I still can’t find a reason why under fiat money, we charge interest on home, condo and apartments constructed and owned by individuals. As far as I know the private mortgage industry is entirely parasitic and is the primary driver of inflation.
I mean. That’s what it looks like, and I can’t find a competing argument.
The MMT folks are partly right.
Source date (UTC): 2014-11-03 07:44:00 UTC
GEEK TORTURE 🙂
So I send Vitalii a note that I am blown away at how fast the app is now, and he says that he can make it 5x faster, but that he won’t tell me how and I have to wait until the other work is done.
It’s like having your parents tell you that you must wait for a present until Christmas. 😉
Source date (UTC): 2014-11-03 05:55:00 UTC
RETURNING ARISTOCRACY, AND THEREFORE TRUTH, TO THE ACADEMY
(worth repeating)
My preference would be to teach War, Politics, Law, Economics, Finance, and Propertarian philosophy as a curriculum in all universities so that the Cathedral possessed internal competition. And it would restore male female balance to the Academy’s numbers of graduates.
I should add to that that in high school or in college, either one, we should restore, grammar, rhetoric and testimony.
if we taught grammar, rhetoric and testimony, within a generation that would restore western civilization.
“What color is the cube”
“From this angle I see two sides of the cube, and those two sides are white”
“So the cube is white”
“No, I cannot testify to that, I can only testify to seeing two sides of the house, and they are white”.
You see, warriors cannot add imaginary content to observations because people will die, or opportunities will be lost, if they do. So testimony evolved in the west out of the cult or raiders, and the rituals of initiatic warriors.
The truth is enough.
But only if people know the difference between observation and imagination.
Filling in the blanks is lying.
You don’t fill in the blanks. Because imagination contains bias.
Source date (UTC): 2014-11-03 05:08:00 UTC
ANGLO WORLD: THE SPORT OF CONFLICT
In the anglo world, our law evolved such that the judge was a trusted referee for combatants, not an authority. The judge is a referee, the two sides enter combat and the jury (the audience) determines who has won or lost. The common law had then to be understandable by common jurors, since they determine the outcome -they ‘judge’. The ‘judge’ himself or herself, is merely a referee to ensures that the rules of the game are obeyed.
Why does the jury system work in the anglo-sphere and why is it either feared or unworkable in others? And what can we learn from that?
Source date (UTC): 2014-11-03 05:03:00 UTC
http://www.newyorker.com/science/maria-konnikova/social-psychology-biased-republicansTHREE THOUGHTS: ARE MEMBERS BIASED AGAINST THE ENTRY OF CONSERVATIVES; and second, is there a bias toward support of left conclusions in research by those members; and third, are members with a bias drawn to the discipline of psychology?
It’s a specialization. The military is a specialization.
Psychology, if not for its complete abandonment of freudianism, and adoption of Operationism would have perished as a pseudoscience, as has social science, if it had not reformed. As it has reformed, it has moved more to the center. In practical terms Haidt appears to function as a classical liberal libertarian today (not a libertine libertarian), despite his left sentiments.
But its merely a specialization. If we took military strategy and tactics, and put it into the university system, instead of in the war colleges, you would see that most were conservative. (in fact that’s a pretty good idea).
Moral biases lead us to specializations where we can exercise our moral biases.
As I became self aware, I realized that I write the particular brand of philosophy I do because my highest moral priority is conflict prevention. I am very, very good at conflict, but that is partly because I dislike it so much, that I want it to end.
It so happens that in order to write something reasonably scientific about the subject of philosophy – particularly ethics and politics – that my cognitive bias is terribly useful. Because law is the philosophy of conflict resolution.
So its logical that psychology will move to left of center, as the scientific evidence forces center bias, while the people drawn to the subject continue to demonstrate left bias.
I am fairly sure that if we required operational speech in all disciplines we would see the same motion as we have in psychology: toward a reformation and drive back to the classical liberal center.
But I doubt that we would change the preference for those with progressive (female reproductive strategy) bias to the field.
My preference would be to teach War, Politics, Law, Economics, Finance, and Propertarian philosophy as a curriculum in all universities so that the Cathedral possessed internal competition. And it would restore male female balance to the Academy’s numbers of graduates.
Source date (UTC): 2014-11-03 04:23:00 UTC
http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/us-growth-and-weakening-global-economy-by-nouriel-roubini-2014-10#qijbgttUhPYimsC2.99″—ROUBINI ON THE SINGLE ENGINE (ANGLO) WORLD ECONOMY
I’ve followed Roubini for many years now, mostly because I think using the same frames of reference (incentives rather than statistics), and so I understand him more clearly than I do most other (correlative) economists. I am never interested in up-sides. That is the job of people with specialized knowledge of sectors, and instead I’m interested in politics and entrepreneurship. And Roubini’s ideas emphasize political and entrepreneurial risk, rather than financial opportunity.
This is a short but accurate article on the state of the world economy., I tend to follow Roubini Global Economics and George Friedman (See The Next 100 Years George Friedman) and advise those who are likewise interested in the political and entrepreneurial cycle (rather than financial opportunity) to do likewise.
Here are a few comments from others:
IT”S TRUE, NOT MORAL, NOT PREFERABLE, BUT TRUE
—“Roubini is a realist and he is using the basic operating assumptions of the world economy in his analysis. These assumptions include two crucial monetary facts, namely, 1. the status of the US Treasury bill as an unrivaled store of value (a status unaffected by the 2008 crash and all its consequences), and 2. the centrality of the City of London in global currency markets. The US stores value, produces liquidity (through QE and ultra-low policy rates), and consumes other countries’ manufactures with the money. The UK creams off huge profits from the froth of exchange (and their central bank has also produced a good bit of liquidity to keep the financial markets rolling, I might add). Both these functions are systemically necessary to the current pattern of the global economy, and they have have persisted since the mid-1970s with only incremental changes owing mostly to the rise of China and the consequent relativizaton of the importance of Japan. We may find these two crucial operating conditions aberrant from the viewpoint of neoclassical economics, or just plain unjust from the viewpoint of equality between nations, but they exist, they function and so far, they have only been perturbed, not altered, by the tremendous crisis of the last six years.”—
THE PROBLEM
My problem with this is that it creates very bad behavior in the world, and that is why the empire must fall.
Source date (UTC): 2014-11-03 01:58:00 UTC
—“What a stark contrast to the realities of our present, co-opted, american system, wherein “redress of grievance,” by the body of people is rejected as “not having standing,” and where the judiciary remains unconvinced (biased) that harm has been imposed upon an individual – when in actuality, injury by (previous) government action was imposed upon all.”— William L. Benge
(edited for clarity)
Source date (UTC): 2014-11-02 18:21:00 UTC
damn… it’s not that you have a right to ancestral lands, (under narrow conditions), it is that you have a moral obligation to restore ancestral lands. Interesting….
Source date (UTC): 2014-11-02 17:51:00 UTC
You know, writing about what you CAN experience, analogies to experience, and that which you cannot experience is really difficult…. All language is analogy to experience, so try to talk to the blind and deaf about color and sound requires layers of analogy all of which are open to misinterpretation and error… sigh…
Source date (UTC): 2014-11-02 17:22:00 UTC
SIMPLICITY: TRUTH IS ENOUGH
Free speech in a culture of men who tell the truth increases the velocity of cooperation and production. Free speech in a culture of men who systemically lie, by sophisticated means, temporarily increases consumption at the expense of trust and the consequential increases in innovation and production. In the 20th century science is somewhat immune from lying if not from their fascination with non-truthful speech, because so little (other than global warming) has been profitable to lie about and because like doctors and lawyers they protect their ‘ticket’ by persecuting offenders. It is this same ethic that is missing from politics. As such, without a systemic means of policing, free speech is simply a legalized endorsement of systematic lying for personal, organizational, political, and tribal gain. The only means we have of such a defense at the extra-professional scale of general political speech is the law. We may never be able to speak or know the ultimate truth on any matter, but thanks to science we have learned how to speak truthfully, and truthful speech is s required wherever others may come to harm, and politics, as the organized application of violence, is by definition the use of harm whenever used deceitfully.
Truth is enough The law is enough. Property rights are enough. And voluntary Exchange is a sufficient vehicle for the achievement of human wants and needs.
Source date (UTC): 2014-11-02 16:43:00 UTC