Freedom is not a synonym for the right to vote in fair and open elections. Fair and open elections with a wide franchise might – might – be a useful instrument for promoting freedom. But contrary to much shallow thinking, the right to participate in such elections is not itself “freedom”. Freedom is the right to choose and act as you please, with this right bound only by the equal right of every other peaceful individual to do the same. (Or to quote Thomas Sowell, “Freedom … is the right of ordinary people to find elbow room for themselves and a refuge from the rampaging presumptions of their ‘betters’.” I would add that freedom requires also elbow room from the rampaging presumptions – and from the enviousness, ignorance, myopia, and even the good intentions – of one’s peers and, indeed, from those of everyone.)
In practice it is sometimes difficult to identify the detailed locations of the boundaries that best ensure equal freedom for everyone. This reality, however, neither renders the goal of equal freedom of choice and action for everyone less desirable nor makes this definition of freedom less serviceable.
Don Boudreaux, “Quotation of the Day…”, Café Hayek, 2017-04-23.
May 10, 2019
QotD: Defining freedom
May 9, 2019
QotD: Respect for the law
Here one comes upon an all-important English trait: the respect for constitutionalism and legality, the belief in “the law” as something above the State and above the individual, something which is cruel and stupid, of course, but at any rate incorruptible.
It is not that anyone imagines the law to be just. Everyone knows that there is one law for the rich and another for the poor. But no one accepts the implications of this, everyone takes it for granted that the law, such as it is, will be respected, and feels a sense of outrage when it is not. Remarks like “They can’t run me in; I haven’t done anything wrong”, or “They can’t do that; it’s against the law”, are part of the atmosphere of England. The professed enemies of society have this feeling as strongly as anyone else. One sees it in prison-books like Wilfred Macartney’s Walls Have Mouths or Jim Phelan’s Jail Journey, in the solemn idiocies that take place at the trials of conscientious objectors, in letters to the papers from eminent Marxist professors, pointing out that this or that is a “miscarriage of British justice”. Everyone believes in his heart that the law can be, ought to be, and, on the whole, will be impartially administered. The totalitarian idea that there is no such thing as law, there is only power, has never taken root. Even the intelligentsia have only accepted it in theory.
George Orwell, “England Your England”, 1941-02-19.
May 8, 2019
May 7, 2019
QotD: Competitive Wokeness
I love competitive #Wokeness.
No, seriously — it’s high time you people out in the real world got to experience one of the defining joys of life in the ivory tower. In the ivy-covered halls of academe, the Marxist Postcolonialist Feminsts have longstanding beef with the Postcolonialist Feminist Marxists. They’d each happily feed the other into a wood chipper, even though to outsiders it would look like the pot executing the kettle for counterrevolutionary crimes. If you’re the sort who takes schadenfreudy delight in very obvious folly, university life is hilarious.
It’s even funnier if you take these buffoons at their word. Compared to the pronouncements of your average Angry Studies professor, Pol Pot was a sane and balanced man. In reality, of course, university people are so soft and coddled, they make the Eloi look like the Sons of Anarchy. Spending so much time around college folk is one of the main reasons for my mantra: “Today’s SJW is tomorrow’s obergruppenfuhrer.” They talk a fearsome game, these campus Ches, but they cry if the cafeteria is out of free trade sustainably sourced indigenous grown gluten free soy milk. When the zeitgeist shifts, they’ll be the first to knuckle under.
Severian, “The Reluctant Revolutionary”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2019-04-05.
May 6, 2019
QotD: Political scandals
If you say “Clinton scandal,” the first thing that comes to mind for most people, at least for those of us old enough to have been around for Bill Clinton’s presidency, is Monica Lewinsky. That’s a shame: I am convinced that Hillary Rodham Clinton’s cattle-futures shenanigans were in fact a much more serious offense as a matter of public corruption. But most people don’t understand futures trading. Everybody understands diddling the interns. Nobody understands finance. Everybody understands sex.
(Except Objectivists.)
That’s why financial scandals rarely end political careers, but sex scandals often do, especially for Republicans.
Kevin D. Williamson, “Fanciful Trump ‘Scandals'”, National Review, 2017-04-16.
May 5, 2019
QotD: A growing French industry
The French, I think, must be world champions in the production of books lamenting the state of their economy (they are also good at taking antidepressants). Occasionally, it is true, someone writes a book to the effect that things are not so very bad in France, in fact that they are really quite good, at least by comparison with everywhere else; but this is so contrary to the majority of what is written that it has the quality of whistling in the wind. If the French economy had grown at the rate at which books are published predicting its imminent collapse, it would be flourishing indeed.
Theodore Dalrymple, “Beneath Paris”, Taki’s Magazine, 2017-01-07.
May 4, 2019
QotD: Calorie-dense modern snack food
So what does cause this fattening effect? I think the book’s answer is “no single factor, but that doesn’t matter, because capitalism is an optimization process that designs foods to be as rewarding as possible, so however many different factors there are, every single one of them will be present in your bag of Doritos”. But to be more scientific about it, the specific things involved are some combination of sweet/salty/umami tastes, certain ratios of fat and sugar, and reinforced preferences for certain flavors.
Modern food isn’t just unusually rewarding, it’s also unusually bad at making us full. The brain has some pretty sophisticated mechanisms to determine when we’ve eaten enough; these usually involve estimating food’s calorie load from its mass and fiber level. But modern food is calorically dense – it contains many more calories than predicted per unit mass – and fiber-poor. This fools the brain into thinking that we’re eating less than we really are, and shuts down the system that would normally make us feel full once we’ve had enough. Simultaneously, the extremely high level of food reward tricks the brain into thinking that this food is especially nutritionally valuable and that it should relax its normal constraints.
Adding to all of this is the so-called “buffet effect”, where people will eat more calories from a variety of foods presented together than they would from any single food alone. My mother likes to talk about her “extra dessert stomach”, ie the thing where you can gorge yourself on a burger and fries until you’re totally full and couldn’t eat another bite – but then mysteriously find room for an ice cream sundae afterwards. This is apparently a real thing that’s been confirmed in scientific experiments, and a major difference between us and our ancestors. The !Kung Bushmen, everyone’s go-to example of an all-natural hunter-gatherer tribe, apparently get 50% of their calories from a single food, the mongongo nut, and another 40% from meat. Meanwhile, we design our meals to include as many unlike foods as possible – for example, a burger with fries, soda, and a milkshake for dessert. This once again causes the brain to relax its usual strict constraints on appetite and let us eat more than we should.
The book sums all of these things up into the idea of “food reward” making some foods “hyperpalatable” and “seducing” the reward mechanism in order to produce a sort of “food addiction” that leads to “cravings”, the “obesity epidemic”, and a profusion of “scare quotes”.
Scott Alexander, “Book Review: The Hungry Brain”, Slate Star Codex, 2017-04-27.
May 3, 2019
QotD: The key difference between The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged
Reading Goddess of the Market much later in life, I finally met the woman behind the philosophy. Rand doesn’t start out so bad, at least in Burns’ telling. Who can blame the Russian-born Rand, watching helplessly as Communists seize her father’s pharmacy, for growing up to be a furious foe of collectivism (and realpolitik compromise), whose übermensch heroes fight back against the “parasites, moochers and looters“, and win?
Yet the sprinklings of patriotic, almost Capra-esque populism that softened The Fountainhead’s unavoidable elitism are absent entirely in her follow-up, Atlas Shrugged, replaced by an almost hallucinatory misanthropy. What happened, Burns wonders, in the intervening thirteen years?
The answer seems obvious to me now, rereading her book in my 50s:
Menopause.
Ayn Rand, the avatar of adolescence, was going through The Change.
“Now in her forties,” writes Burns of the author between novels, “Rand struggled with her weight, her moodiness, her habitual fatigue.” Already dependent on the crazy-making Benzedrine she’d been popping to help her meet her Fountainhead deadline, Rand was hurtling toward what we’d now recognize as a midlife crisis.
Enter Nathaniel Blumenthal. He’d begun corresponding with Rand while still a high school student, but unlike her thousands of other teenage fans, he’d even memorized The Fountainhead. At UCLA, he’d coauthored a letter to the campus paper, declaring that a professor with suspected Communist ties who’d killed himself deserved “to be condemned to hell.” Then he changed his surname to “Branden” because it had “Rand” in it.
So, basically a nut.
Kathy Shaidle, “The Danger of Ayn Rand”, Taki’s Magazine, 2017-04-18.
May 2, 2019
May 1, 2019
QotD: Standardized measurements, feudalism, and revolution
The pint in eighteenth-century Paris was equivalent to 0.93 liters, whereas in Seine-en-Montane it was 1.99 liters and in Precy-sous-Thil, an astounding 3.33 liters. The aune, a measure of length used for cloth, varied depending on the material (the unit for silk, for instance, was smaller than that for linen) and across France there were at least seventeen different aunes. […]
Virtually everywhere in early modern Europe were endless micropolitics about how baskets might be adjusted through wear, bulging, tricks of weaving, moisture, the thickness of the rim, and so on. In some areas the local standards for the bushel and other units of measurement were kept in metallic form and placed in the care of a trusted official or else literally carved into the stone of a church or the town hall. Nor did it end there. How the grain was to be poured (from shoulder height, which packed it somewhat, or from waist height?), how damp it could be, whether the container could be shaken down, and finally, if and how it was to be leveled off when full were subjects of long and bitter controversy. […]
Thus far, this account of local measurement practices risks giving the impression that, although local conceptions of distance, area, volume, and so on were different from and more varied than the unitary abstract standards a state might favor, they were nevertheless aiming at objective accuracy. This impression would be false. […]
A good part of the politics of measurement sprang from what a contemporary economist might call the “stickiness” of feudal rents. Noble and clerical claimants often found it difficult to increase feudal dues directly; the levels set for various charges were the result of long struggle, and even a small increase above the customary level was viewed as a threatening breach of tradition. Adjusting the measure, however, represented a roundabout way of achieving the same end.
The local lord might, for example, lend grain to peasants in smaller baskets and insist on repayment in larger baskets. He might surreptitiously or even boldly enlarge the size of the grain sacks accepted for milling (a monopoly of the domain lord) and reduce the size of the sacks used for measuring out flour; he might also collect feudal dues in larger baskets and pay wages in kind in smaller baskets. While the formal custom governing feudal dues and wages would thus remain intact (requiring, for example, the same number of sacks of wheat from the harvest of a given holding), the actual transaction might increasingly favor the lord. The results of such fiddling were far from trivial. Kula estimates that the size of the bushel (boisseau) used to collect the main feudal rent (taille) increased by one-third between 1674 and 1716 as part of what was called the reaction feodale. […]
This sense of victimization [over changing units of measure] was evident in the cahiers of grievances prepared for the meeting of the Estates General just before the Revolution. […] In an unprecedented revolutionary context where an entirely new political system was being created from first principles, it was surely no great matter to legislate uniform weights and measures. As the revolutionary decree read “The centuries old dream of the masses of only one just measure has come true! The Revolution has given the people the meter!”
James C. Scott, Seeing Like A State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, 1998.
April 30, 2019
QotD: Successful “democracies” in history have usually been disguised oligarchies
Thus we get the “Revolutions” in America and France, where educated and newly politicised chattering classes try to find a simplistic solution to all the world’s problems. Their solution being to adopt a system which fits their preferred world order, and seems to give them an advantage that will allow them to force people into their way of thinking.
Humans being what they are, it didn’t work of course.
The American Revolution, supposedly about ‘equality for all’ – if you want to fall for idealistic propaganda – was actually a tax rebellion by Northern states (who also wanted to get rid of the English government’s treaties that kept them out of Indian land), and the Southern states (who wanted to block the English anti-slavery legislation from spreading to their nice comfy system). It was never really about equality, and all the exclusions of people from voting on the basis of colour, race, sex, religion, immigration status, etc., should have made it clear to anyone that what was being considered was really an Oligarchy. Similar in fact to the Ancient Greek and Roman slave-based societies, where some special and limited classes shared rights no one else had.
Actually all “successful” democracies in history have always been Oligarchies. The 1,000 year old “Sublime Republic of Venice” – on which large parts of the US constitution were based – for instance, being limited to a certain number of families that had the vote. Similarly the “Republics” of Ancient Greece or Rome, and modern Switzerland or Israel, being based on vote by military service – another way of ensuring the voters might put national interests above selfish ones.
The first few French republics (those squeezed in around the inevitable dictatorships and emperors that are the result of such systems) were also based on a limited franchise. In their case not a race or religion or sex one like the US, but a straight property qualification that saw a small percentage of both sexes as voters.
Unsurprisingly the Oligarchical Republics of the 18th and 19th centuries were some of the most internally violent (US Slavery, Civil War, Indian Wars, the Terror, multiple revolts and “communes”, Lynchings, Jim Crow laws, etc), and externally aggressive (Napoleonic Wars, Spanish–American Wars, “Interventions” in Central America, Occupations of Hawaii, Philippines, etc.) governments in history. Rivaling the Greek and Roman republics for their aggressive expansionism by land and sea, and certainly being no less effective than more traditional military (Russia and Germany) or trade (Britain and Netherlands) expansionist states.
(And here I would note that the one of the mitigating factors in the idea that German Nationalism was a problem in WWI, was that the populist Navy Leagues and Colonial Leagues of the newly enfranchised voting classes did in fact push Nationalism to dangerous extremes. The Kaiser was a dangerous loon, but he was a dangerous loon responding to the fervor of the dregs of the petit bourgeois who had been enfranchised in his nation, not a man with Napoleonic capabilities in his own right.)
Nigel Davies, “The Solution is… European Union/Multiculturalism/Communism… Name your poison!”, rethinking history, 2015-12-26.
April 29, 2019
QotD: Prostitution
I had a few patients who were prostitutes. I remember one well-dressed lady in her 40s, whose profession I asked in the course of my history-taking.
“Dominatrix,” she said.
She was obviously very good at it because she had an international clientele, including, for example, a judge in Alabama. She told me that she never went anywhere in her car without her kit, for she might receive an emergency call at any time from Hong Kong or South Africa. You might have thought that being whipped by one woman in black fishnet stockings was as good as being whipped by another, but apparently this was (and I presume still is) not so: It’s the words and gestures that go with the whipping that count as well.
This activity of hers gave her a very good living (her car was far better than mine); she was sending her daughter to private school. I admired her enterprise and thought of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. Was she or the judge in Alabama to blame? Was either of them to blame at all?
Of course, she wasn’t typical of the profession, and hard cases, as they say, make bad law. But I am not at all sure that I saw the poor prostitutes in my street as merely victims, as the new French law would have them. Not everyone with their life history becomes a crack-taking prostitute. This does not mean that I did not pity them for what they had become. If we can truly sympathize only with those who have done nothing to contribute to their own fate, we shall have very restricted sympathies indeed.
Theodore Dalrymple, “Turning Tricks Into Sympathy”, Taki’s Magazine, 2016-04-09.
April 28, 2019
QotD: Innovations in taxation
The door-and-window tax established in France [in the 18th century] is a striking case in point. Its originator must have reasoned that the number of windows and doors in a dwelling was proportional to the dwelling’s size. Thus a tax assessor need not enter the house or measure it, but merely count the doors and windows.
As a simple, workable formula, it was a brilliant stroke, but it was not without consequences. Peasant dwellings were subsequently designed or renovated with the formula in mind so as to have as few openings as possible. While the fiscal losses could be recouped by raising the tax per opening, the long-term effects on the health of the population lasted for more than a century.
James C. Scott, Seeing Like A State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, 1998.
April 27, 2019
QotD: When McDonald’s came to Moscow
[In an NPR broadcast] McDonald’s is positively portrayed as being an excellent, almost heroic, force for good. McDonald’s manner of doing business is celebrated as changing social norms for the better – for making the world (or at least Russia) not only a more consumer-friendly place, but also a more pleasant, a more polite, a more respectful, and a (yes) more happy place.
Listeners are reminded at the start of the clip that Americans smile a lot, including at strangers. Russians – and, especially, Russians under Soviet domination – did not smile very much. Then McDonald’s opened in Moscow in 1990. McDonald’s trains its workers to smile at customers, and to be polite and friendly. We then learn – from one of the Russians who worked at that McDonald’s in Moscow – that that restaurant became a place of pleasant refuge for Muscovites. The simple, smiling friendliness and politeness that Americans take for granted was, in Russia, actively sought after by many Russians and embraced by their choosing to dine at McDonald’s.
Commerce – voluntary exchange – is essential for what Deirdre McCloskey calls “market-tested betterment.” This betterment, however – and Deirdre would agree – is manifested not only in new and better material products but also in the ways in which businesses treat consumers. In market economies consumers are valuable to businesses; in these economies consumers are treated by businesses as respected guests. In contrast, in non-market economies – in economies in which prices and profits are prevented from moving in market-clearing directions – consumers are treated by ‘businesses’ as repellant pests.
Don Boudreaux, “Doux Commerce, avec Sourires“, Café Hayek, 2016-06-17.
April 26, 2019
QotD: European jokes about the neighbours
… it is also the Finns who snicker at overbearing Swedes (“What’s the difference between the Swedes and the Finns? The Swedes have got nice neighbours”); and the Portuguese, who mock Spanish arrogance (“In a recent survey, 11 out of 10 Spaniards said they felt superior to the others”).
There are the Irish, who joke about buttoned-up Brits (“What’s the English definition of a thrill? Having an After Eight at 7.30”); and the Poles, who have a go at the Germans for pretty much anything (“German footballers are like German food: if they’re not imported from Poland they’re no good”).
Making fun of our best enemies, said Romain Seignovert, who has just published a book on the jokes Europeans tell about their neighbours, is a great European tradition. “We are a big, diverse community with a centuries-long common history of highs and lows, and our humour reflects that,” he says.
[…]
There is a deeper point. Ultimately, Seignovert said, laughing at our neighbours is “recognising, even celebrating, our particularities. It shows we’re not indifferent. Europe isn’t just political and economic, it’s also cultural – about all these nations, living together. The EU hasn’t made enough of that.”
That may be true. But Seignovert, remember, is French, so what he says should clearly not be taken too seriously. In the words of one particularly fine Belgian quip: “How does a Frenchman commit suicide? By shooting 15cm above his head, right in the middle of his superiority complex.”
Jon Henley, “‘Crude, but rarely nasty’: The jokes Europeans tell about their neighbours”, The Guardian, 2016-05-08.
