SMACK DOWN
“I want to go watch!”
“You will be the first person to use gazolin and start war in my country. If you wanna war, then go to your f__king states, and make war with your Obama. Ukrainians won’t be using violence. We are not a violent people.”
What can I say. I’m an anarchist. 😉
Source date (UTC): 2013-12-01 10:24:00 UTC
THE MARRIAGE GAP
“The single best correlation with Bush’s share of the vote by state that anybody has yet found is: the average years married by white women between age 18 and 44: an astonishing r-squared = 83 percent.
(This has to be one of the highest r-squareds for a single factor ever seen in political science.) Bush carried the top 25 states ranked on “years married.” — Steve Sailer
REPUBLICANS are attractive to MARRIED PEOPLE and small business.
Because a marriage is a small business.
I know people don’t like it.
But that’s just how it is.
Source date (UTC): 2013-11-30 12:26:00 UTC
THE END OF THE EUROPEAN PROJECT
–“The Europe which is treated here is not the clean, peaceful, rational continent of economists or technocrats, a prosperous and amnesiac world whose history is entirely written between the treaties of Rome of 1956 and of the great market of 1993. Thirty-five years is a bit short to understand a civilization born of the Roman conquest, the Germanic invasions and the Christianization of the peoples. [p. 13]”–
Source date (UTC): 2013-11-30 06:41:00 UTC
TODD ON THE EU
–“My opposition to the Maastricht Treaty stems very directly from my knowledge of the anthropology and history of our continent. A real sensibility to the diversity of European customs and values can only lead to one conclusion: the central monetary management of societies as different as, for example, France and Germany, must lead to a massive dysfunction, first, of one or other society, and, then, of both. There is, in the ideology of unification, a will to break human and social realities which recalls, strangely but invincibly, Marxism-Leninism.”–
The EU IS A MARXIST AMBITION
Source date (UTC): 2013-11-30 05:51:00 UTC
THE EXTENDED FAMILY’S WAR ON INDIVIDUALISM
–“communism is a transference to the party state of the moral traits and the regulatory mechanisms of the exogamous community family. Sapped by urbanization, industrialization and the spread of literacy, in short by modernization, the exogamous community family passes on its egalitarian and authoritarian values to the new society. Individuals with equal rights are crushed by the political system in the same way they were destroyed in the past by the extended family when it was the dominant institution of traditional Russian, Chinese, Vietnamese or Serbian society.” —
Source date (UTC): 2013-11-29 06:50:00 UTC
http://www.stephenhicks.org/”Noam Chomsky is a mixed bag intellectually, but I like this quotation forwarded to me by Edward Fox:
CHOMSKY ON POSTMODERNISM
“There are lots of things I don’t understand — say, the latest debates over whether neutrinos have mass or the way that Fermat’s last theorem was (apparently) proven recently. But from 50 years in this game, I have learned two things: (1) I can ask friends who work in these areas to explain it to me at a level that I can understand, and they can do so, without particular difficulty; (2) if I’m interested, I can proceed to learn more so that I will come to understand it. Now Derrida, Lacan, Lyotard, Kristeva, etc. — even Foucault, whom I knew and liked, and who was somewhat different from the rest — write things that I also don’t understand, but (1) and (2) don’t hold: no one who says they do understand can explain it to me and I haven’t a clue as to how to proceed to overcome my failures. That leaves one of two possibilities: (a) some new advance in intellectual life has been made, perhaps some sudden genetic mutation, which has created a form of ‘theory’ that is beyond quantum theory, topology, etc., in depth and profundity; or (b) … I won’t spell it out.”
Source date (UTC): 2013-11-28 01:19:00 UTC
“…a herd of timid and industrious animals of which government is the shepherd…” QUOTE: “It seems that if despotism came to be established in the democratic nations of our day, it would have other characteristics: it would be more extensive and milder, and it would degrade men without tormenting them. … I see an innumerable crowd of like and equal men who revolve on themselves without repose, procuring the small and vulgar pleasures with which they fill their souls. … Above these an immense … power is elevated, which alone takes charge of assuring their enjoyments and watching over their fate. It is absolute, detailed, regular, far-seeing, and mild. It would resemble paternal power if, like that, it had for its object to prepare men for manhood; but on the contrary, it seeks only to keep them fixed irrevocably in childhood; it likes citizens to enjoy themselves provided that they think only of enjoying themselves. It willingly works for their happiness; but it wants to be the unique agent and sole arbiter of that; it provides for their security, foresees and secures their needs, facilitates their pleasures, conducts their principal affairs, directs their industry, regulates their estates, divides their inheritances; can it not take away from them entirely the trouble of thinking and the pain of living? So it is that every day it renders the employment of free will less useful and more rare; it confines the action of the will in a smaller space and little by little steals the very use of it from each citizen. … Thus, after taking each individual by turns in its powerful hands and kneading him as it likes, the sovereign extends its arms over society as a whole; it covers its surface with a network of small, complicated, painstaking, uniform rules through which the most original minds and the most vigorous souls cannot clear a way to surpass the crowd; it does not break wills but it softens them, bends them, and directs them; it rarely forces one to act, but it constantly opposes itself to one’s acting; it does not destroy, it prevents things from being born; it does not tyrannize, it hinders, compromises, enervates, extinguishes, dazes, and finally reduces each nation to being nothing more than … I have always believed that this sort of regulated, mild, and peaceful servitude, whose picture I have just painted, could be combined better than one imagines with some of the external forms of freedom, and that it would not be impossible for it to be established in the very shadow of the sovereignty of the people.” –Alexis de Tocqueville
“…a herd of timid and industrious animals of which government is the shepherd…” QUOTE: “It seems that if despotism came to be established in the democratic nations of our day, it would have other characteristics: it would be more extensive and milder, and it would degrade men without tormenting them. … I see an innumerable crowd of like and equal men who revolve on themselves without repose, procuring the small and vulgar pleasures with which they fill their souls. … Above these an immense … power is elevated, which alone takes charge of assuring their enjoyments and watching over their fate. It is absolute, detailed, regular, far-seeing, and mild. It would resemble paternal power if, like that, it had for its object to prepare men for manhood; but on the contrary, it seeks only to keep them fixed irrevocably in childhood; it likes citizens to enjoy themselves provided that they think only of enjoying themselves. It willingly works for their happiness; but it wants to be the unique agent and sole arbiter of that; it provides for their security, foresees and secures their needs, facilitates their pleasures, conducts their principal affairs, directs their industry, regulates their estates, divides their inheritances; can it not take away from them entirely the trouble of thinking and the pain of living? So it is that every day it renders the employment of free will less useful and more rare; it confines the action of the will in a smaller space and little by little steals the very use of it from each citizen. … Thus, after taking each individual by turns in its powerful hands and kneading him as it likes, the sovereign extends its arms over society as a whole; it covers its surface with a network of small, complicated, painstaking, uniform rules through which the most original minds and the most vigorous souls cannot clear a way to surpass the crowd; it does not break wills but it softens them, bends them, and directs them; it rarely forces one to act, but it constantly opposes itself to one’s acting; it does not destroy, it prevents things from being born; it does not tyrannize, it hinders, compromises, enervates, extinguishes, dazes, and finally reduces each nation to being nothing more than … I have always believed that this sort of regulated, mild, and peaceful servitude, whose picture I have just painted, could be combined better than one imagines with some of the external forms of freedom, and that it would not be impossible for it to be established in the very shadow of the sovereignty of the people.” –Alexis de Tocqueville
http://www.wnd.com/2013/11/2016-obama-plans-to-take-america-down/(I actually believe this you know)
Source date (UTC): 2013-11-27 06:37:00 UTC
QUESTIONING THE ECONOMIC IMPACT OF THE SCALE OF THE STATE.
(profound) (worth reading)
(And an additional hypothesis)
by Peter Boettke
–“States capacity is required for tax collection, but the emergence of property rights and their enforcement predate both the formal state and the establishment of a taxing authority. Tyler gives a nod to Franz Oppenheimer in his link — Oppenheimer’s The State was a classic discussion of the conquest origins of formal government. The state is violence, the state is war. At least that is one way to put it. But does that conquest theory of the origins of the state undermine or support the state as essential for modern economic growth hypothesis?
An alternative hypothesis is that rules that enable individuals and groups to realize the gains from social cooperation under the division of labor can arise outside of the formal apparatus of the state, and be supported through a diversity of institutional arrangements. I already linked to my close colleague Dragos Paul Aligica’s new book on Institutional Diversity and Political Economy, but today I was pointed to (ht: Angel Martin) to a new project among younger scholars in Europe focusing on the question of institutional design and institutional diversity influenced by Douglass North, Avner Greif, and Elinor Ostrom.”–
by Mark Lutter:
— “I don’t think state capacity and competition between states are mutually exclusive. During the middle ages there existed growth inhibiting organizations and institutions other than the state, guilds for example. State capacity essentially ensured sufficient power to stop local barriers to trade.
Another aspect in which state capacity could lead to economic growth requires thinking about optimal tax theory. Certain types of taxation inhibit growth more than others. Increasing state capacity allowed the state to collect taxes using distortionary mechanisms.”—
by Curt Doolittle
I’ll offer a fourth hypothesis: centralization of free riding and rent seeking forces the decentralized citizenry to enter the market.
The way to articulate and therefore understand these abstract processes is to refer to their causes not effects: free-riding and rent seeking.
The statement “State capacity essentially ensured sufficient power to stop local barriers to trade” is correct, but would be causally articulated as the state forced the centralization of rent seeking.
This is the same purpose that the federal governments provides: negotiation of terms for access to markets.
In other words, they force market prices to be free of rent seeking. The question is whether the multiplier from central rent seeking or the multiplier from distributed rent seeking is superior. I think that’s very hard to prove.
In fact, all we can prove is that the state centralizes rent seeking. I don’t think we can prove that there is much benefit to the centralization of rent seeking. It appears only that stability in rent seeking is superior to volatility in rent seeking, because stability in rent seeking forces all individuals to compete in the market now that the capacity to seek rents is put at a distance.
Conversely, the concentration of rents creates a rental economy that generates rent-based wealth. (Washington DC). But there isn’t any evidence that rent based wealth has an particular value to a society other than generating wealthy consumers that are concentrated in the local rent-economy.
The entire problem remains the same: how to force out rent seeking and free riding such that all individuals are participating in the market for goods and services.
This is the necessary foundation for any economy, and the necessary foundation of property rights: property rights are a prohibition on rents and free riding, forced from the family to the individual, as rents and free riding are forced upward into the state at the expense of the family.
If you grasp that this is what is being done, then you will grasp the causal nature, not the descriptive nature, of the process of developing states: the centralization of rent seeking and free riding, and in doing so, forcing individuals to compete in the market for goods and services.
I am not convinced that this organized monopoly on rents and free riding is more influential to the economy than whatever ‘investments’ are made by the state. One can argue that the business of rent seeking and free riding is extremely profitable. That’s possible to argue.
But in any human population, driving the maximum number of individuals to compete in the market for goods and services is what increases productivity under the division of knowledge and labor.
Like all human cognitive processes, we identify what is visible as causal, rather than what is invisible.
The scale of the state and the provision of taxes are meaningless. They are a MEANS but not the good provided. The good provided, and the benefits to any society, are created by the universal prohibition on the visible crimes of violence, fraud and theft, and the invisible crimes of rents and free riding. We accomplish these prohibitions by forming an institution that enforces those prohibitions and provides insurance against them.
Source date (UTC): 2013-11-27 05:58:00 UTC