality. Who wants to deny that this phenomenon has at least removed one of the causes of many people’s unhappiness?

No less absurd is the second reproach thrown upon capitalism — namely, that technological and therapeutical innovations do not benefit all people. Changes in human conditions are brought about by the pioneering of the cleverest and most energetic men. They take the lead and the rest of mankind follows them little by little. The innovation is first a luxury of only a few people, until by degrees it comes into the reach of the many. 

It is not a sensible objection to the use of shoes or of forks that they spread only slowly and that even today millions do without them. The dainty ladies and gentlemen who first began to use soap were the harbingers of the big-scale production of soap for the common man. If those who have today the means to buy a television set were to abstain from the purchase because some people cannot afford it, they would not further, but hinder, the popularisation of this contrivance. 

The inherent tendency of capitalism is towards shortening the interval between the appearance of a new improvement and the moment its use becomes general.

2. The Argument of Materialism

Again there are grumblers who blame capitalism for what they call its mean materialism. They cannot help admitting that capitalism has the tendency to improve the material conditions of mankind. But, they say, it has diverted men from the higher and nobler pursuits. It feeds the bodies, but it starves the souls and the minds. It has brought about a decay of the arts. Gone are the days of the great poets, painters, sculptors and architects. Our age produces merely trash. ...

'Fallingwater,' Frank Lloyd Wright, 1936

Among those who make pretense to the appellation of educated men there is much hypocrisy. They put on an air of connoisseurship and feign enthusiasm for the art of the past and artists passed away long ago. They show no similar sympathy for the contemporary artist who still fights for recognition. Dissembled adoration for the Old Masters is with them a means to disparage and ridicule the new ones who deviate from traditional canons and create their own.

John Ruskin will be remembered — together with Carlyle, the Webbs, Bernard Shaw and some others — as one of the gravediggers of British freedom, civilisation, and prosperity. A wretched character in his private no less than in his public life, he glorified war and bloodshed and fanatically slandered the teachings of political economy which he did not understand. 

He was a bigoted detractor of the market economy and a romantic eulogist of the guilds. He paid homage to the arts of earlier centuries. But when he faced the work of a great living artist, Whistler, he dispraised it in such foul and objurgatory language that he was sued for libel and found guilty by the jury. It was the writings of Ruskin that popularised the prejudice that capitalism, apart from being a bad economic system, has substituted ugliness for beauty, pettiness for grandeur, trash for art.

'Nocturne in Black and Gold: TheFalling
Rocket,' James McNeil Whistler, 1875

As people widely disagree in the appreciation of artistic achievements, it is not possible to explode the talk about the artistic inferiority of the age of capitalism in the same apodictic way in which one may refute errors in logical reasoning or in the establishment of facts of experience. Yet no sane man would be insolent enough as to belittle the grandeur of the artistic exploits of the age of capitalism.

The preeminent art of this age of “mean materialism and money-making” was music. Wagner and Verdi, Berlioz and Bizet, Brahms and Bruckner, Hugo Wolf and Mahler, Puccini and Richard Strauss, what an illustrious cavalcade! What an era in which such masters as Schumann and Donizetti were overshadowed by still superior genius!

Then there were the great novels of Balzac, Flaubert, Maupassant, Jens Jacobsen, Proust, and the poems of Victor Hugo, Walt Whitman, Rilke, Yeats. How poor our lives would be if we had to miss the work of these giants and of many other no less sublime authors.

Let us not forget the French painters and sculptors who taught us new ways of looking at the world and enjoying light and color.

Nobody ever contested that this age has encouraged all branches of scientific activities. But, say the grumblers, this was mainly the work of specialists while “synthesis” was lacking. One can hardly misconstrue in a more absurd way the teachings of modern mathematics, physics, and biology. And what about the books of philosophers like Croce, Bergson, Husserl, and Whitehead?

Each epoch has its own character in its artistic exploits. Imitation of masterworks of the past is not art; it is routine. What gives value to a work is those features in which it differs from other works. This is what is called the style of a period.

In one respect the eulogists of the past seem to be justified. The last generations did not bequeath to the future such monuments as the pyramids, the Greek temples, the Gothic cathedrals and the churches and palaces of the Renaissance and the Baroque. In the last hundred years many churches and even cathedrals were built and many more government palaces, schools and libraries. But they do not show any original conception; they reflect old styles or hybridise diverse old styles. Only in apartment houses, office buildings, and private homes have we seen something develop that may be qualified as an architectural style of our age. Although it would be mere pedantry not to appreciate the peculiar grandeur of such sights as the New York skyline, it can be admitted that modern architecture has not attained the distinction of that of past centuries.

The reasons are various. As far as religious buildings are concerned, the accentuated conservatism of the churches shuns any innovation. With the passing of dynasties and aristocracies, the impulse to construct new palaces disappeared. The wealth of entrepreneurs and capitalists is, whatever the anticapitalistic demagogues may fable, so much inferior to that of kings and princes that they cannot indulge in such luxurious construction. No one is today rich enough to plan such palaces as that of Versailles or the Escorial. The orders for the construction of government buildings do no longer emanate from despots who were free, in defiance of public opinion, to choose a master whom they themselves held in esteem and to sponsor a project that scandalised the dull majority. Committees and councils are not likely to adopt the ideas of bold pioneers. They prefer to range themselves on the safe side.

Side table by Eileen Gray, chair by Marcel Breuer

There has never been an era in which the many were prepared to do justice to contemporary art. Reverence to the great authors and artists has always been limited to small groups. What characterises capitalism is not the bad taste of the crowds, but the fact that these crowds, made prosperous by capitalism, became “consumers” of literature — of course, of trashy literature. The book market is flooded by a downpour of trivial fiction for the semi-barbarians. But this does not prevent great authors from creating imperishable works.

The critics shed tears on the alleged decay of the industrial arts. They contrast, e.g., old furniture as preserved in the castles of European aristocratic families and in the collections of the museums with the cheap things turned out by big-scale production. They fail to see that these collectors’ items were made exclusively for the well-to-do. The carved chests and the intarsia tables could not be found in the miserable huts of the poorer strata. 

Those caviling about the inexpensive furniture of the American wage earner should ... [realise that w]hen modern industry began to provide the masses with the paraphernalia of a better life, their main concern was to produce as cheaply as possible without any regard to aesthetic values. Later, when the progress of capitalism had raised the masses’ standard of living, they turned step by step to the fabrication of things which do not lack refinement and beauty. Only romantic prepossession can induce an observer to ignore the fact that more and more citizens of the capitalistic countries live in an environment which cannot be simply dismissed as ugly.

3. The Argument of Injustice

The most passionate detractors of capitalism are those who reject it on account of its alleged injustice.

It is a gratuitous pastime to depict what ought to be and is not because it is contrary to inflexible laws of the real universe. Such reveries may be considered as innocuous as long as they remain daydreams. But when their authors begin to ignore the difference between fantasy and reality, they become the most serious obstacle to human endeavours to improve the external conditions of life and well-being.

The worst of all these delusions is the idea that “nature” has bestowed upon every man certain rights. According to this doctrine nature is openhanded toward every child born. There is plenty of everything for everybody, they say. Consequently, everyone has a fair inalienable claim against all his fellowmen and against society that he should get the full portion which nature has already allotted to him. The eternal laws of natural and divine justice require that nobody should appropriate to himself what by rights belongs to other people. The poor are needy therefore only because unjust people have deprived them of their birthright. It is the task of the church and the secular authorities to prevent such spoliation and to make all people prosperous.

Every word of this doctrine is false. Nature is not bountiful but stingy. It has restricted the supply of all things indispensable for the preservation of human life. It has populated the world with animals and plants to whom the impulse to destroy human life and welfare is inwrought. It displays powers and elements whose operation is damaging to human life and to human endeavours to preserve it. Man’s survival and well-being are an achievement of the skill with which he has utilised the main instrument with which nature has equipped him — reason.

Men, cooperating under the system of the division of labour, have created all the wealth which the daydreamers consider as a free gift of nature. With regard to the “distribution” of this wealth, it is nonsensical to refer to an allegedly divine or natural principle of justice. What matters is not the allocation of portions out of a fund presented to man by nature. The problem is rather to further those social institutions which enable people to continue and to enlarge the production of all those things which they need.

The World Council of Churches, an ecumenical organisation of Protestant Churches, declared in 1948: “Justice demands that the inhabitants of Asia and Africa, for instance, should have the benefits of more machine production.” This makes sense only if one implies that the Lord presented mankind with a definite quantity of machines and expected that these contrivances will be distributed equally among the various nations. Yet the capitalistic countries were bad enough to take possession of much more of this stock than “justice” would have assigned to them and thus to deprive the inhabitants of Asia and Africa of their fair portion. What a shame!

The truth is that the accumulation of capital and its investment in machines, the source of the comparatively greater wealth of the Western peoples, are due exclusively to laissez-faire capitalism which the same document of the churches passionately misrepresents and rejects on moral grounds. 

It is not the fault of the capitalists that the poorer countries did not adopt those ideologies and policies which would have made the evolution of autochthonous capitalism possible. 

Neither is it the fault of the capitalists that the policies of these nations thwarted the attempts of foreign investors to give them “the benefits of more machine production.” No one contests that what makes hundreds of millions in these nations destitute is that they cling to primitive methods of production and miss the benefits which the employment of better tools and up-to-date technological designs could bestow upon them. But there is only one means to relieve their distress — namely, the full adoption of laissez-faire capitalism. What they need is private enterprise and the accumulation of new capital, capitalists, and entrepreneurs. It is nonsensical to blame capitalism and the capitalistic nations of the West for the plight the backward peoples have brought upon themselves. The remedy indicated is not “justice” but the substitution of sound, i.e., laissez-faire, policies for unsound policies.

It was not vain disquisitions about a vague concept of justice that raised the standard of living of the common man in the capitalistic countries to its present height, but the activities of men dubbed as “rugged individualists” and “exploiters.” The poverty of the backward nations is due to the fact that their policies of expropriation, discriminatory taxation, and foreign exchange control prevent the investment of foreign capital while their domestic policies preclude the accumulation of indigenous capital.

All those rejecting capitalism on moral grounds as an unfair system are deluded by their failure to comprehend what capital is, how it comes into existence, and how it is maintained — and what the benefits are which are derived from its employment in production processes.

The only source of the generation of additional capital goods is saving. If all the goods produced are consumed, no new capital comes into being. But if consumption lags behind production and the surplus of goods newly produced over goods consumed is utilised in further production processes, these processes are henceforth carried out by the aid of more capital goods. 

All the capital goods are intermediary goods, stages on the road that leads from the first employment of the original factors of production, i.e., natural resources and human labour, to the final turning out of goods ready for consumption. They all are perishable. They are, sooner or later, worn out in the processes of production. If all the products are consumed without replacement of the capital goods which have been used up in their production, capital is consumed. If this happens, further production will be aided only by a smaller amount of capital goods and will therefore render a smaller output per unit of the natural resources and labor employed. To prevent this sort of dissaving and disinvestment, one must dedicate a part of the productive effort to capital maintenance, to the replacement of the capital goods absorbed in the production of usable goods.

Capital is not a free gift of God or of nature. It is the outcome of a provident restriction of consumption on the part of man. It is created and increased by saving and maintained by the abstention from dissaving.

Neither have capital or capital goods in themselves the power to raise the productivity of natural resources and of human labor. Only if the fruits of saving are wisely employed or invested, do they increase the output per unit of the input of natural resources and of labor. If this is not the case, they are dissipated or wasted.

The accumulation of new capital, the maintenance of previously accumulated capital and the utilisation of capital for raising the productivity of human effort are the fruits of purposive human action. They are the outcome of the conduct of thrifty people who save and abstain from dissaving, viz., the capitalists who earn interest; and of people who succeed in utilizing the capital available for the best possible satisfaction of the needs of the consumers, viz., the entrepreneurs who earn profit.

Neither capital (or capital goods) nor the conduct of the capitalists and entrepreneurs in dealing with capital could improve the standard of living for the rest of the people, if these noncapitalists and nonentrepreneurs did not react in a certain way. If the wage earners were to behave in the way which the spurious “iron law of wages” describes and would know of no use for their earnings other than to feed and to procreate more offspring, the increase in capital accumulated would keep pace with the increase in population figures. All the benefits derived from the accumulation of additional capital would be absorbed by multiplying the number of people. However, men do not respond to an improvement in the external conditions of their lives in the way in which rodents and germs do. They know also of other satisfactions than feeding and proliferation. Consequently, in the countries of capitalistic civilisation, the increase of capital accumulated outruns the increase in population figures. To the extent that this happens, the marginal productivity of labour is increased as against the marginal productivity of the material factors of production. There emerges a tendency toward higher wage rates. The proportion of the total output of production that goes to the wage earners is enhanced as against that which goes as interest to the capitalists and as rent to the land owners. 

To speak of the productivity of labour makes sense only if one refers to the marginal productivity of labour, i.e., to the deduction in net output to be caused by the elimination of one worker. Then it refers to a definite economic quantity, to a determinate amount of goods or its equivalent in money. The concept of a general productivity of labour as resorted to in popular talk about an allegedly natural right of the workers to claim the total increase in productivity is empty and indefinable. It is based on the illusion that it is possible to determine the shares that each of the various complementary factors of production has physically contributed to the turning out of the product. If one cuts a sheet of paper with scissors, it is impossible to ascertain quotas of the outcome to the scissors (or to each of the two blades) and to the man who handled them. To manufacture a car one needs various machines and tools, various raw materials, the labour of various manual workers and, first of all, the plan of a designer. But nobody can decide what quota of the finished car is to be physically ascribed to each of the various factors the cooperation of which was required for the production of the car.

For the sake of argument, we may for a moment set aside all the considerations which show the fallacies of the popular treatment of the problem and ask: Which of the two factors, labour or capital, caused the increase in productivity? But precisely if we put the question in this way, the answer must be: capital. What renders the total output in the present-day United States higher (per head of manpower employed) than output in earlier ages or in economically backward countries is the fact that the contemporary American worker is aided by more and better tools. If capital equipment (per head of the worker) were not more abundant than it was three hundred years ago, say, then output (per head of the worker) would not be higher. What is required to raise, in the absence of an increase in the number of workers employed, the total amount of America’s industrial output is the investment of additional capital that can only be accumulated by new saving. It is those saving and investing to whom credit is to be given for the multiplication of the productivity of the total labour force.

What raises wage rates and allots to the wage earners an ever increasing portion out of the output which has been enhanced by additional capital accumulation is the fact that the rate of capital accumulation exceeds the rate of increase in population. The official doctrine passes over this fact in silence or even denies it emphatically. But the policies of bureaucrats and labour unions clearly show that their leaders are fully aware of the correctness of the theory which they publicly smear as silly bourgeois apologetics. They are eager to restrict the number of job seekers in the whole country by occupational licensing and anti-immigration laws, and in each segment of the labour market by preventing the influx of newcomers.

That the increase in wage rates does not depend on the individual worker’s “productivity,” but on the marginal productivity of labour, is clearly demonstrated by the fact that wage rates are moving upward also for performances in which the “productivity” of the individual has not changed at all. There are many such jobs. A barber shaves a customer today precisely in the same manner his predecessors used to shave people two hundred years ago. A butler waits at the table of the British prime minister in the same way in which once butlers served Pitt and Palmerston. In agriculture some kinds of work are still performed with the same tools in the same way in which they were performed centuries ago. Yet the wage rates earned by all such workers are today much higher than they were in the past. They are higher because they are determined by the marginal productivity of labour. The employer of a butler withholds this man from employment in a factory and must therefore pay the equivalent of the increase in output which the additional employment of one man in a factory would bring about. It is not any merit on the part of the butler that causes this rise in his wages, but the fact that the increase in capital invested surpasses the increase in the number of hands.

All pseudo-economic doctrines which depreciate the role of saving and capital accumulation are absurd. What constitutes the greater wealth of a capitalistic society as against the smaller wealth of a noncapitalistic society is the fact that the available supply of capital goods is greater in the former than in the latter. 

What has improved the wage earners’ standard of living is the fact that the capital equipment per head of the men eager to earn wages has increased. It is a consequence of this fact that an ever increasing portion of the total amount of usable goods produced goes to the wage earners. None of the passionate tirades of Marx, Keynes and a host of less well known authors could show a weak point in the statement that there is only one means to raise wage rates permanently and for the benefit of all those eager to earn wages — namely, to accelerate the increase in capital available as against population. If this be “unjust,” then the blame rests with nature and not with man.

* * * * 

Ludwig von Mises (1881-1973) was the acknowledged leader of the Austrian School of economic thought, a prodigious originator in economic theory, and a prolific author. Mises' writings and lectures encompassed economic theory, history, epistemology, government, and political philosophy. (Some cogent quotes here from the great man.)

This post previously appeared at the Mises Blog.

"...owning oneself."

"No price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning oneself."

~ Friedrich Nietzsche. (Translation by Stephen Hicks, pictured here with the quotation on the wall at Universidad de la Libertad in Mexico, where he delivered five lectures on philosophy of economics: Property, Trade, Money, the Enlightenment, & Entrepreneurism)

 

The problem of knowledge in society

"The peculiar character of the problem of a rational economic order is determined precisely by the fact that the knowledge of the circumstances of which we must make use never exists in concentrated or integrated form, but solely as the dispersed bits of incomplete and frequently contradictory knowledge which all the separate individuals possess. The economic problem of society is thus not merely a problem of how to allocate 'given' resources—if 'given' is taken to mean given to a single mind which deliberately solves the problem set by these 'data.' It is rather a problem of how to secure the best use of resources known to any of the members of society, for ends whose relative importance only these individuals know. Or, to put it briefly, it is a problem of the utilisation of knowledge which is not given to anyone in its totality."

~ third paragraph from F.A. Hayek's Nobel Prize speech from 1972. David R. Henderson reckons the published speech "is one of the ten most important articles published in economics in the last 80 years. So, it’s worth the effort." And the most important paragraph in this article, he reckons, is this third paragraph — and the most important sentence in the whole article being this paragraph's first sentence. Henderson himself helps to untangle Hayek's German locution in his own teaching notes. With all appropriate humility, I have a go below at translating it into plain English ...

MY 'TRANSLATION':

"Specialist knowledge is distributed throughout society — knowledge of particular circumstances or opportunities, 'local knowledge' if you like, which specific separate individuals possess and which will often appear contradictory. (There is after all no such thing as a 'collective brain' that knows or can know and integrate every single discrete circumstance.)

    "Yet in a rational economic order, those specific morsels of local and focussed knowledge are being put to use at every moment across society to find, transform, produce and distribute resources for ends whose relative importance only individuals know. And from that process comes the things we each value, produced by minds none of whom can ever see the whole.

    "To put it briefly, it is a little-recognised miracle of the integrated utilisation of morsels of local knowledge, none of which is given to anyone in its totality, to create the wealth on which we all depend."

'Hurricanes Are Not Going Away; We Must Double Down on What’s Making Them More Survivable'

"Storms like Helene and Milton [and cyclones like Gabrielle] ought to drive us to recommit to and expand the very institutions that have made natural disasters more survivable for so many, not to abandon them out of some false hope that bad weather can be eliminated. ...
    "A world without dangerous weather is an imaginary ideal. Press even the most ardent climate activists, and they’ll admit as much. ... But a world with marginally better weather would still have hurricanes, wildfires, heat waves, and all the other maladies we’re so often led to believe only plague us because we burn fossil fuels. So, if we’re serious about tackling the problems caused by dangerous storms and other natural disasters, the solution lies in better adapting to bad weather, not pretending we can eliminate it.
    "Fortunately, humans are very good at adapting to bad weather. And, while we have been for most of our history, we have become incredibly good at it in the last two hundred years thanks primarily to one thing—the economic growth that resulted from the Industrial Revolution.
    "Economic growth is not just some metric for measuring business activity. It reflects the creation of the wealth that has allowed humans to not only survive but live comfortably in nearly every region on earth. Thanks to a robust energy industry and modern HVAC systems, there are bustling cities all the way from arid deserts to the frigid taiga. ...
    "This is all to say that the problems often ascribed to climate change are fundamentally problems of poverty.
    "Fortunately, we already know what solves poverty: market institutions grounded in a private property norm. Unfortunately, those are the very institutions the so-called environmentalist movement has set its sights on."

~  Connor O'Keefe from his post 'Hurricanes Are Not Going Away; We Must Double Down on What’s Making Them More Survivable'

John Key: "...he served himself and not the nation."

Cartoon by Richard McGrail from The Free Radical

"Something which has puzzled me in recent years is the ... dismissive attitude to the John Key government as wasted years. ... The light dawned when 'The Herald' published an astonishingly ignorant but revealing article by Key on why, if an American he’d vote for Trump. ... In a nutshell Key said ... Trump’s promised tax cuts would suffice to determine his vote.
    "The extraordinary thing about Key’s article was its astonishing shallowness. ... 
    "It was only after reading Key’s article that I finally comprehended [the] steadfast derision for the Key years, specifically the wasted opportunity to make meaningful and desired changes ...
    "His likeable affability aided by a wallowing Labour Party saw him able to coast along, enjoying being Prime Minister but blowing the opportunity to make meaningful change. In that sense he served himself and not the nation and ... condemnation has been 100% correct.
    "It’s now evident Key saw being Prime Minister solely in the context of a personal career highlight experience rather than any wider desire to build a better nation."

~ Bob Jones from his post. [Link added]

Well, that's sunk it.

 

In the absence of any cogent reason to think otherwise, and we've been given none at this stage, the direct cause of HMNZS Manuwai running onto a reef while on a simple survey, then catching fire, and then sinking, looks like nothing less than blithering incompetence. And an inquiry by the Navy about the Navy doesn't give confidence we'll ever know much more.

The author of a history of the Royal Navy in the Pacific, John McLean, observes that 

The sunken Manawanui was a survey/research vessel. It was doing survey work in Samoan waters when, under the control of Yvonne Gray, it went to the bottom of the ocean. Surveying has been an important function of the Royal New Zealand Navy since its creation in the Second World War and before that hydrographic surveys were carried out by the Royal Navy which defended the seas around our coasts until the 1940s. The centuries old principle of surveying is that the surveying vessel - or "mother ship" if you like - stays out at sea while the inshore surveying is done by the ship's small boats. That way they can get in and out of shallow waters, reefs and even river mouths. They then return to the survey vessel where the charts are drawn up. So why did Commander Gray take the large and valuable ship so close to the reef?

Given that this was a survey vessel whose commander appeared to have no idea of how to safely survey, and no clue where the ocean floor was, is there any reason not to think blithering incompetence?

To which, in the absence until then of any cogent reason to think otherwise — and in a climate of "diversity hires" — readers, writers and commentators (including Mr McLean) have been raising the issue of Commander Gray's lesbianism. Not that being a lesbian makes you unable to command a ship. But, in an era of widespread diversity hires — when the recently retired Chief of Navy Rear-Admiral David Proctor feels the need to boast that "having wahine (women) as commanding officers on more than 60%of our ships as well as heading up other important portfolios, is a realisation of that goal ['to celebrate the diversity of our personnel']" — it surely makes you more likely to be promoted to command one before you're fully competent to do so.

Which we're entitled to think has happened here. Particularly when Gray's colleague, Fiona Jameson, captain of the frigate HMNZS Te Kaha, is not just another poster girl for "inclusiveness," but also for sheer blind incompetence. As McLean observes:

Gray's ship sank while Jameson crashed Te Kaha into Auckland's Kauri Point ammunition depot, leaving a gash of more than half a metre that cost $220,000 to repair. At the time of her appointment to Te Kaha Jameson gushed, "Now as I take command with three other women [commanding officers], I get....a greater normality around wahine toa leadership". The poor thing can't even speak English properly let alone steer a ship without hitting a wharf.

Observing this from Britain where he's exploded many a PC pomposity himself, author Peter Boghossian sums up:

Highlighting that the captain of the sunk ship is a lesbian and implying that’s the cause of the crash is grossly irresponsible. Yet we will increasingly find ourselves in this predicament as we hire and promote people on characteristics other than merit. And it’s only beginning.

So it is.

Treaty Principles Debate: Have a Listen

I don't recommend many podcast episodes here at NOT PC, but here's one I reckon you should put aside some time for: it's the Working Group's latest podcast, featuring an hour-long debate over his Treaty Proinciples Bill between ACT's David Seymour, and Ngāti Toa's Helmut Modlik.

Hosted by commy bigmouth Martyn Bradbury and libertarian liquidator Damien Grant, it's worth a listen not least because the participants speak with candour, in good faith , and with humour — and (for the most part) are listening to each other. And how many political debates can you say that about today, especially this one!

Dole for developers

"[M]inisters [are] going to offer free downside price/liquidity insurance to large and established property developers. It [will] be sold as strictly 'time-limited' except that there [will], in fact, be no time limit specified. ...
    "This government (rightly) made much of inheriting a large structural fiscal deficit, and wanting to get government out of business. Instead, they jump in boots and all. And all apparently on the basis that a couple of Cabinet ministers and their Ministry of Housing and Urban Design officials know better than the market what should be built when, where, and by whom ...
    "[I]t brought to mind that old jeer about business-friendly (as opposed to pro-market) governments [helping businesses] to 'capitalise the gains and socialise the losses.' [Or that govts 'helping business' quickly corrupts into 'helping particular businesses.'] ... Plenty of people and firms will have undergone huge stress in the last couple of years, as inflation was squeezed back out of the system. It was and is a necessary adjustment. But most didn’t enjoy the favour of ministers. ...
    "[T]here is just no good or compelling analytical foundation for any sort of intervention of this sort (none are provided, and none are readily conceivable)."

~ Michael Reddell from his post 'Public policy just keeps on worsening'

It's the new unimproved, coerced Public Interest Journalism Fund

"The skirmishing continues between the mainstream media and Google (along with other major platforms) about the [so-called] Fair Digital News Bargaining Bill (or should that be the Coerced and Compelled News Media Subsidy Bill). ...
    "[W]hen the Bill was reported back from the Select Committee, the recommendation was that it go no further. Minister Goldsmith ignored that advice and decided to go ahead with the Bill, much to the consternation of the large digital platforms and the undisguised glee of the [to-be subsidised] mainstream media. ...
    "Google ... [has] been transparent with the Government that ... if the Bill is enacted Google will remove itself from the playing field and will hide [New Zealand] news stories from search results. ... Google would also discontinue its current voluntary agreements through which it partners with and provides some financial support to news publishers
    "[T]he [so-called] Fair Digital News Bargaining Bill is coercive in nature. It compels platforms to negotiate with mainstream media for a means of payment for linking to or aggregating their content. If agreement cannot be reached a regulator steps in and determines what payment should be made. Failure to comply attracts civil penalties.
    "This is neither fair – in that it is compelled and is backed by coercion and the power of the State – nor is it bargaining in that in the final analysis a regulator may fix a payment by diktat. ... [A 'tax' to pay a coerced media subsidy.]
    "[T]here is a solution ... but it lies in existing law, rather than in the creation of a new regulatory bureaucracy backed by a Bill the name of which is in direct contradiction to what it proposes to do. ... [T]he Platforms are ... “free-riding” on the content created by mainstream media ... directly or indirectly without the permission of the 'owner' of that content. Basically that amounts to copyright infringement and the Copyright Act 1993 provides for remedies for infringement as well as a licensing structure that enables a centralised body to administer payment of licensing fees for use of material. APRA for example looks after payments for the music industry. ...
    "The problem for mainstream media, if it insists on proceeding to support the [Bill] is that it will shoot itself in the foot. Whether they like it or not, most of mainstream media traffic is generated through platforms such as Facebook or Google. Should the platforms leave the news aggregation space, traffic to dedicated mainstream media sites will diminish and advertisers will be less likely to place content where the eyeballs seeing it are diminishing. If the [so-called] Fair Digital News Bargaining Bill is enacted, it may well be a Pyrrhic victory for media."

~ David Harvey from his post 'Google vs Media'

Remembering October 7

"The first anniversary of the October 7 attacks by Hamas against Israel is approaching. Not a day since has passed when the consequences and after-shocks of that terrible day have not been felt around the world. More than any other event in living memory, it has polarised and divided people everywhere.
    "Eight weeks after the attacks, I was invited to the Israeli Embassy in Wellington to watch the 47 minutes of footage compiled by the Israeli Government called 'Bearing Witness.' ... Did watching 'Bearing Witness' alter any of my opinions? Yes, it did.
    "I expected to see men, women and children slaughtered but the level of hatred and barbarity was incomprehensible. Often the mutilation continued after the victim was killed as if that were only one stage in a process that would continue until what was left was unrecognizable. We saw 139 killings or bodies but in many cases the bodies were so disfigured or burned that they ceased to look human. ...
    "It does, I think, at least partially explain Israel’s ferocious response in the year that has followed the attacks. In my view, anyone in the Israeli government or military who viewed that footage would conclude that they face an immediate existential threat. Their enemies do not simply wish to take territory or wage a war – killing was not enough. Their enemies that day wished for the elimination of every Jewish man, woman and child until nothing remained but dust. That was the point that I did not fully appreciate until I saw this footage. ...
    "October 7 and Israel’s response will undoubtedly be debated for a lifetime. Hopefully we will live to see a peaceful resolution to this most intractable of conflicts."

~ Philip Crump from his post 'Bearing Witness to October 7'