Discrimination

“Civil rights used to be about treating everyone the same. But today some people are so used to special treatment that equal treatment is considered to be discrimination."
          ~ a Random Thought of Thomas Sowell

[Hat tip Bob Jones] 

We're back to farming subsidies again ...

"The Government never foresaw the land-use forces they were unleashing with the Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS)....

    "The bottom line is that [so-called] carbon forestry is now far more profitable than sheep and beef farming on nearly all classes of land. We are indeed on the cusp of the greatest rural land-use changes that New Zealand has seen in the last 100 years."

           ~ Keith Woodford, who says 'The ETS is both a gold mine and a minefield'

[Hat tip Ele Ludemann]

Today's political conflicts are dominated by one unspoken assumption on all sides -- one that that Joakim Book makes plain for us this guest post: Political arguments isn’t truly over specific policy proposals such as vaccine mandates, immigration or foreign policy -- about issues of health or eating habits, about sexuality or workout routines. Those are all downstream from the much bigger, and much deeper question: For what purposes may societies condone the use of violent force? 
    The answer, says Book, is many fewer than most people presently believe. Because most things are simply none of the government’s business.

That’s None of Your Business, Actually

by Joakim Book

At the basis of mainstream political economy lies the idea that government assemblies ought to meddle with the personal decisions made by individuals. If people don’t act, value, believe, transact, or uphold the values that hold sway among a government and its cronies at any given time, the awesome force vested in the power of politics will and should crack down on them.

That initial mistake causes a good percentage of all arguments about politics -- which too often amount to someone complaining that "my team" isn't it control. Yet it never seems to occur to these people that if we don’t have a bloated government administration over which others can wrestle control, then it doesn’t matter much who is in charge. The fight over central government involves the taxes and regulations we lobby and protest over; it’s the goodies we obtain from others and distribute as we see fit; it’s the money bags and subsidies we throw at things our experts in their lab coats have proposed; it’s the building codes and the zoning regulations, the travel restrictions and the health declarations.

If you object to the fight, you’re apathetic. If you protest the result, you’re anti-science. If you speak up, you’re offering hate speech. But the government doesn’t really work for the benefit of the majority, and it will not lead us to a land of milk and honey.

The Britons who led the world into the Industrial Revolution were not politicians but scientists and entrepreneurs who saw new ways to make new things work -- and to make them pay. The people who founded New Zealand were not the aristocrats who barely realised this Revolution was happening, but largely by small-time settlers who wanted the aristocracy and political class off their back so they could make a life for themselves here on the back of that Revolution's prosperity. But this was never made explicit. In the United States of America, it was: the U.S. was, to quote John Goodman’s character Frank in the movie The Gambler, “based on F-U.” Indeed, the explicit foundation of the United States of opportunity was that the rulers may not – indeed cannot – interfere in the squabbling between citizens, and their individual pursuit of life, liberty, and happiness. 

On the back of that, the United States (and the other English-speaking places) were once governed by what anyone would now call a very minimal government. Those governments gave way long ago to the behemoths we now have.

Somewhere along the way, was it World War I, the creation of the Fed, the destruction of academia? – we all stood on its head the logic of liberty made plain in America's founding. If anybody anywhere offends, or otherwise causes harm, if anybody has access to something others don’t, if anybody holds a thought not in step with his fellows, the aggrieved must assemble as many cronies and allies as possible, and then snitch, fire, steal, mandate, imprison or ultimately kill those who have the nerve to disagree. There is intolerance in whichever side of the political aisle you look. There can be no mercy (says one team) for wrong thinkers, for the climate deniers or the anti-vaxxers. There can be no tolerance (says the other team) for those who don’t embrace tradition, unquestionably respect the life of an embryo, or see the impact of immigration as anything but frightening.

In short, we have a desire to rule, a desire to dominate others. The pandemic, says Michael Malice, has been the perfect setting for neurotic and low-status people to dominate – for any number of big fat hypocrites to take their chance to assert moral and physical force over the rest of us. Another pariah of the establishment, Joe Rogan, in a conversation with Heather Heying and Bret Weinstein (two ultra-pariahs of the ruling class) called the Karens and the wrath-seekers “the weakest minds, and the most cowardly amongst us.”

What prompted this reflection was, oddly and illustratively enough, Sarah O’Conner’s discussion in the Financial Times on Universal Basic Income, which is the idea that a government, out of general revenue, can and should afford every citizen a basic livelihood. She doesn’t like it, but for all the wrong reasons:

“If a UBI let employers off the hook entirely from the idea that a job should be something a person can live on, it could make it easier to hire people for fewer hours on a casual or fleeting basis. […] There is a danger in seeing job insecurity as an inevitability to which we must adapt, when in some cases it is simply a regulatory failure to which we should respond.”

There are three problems here that relate to the way we look at economic and political relations in the 2020s.

First, what other people do and the transactions they make are no one’s business but their own. Letting “employers off the hook,” or saying that “a job should be something a person can live on” is entirely detached from the way a liberal, free society orients itself. These things are the business of the people making those transactions,and no one else’s.

Second, “pay” isn’t something that employers, by virtue of being rich, entrepreneurial, or profit-seeking rightfully owe anyone. Pay is owed as a result of contracts made between employers and workers. These are an outcome of trade. Workers provide value for their employers, who in turn pay wages at an agreed-upon rate. That a third-party observer disagrees with the valuation made by either party is beside the point.

Third, the canards of “job insecurity,” of “we must adapt,” and “regulatory failure,” indicate an urge toward central-planning that is almost always unwarranted. Many libertarians correctly object that governments are in no position to make such determinations. Government functionaries have poor information and inadequate enforcement mechanisms to will their visions into reality. In the end, they tend to make matters worse everywhere they act.

While O’Connor misses this view in the narrow topic of UBI, the conflict isn’t over that specific policy proposal, or even about vaccine mandates. It’s not about the politics surrounding abortion or immigration or foreign policy. It’s not about issues of health or eating habits, about sexuality or workout routines. Those are all downstream from the much bigger, and much deeper question: For what purposes may societies condone the use of violent force?

The answer is many fewer than most people presently believe. Because most things are simply none of the government’s business.

  Joakim Book is a writer, researcher and editor on all things money, finance and financial history. He holds a masters degree from the University of Oxford and has been a visiting scholar at the American Institute for Economic Research in 2018 and 2019.

His work has been featured in the Financial Times, FT Alphaville, Neue Zürcher Zeitung, Svenska Dagbladet, Zero Hedge, The Property Chronicle and many other outlets. He is a regular contributor and co-founder of the Swedish liberty site Cospaia.se, and a frequent writer at CapX, NotesOnLiberty, and HumanProgress.org. This post first appeared at AIER; it has been edited for local context.

Rights, in less than a minute each

"There are no economic miracles...."

"There are no economic miracles. Rather there are countries held far below their potential due to bad government policies. South Korea in the early 1960s was one example, while China under Mao was another. In the Korean case, economic success resulted from following the recommendation of US policymakers. In the German case, economic success came after domestic policymakers ignored the advice of US policymakers and freed up domestic prices (in 1948).
    "The common thread is that almost all economic 'miracles' involve some form of economic liberalisation. What looks like a 'miracle' is the rapid growth after the removal of growth constraints."

          ~ Scott Sumner, from 'Doug Irwin on the Korean miracle'

"Society is nothing but the combination of individuals for cooperative effort."

"Individual man is born into a socially organised environment. In this sense alone we may accept the saying that society is--logically or historically--antecedent to the individual. In every other sense this dictum is either empty or nonsensical. The individual lives and acts within society. But society is nothing but the combination of individuals for cooperative effort. It exists nowhere else than in the actions of individual men. It is a delusion to search for it outside the actions of individuals. To speak of a society's autonomous and independent existence, of its life, its soul, and its actions is a metaphor which can easily lead to crass errors.
    "The questions whether society or the individual is to be considered as the ultimate end, and whether the interests of society should be subordinated to those of the individuals or the interests of the individuals to those of society are fruitless. Action is always action of individual men. The social or societal element is a certain orientation of the actions of individual men. The category end makes sense only when applied to action....
    "Within the frame of social cooperation there can emerge between members of society feelings of sympathy and friendship and a sense of belonging together. These feelings are the source of man's most delightful and most sublime experiences. They are the most precious adornment of life; they lift the animal species man to the heights of a really human existence. However, they are not, as some have asserted, the agents that have brought about social relationships. They are fruits of social cooperation, they thrive only within its frame; they did not precede the establishment of social relations and are not the seed from which they spring.
    "The fundamental facts that brought about cooperation, society, and civilisation and transformed the animal man into a human being are the facts that work performed under the division of labor is more productive than isolated work and that man's reason is capable of recognising this truth. But for these facts men would have forever remained deadly foes of one another, irreconcilable rivals in their endeavors to secure a portion of the scarce supply of means of sustenance provided by nature. Each man would have been forced to view all other men as his enemies; his craving for the satisfaction of his own appetites would have brought him into an implacable conflict with all his neighbors. No sympathy could possibly develop under such a state of affairs."

          ~ Ludwig Von Mises, from 'Human Cooperation,' in his book Human Action

"The purported conflict between property rights and human rights is a mirage—property rights *are* human rights."

"For decades social critics in the United States and throughout the Western world have complained that 'property' rights too often take precedence over 'human' rights, with the result that people are treated unequally and have unequal opportunities. Inequality exists in any society. But the purported conflict between property rights and human rights is a mirage—property rights are human rights."
          ~ Armen Alchian, from his entry on 'Property Rights' in The Concise Encyclopaedia of Economics

[Hat tip Stephen Hicks]

"Businesses have a huge interest in keeping their people safe from Covid and they can do it faster than governments..."

"We, and others, have operated in some of the most Covid-ravaged countries in the world and we have kept our Kiwi staff Covid-free for more than a year and a half because of the protocols that have been put in place by the businesses we work with. . .
    "What we have learned from our experience over the past year and a half is that businesses have a huge interest in keeping their people safe from Covid and they can do it faster than governments..."
          ~ Ian Taylor, from 'NZ needs business help to get ahead of virus'

[Hat tip Home Paddock]

No, CO2 does not drive disasters

 

There's something nasty in the way warmists gloat whenever there's a natural disaster -- a bushfire, a hurricane, a flood -- something evil in the glee which these disasters are reported, always with a link to 'global warming, almost alway revelling in the human tragedy as a 'payback' for our comfortable lifestyles driven by high energy use.

No surprise to hear that these ghouls are also fantasists. On top of similar studies elsewhere comes three from Australia, affirming ...

... there has been no significant change in natural disasters, precipitation, or bushfire across Australia for the last several decades.
    “Here we utilise an Australian natural disaster database of normalised insurance losses to show compound disasters are responsible for the highest seasonal financial losses. … There has been no temporal trend in their frequency since 1966.
    "The predominant and most predictable driver of climate-related disaster events is not anthropogenic global warming, or CO2 emissions, but the El Niño Southern Oscillation."

No wonder, really, because how could a one degree rise in 150 years possibly cause any such acceleration of disaster on the scale regularly claimed by warmists.

No, our planet is not totally safe. It has always delivered natural disasters, situations which are beyond our ability to cope. But rather than take this already unsafe planet and make it more unsafe, our abundant use of energy takes this unsafe planet and makes it safer. The more energy we have, the less we have to fear.

Especially comforting news when you know the rate of disasters aren't increasing. And won't be.

"Sacrificing progress makes people poorer, and ... puts them more at the mercy of natural disasters."

"As an indication of how much better wealthy countries are at resisting flood and tempest, look at July’s floods in the city of Zhenghou, which were reported by Western media as a kind of cataclysm – the sort of climate change-induced event from which the world must save itself. Those floods killed 219 people. By contrast, in the much-poorer China of 1975, 26,000 people were killed by a typhoon in the surrounding Henan province."
          ~ Ross Clark, from 'The West Has Doomed COP26 to Failure'

[Hat tip GWBF Newsletter]

"Social media has made it far too easy for people to rail against the latest political outrage without getting their feet wet."

"Every gesture of resistance which is void of either risk or impact is nothing but a cry for recognition."
          ~ Stefan Zweig, from a 1941 interview  

"Welcome to Renewables-World..."

"Welcome to Renewables-World where we spend $3.3b to get half a million in benefits."

~ Jo Nova, from her post 'Renewable bandaid burns money: New transmission line alone costs as much as new advanced Coal Plant'

“It is plain that the Forgotten Man and the Forgotten Woman are the real productive strength of the country.”

"As soon as A observes something which seems to him to be wrong, from which X is suffering, A talks it over with B, and A and B then propose to get a law passed to remedy the evil and help X. Their law always proposes to determine what C shall do for X or, in the better case, what A, B and C shall do for X... What I want to do is to look up C. I want to show you what manner of man he is. I call him the Forgotten Man. Perhaps the appellation is not strictly correct. he is the man who never is thought of. He is the victim of the reformer, social speculator and philanthropist... He works, he votes, generally he prays—but he always pays..."
    “It is plain that the Forgotten Man and the Forgotten Woman are the real productive strength of the country.”
          ~ William Graham Sumner, from his The Forgotten Man + Other Essays

RELATED: 

• 'William Graham Sumner: The Forgotten Man Who Reminded Us About 'The Forgotten Man' ~ Mark Hendrickson, FORBES
• 'Political Rhetoric Hides the Political Reality of Peaceful Production vs. Plunder' ~ Richard Ebeling, AIER

Sam Spade takes on 9/11

Someone on Twitter was asking why everyone felt the need to tell the world where they were twenty years ago when terrorists destroyed the twin towers. Yes, it affected everybody -- it seems almost all of us around at the time have or had only one or two degrees of separation at most from those buildings -- but it did seem to smack a little more of self-indulgence than commemoration. 

So I did like Robert Tracinski's take on things.

PS: Pretty sure the 'Flitcraft Parable' appears in The Maltese Falcon not The Thin Man. But you should read both anyway just to make sure.

...no ordinary word

"Over time, some men trade their passion for domesticity."
          ~ from a review essay of Graham Parker's Struck by Lightning

"In short, postmodernism is relativism run riot, skepticism on stilts..."

"In short, postmodernism is relativism run riot, skepticism on stilts. In terms of the culture wars, it informs the arguments of those who think that American society is inferior to others and on the decline, that there are no 'Great Books' of a higher order of merit than others, that science and technology are socially constructed and are not making genuine progress, and that modern free-market economics has lowered living standards. As Hicks notes, there is a contradictory tone to all this — all cultures are equal, but ours stinks; all truth is relative, except the unquestionable po-mo truth; no race, class or gender is superior, but middle class white males are clearly inferior; and no books are superior, except, of course, those by third-world authors. Where does this farrago of resentment come from? 

    "Hicks rightly views postmodernist philosophy as the most recent manifestation of the reaction against the Enlightenment, what we might call the Counter-Enlightenment..."
          ~ Professor Gary James Jason reviewing Stephen Hicks's Explaining Postmodernism 

"Trusting and unworldly kids attending university today are victims of a gigantic fraud..."

"There are intangible reasons to justify say a year or two at university as a bridging experience between childhood and adult status. But otherwise, unless studying for a traditional career such as medicine or law, to a very large degree trusting and unworldly kids attending university today are victims of a gigantic fraud.... luring the simple-minded seeking letters after their names....
    "The modern university is today largely a scam, exploiting the vulnerable with its ever expanding range of non-intellectual bullshit degrees.... academic nonsense, in which the participants waste their lives at public expense, pointlessly pursuing esoteric imaginary elements of their utterly bogus purported field of study.... [while universities are] transforming themselves into competitive commercial enterprises while maintaining a veneer, largely imagined, of being intellectual institutions."
          ~ Bob Jones, from his post 'The Contemporary World's Biggest Fraud'

"It is art that lights the fire for us to push and grow..."

Artist Michael Newberry with a painting from his Eudaemonia series

“So many disciplines add to our evolution—philosophy, psychology, sciences. . .—but none of them are ends in themselves except for art. . . . It is art that lights the fire for us to push and grow, it is art that refuels our spirit when it is exhausted and can’t do more, and it is art that rewards us for a job well done and life well lived.”

~ Artist Michael Newberry, from his stunning new book Evolution Through Art 

"Capitalism is a system of class harmony..."

"Capitalism is a system of class harmony, in which the accumulated wealth of the capitalists, i.e., their capital, is the source of the supply of products and the demand for labour, and progressively enriches wage earners.
    "The result is that today the average wage earner in a capitalist country has a higher standard of living than did the kings and emperors of the past, such as Augustus Caesar, Louis XIV, and Queen Victoria."

          ~ George Reisman. For proof, see his Capitalism: A Treatise on Economics

"Happiness lies in being privileged to work hard for long hours in doing whatever you think is worth doing...."

"Happiness lies in being privileged to work hard for long hours in doing whatever you think is worth doing.... Each man or woman must find for himself or herself that occupation in which hard work and long hours make him or her happy."

~ Robert Heinlein, talking through his character Jubal Harshaw in his novel To Sail Beyond the Sunset

 

“Giving back” really is a terrible phrase

The phrase “give back” is as common as it wrong. It implies that something was taken in the first place. It paints the successful entrepreneur as a taker who through their success has deprived us of something that must be returned. Even worse, as philosopher Stephen Hicks explains, "the phrase also denies the benevolence of the giver. If you are only giving back what is rightfully someone else’s, then you do not deserve any special praise for your action. Your benevolence need not be acknowledged or honoured."

Jacob Hibbard picks apart the nonsense in this guest post.

Why People Should Stop Saying CEOs Have a Duty to 'Give Back' to Society

by Jacob Hibberd

It is not uncommon for successful businessmen, entrepreneurs, and celebrities to talk about what they are doing to “give back” to society or how they feel a need to “give back.”

Kelli Richards for example, CEO of The All-Access Group, maintained in a 2017 Inc. article  that “companies and individuals who [have] done well financially [are] honour-bound to look around and philanthropically offer a helping hand to those who weren't as fortunate—to honour the greater good.”

While it is can sometimes be praiseworthy for entrepreneurs and successful individuals to engage in non-sacrificial philanthropy, the idea that successful innovators need to “give back” in order to honour the "greater good" is faulty and ultimately immoral.

First, the phrase “give back” implies that something was taken in the first place. It paints the successful entrepreneur as a taker who, through their success, has deprived the rest of us of something that must be returned. This could not be further from the truth.

Jeff Bezos isn’t roaming the country with his brute squad demanding your business or your life. No taking has occurred that would require “giving back” as compensation. Instead, innovators and entrepreneurs— including the derided billionaire class—are creating immense value for us, not only by providing goods and services, but also by creating jobs that allow us to earn a living. 

In a capitalist society with the rule of law where individual rights are secured, wealth or success is not taken, it is produced, earned, and voluntarily given through mutually beneficial trade. Innovators create products and provide services that we, the consumers, value more than the dollars in our pockets and enter into voluntary transactions to acquire. The idea that the resulting wealth, peacefully acquired, comes with it a demand to "give back" is as wrong as it is insulting to producers.

The concepts of the duty to “give back” and serving the “greater good” also lead to greater resentment in society and ultimately lead to immoral policies. When we embrace the idea that the successful have a duty to “give back” to us and serve an amorphous “greater good,” we begin to resent the innovators when they do not “give back” in the ways that we want them to. It’s too little, people say; or, it’s to the wrong people; or, it’s serving the wrong sort of greater good -- and of course the complaint that it’s not being given to me.

This resentment festers until we turn to our common agent, the government, and demand that it uses force to take the wealth of the successful and “give it back” in the way that "we" judge best, serving our vision of the “greater good,” violating the rights of the successful and perverting the government from its proper role.

Societies built on resentment and the plundering of the successful in the name of the “greater good” implode. If you want to see it in real time, look at what’s happening to California now. Innovators are fleeing due to burdensome regulations and taxes.

So instead of demanding that entrepreneurs and innovators “give back,” and resenting them when they don’t use their wealth the way we like, let’s strive to have some gratitude.

Let’s recognise the immense value that Jeff Bezos, Steve Jobs, and Elon Musk (in his non-grifting mode) have created for us and society. They give us a greater quality of life when they create the next Amazon, the next smartphone, or open the next factory that creates thousands of jobs. They don’t need to be forced to help society. They are already helping.

* * * * 

Jacob Hibbard is the Grassroots Director for Americans for Prosperity Utah and a first year law student at Brigham Young University. His op-ed first appeared at the Foundation for Economic Education. It has been lightly edited.

[Hat tip to Stephen Hicks for the link and post title.]

"Integrity is the principle of being principled..."

"Integrity is the principle of being principled, practicing what one preaches regardless of emotional or social pressure, and not allowing any irrational consideration to overwhelm one's rational condition."

~ Thomas Becker, from his article 'Integrity in Organisations: Beyond Honesty and Conscientiousness,' paraphrasing Leonard Peikoff (p. 242)

"Neither individuals nor corporations have any right to come into court and ask that the clock of history be stopped, or turned back, for their private benefit. That is all'.”

 

“'There has grown up in the minds of certain groups in this country the notion that because a man or corporation has made a profit out of the public for a number of years, the government and the courts are charged with the duty of guaranteeing such profit in the future, even in the face of changing circumstances and contrary to the public interest. This strange doctrine is not supported by statute not common law. Neither individuals nor corporations have any right to come into court and ask that the clock of history be stopped, or turned back, for their private benefit. That is all'.”

~ Judge's verdict, delivered in Robert Heinlein's excellent, and once-again topical, 1949 novella 'The Man Who Sold the Moon'