Category Archives: political-economy

Shame, how useful?

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This entry on shaming the poor was interesting to me, because I have the NASB translation of Paul’s rebuke of the Corinthians stuck in my head:

What! Do you not have houses in which to eat and drink? Or do you despise the church of God and shame those who have nothing? What shall I say to you? Shall I praise you? In this I will not praise you.

Interestingly, the ESV uses the word “humiliate,” rather than “shame.”  I don’t know which might be closer to the Greek original, but the interchangeability of the two words in English is rather revealing.

But I wonder how much usefulness is to be found in shame in the case of people who are actually responsible for the shame they bring on themselves (unlike children).  I won’t deny that it can deter undesirable behavior.  But it seems to me it is just as likely to deter the admission of wrong behavior, to motivate people to cover their behavior, and to even cause them to deceive themselves about it.

And that can only make the problem behavior even worse.

For those of you with movie lists to see

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I knew about this but forgot about it until just now.  Here is the Mises Institute’s recommendations for movies.  This may violate some ideal of separating art and politics.  I prefer to think of separating art and “preaching” (Like Ayn Rand did [i.e preaching, no separation at all!]; and some of these movies may fail by that criterion).  On the art end of the spectrum, revealing how politics works can be just as artistic as a literary character study.  Take a look

Cars: I have a fantasy

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“Dream” would make it sound like I think it is going to happen.

I have a dream that all the automakers both domestic and foreign join together to beat the next president into the ground exposing how the economy is hampered, the public exploited, and the poor especially are made poorer, by the stupid quest for energy “independence.”

Billions of dollars are poured into corporations from taxes in order to raise corn prices and increase pollution to make ethanol. Cars become less affordable as this idiotic quest is pursued because illusion makes better government PR than does reality. After all, the economy would already go in that direction, which means there would be nothing for politicians to fix. Making up stupid self-damaging goals that no rational person would ever pursue without being loaded with misinformation, provides a rational for real government intervention. The entire discourse of our political culture on energy is to find a way to make national economic self-destruction look rational so that the government can be justified in forcing us to pursue that course, which would never happen otherwise.

I’m sorry but, duh, people already have an incentive to conserve energy. It is called the price of fuel. Anything else is just killing one’s citizens.

And, for the record, one thing that keeps you poor and unemployed is not having transportation. The more cars become out of reach, the more we will see people locked in poverty.

And automakers could, if they had the will, spell it all out.

But they won’t. They’ll run from the whip and chase the taxpayer-funded carrot and they will cave. More than that, they will promote the Presidential line of garbage by extolling their own virtues in abiding by unnecessary and destructive regulations. In this way all private industries become mouths for the public sector’s deceptions designed to glorify the public sector.

(BTW, on one issue in the news story I have to concede: I think the states should be allowed to set their own emission standards. It may be stupid, but I think they have the authority to be stupid. Hopefully prices would skyrocket in those states while people would see other states where people could still afford cars. But, in any case, forcing other people to bear the cost of your driving by poisoning their air is a different issue in principle–though I’m not sure how reliable the facts are–than myths about the need for fuel efficiency or independence, or fictions about “the greenhouse effect.”)

No surprise at all: entrepreneurs are not likely to be capitalists

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This is fine, but any claims to inconsistency or surprise simply don’t make sense.

Entrepreneurs are looking for huge payoffs.  They want locked-in mass markets.  Microsoft will make exponentially more money convincing the UN that poor people need computers and should subsidize their distribution than they will selling their product to free people in a market without any other adjectives.

I realize I could go into Microsoft’s own record here and show that they are as likely to advocate free market capitalism as a Detroit union leader is to advocate the unilateral end to all trade restrictions.  But why pretend that Microsoft is so exceptional.  Read tech business news.  When isn’t some company trying to make their living by taking some other company to court over intellectual property.  The world of global mega-corporations is a world of piracy and viking raids.  It is a world of government contracts.  It is a world where the Chines government is always right and if that means we turn over dissidents, then that is just the cost of doing business.  Except that the large businesses don’t even view it as a cost–it is just a freebie that lets them win favor.

I doubt very much that Gates credits the free market with any part of his success.  He saw opportunities and he took them.  Depending on who you read, some number of these opportunities were chances to break rules as much as prosper by playing by them.

If anything, I suspect Gates simply thinks that the thing itself, the computer and software industry, was simply the result of the inevitable process of progress.  It’s not about capitalism.  It’s not about freedom (beyond all the personal freedoms that statists want subsidized).  It is about Microsoft as the true messiah who brings us into the new era.

But, whatever is going on, opportunism is not capitalism.  If an opportunist appreciates a free market, it is only to the extent that he is in a position to use it.  But the free market limits the opportunity of the ambitious as much as it empowers.  So the opportunist moves on without inconsistency to appreciate whatever else might give him his chance to increase power.

Hat Tip: Bobber’s Del.icio.us links

The reason to give up on television

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Dark Angel - Season 1Max Headroom tried, but Dark Angel – The Complete First Season was the best cyberpunk TV season ever. Since Firefly never got a complete season, arguably DA was simply the best sci-fi season ever–the only competition possible would be from Battlestar Gallactica. Second Season was quite different though no less superb (I’m not showing you the cover because it is seriously ugly. I thought for awhile that S2 must have involved a change in actress. I have to assume someone in charge of design had a serious grudge against Alba). I could see readers being thrown a bit as the plot twisted from a more conventional near-future scenario into a more ancient-conspiracy type story with a strong kingdom of the animals feel to it (and one of the DVD commentaries leads me to suspect that 9/11 led the creative team to want to replace the freedom v. feds theme with a bad guy that could leave the feds looking better–which I think was a sad development).

But it was simply great. Especially since a lead protagonist was the Pacific Northwest itself. The future Seattle portrayed and the whole scenario was superb on many levels.

Yet it got cancelled. Why? Did it not get good ratings? Actually the first season, Tuesday night, got fine ratings. The second season was played in a Friday night death slot but still got reasonable ratings. In fact, the Fox Network initially picked it up.
So what was the problem?

Well, Joss Whedon wanted Fox to do Firefly.

But Mark, Firefly was a fantastic show. You’re telling me that Fox had a chance to air two incredibly brilliant shows? Why is that bad?

It is bad, because they were both “high budget” and Fox wouldn’t do both. They picked up Firefly instead.

Oh, that’s too bad. But you’re not declaring a preference for Cameron over Whedon are you? Because then we would have to take away your blog name and kick you out of the fan club and everything.

Right. Because Fox was sooooo loyal to Whedon, airing all of ten out of thirteen shows, and only changing the show time more often than the number of episodes.

No, what we got was two dead scifi shows that were both better than almost any other dramas on television.

That is the reason to give up television. No matter how many advantages that TV series have over movies, the fact remains that no movie-goer is kicked out of the theatre before the story is over. I’m just sick of getting interested in dramas that obviously have a multi-season story arc die before their time for completely bogus reasons.

Sheriff: SWAT Team Necessary Because Man Is a “Self-Proclaimed Constitutionalist”

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From the Reason blog.

My political take-away: more evidence of the country in the handbasket going you know where.

My personal take-away: be really nice and compliant to officials unless you want to be terrorized at gun point.  The “triumph” of getting away with rudeness is just not worth the risk.  Face it: we’re slaves.  So be a smart slave.

hat tip

At risk of sounding like a conspiratorial homeschooler

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even though I don’t homeschool….

As Ron Paul pointed out, the real conspiriacy is a conspiriacy of ideas.  My point is that there is a conspiracy of incentives.

It isn’t just “the public school establishment” that opposes homeschooling.  The entire corporate culture of the Western world thrives on making deals to get access to mass markets on the best terms possible.  Offering expensive medication to the few that will be diagnosed is not enough for the mental “health” pharma industry (for example).  No.  They are much better off with mandatory “screening” and diagnosing and proscribing in public schools.  The more children are allowed to opt out, the less they have to win.

And what is true of the pharmacracy is true of many other corporations.

Here is the inspiration for this post.

Big corporations don’t merely sell out Chinese dissidents to their government

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One telecom company said “no.” It was Qwest. The Qwest response to overtures was simple: “We’d love to work with you on this. But you do need to change the law so we can do it legally.” Apparently as soon as that happened, Qwest lost a series of important government contracts. And the next thing you know, the Justice Department was feverishly working on a criminal investigation looking at Qwest’s CEO on insider trading allegations—amidst very strange dealings between the Justice Department and the federal judge hearing the case. Of course, this is all the purest coincidence. Or maybe not. What kind of society does this sound like?

Here’s a confession: I actually don’t know what I think about Ron Paul when I think of all the responsibilities of a president. And I, frankly, get tired of hearing about what a perfect document the Constitution is and how it should be followed forever and ever world without end.

But sometimes I don’t care. I just want to vote for the guy who will spend his term trying to destroy these bureaucracies. Just promise you will raise unemployment in the Virginia and Maryland capital suburbs by, say, ninety percent, and you will have my vote.

The question is now before the Senate for a vote on the telecom amnesty bill. As usual, the White-Flag Democrats are abandoning opposition to the Administration’s initiative and are laying the foundation for it to be steamrolled through the Senate. Harry Reid’s conduct in particular has been reprehensible and spineless. This vote is a milestone on the road to serfdom. It’s time to put up a roadblock instead. Write or phone your senator immediately and advise them that you oppose the grant of amnesty for warrantless surveillance to telecommunications companies and that you expect them to do the same.