The “mercantile system” is […] what we today commonly call “protectionism” or “economic nationalism.” By duping the general public into believing that the artificially promoted and protected profits and wages reaped by a handful of highly visible and politically powerful firms and workers are the same as — or are evidence of — a high standard of living for ordinary people nationwide, mercantilists convince members of the general public to accept government-imposed restrictions on their freedom to trade with foreigners. More succinctly, protectionists pull off the rather amazing feat of convincing ordinary people that their standard of living rises when government artificially increases the scarcity of the goods and services that they wish to consume.
Don Boudreaux, “Quotation of the Day…”, Café Hayek, 2017-12-17.
March 6, 2020
QotD: Mercantilism
March 5, 2020
QotD: Champagne
Lily Bollinger
March 4, 2020
QotD: Tax cuts “for the rich”
This is why populism and nationalism, taken to their natural conclusions, always lead to statism. The state is the only expression of the national or popular will that encompasses everybody. So, the more you talk about how the fundamental unit of society is a mythologized collective called “The People” or the nation, the more you are rhetorically empowering the state.
Sure, the Constitution begins with the words “We the People,” but that is not a populist sentiment — it’s a statement of precedence in terms of authority: The people come before the government (not the European notion of the state). The spirit of the Constitution is entirely about the fact that The People are not all one thing. It places the rights of a single person above those of the entire federal government! It assumes not only that the people will disagree among themselves, but that the country will be better off if there is such disagreement. No populist frets about the tyranny of the majority. American patriots do.
But if you recognize that humans create wealth with their brains and their industry and that it therefore belongs to them, you’ll be a little more humble about the state’s “right” to take as much as it wants to spend how it wants. Human ingenuity is the engine of wealth creation, and there is no other.
But that doesn’t mean government doesn’t play a role. Because, as I said, there will be no wealth creation if there is no rule of law. There will be no investment or ingenuity if there is no guarantee that you will be able to collect on that investment or reap the benefits of your innovation. Without such an environment, the biggest mob wins. And when the mob wins, children starve to death in what should be one of the richest countries in the world.
Jonah Goldberg, “America and the ‘Original Position'”, National Review, 2017-12-22.
March 3, 2020
QotD: Public service and competitive private enterprise
And I’m not suggesting that the levels of corruption and incompetence are comparable to those found in third world hellholes. A local official in your county council is very unlikely to demand a bribe and then have your daughter raped by his buddies if you decline. He’s especially unlikely to get away with it, and then douse your family in petrol and burn them alive if you complain – those are the levels of corruption found elsewhere in the world, so we need to retain some perspective here.
But those countries have not benefited from a thousand years of sacrifice to earn us a culture that has learned through bitter experience how to run a country. Our civil servants should be performing at the highest standard and be the best in the world, because what they inherited was a culture that conquered that world, and brought civilisation and progress (often at great cost) to every corner of it.
That they have fallen from these heights and now occupy such low places should be a matter for great national shame. And yet they continue to lord it over those they pretend to serve – try calling your local planning department if you want instruction in how supercilious a local functionary feels able to be when speaking to those he claims to serve. If you just want them to do their job, you better be prepared to beg.
Whereas on the flip side, we might agree that the private (voluntary) sector is largely filled with honest and hardworking people and entrepreneurs, but there are crony capitalists out there too.
Your local butcher and baker (those that have survived the regulatory avalanches under which the crony capitalists have begged their pet politicians to bury them) remain staunch servants of their customers (through regard to their own interests), whereas oligoplists (supermarkets, telcos, insurance companies, banks, energy suppliers or transport companies) deliver to us just what the monopolists of government do – an icy contempt that would soon turn to withering small arms fire if the laws allowed it.
Alex Noble, “Corruption In The Coercive And Voluntary Sectors: Rotten Apples? Or The Tips of Icebergs?”, Continental Telegraph, 2019-12-02.
March 2, 2020
QotD: The legend of Rommel and the Afrika Korps
It’s an attractive image all around, and it is unfortunate that practically all of it is false. The desert was hardly a haven of beauty or romance. It was a pain, and fighting in it was a nightmare for both sides. Far from letting the respective tank fleets roam free, the desert chained them irresistibly to their supply lines, and a single failed supply convoy or a lost column of trucks could stop an entire offensive dead in its tracks. Contrary to the alleged mobility of desert warfare, both sides would spend far more time in static defensive positions, often quite elaborate, then they would launching tank charges.
That leaves us with Rommel. Here, too, we should challenge the mythology. He was hardly apolitical. His entire career had been based on Hitler’s favor, and we might reasonably describe his attitude toward the Führer as worshipful. He was Hitler’s fair-haired boy, a young officer repeatedly promoted over more senior candidates. He was a media creation. Nazi propaganda painted him not only as a garden-variety hero, but as a model National Socialist and Aryan, a man who could overcome stronger enemies through the sheer force of his will. He was not merely a passive bystander to the hype; he was an active accomplice. He loved nothing better than having a camera crew along with him on campaign, and he would regularly order scenes to be reshot if his posture was insufficiently heroic or the lighting had not shown him to best advantage. As is often the case, his relationship to the media was both self-serving and self-destructive. During the years of victory, the German propaganda machine used him as an example to the nation. When things went sour, he became a diversion from the increasingly bad news on other fronts. Finally, when he was no longer useful for any purpose at all, the regime dropped him altogether and eventually killed him.
Robert Citino, “Drive to Nowhere: The Myth of the Afrika Korps, 1941-43″, The National WWII Museum, 2012. (Originally published in MHQ, Summer 2012).
March 1, 2020
QotD: Women who “drag home strangers for a little nail-and-bail”
So, no, Sex and the City‘s Samantha isn’t a completely fictional character in how, after sex, she brushes men off herself like large, penis-equipped crumbs. […] I referenced research from anthropologist John Marshall Townsend, who discovered that Samantha’s post-sex detachment is pretty atypical — that many women who intend to use and lose a guy often find themselves going all clingypants the next morning.
Understanding what allows the Samantha type to escape this takes separating the women who have casual sex from those who feel okay about it afterward.
Women have casual sex for various reasons. For some, it seems the feminist thing to do — to prove they can do anything a man can do, whether it’s working on an oil rig or dragging home strangers for a little nail-and-bail. Townsend notes that women hook up because they aren’t ready for a relationship, because they’re trying to punch up their sex skills, or — as with rock groupies — to get some small piece of a guy they know is out of their league. Other women see hookups as the “free candy!” they can use to lure some unsuspecting man into the relationship van.
There’s a widespread belief, even held by some researchers, that higher testosterone levels in women mean a higher libido, but testosterone’s role in female desire is like that Facebook relationship status: “It’s complicated.” Research by clinical psychologist Nora Charles, among others, suggests that “factors other than … hormones” are behind which women become the Princess Shag-a-lots.
Personality seems to be one of those factors. In looking at what’s called “sociosexuality” — what sort of person has casual sex — psychologist Jeffrey A. Simpson finds that extraversion (being outgoing, exhibitionistic, and adventure-seeking), aggressiveness, and impulsivity are associated with greater willingness to have an uncommitted tumble.
However, once again, all the reasons a woman’s more likely to have casual sex don’t stop her from getting tangled up in feelings afterward. The deciding factor seems to be where she falls on what the late British psychiatrist John Bowlby called our “attachment system.” According to Bowlby, how you relate in close relationships — “securely,” “anxiously,” or “avoidantly” — appears to stem from how well your mother (or other primary caregiver) sussed out and responded to your needs and freakouts as an infant.
If she was consistently responsive (but not overprotective), you’re probably “securely attached,” meaning you have a solid emotional base and feel you can count on others to be there for you. This allows you to be both independent and interdependent.
Being “anxiously attached” comes out of having a caregiver who was inconsistently there for you (perhaps because they were worn thin) or who was overprotective. This leads to fear and clinginess in relationships (the human barnacle approach to love).
And finally, being “avoidantly attached” is a response to a cold, rejecting caregiver — one who just wasn’t all that interested in showing up for you. Not surprisingly, perhaps to avoid risking all-out rejection by being too demanding, the avoidantly attached tend to adapt by becoming people who push other people away.
It’s avoidantly attached women who social psychologist Phillip Shaver and his colleagues find can have casual sex without emotional intimacy — and, in fact, tend to see their “discard after using” attitude as a point of pride. (It sounds better to be a “sexual shopaholic” than a person with unresolved psychological problems.)
Amy Alkon, “Shaggedy Ann”, Advice Goddess, 2016-09-27.
February 29, 2020
QotD: Perceived causes of madness during the Renaissance
In some cases, it was the result of an excess of passions, flightiness, or imagination: the most famous example is Don Quixote, who went crazy after reading too many fiction books. This was actually considered a very serious risk by practically all classical authorities, especially for women. Foucault quotes Edme-Pierre Beauchesne:
In the earliest epochs of French gallantry and manners, the less perfected minds of women were content with facts and events as marvelous as they were unbelievable; now they demand believable facts yet sentiments so marvelous that their own minds are disturbed and confounded by them; they then seek, in all that surrounds them, to realize the marvels by which they are enchanted; but everything seems to them without sentiment and without life, because they are trying to find what does not exist in nature.
And a newspaper of the time:
The existence of so many authors has produced a host of readers, and continued reading generates every nervous complaint; perhaps of all the causes that have harmed women’s health, the principal one has been the infinite multiplication of novels in the last hundred years … a girl who at ten reads instead of running will, at twenty, be a woman with the vapors and not a good nurse.
Novels weren’t the only danger, of course. There were other hazards to watch for, like waking up too late:
The moment at which our women rise in Paris is far removed from that which nature has indicated; the best hours of the day have slipped away; the purest air has disappeared; no one has benefited from it. The vapors, the harmful exhalations, attracted by the sun’s heat, are already rising in the atmosphere.
Also, freedom:
For a long time, certain forms of melancholia were considered specifically English; this was a fact in medicine and a constant in literature … Spurzheim made a synthesis of all these analyses in one of the last texts devoted to them. Madness, “more frequent in England than anywhere else,” is merely the penalty of the liberty that reigns there, and of the wealth universally enjoyed. Freedom of conscience entails more dangers than authority and despotism. “Religious sentiments exist without restriction; every individual is entitled to preach to anyone who will listen to him”, and by listening to such different opinions, “minds are disturbed in the search for truth.”
These are a very selective sampling of quotes from just one of Foucault’s many chapters, and some of them are separated by centuries from others, but the overall impression I got was that conformity/wholesomeness/clean living was salubrious, and deviations from these likely to cause madness. Essentially, if you deviate from your humanity a little bit of the way – by failing to be a godly, sober-living, and industrious person – then that can compound on itself and make you lose practically all of your humanity. You will end up a feral madman, little different from a beast.
Scott Alexander, “Book review: Madness and Civilization”, Slate Star Codex, 2018-01-04.
February 28, 2020
QotD: Greek and Roman views of markets
Now, if it could be shown that the Aztecs had no concept of market behaviour, and that they were motivated by considerations wholly different from our own, it would be of little consequence. Everything we know about Aztec civilisation raises doubts whether it was worth calling a civilisation. The Aztecs had no writing and were ignorant of metal working and wheeled transport. Their cultural values were expressed in ritual torture, mass human sacrifice and cannibalism. The Mayans and Toltecs and all the others of their sort seem to have been no better. We may deplore the brutality of the Spanish conquest, but still conclude that it was, on balance, a blessing for the peoples of South America.
But it is different with the empires of the ancient Near East — and very different with the Greeks and Romans. These latter races are our intellectual fathers. Everything we ourselves have achieved is built on the foundations they laid. They gave us the names of all our arts and sciences. Eighty per cent of the English vocabulary is derived from Greek or Latin. Knowledge of these languages may be less widely diffused than it was until a century ago. But the general prestige of the Greeks and Romans is barely less now than it was among the mediaeval pilgrims who gaped at the crumbling remains of the Colisseum and the Baths of Diocletian. If it can be shown that they were wholly unlike us in their economic motivations, that would surely place in doubt the notion that market behaviour is natural to us.
And if few people outside the relevant university departments have read Polanyi and Finley, their conclusions are transmitted through popular histories and newspaper articles and television documentaries, and through large numbers of students who, however superficially, are exposed to these conclusions.
Sean Gabb, “Market Behaviour in the Ancient World: An Overview of the Debate”, 2008-05.
February 27, 2020
QotD: Clichés of bad travel writing
Kerry Howley, “But the People Are So Friendly“, Hit and Run, 2005-08-18.
February 26, 2020
QotD: Chardonnay
Jay McInerney, Bacchus & Me: Adventures in the Wine Cellar, 2002.
February 25, 2020
QotD: Canadian content rules
I tried making this case to a left-leaning friend. She said, half-joking, “I know you are speaking Canadian but I can’t understand any of the words.” I am reminded every day of my former communication studies undergrads who would argue for Canadian content rules (I am told these represent “regulation” and not “censorship”) and, with no change of expression, cheerfully explain they never watch Canadian television because it is uniformly awful. Such is the naked truth of ideology.
Ghost of a Flea, “Poisoning the Well”, Ghost of a Flea, 2005-08-12.
February 24, 2020
QotD: Not the village, not the family … the individual
The conservatives reply, “No, it does not take a village; it takes a family.”
Both sides are wrong. It takes an individual. It takes an individual to accomplish even modest goals. It takes a special kind of individual to accomplish great things. More often than not, individuals accomplish what they do in spite of the family, or in spite of the village.
It takes an individual to think, conceptualize, plan, and create. It takes an individual to rise above mediocrity, fear, and toward new discoveries.
“Families” do not work, study, and make a living. Individuals do. “Villages” do not discover electricity, or cure terrible diseases. Individuals do. Families and villages are not mystical entities. The are comprised of individuals. It is the brightest, and most creative, of those individuals upon whom the family and village depend.
Michael J. Hurd, “It Takes An Individual”, Capitalism Magazine, 2005-08-11.
February 23, 2020
QotD: Go eat bugs, plebs!
What is with these people?
This bug bingeing is a running theme in the mainstream media. The New York Times, taking a break from passively aggressively correcting its garbage takes, asks “Why Aren’t We Eating More Insects?” The answer is, of course, “Because they are insects, you weirdos.”
CNN goes on about “Bugs: The Food That Can Feed, And Maybe Save, The Planet,” as if Brian “Tater” Stelter is going to give up stuffing Cheetos in his talk-hole in exchange for caterpillars.
And National Geographic manages to do the impossible and make us hate the United Nations even more by informing us that the “U.N. Urges Eating Insects,” and offering us “8 Popular Bugs to Try.” Popular with whom?
The Economist is talking about people munching millipedes in Congo, and you have to wonder why we would take Congo’s lead in anything. It’s the Congo – you should carefully examine what the Congo does, then do the opposite. That goes for other strange countries too. Frankly, foreign countries are generally terrible and there is not a lot that other countries have to teach us – I lived on two other continents and this bizarre notion liberal Americans have about other countries being better than us is grossly misplaced. Other countries are mostly terrible.
Exhibit A: They eat bugs.
Do you think the people of Congo are saying, “Beef? Pass. Hand me that plate of maggots!” You don’t eat grasshoppers because you have other options. No one’s first choice is fruit flies.
Kurt Schlicter, “Tell The Nags To Go Pound Sand”, Townhall.com, 2019-11-19.
February 22, 2020
QotD: Veblen’s “leisure class” evolve into the “luxury belief class” in truly affluent cultures
Thorstein Veblen’s famous “leisure class” has evolved into the “luxury belief class.” Veblen, an economist and sociologist, made his observations about social class in the late nineteenth century. He compiled his observations in his classic work, The Theory of the Leisure Class. A key idea is that because we can’t be certain of the financial standing of other people, a good way to size up their means is to see whether they can afford to waste money on goods and leisure. This explains why status symbols are so often difficult to obtain and costly to purchase. These include goods such as delicate and restrictive clothing like tuxedos and evening gowns, or expensive and time-consuming hobbies like golf or beagling. Such goods and leisurely activities could only be purchased or performed by those who did not live the life of a manual laborer and could spend time learning something with no practical utility. Veblen even goes so far as to say, “The chief use of servants is the evidence they afford of the master’s ability to pay.” For Veblen, Butlers are status symbols, too.
Building on these sociological observations, the biologist Amotz Zahavi proposed that animals evolve certain displays because they are so costly. The most famous example is the peacock’s tail. Only a healthy bird is capable of growing such plumage while managing to evade predators. This idea might extend to humans, too. More recently, the anthropologist and historian Jared Diamond has suggested that one reason humans engage in displays such as drinking, smoking, drug use, and other physically costly behaviors is because they serve as fitness indicators. The message is: “I’m so healthy that I can afford to poison my body and continue to function.” Get hammered while playing a round of golf with your butler, and you will be the highest status person around.
Rob Henderson, “Thorstein Veblen’s Theory of the Leisure Class — A Status Update”, Quillette, 2019-11-16.
February 21, 2020
QotD: Thought experiment
Still, that’s not the deal on offer. You have to buy an incarnation lottery ticket, and the results would be random.
I’m not big on dividing people up by abstract categories, and I certainly don’t mean them to be pejorative. But as a historical matter, being born poor, gay, black, Jewish, ugly, weird, handicapped, etc. today may certainly come with some problems or challenges, but on the whole those traits are less of a shackle or barrier than at any time in the past. The only trait where I think it might be a closer call is dumbness. All other things being equal, a not-terribly-intelligent person with a good work ethic and some decent values might have had more opportunities before machines replaced strong backs. But even here, I can think of lots of exceptions.
Jonah Goldberg, “America and the ‘Original Position'”, National Review, 2017-12-22.
