Curt Doolittle

Form: Mini Essay

  • The Need For Manufacturing Jobs Is Not a Myth

    Myth of China’s Manufacturing Prowess

    Myth of China’s Manufacturing Prowess

    Contrary to the conventional view, manufacturing in the U. S. has been growing in the past two decades despite the decline in manufacturing jobs. The latest data show that the United States is still the largest manufacturer in the world. In 2008, U.S. manufacturing output was $1.8 trillion, compared to $1.4 trillion in China. This means that the United States is producing goods with higher value, such as airplanes and medical equipment. In addition, most jobs the United States lost to China are low-skilled jobs. By outsourcing those low-skilled jobs to China, Americans have actually become more competitive in high-skilled jobs such as management, innovation, and marketing. The low-skilled jobs also serve China well as Chinese rural migrants have opportunities to move up in life and gain some skills.

    I love it: “manufacturing in the U. S. has been growing in the past two decades despite the decline in manufacturing jobs”. What she means is ” productivity has grown as jobs have decreased. Which is a silly metric when the reason people are talking about manufacturing jobs, not productivity. Secondly, what is hidden in those numbers is the vast difference between small plastics firms for example, that are struggling to survive, and vast, highly efficient manufacturing and engineering organizations that ship goods around the world. (I need to get my hands on this data and mine it a bit. I think that it’s far worse than we see. Productivity can jump simply by consuming capital stock, or temporarily slashing wages.) It is a logical fallacy, and perhaps, a socially destructive one, to compare productivity to unemployment. The question is what is the highest productivity available without redistribution of productivity gains? We have a lot of unemployed people due to government’s misallocation of capital over decades if not a century. We need more manufacturing jobs that are also more productive than elsewhere. Manufacturing job != manual labor. It means ‘PRODUCING GOODS FOR EXPORT”. And yes, we need more of them, and the people clamoring for them are right to do so. It’s as if ‘it’s good enough to win numerically, is the same as actually reaching maximum productivity”. I mean, what kind of over-intellectualizing nut makes these kind of comparisons? The problem is that MONETARY POLICY is NOT ENOUGH of a lever. We need policy that intentionally uses the private sector to create productivity enhancing exports that require the creation of jobs. But our ethic of non-involvement, our unsophisticated politicians who are far more skilled at redistribution and regulation are not skilled at, nor capable of, producing long-term investment. And they are very unlikely to ask the top 1000 business people in the country, exclusive of the multinationals, how to accomplish it. Even though we all know The top seven:

      Some Simple Rules Of Thumb:

        8) The private sector is not able to concentrate capital in capital-intensive industries that create exports without both removal of state disincentives, and the assistance of the state in creating a market in which people will risk time and capital. A polity does not always need leadership except in time of crisis. Crisis in this case, created by a government too foolishly dancing with the devil of socialism, dressed up in Keynesian costume, with a joyful following of clerks of the church of positivism chanting from tomes whose authors pretend wisdom. THEREFORE General Liquidity Is An Insufficient Lever For Altering A Distorted Economy. People need opportunities to flock together and exploit together. Opportunities to create exports. Not consumption but exports.

      • No Surprises In Wikileaks: It Only Illustrates The Obvious: Overreach By Our Bureaucracy.

        SURPRISE? NO SURPRISES IN WIKILEAKS AT ALL. These are common diplomatic cables, written in the common business-language-of-state. Anything ‘shocking’ is simply the result of how people speak when they believe that their communications will remain private. Look at your own email, or personal conversations. We all trash-talk whenever we can. It vents our frustrations. For example: Everyone knows that Berscolini is a vain and incompetent man. But he’s a politician in Italy. Putin? We’ve all known Putin’s ambitions and position for years. Is confirmation something we needed? There is nothing so far in these docs that hasn’t been discussed to death. The docs only give legitimacy to those previously debated topics. *** Fools will always find a source of conspiracy in the natural incompetence of bureaucracy. *** WHAT WE LEARNED: There are only three things to learn from these docs:

        [callout]There is no competent leadership in washington, and it is possible that there cannot be competent leadership, that can develop a consistent policy across that divergent a set of interests.[/callout]

        1) The people who work on these communications are simple white collar government clerical bureaucrats, covering the communications of a vast and diverse state department, running a large naval empire during a time of enormous economic and political power changes. 2) The state department bureaucracy is too big, and american political and military reach is larger than the competence of the individuals in the State Department can coordinate — which is true of all bureaucracies. 3) There is no competent leadership in washington, and it is possible that there cannot be competent leadership, that can develop a consistent policy across that divergent a set of interests. HOWEVER The solutions to most of these diplomatic issues has been covered by Huntington in the Clash Of Civilizations. That is the only policy document necessary to coordinate the vast national interests abroad. We need a strong russia. We need a non-nuclear iran. Islam needs a different core state. We need to help south american, asian, hindu and the vast, ignorant, poor islamic states come into power, while we gracefully reduce our scope of responsibilities.

      • Two Founder Quotes Translated Into Forgone Opportunity Costs

        “To suppose that any form of government will secure liberty or happiness without any virtue in the people is a chimerical idea.” — James Madison Becomes: “Liberty represents the ability of each individual to achieve his greatest happiness, but only by servicing the wants and needs of others, and to do so by participating in the market. By doing so he reduces prices and increases choices, and creates value through exchange and decreasing prices through a division of knowledge and labor. It is an impossible supposition, that any form of government that we create, and any system of incentives and punishments we invent, will secure us our desired prosperity without the willing contributions of citizens, who daily pay for that prosperity by their expenditure of effort in production and exchange, but also by their forgoing of opportunity for gain by means of legal plunder, or by fraud, or by theft, and therefore avoiding paying the high cost of maintaining that prosperity.” “To compel a man to subsidize with his taxes the propagation of ideas which he disbelieves and abhors is sinful and tyrannical.” — Thomas Jefferson Becomes: “A man pays for his government first, in forgone opportunity costs, and second, by the expenditure of his time and labor in production and trade, and third, by the taxes he directly pays to the government. He pays with all three: since all three are avoidable, he pays with all three methods. Manners, Ethics, Morals, and most importantly, his avoidance of corruption: to live off the productive results of others without voluntary exchange – provide his easiest means of cheating – of obtaining the benefits of such a society at a discount. A man who does not pay the cost of manners, ethics, morals, AND observation of the cultural system of obligatory payments we call culture, is a thief. Therefore when the government ‘tolerates’ counter-cultural behavior it condones theft. When it supports people who do not make such payments, it pays one group to steal from another. Therefore, no man who makes payments to the state either in taxes or in forgone opportunity costs, should ever tolerate redistribution of his efforts to brigands, and thieves. The purpose of a government is to disallow people to obtain extra-market discounts while obtaining the benefits of participating in the market. A barbarian is someone who does not participate in the market, and in particular, someone who steals from the payments of citizens by avoiding the forgone opportunity costs we call ‘culture’.

      • What Do The Elections Mean For The Economy?

        In a staff meeting the other day, one of our senior people asked me what the elections mean for the economy, since our business (advertising and marketing) is highly influenced by the direction of the economy. We are a leading indicator of both upward and downward trends. I responded that the question depended upon the time frame one was using. In the short term, the elections mean that a divided government will eliminate social and political tensions so that people will spend more time on meaningful activities at home and work, and that business people will feel less [glossary:REGIME UNCERTAINTY] Regime Uncertainty. That means that the small business side of the economy should improve. That’s about all. The common people assume that the quantity of political rhetoric is equal to the qantity of economic power that a state can exercise, and this is not true. A state as we currently have constructed it, is largely capable of USING economic wealth in the short term, but incapable of creating wealth in the long term. That is the primary change in government over the past hundred and fifty years. We have converted from middle-class wealth creation to lower class wealth distribution in the west, as the consumer economy and democracy put political power in proletariat hands. That trend was acceptable given our extraordinary wealth. But the current trend must reverse itself, and the power of government must switch from an ambition entirely devoted to redistribution, to one more concerned with increasing the intellectual capacity of our less-than-hard-working citizenry.

        [callout]A state, as we currently have constructed it, is largely capable of USING economic wealth in the short term, but incapable of creating wealth in the long term. That is the primary change in government over the past hundred and fifty years. We have converted from middle-class wealth creation to lower class wealth distribution in the west, as the consumer economy and democracy put political power in proletariat hands. [/callout]

        In the medium term, it means that middle class white people are beginning to act like a minority, as has been predicted for some time now by any number of public intellectuals (Buchanan). It means that our economic recovery will be slow and protracted and vulnerable to shocks, and that it will take a decade or more for the worlds distorted capital structure to realign. It means that unemployment will be persistent and chronic for that period of time. It means that the US will not likely return to previously comforting low unemployment levels. It means uncertainty will prevail. In the long term, in regard to the general economy in the united states, it is not likely that any government intervention on any scale that is politically tolerable, will allow the adjustment to education that is needed to alter our basic competitiveness. It is unlikely that US businesses will produce at 20th century levels, which were only possible because of factors outside of political action: the large land area, the high rate of breeding and immigration, the high transformation of the population into the middle class, the low cost of language and legal transactions due to cultural homogeneity, and the low cost of administration due to the use of the common law. The response to my statements was that they painted a gloomy outlook. I responded that there is a vast difference between objective reality, and the emotional experience that we attach to it. I read something the other day about african meat-packers, living a terrible and dirty life. But that during the day, as they worked, they were joyous, playful, enjoyed their friends and family, and in general described themselves as happy. For human beings, uncertainty, unpredictability, and negative environmental change are impediments to our rather fixed rate of adaptation. But people adjust to their circumstances when they can, and find good in almost everything. Therefore, the objective picture may appear gloomy, but the general sentiment will improve as people adjust to the new circumstances. What will happen is the perception of power, or excellence, which we refer to as ‘status’ will change, worldwide, and continue, as it has since the collapse of the soviet system, to be local and cultural, and less western or ideological. The world’s common people, will continue to return to it’s civilizational biases, and admirations. It’s business leaders and intellectuals will continue to explore each other. Consumers will adopt whatever fashion is relevant to them. But by and large, they will be more interested in their cultures than in western culture. The west will be less of a destination for the highly talented and upwardly mobile. And the western demographic problem (the high land occupation by white christians) will be under pressure, and white christians will increasingly adopt minority postures, just as their political leadership warned they would for the past century and a half. This is the meaningful trend. We will be less wealthy of a civilization relative to others than we have been since the opening of the atlantic trade 500 years ago. Our politics is just the daily expression of our sentiments as these shifts occur.

      • Our Failure To Keep It.

        The takeover of the administration of state by the middle class in England created a problem for politicians. WIth their new found responsibility, they were not against the king any longer, and now were against each other. Some were cognizant of the risk. Conservatism: Sentiments of freedom from totalitarianism, brotherhood of protection of the city, individual responsibility. group persistence. the unity of church and state. fidelity to one’s word. Objective truth in all statements. Purity. These are sentiments of group persistence. Classical Liberal: institutional Balance of power, the rule of law, enfranchisement of the many, contractually explicit government, the virtuous citizen created by trade and exchange. Libertarian Anarcho Capitalist: privatized institutions of social services, sound money, and the credit society. Hoppian Monarchy: the inter-temporal incentives of monarchy to accumulate social capital. Insurance companies as vehicles for Machiavellian: power maintained by minority willing to keep it by violence. violence is superior to fraud in both practice and logic. Compulsory saving. What separates the west from the less successful cultures, is that the [glossary:aryan] tradition’s philosophy is political rather than interpersonal. The greeks solved the problem of politics. The romans adopted and spread it. The church by contrast teaches empathy. The military state teaches objective truth. Neither compromises. Our version of ying-and-yang is not philosophical and personal, but institutional and political, and people are expected to master both empathy and objective truth. We did not fail to solve the problem of politics as did the other societies. We failed to keep it once we solved it. Monarchy, Senate (lords), Parliament, militarism, and the credit society. A house for each class. Not class warfare, but class cooperation.

      • The Child Of Democracy And Secularism Is Stillborn

        (Posted in the comments section of the NYT) In response to the comments section of one of Paul Krugman’s articles: British Decline I felt that all the people that were commenting were right. They understood the failure of conservative policy. The same way that conservatives understand the failure of liberal policy. But they are working on different axis. Neither to do with one another. Our ideological war has now become a race and class war. New elites are emerging. They are less invested in the previous order. They are messianic. They are driven by the one force that is unstoppable: the loss of status and power, which no group will tolerate, and which whites only tolerated because of the combined guilt of slavery and colonialism, and the attack on men by feminism. The elites widthrew from society, participated in the commercial marketplace, left the arts to immigrants, and abandoned high culture. This was fine until the middle class was threatened. At this point, not only is the middle class threatened but so are the working class whites. Under duress people rely upon the mirror test: people who look like them. They are under duress economically. And they feel that their government, the very government that they surrendered, is against them. The ascendency of europeans and the protestant reformation is being undone. Classical liberalism is being undone. It is being undone for exactly the reasons conservatives stated it would be undone. The inability of conservatives to produce a cult (romanticism) and the abilty of conservatives to produce an economic and political model to compete with socialism and social-democracy, using the tools of monetary policy, and the state, to transfer power and advantage. RE: “Japan has a big asset: a leadership that honestly cares for its people. This caring (amateur sociology, according to professional economist), is due to their tribal unity.” This comment correctly states the issue: that despite hardship and demographic changes, the japanese remain under solidarity.

        [callout]Neither side wins. Period. We all lose. A nation is its cult. Economics is not a sufficient means of organizing a polity. Democracy wasn’t the only god that failed. It married secularism. And it’s child is stillborn.[/callout]

        This is scientific data, not amateur sociology: The japanese are a homogenous racist society. Economic success by any group will not lead to political disenfranchisement of another group, wherein the dominant group will lose privilege and opportunity, or the competing groups will not eliminate but simply alter the baises of privilege and opportunity. The USA is an empire. People of different races, cultures and religions, do not mix except under very rare circumstances at the margins, largely to do with status economies and the resulting access to mates and opportunities. The human accounting system is status, not money. Because intra-group status is more rewarding than extra-group status. We will not have multi-culturalism when different groups have the ability to obtain political power, and can undermine the majority status system. There was far more multi-culturalism under the great monarchies of europe than today. Simply because commercial excellence was the only status route available to minorities, because the political system was not open to them. Power is not meritocratic. It just is power, and the most important objective of power is to deprive other people of it. And the most important feature of western culture was that it allowed status gain by market activity even if denied access to political office which might alter that dichotomy. The conservative movement was a reaction to a violation of its core principle of long term group cohesion – a necessary component of land holding and trade-route holding – persistence which cannot be maintained through economic means alone. Only tribalism and pure military strength are strong enough to hold trade routes. THe conservative movement since the end of the war was a reaction against the disintegration of the sentiments of group-persistence, due to immigration, post-slavery political problems, feminism and anti-colonialism, as a coalition against the established political order. And instead of obtaining their ‘rights as englishmen’ of property, and market participation, these groups sought political power – political power is not meritocratic. It is just force. This process s playing out, and will play out, as materially important and highly predictive. Our culture will not assimilate and unify. It will not achieve the grand vision. We are demographically adopting the south american model. We will, and are, fragmenting to the point where the government may lose the ability to govern. If we get only two states to make use of nullification that will be the end of our multi-cultural, melting-pot fantasy. And three more years of low employment will almost guarantee it. Good economics is not macro economics. All economics is micro. Because the vast movement of human beings over time is determined by what they cannot sense by quantitative means, and what they can sense by qualitative means: the loss of their status and opportunity due to enforced competition, and competition from people who are no longer asked to integrate and to be ‘american’ and adopt american values, but to oppose those values and retain their culture at any cost, because en-masse, it is a way to obtain political power, rather than participate in the market and become an american by earning status in the market. All your criticisms of the free trade movement are correct. Conservatives were attempting to preserve the cult of american classical liberalism, preserve existing status hierarchies, and force people to conform to that value system – their cult – and therefore force people into the market under the monarchic classical liberal model. THe conservative policies that you are railing against are simply means of undermining the attack on the classical liberal cultural order. Justified as economic nonsense maybe. But pursued for precisely conservative reasons. Neither side wins. Period. We all lose. A nation is its cult. Because economics is not a sufficient means of decision making in a polity. Democracy wasn’t the only god that failed. It married secularism. And it’s child is stillborn.

      • The Difference Between The Liberal And Conservative Mind?

        From Education And Its Discontents

        About three years ago, a scientific study was undertaken to examine some of the differences between the conservative and the liberal mind. One of the conclusions emerging from the study was that liberal people tend to be able to handle ambiguity and nuance better than conservative people, processing new information that might challenge some of their beliefs, incorporating that information and even altering their thinking on a subject as a result. Conservative minds, on the other hand, tend to adhere to beliefs and convictions despite evidence that call them into question.

        From what I can gather from the postings, I’m not sure this test demonstrates what the authors of both the study and the articles assume. COGNITIVE DIFFERENCES Conservatives have a longer (lower) time preference. (This is why they are happier than liberals, and tend to be wealthier.) Because they have a longer time preference:


        1. They are less likely to attempt to ‘serve or satisfy’ the immediate requests of others: lower empathy, longer (lower) time preference, greater pattern reliance (tendency to see the world through natural law.)
        2. They are more likely to try to identify patterns and begin acting in anticipation, rather than simply reacting.
        3. Unless we know the male-female ratio and ages, we don’t know if this test is simply an empathy or dominance test.

        The same test would need to be run with time preference survey questions, and the male-female statistics would have to be included. The more interesting question is, why liberals — people with shorter (higher) time preference, and greater empathy — tend to be less happy and less successful in life? RESISTANCE TO CHANGE The reason conservatives are change resistant, is because: a) they are inter-temporally pattern sensitive they are very reliant on forecasting, and significant pattern changes mean high cost of reorganizing patterns. b) In natural law, and in Greek philosophy, and in the western mythic narrative, human HUBRIS is the primary warning. ie: they are skeptical. c) Government is the repository of a great deal of power, and the most dangerous human hubris, and is most susceptible to the fashionable short term sentiments of human beings. d) Conservatism, because it is the repository of the militial and commercial sentiments in western civilization is meritocratic in the sense that they accept established rules, and will operate within them, and see others who do not make the sacrifice of operating by the same rules, and in particular, those who use the artifice of government to circumvent ‘the rules of the game’, as either immoral or thieves or both. This is a different strategy from charity. Redistribution and charity are conservative sentiments, but they allow conservatives to ‘fund’ instances of charity that have ‘good’ behaviors, most of which are extending time preference. They see people who use government to forcibly redistribute without requiring extending time preference, as either profiting from corruption, theft of the fruits of their effort for personal political gain, or simply a moral corruptoin of society that shortens time preferences. Understanding the conservatives sentiment requires understanding that conservatives KNOW that they passed on many opportunities for self satisfaction. To a large degree, conservatives do not disfavor redistribution. They disfavor the means and uses of redistribution favored by people with shorter, higher time preferences, because they see it as theft of their sacrifices. And not all people who vote conservatively have longer time preferences. There are plenty of people in the financial sector who are not conservative, just voting with conservatives to exploit the monetary opportunity of doing so. The fact that they take advantage of conservative policies does not mean that they are either conservative or have a longer time preferences. It simply means the are voting for longer time preference in order to exploit the opportunity for a shorter time preference. In effect, this is fraudulent behavior and one of the problems with democracy itself.THE NATIONAL CONTEXT The country is center-right (conservative leaning) and will always be so. This is for demographic reasons that have largely to do with the dominant class and culture of the people who occupy that particular geography. Structurally, conservatives have opposed both good and bad change. The impact of women, catholic, and Jewish votes, as well as the rapid third world immigration did accomplish exactly what they stated it would do. Whether that is ‘good’ or ‘bad’ is a matter of economics and preference. The conservative sentiment is to resist change until they see risk abandoned, then to adopt the new state of affairs as the ‘conservative’ position. To a conservative who sees the rules established by the constitution (a classical liberal) or a conservative who adheres to the western tradition (a conservative) or a religious conservative, or a small business owner or craftsman (an economic conservative), or an investor (a financial conservative)the threat to the established political order, to which they feel they have made sacrifices and taken risks, these political ‘innovations’ are not ‘goods’. They are ‘bads’. Because of the two party system, there are conservatives in both parties. People tend to be conservative or liberal on different issues. They self identify as liberal or conservative, for a set of reasons. And left-right political nonsense is almost always meaningless, because all elections are decided by a fractional portion the independents in the middle. The change in US voting patterns is almost entirely to the rise in young single mothers, immigrants and breeding rates of different social classes. Independents and conservatives are in roughly equal proportion, making up over eighty percent of the population. With liberals making up less than twenty. Despite our desire to the contrary, political sentiment is NOT rational: it is inherited from one’s parents, and is largely a function of class, history and occupation. IN CLOSING Given the interpretation of this questionably meaningful study, it’s easy to see that this is another example of why conservatives believe that hubris is alive and well. 🙂

        UNDERSTANDING TIME PREFERENCE

        • Time preference is the tendency to seek shorter or longer outcomes. In the literature short time preference is called ‘High’ and long time preference is called ‘Low’, because at the time when economists were inventing Marginalism, they thought about satisfying preferences marginally, by stacking people’s preferences. in the ‘stack of preferences held by the individual’, something could be described as higher in the list or lower in the list.
        • Because time passage increases complexity logarithmically, long time preference must rely on what cannot be observed directly – general rules and principles using historical allegory.
        • In general terms, Long time preference is a FORECASTING method of human interaction, not a SATISFACTION method of human interaction.
        • Time preferences are incommensurable. Or more simply, long waves and short waves don’t allow us to think both short and long term very well. Planning by combining long and short time frames is either difficult or impossible.
        • Different social classes have different time preferences. Since longer time preferences require greater complexity, and complex goods are of greater scarcity, then classes are divided by those with higher mean IQ’s, longer time preferences, and who engage in production involving and affecting a larger number of people, over longer periods of time.
        • Since it must rely upon what cannot be observed correctly it often appears less EMPATHIC and EGALITARIAN. When in fact, it is the difference between having a priority for short term or long term satisfaction. We would not successfully raise children if women were not empathic and sensitive to cues from children. Children cannot survive a mother who does not feel the need to satisfy them. Conversely, tribes would not survive if the males were not working on the problem of whether the local territory could continue to support them.
        • In large part, the division of labor increases production. The division of knowledge increases production. And since different outcomes take different amount of time, and some outcomes take a very long time, and since planning becomes very difficult for human minds when we mix a large number of time frames, humans participate in a vast division of TIME, with some producing short term goods and some long term goods, and together we tend to specialize.
        • The shorter time preference strategy is to accumulate small successes at low cost and to navigate to a satisfactory end. The longer time preference strategy is to forgo short term satisfaction in order to accomplish a long term end. This is why conservative societies survive longer: they are capable of surviving duress without loss of social cohesion.
        • Urbanites and Ruralas have different time preferences, largely because there are more opportunities for inexpensive gain when people are in more dense population. This is why cities are inseparable from markets. A city is market, otherwise it would not be a city. Each would not survive in the others environment.

      • “It’s So . . . Complex?” Not Really.

        MEGAN MCARDLE at the Atlantic, posted an essay question by Pascal Emmanuel-Gobry.

        Complex societies collapse because, when some stress comes, those societies have become too inflexible to respond. In retrospect, this can seem mystifying. Why didn’t these societies just re-tool in less complex ways? The answer Tainter gives is the simplest one: When societies fail to respond to reduced circumstances through orderly downsizing, it isn’t because they don’t want to, it’s because they can’t.

        The thesis is false. Luddite on top of false. But false. 1) Governors are simply unable to possess sufficient knowledge. In the absence of knowledge governors do the one thing we charge them with: make laws. They make laws without knowledge. It is the system of regulations that breaks down, not technological complexity. Lawmakers cannot make good laws because they lack the ability to possess or integrate the knowledge necessary to make economic laws. Why this is the general critique of socialism (central planning) but we do not apply the same logic to republican government (central legislation) is an more interesting topic of study. Knowledge and incentives. You need both. Government has neither.

        [callout]Our current state of affairs is not a problem of politics and parties. It is a problem with the very structure of government, and the multitudinous myths that we live under, tell ourselves and use to justify our wants and wishes. Our government was very useful for selling off a continent in the agrarian era. In the post agrarian, dense-urban era, we are too sufficiently un-equal, to diverse, possessed of too fragmentary knowledge, for lawmaking as we understand it.[/callout]

        2) His analysis of complexity is erroneous. There is no evidence of marginal decreases in effectiveness. And any such analysis belies a misunderstanding of technical and epistemic progress. It is not LINEAR or STATIC. As is biology, innovation functions by punctuated equilibria. In other words, random, large shifts occur due to accumulated minor innovations, whereby all previous innovations are disrupted, and all social orders reorganize around the large shifts. 3) The context is erroneous. Western dominance rose because of changes in trade routes. The USA became dominant by selling off a continent to immigrants, and concentrating that capital in military and political conquest. A republican government is the only government dynamic enough (incorporating enough people) to sell off a continent. We did not make an excellent country. We simply sold off a continent and funded technological development with the proceeds. These proceeds are now in the form of intellectual capital. That intellectual capital is fluid, and open to unfettered replication. The world is copying that technology at a low cost. This low cost is allowing vast increases in population and vast increases in the structure of production, allowing people to move from subsistence farming to a suburban and urban working class. This migration is creating a vast pool of available labor. Since people are NOT EQUAL in ability, this means that the USA is specializing in productive efforts open only to the top two quintiles. It means that the bottom three quintiles are not able to participate in the production of the USA’s specialisms (creative marketing, medicine, education, product development, financial innovation) and the specializations are no longer sufficiently profitable to assist the lower quintiles by redistribution. Free Traders were wrong. Nations cannot specialize because people in them are unequal. CLASSES within NATIONS must specialize. Free trade is dangerous to the stability of advanced societies between whom differences are not sufficiently marginal. 4) We do not need simplicity. We need innovation and reorganization. We need the assistance of the government to concentrate capital in industries where we can be competitive, and to retain all possible capital inside the country, so that the lower quintiles do not so much suffer from the affect of increased competition from around the world. The Author of your essay is yet another Luddite. The way is not back, it is forward. 4) we have taken over the policing of trade routes from the British empire. We have built a political empire, if not an economic one. And we could afford that empire when Europe was in tatters, and the rest of the world languished in pre-capitalist technologies. We cannot afford to run this empire any longer. Any more than England could after the war. However, there will be no gains to be realize for the purposes of redistribution. The USA will no longer be able to borrow, nor productive enough to export it’s way to prosperity. We will not have either empire, nor our previous wealth. SUMMARY Societies failed because the were no longer able to coordinate. People must have coordinating myths. Myths are the means by which codify what we pay for social order: respect for some form of property or another. Every ‘respect’ of some form of property is a forgone opportunity. These forgone opportunities are costs. These costs are very expensive. The most advanced societies contain people who forgo great opportunities to ‘disrespect’ property. The primitive societies do not forgo those opportunities. This behavioral development is a very high cost. The first myths were simply conventions. They were formalized into Religions. Religions finally failed when the middle class developed, and societies became large enough that people could visibly ‘cheat’ with anonymity. Lawmaking developed in order, largely, to legitimize government (and it’s social order) by standardizing punishments for similar crimes against life and property. That technology of Lawmaking has failed (although our government does not recognize this.) Because laws are too many and too irrelevant and too impossible to police. Our politicians knowingly state that they do not understand nor have they even read, many of the laws that they implement. They leave this process to the bureaucracy. The bureaucracy serves it’s own purpose. And it is the bureaucracy that citizens learn to loathe. “Revolutions are built from the accumulation of petty violence by the bureaucracy, not the heinous crimes of a few politicians, princes, or kings.” The next form of government after lawmaking is banking and credit. The reason being that only that system will allow us to ‘sense’ the world, and only that system will allow the state to engage in the increase in capital so that redistribution is possible. Rather than the (current) assumption that capital will continue to accumulate and the government must simply confiscate enough of if to keep the citizens happy. To survive, we will become even more capitalist, not less. We must. Because only property, pricing, and numbers can provide us with the information to coordinate in vast division of knowledge and labor. THE STATE OF THE UNION Our current state of affairs is not a problem of politics and parties. It is a problem with the very structure of government, and the multitudinous myths that we live under, tell ourselves and use to justify our wants and wishes. Our government was very useful for selling off a continent in the agrarian era. In the post agrarian, dense-urban era, we are too sufficiently un-equal, to diverse, possessed of too fragmentary knowledge, for lawmaking as we understand it. This is why our society is failing. It is why previous societies have failed: the inability to regulate consumption and concentrate capital for production because the social orders did not develop a level of granular management. That management is visible to us in the private banking, credit and finance systems. Our governments must realize that they are banks first. You can’t redistribute something if you have nothing to start with. The first purpose is defense and property definition (order) The second purpose of the state is productivity (competition) The third is redistribution. (the result of order and competition) They must exist in that order. A state that does not focus on productivity will eventually be unable to redistribute, compete, or maintain order. SPECIOUS ARGUMENTS BY LUDDITES Arguments about complexity are specious. A division of labor is by definition complex. A market is complex, or we would not need it. Pricing systems are complex or we would not have had them. If we became less complex we would have to return more people to farming, and possibly, kill off billions of existing human beings. Complexity is our friend. The accumulated social and legal hindrances to reorganization, and the accumulated ERRORS in political philosophy that prohibit the concentration of capital behind innovative productive ends, is the problem. Our institution of government, as we practice it today, is the problem. It is predicated upon erroneous myths. It is structured to make laws for farmers. It is burdened with assumptions of productivity that may never be met. The institutions of government that are more socialist are even worse. They pretend knowledge of a future that cannot be known. And Luddite solutions are appeals to create a certain future, whose only certainty is destruction and poverty.

      • Updating English Spelling? Not so fast, maybe.

        For some reason, Joseph Fouche from The Committee On Public Safety found a proposal on revising English Spelling interesting enough to write about. He lifts this example:

        It woz in the ferst dae ov the nue yeer that the anounsment woz maed, aulmoest simultaeneusli from three obzervatoris, that the moeshen ov the planet Neptune, the outermoest ov aul the planets that w(h)eel about the sun, had bekum very eratik. A retardaeshen in its velositi had been suspekted in Desember. Then a faent, remoet spek ov lyt woz diskuverd in the reejen ov the perterbd planet. At ferst this did not cauz eni veri graet eksytment. Syentifik peepl, houever, found the intelijens remarkabl enuf, eeven befor it becaem noen that the nue bodi woz rapidli groeing larjer and bryter, and that the moeshen woz kwyt diferent from the orderli proegres ov the planets…

        For some other reason known only to those of us who are social science nerds, I felt the need to respond. Possibly because I am a conservative by nature. Possibly because I understand as an economist, the value of CAPITALIZING just about everything. And that language is a form of capital that can either amplify or discount human beings that use it. SPELLING IN ENGLISH CONVEYS INFORMATION The odd spelling certainly makes the language harder to learn but conveys with it much greater content, and it solves the problem of homonyms (words that sound the same but have different meanings) and context. Complex spellings approach abstract symbols that reduce the problem of defining context with similar sounds. All those spellings and oddities convey information. That information is useful. THERE IS NO REASON THE FUTURE OF WRITTEN LANGUAGE IS CONSONANTAL It might be better to see it as an advantage for a very complex language to approach becoming both phonetic and pictographic rather than purely phonetic. (Which is what has happened with english.) Imagine chinese by contrast, which is a very old language, and is constructed of a myraid of homonyms and complex tones. (languages start with clicks in the ancient past and end with tonal songs in the distant future.) There are only 30K images or words. Not the nearly 1M in english. They speak poetically because they can’t be more precise. It’s an old language but a primitive one. English, the germanic indo european languages in particular, are technical languages. They are the languages of craftsmen and soldiers: meant to convey precision. LANGUAGES CONTAIN METAPHYSICAL JUDGEMENTS Try to speak probabalistically in Spanish. Try to speak factually in polish. Try to eliminate emotional experience from Romanian or italian. Try to convey duty in the Slavics. Languages are more than sounds. They are complex constructs that frame and limit as well as amplify, different social ideas. English is wonderful for insulting someone’s intelligence. Eskimo is wonderful for describing weather. Talk about sex or emotional experience in italian or french. See other languages for what they are: vastly primitive. THE ECONOMICS OF WRITING ARE CHANGING Another argument might be, that we are rapidly approaching a position where reading and writing, which are very abstract very inexpensive forms of illustration, may be irrelevant to more than half of the population: where the future is most likely constructed of pictograms or videograms – moving illustrations that are constructed by and presented by machines. The only reason we use letters rather than images is that they are less expensive to produce. Especially for consonantal languages. However, as languages mature (which they are doing rapidly right now) they become lazy and tonal rather than consonantal. And our current symbolic representations of those languages with consonantal symbols that do NOT convey tones is limiting to representing the tonal. And while the above statement may seem economically impossible, because of the current perception of machines as expensive, we must remember that writing materials were as expensive in the past, during the development of writing, as we consider computers today. Today’s iPad is yesterday’s quill and parchment. LUDDITES ARE EVERYWHERE Effectively the author is promoting a pidgin: a language for simple people to hold simple conversations, rather than a language for conveying complex information. As such, he is, like many others, a Luddite. And luddites are searching for a simpler past rather than a complex, safer, and more prosperous future. And we do not need to dumb down our civilization any further. Even if it does make reading easier. Learning to read a hard language if it conveys greater information increases human capital. 🙂

      • Reason Is Insufficient To Reform Immigration. Violence Is The Only Political Option.

        A friend posted an article on immigration reform. It’s yet another appeal to perceived wisdom.

        [callout]We can be free, or we can be exploited, or we can be oppressed or we can be enslaved, or we can be murdered. Choose your position on that spectrum. [/callout]

        Once an argument is understood in that it possesses explanatory power, is non-contradictory, and solves a pertinent practical political problem, one can seek consensus. And as long as that consensus appeals to a majority, then a democratic polity can adopt the policies that support the argument. However, the classical liberal ideal cannot be supported within a democracy, and no such rational arguments can prevail, for the sole reason that freedom is the desire of the minority – the creative class. And instead, safety is the objective of the majority. And the majority will always pursue safety rather than liberty. If the freedom-desiring minority loses it’s willingness to use violence to preserve it’s freedom, it will possess neither freedom, nor prosperity. And the rest of the civilization will calcify upon being deprived of the mental fertility of its creative, and therefore, most productive classes. This is the history of civilization. Fertility followed by calcification, followed by conquest and poverty. The answer is not violence, nor is the answer argument. The answer is sufficient argument so that the creative classes will apply violence, for the purpose of obtaining and maintaining the political power needed to secure the minority liberty against the predatory majority’s exploitation of the creative class in order to obtain security. We can be free, or we can be exploited, or we can be oppressed or we can be enslaved, or we can be murdered. Choose your position on that spectrum. Because your actions and the use of violence will determine it. Talk is cheap, and demonstrably ineffective.