Nightmare in Econ 101

I was just looking for a video that had been on YouTube that gave a very clear and very concise definition of capitalism as an economic system. Can't find that video. Instead, came across dozens of others that would have been funny except that they were so very painful to watch. When you get a headache while you're thinking about something -- I mean your head just starts to ache as you try to wrap your brain around a certain idea -- usually it's because the idea is fundamentally flawed and so full of contradictions that it can't be assimilated by anything as stubbornly logical as the human mind. 

After listening very sincerely to some of these poor people on YouTube, I think I discovered what their problem is: They've all been taught Marxism as a sort of "economic truth." And Marxism really doesn't make a damn bit of sense when you hold it up against REALITY. The confusion, and the headache, come in as you try to reconcile what you see all around you with Marx's interpretation of it. 

First of all, Marx says that labor is the basis of economic value. No. Not necessarily. Not unless you want it to be. According to that standard, wildflowers would have no value, since they require no human labor to produce. Is it true that wildflowers have no value? What do they mean to you personally? 

You see, nothing in the world contains within itself what we, as human beings, would call "value." Gold, diamonds and things like that are said to have an "intrinsic value" due to their scarcity. But who cares if they're scarce? We care, the human race cares, so we assign them a value. 

Is oil valuable? Up until the middle of the 1800s or thereabouts, crude bubbling up out of the ground was collected by con artists, packaged into small bottles with ornate labels, and sold as cure-alls (the infamous "snake oil.") The smelly, tarry stuff had not much other value, and it certainly didn't cure anything. Until somebody figured out how to make kerosene out of it to replace whale oil for use in lamps. Then Rockefeller started mining and marketing it. 

Takes lobsters... please. I don't like lobster and once asked a guy, "What on earth possessed someone to actually eat something that looked like that?" Easy answer: Starvation. I suppose if I was starving in Maine or someplace, I'd assign some value to lobster.

OK, so compare this to labor-as-the-source-of-value. All of you cogs in the corporate machinery, who sit all day taking one column of numbers and turning it into two or three other columns of numbers... Do you value those columns you've created? I mean, do they have any value for you? You've invested your labor in them. According to Marx, they should be of extreme importance to you. Are they?

On the other hand, you might own a little hat that your mother knitted for you from a ball of cheap yarn. She probably invested a couple hours in the hat's creation. Is it the labor that makes it valuable, or is it because it is your mother's labor? You give it value; the poor little hat probably doesn't mean much to anyone else.

In one video on YouTube, you can see this one tormented wannabe economic scholar sinking ever more deeply into the quicksand of confusion as he claims that "early capitalists" wanted monopolies so that they could sell "commodities" for more than they were worth. Here's a hint, earnest little dude, you can't sell commodities or anything else for more than they're worth. The buyer pays only what it's worth to him or he doesn't buy it. The price he's willing to pay is one way to measure its value TO HIM. It may not be as valuable to someone else. And what other value does the commodity have? Compared to what? Where ELSE does this commodity get value, except from people who assign a specific value to it? 

If the seller prices a thing too high, potential buyers will find or create substitutes. Labor, priced too high, is substituted with machinery. AUW, SEIU, Teamsters, beware. No one really has to put up with your demands and if you price your skill and labor too high, well, too bad for you. 

And this is what a "market" is:  A place where buyers and sellers determine the economic value of things. Doesn't matter how much labor it took to create a thing. Doesn't always matter much what it's made of. The buyer and seller get together and determine -- How much is this worth?

There simply is no other source of value, economic or otherwise, in human civilization, except the human capacity for identifying and organizing things. In addition, the markets and the value they generate for things is extremely fluid. A while back, some people would stand out in the rain in front of Toys R Us and pay anything for a Cabbage Patch doll. What do you think these dolls are going for now? Not a fraction of the current "value" of the latest iPad, apparently.

Another example, people who do crafts can sit for hours producing a single lovely cut-out paper snowflake, or a crocheted afghan, or a handmade sweater. The fact that these items might represent hours of somebody's labor doesn't give them any kind of value -- not when they're exchanged in a market where all of these items can be made by machine much more quickly and usually to a higher standard of quality. 

So Marx is full of crap. He's just one more guy who contrived a metaphor for the world he saw around him. We all do. We all have our way of interpreting the world around us. Some use religious precepts as their way to organize and evaluate their lives and the world around them. Others use money exclusively. Others prioritize and value things according to their usefulness for their children, spouses, or pets. 

The metaphor Marx came up with apparently suited his own purposes -- or at least his friend, Engels, was willing to pay Marx's bills to keep Marx producing -- but Marxism is not a very accurate description of the world or of human civilization, and therefore not a very useful interpretation of economics. 

Keynes doesn't really work, either. If anything, Keynesian economics only demonstrates the principle that Milton Friedman described as the economy being like a balloon -- if you pinch one end of it, the air inside only bulges out somewhere else. (And, of course, pinched too tight all around, or inflated beyond capacity, the balloon can also explode....)

You know, life is not all that complicated -- until misguided professors and others compel you to view the world through a distorted lens. Suddenly nothing makes any sense. Here comes that damn headache.

So what to do? Live by your own lights. Organize and evaluate the world according to what makes you comfortable and satisfied. I think Jefferson called this "the pursuit of happiness." You have to have some personal liberty to have any chance at that at all. And you  have to have some confidence in your own individual judgment. Don't be afraid to try and fail. That's how you learn, as in, "Man, that socialist thing is totally screwed up!" Tried and failed. 

Save the Republic! 

North Korea: the irrational actor

You know, law is built on the idea of the "rational actor." The rational actor is a person or entity that will act in its own best interests. They act more or less rationally; they have a positive reason for what they do.

So introducing the "irrational actor." The irrational actor is a person or entity that acts on what looks like impulse, whether or not their actions are apparently in their own best interests. They are, in a word, loose cannons.

Khaddaffi played the irrational actor for a while. Just a looney-toons, doing what comes natcherly, impuslively, without a thought to the impact of his actions. Supposedly. That is, Khaddaffi did somehow profit for his role as the irrational actor. For a while. Until Ronald Reagan just got fed up with it and bombed the crap out of him. We haven't heard too much from Khaddaffi since then, except for that bizarre spectacle he put on at the U.N. a year or so ago. We must conclude, on the basis of that, that he has completely lost his grip on reality -- if he had a grip in the first place.

So now comes Kim Il Jong or whatever. The lunatic who heads up North Korea. Lately he's been sort indiscriminately bombing South Korea, sinking South Korean ships, lobbing mortars over a small island.

China has long served as a kind of suzerain for Korea as a whole. I mean, over centuries. A suzerain is kind of a protector. And China also has stepped in when Korea got just so nutsoid even China couldn't deal with it. China would just take over until Korea could sort out its internal problems and prove it was capable of looking after itself. Then China would step back.

So now with Korea going nuts and shooting off rockets and bombs kind of willy-nilly, the USA among others has asked China to go have a quiet talk with the lunatics running North Korea. Heard just today that China finally has agreed to go have some kind of talk.

Meanwhile, the US is participating in "war games" in the Yellow Sea this week with South Korea. North Korea says that's why it's been so nervous lately. Actually, North Korea is less "nervous" than it is entirely "unstable." And that's why it's been behaving badly.

So, while we have air craft carriers and all that over there, why not just take out their high command? See, in a country with a dictator and highly centralized command-over-everything government situation, it's pretty easy to annihuilate them in one fell swoop. So, why not? The worst that could happen is that Kim Jung Un (the Un-Kim?) will pop up at the U.N. in a couple years, dressed like a polar bear or something, and rambling about God knows what.

Just a thought.

Save the Republic.

(P.S.: I've worked 60 - 70 hours in each of the past couple weeks, so now's my chance to make up for it with all these pent up comments. You don't have to read them all.)

So what's with Assange?

What is this Assange guy's problem, exactly? He's an Australian with some history in Sweden -- that is, he is accused of rape there, so apparently fled that country. He seems to be living in Iceland now or someplace? Not sure. At any rate, he really, really, really, really, really hates America, even though he seems to have so little experience with the USA.

He's the guy with WikiLeeks (yeah, I know I spelled it my way) where he releases confidential information stolen from the US government.

First of all, let's set Assange aside for a moment. What about the US citizen -- and a soldier, I believe -- who sent Assange the secret files? I do hope that person is charged with treason and will be executed. Treason is the only crime defined in the US Constitution, and historically it's been very hard to prove. However, in this case, treason seems to be pretty apparent, if not blatantly obvious. So hang the guy. Or exile him to the mountains along the Afghan-Paki border and let's see if does as well as bn Laden.

At any rate, so we come back to Assange. I repeat, what is his problem? What the hell has he got to do with anything? Just trying to bring the USA down? Why? I can only conclude that Assange likes the idea of global terrorism and will do all that he, as an individual, can do to protect and promote it.

One sick puppy, n'est-ce pas? And a rapist? Apparently. He seems to be among the knee-jerk anti-American crowd. And I repeat, what has America ever done to him? Perhaps he failed to qualify for a job rounding up dingos in the outback and it was all George Bush's fault. I don't know. For people like him, that seems to be as good an excuse as any.

What a twisted world.

We need the USA more than ever with lunatics like Assange at large.

Save the Republic.

What makes people happy?

Just watched this rather weird segment on Fox with a guy named Dan Buettner, author of a book called Thrive. Apparently the National Geographic Society funded Buettner's trips around the world as he sought the world's happiest places.

I was expecting a review of Disneyland. But Buettner's findings were very different.

So what did Buettner come up with? He discussed a few:

*  Some town in Denmark where Buettner says the government funds everything, so lawyers make about the same thing as garbage collectors and nobody cares about status.

*  Singapore, where the government makes it easy for people to buy property, so extended families all live together. And people like to socialize most with their parents.

*  Then, San Luis Obispo, Calif., where no one smokes, there's not much obesity, and everyone rides bikes.

Anybody else find this a little strange?

First of all, personally I'm not plagued with envy of the rich, and don't know many people who are. Being concerned with justice, I find it appalling that a lawyer would make about the same income as a garbage collector, but that's just me. Do believe Buettner has confused "justice" with "egalitarianism" though.

Second, my relatives are dead, but my mother lived me for the last 15 years or so of her life. I didn't own a house at the time, and still managed, somehow, to socialize with her. I mean, why does that require a government-funded house? And maybe Singapore has a different system, but our government helps people buy houses, and the overall impact on the economy has been completely disastrous.

Frankly, smoking, obesity, and bike riding seem like pretty weak criteria to judge somebody's happiness. I mean, really, those specific values are rather markedly characteristic of political correctness. Seems to me that those values are held mainly by the small far-left splinter group that supports the Comrade.

But perhaps this book may useful as a handbook about what the left regards as the criteria for happiness.

And it just goes to show, one size doesn't fit all.

Save the Republic.

State capitalism by any other name....

Was watching Glenn Beck as he was describing "state capitalism." Honestly, I think he sometimes takes the longest and most complicated route to explaining things. Like the way he struggled with "monetizing the debt." But maybe he was too young to remember exactly what inflation was like in the 1970s, so he goes through three or four chalkboards and lots of graphics when he could have just said "flooding the globe with lots of paper dollars seriously dilutes the value of each individual dollar."

Anyway, back to state capitalism. Which sounds to me like a contradiction in terms. Like "socialist-anarchists." That's actually laughable.

Look, if you have "state capitalism" that means the state essentially owns everything -- going by a strict definition of "own," which means to have the right to determine a thing's use -- though citizens get to run it day-to-day. When it comes to big decisions, the government steps in with regulations and so forth. Strikes me that it's a total recipe for clinical stress, stress being when you have a lot of responsibility and no authority. You don't get to make any decisions, but everything is all your fault.

What a dream world, huh? Wouldn't you want to live there? Sorta like heading up a pharmaceutical company, isn't it? Or a bank. Or GM. Or anyplace that hires people or serves food.

I've mentioned this book before, but actually found it in my library -- The Russians, by Hedrick Smith, who was the New York Times (I think) bureau chief in Moscow for many years when it was the USSR. He wrote the book about everyday life in a "state capitalist" culture. He doesn't really go for the outrages and shocking rights violations so much as he just talks about the routine stuff, like toilet paper not being available to buy all the time -- or anything else. The central planning committee just had bigger fish to fry.

That's what you get with a centrally-controlled economy. Believe it was in this book that he talks about how Russian women complained that the clothes in the stores were unfashionable, unattractive, etc etc. So the state's central committee really made an effort to respond to these complaints and one year came out with something like a dozen different dress styles you could buy. When they were available. Somehow a dozen different styles really didn't solve the problem. They still all looked like cut-out dolls.

Don't even have to go so far afield. Anyone else remember when Nixon froze prices? That was interesting. At the time I worked for a company that made equipment used mainly for aircraft maintenance. (No, not factory work; I worked in the Engineering Office.) Anyway, so Nixon froze prices and everything else.

I used to have lunch every so often with the company's purchasing agent. Almost always when a salesman invited her to lunch, because her husband was the production manager and didn't want her going to lunch alone with the salesmen. So, anyway, this company used a lot of steel for manufacturing, and we sold an awful lot of stuff to the military. But when Nixon put the freeze on, the mills were apparently in process of making rolled steel -- like pipes and stuff -- and we needed flat steel. And couldn't get it. Because there was a freeze, and the steel companies couldn't make it. They couldn't even allow buyers to bid up the price for whatever inventory they might have for flat steel, or not legally anyway, because of the price freeze. The only reason my company got any flat steel was when we could prove it was to produce something the feds had ordered. You like that scenario?

I mean, a centrally-controlled economy is just exactly that stupid and inflexible. One size fits all, they say, it's more efficient that way. Except that it just doesn't work when you're dealing with human beings in a civilized society. Introduce freedom and free markets, and everyone's happy and much, much more productive. Suddenly there's tons of options for everything, lots of jobs, everyone has money to spend. You get the idea.

And anarchist-socialists, like those poop-for-brains currently burning down London because suddenly they're threatened with having pay something for a college education... What the hell kind of an education are they getting? Anarchy is just about the diametric opposite of socialism. Anarchy is the absence of government. Socialism is having a very tightly centralized and authoritarian government that divvies up and redistributes the goods. You can't have both at the same time. It just isn't possible.

Anyway, that's enough for now.

Save the Republic.

Thankful

I wanted to take some time and write about things to be thankful for.

Well, for one thing, I had to work on Thanksgiving. So I'm thankful for that -- that I am working.

I'm extremely thankful that I'm not the only American citizen who still believes in America.Can't even say how thankful. I love America not only for its ideals, but because we understand and believe in those ideals, and are willing to act in order to maintain them.

Thankful that people like Jim DeMint and John Boehner and even Mitch McConnell have agreed to try to do something to make congress more accountable and responsible.

Thankful that there is an America and that I was just lucky enough to be born here. But that wasn't luck so much as some long-dead relatives escaping from Europe. I'm thankful for their courage in making the journey to someplace thousands of miles from their homeland and families, thankful that they were willing and able to put in the work and commitment to build their lives here.

Thankful for Jefferson's idealism and Madison's foresight, George Washington's integrity, and Lincoln's, Reagan's, and even George W. Bush's steadfastness in insisting that America is right and worth preserving.

I'm very thankful that Fox News presents both sides of the story. Don't know that anyone else noticed, but the networks traditionally never discussed substance -- or the actual content of anyone's argument in politics. All they reported on was process -- that is, strategy. How a candidate plans to win, not the platform he or she is running on.

Fox changed all that. I love those guys.

And for anyone (like Ted Koppel or Jay Rockefeller) who perceive Fox and/or even MSNBC as "the death of journalism," gotta say, you guys don't know history. Newspapers and other media have been extremely and forthrightly biased through 99% of their existence in human history. Objectivity is only an illusion, and it's actually dangerous if people believe a news source is unbiased. Bias comes out not only in things like language or a slanted tone, but primarily in deciding exactly which stories are picked up and which aren't. No way to escape being biased. So thank you Fox and even all those looney and extremist blogs, like Huffington, who tell it as they see it and let the public sort it out.

Lots to be thankful for, but that's the public part.

Save the Republic.

All about the junk

Well, I don't fly. So I don't have to worry about strangers goosing me in the name of national security.

You do know how terrorism works? Terrorists aren't trying for the typical capture-the-flag war goals. Their aim is to destabilize governments, create internal conflicts, and provoke otherwise benign governments into becoming oppressors for the sake of "public safety."

So with the new TSA airport feel-'em-all-up policy, Al-Qaeda seems to be winning. Actually my favorite description of the policy comes from a bumper sticker: "Can't see London, Can't see France, Until we see your underpants." I do hope Janet Napolitano flies commercial. She really should. I mean if anybody's a threat to the USA....

What bugs me the most is the posture of so-called Homeland Security. Their modus operandi is to wait until terrorists think up some new tactic, and then respond to that by stripping away one more layer of privacy and dignity from American citizens. We had the shoe bomber, so everyone had to have their shoes scanned. We had the underwear bomber, now airline passengers are subjected to the "porn scans" and/or "enhanced pat-downs" that, in one case, required a breast cancer survivor to show the screener her breast prosthesis. And supposedly neither the scanners nor the pat-downs can detect things like potentially lethal powders or C-4 plastic explosives.

Someone on Fox asked something like, "What will the response be if a terrorist sticks some C-4 up his butt?" Don't even want to think about it. I suppose in that case, every airport would be equipped with an MRI or something. Or you'd have to have a colonoscopy immediately before boarding.

I'd rather drive, anyway. But soon we'll all be required to drive only Government Motors "enhanced semi-electric-powered roller skates," so that the bird-brains in the EPA can nurture their own personal doomsday myth.

It all kind of emphasizes that those in DC have put Al-Qaeda in charge of US security policy. That pisses me off more than anything else. Like, "We'll have to wait and see what they do before we can do anything." That's truly stupid. No other word to describe it.

And meanwhile, any ol' terrorist who wanted to could strap on 150 lbs of C-4 and simply stroll unmolested across the border into Arizona. He'd be lost among all the other mules burdened with marijuana.

What's wrong with this picture?

I think the Israelis have a better program. A former security chief for El-Al airlines was talking, and noted that stopping and searching everyone isn't half as effective as using your brain. The guy brought up the explosives recently found in toner cartridges that were being shipped to Chicago from Yemen. The El-Al guy pointed out that it was a curious situation all together, since there are no toner cartridge factories in Yemen, and tone cartridges don't need to be imported to Chicago. Apparently these things made some people suspicious.

'Course, the USA doesn't want to offend anybody. So even if a Nigerian kid's father calls the US Embassy and warns that his son is probably going to blow up an airplane, the US does nothing about that. Or some schmuck buys a one-way ticket on a trans-Atlantic flight and has no luggage with him. Doesn't even raise an eyebrow.

But that's the difference between putting on a show for the public and really getting smart about security. Napolitano et al fall into the first category, unfortunately. Challenge her or Pistole (strange name for a security guy?), and they demand "Well, what would you do?"

Tell you what, give me your salary and resources and I'll come up with something.

And that's all for now. Probably write more later. I'll feel better once I get my load of tryptophan.

Save the Republic.