Building Bridges

It must have been three or four years ago I saw this wonderful video Keynes vs Hayek the second round. You can YouTube it its very good stuff, if I figure it out I’ll embed it below. Anyway the video works well to describe part of something I really have no love for; economics. I don’t hate the researching of how human nature and finances nor the moshing of them together works, what gets me uncomfortable about economics is that it incorporates so many schools of thought that it can never be right or wrong on its face, there is just always something that wasn’t accounted for. Don’t get me wrong people can be wrong however no one can turn around and say economics as a whole needs to be thought about differently. For instance we can say Christianity or Islam or Business and so on even Philosophy can be approached from new ways but such a paradigm shift has to my knowledge never happened in economics.

The damage of zero accountability is made manifest in today’s age with the teachings of two dead men. One was John Maynard Keynes who observed that society was interconnected; his idea was a work on how the revenue habits of the wealthy ultimately spread across the field. To back track a little, I will be measuring success and failures based on freedom; the more freedom the less historical evidence shows either such ideas leading to totalitarianism and massive death tolls and the less freedom the more historical evidence shows such ideas lead to totalitarianism and massive death tolls. For clarity sake my position is that all things ultimately lead to totalitarianism and that is because there are always opportunists, it is up to the vigilance of free folk to sustain their freedom but there are certain ideologies that not only instigate but promote and propagates totalitarian means and ends. To wrap up the point Maynard identified and encourages the idea that an elite class is needed to maintain a free society. Maynard was wrong but his ideology was based on economics and economics can never be wrong only that something wasn’t accounted for. In this case why Maynard was wrong and what he never accounted for was the previous observations of Adam Smith that wealth can be created by individuals at any level of society.

   

The other is Fredrik Von Hayek who came from the Mises School of economics which means that a default position for him was free markets. He also believed that while growth was production to satisfy demand you needed demand. This for me is where economics stops short and business explains the rest. Demand makes the world grow, without demand there would be no need for invention or innovation. Commodities do the things that people would do in a less convenient way, the effort to satisfy demand is called business but from the economic perspective it’s also entrepreneurship. When people talk about business and say “the consumer or the market” what they are saying is “you and me”. From the Mises school came a “what to do” about Adam Smith’s observations of how people deal with exchange. The answer was less than nothing; we just let the market do what it pleases. Of course there are criminal elements so we need government, but the role of government is always to be a counter balance to criminality, not as incentive against criminals but as a punitive force in other words the thoughts of government should be about what it ought not to do.

Before I go further I feel this area is always glossed over so I’ll elaborate on it: Criminal behavior is not a business trait, if it was then it wouldn’t be criminal. Capitalism is about voluntary exchange, if I hold a gun to someone’s head and say give me your money, that exchange is not voluntary. It is possible for someone to play a word game here to confuse people who haven’t learned the contextual history of the phrase “voluntary exchange.” Some politicians like Michael Steele who is a former chairman of the Republican National Committee believes that in the above scenario the person who gives their money doesn’t have to and that the exchange is voluntary.  Partially he is correct since a person may then put a price tag on their life as worth more than what is on them at that time and give up their money. However there is in lays the partiality; if such people as Mr. Steele thought that logic through, a person who didn’t hand over their goods would possibly lose their life and if not they could have seen harm to themselves done. A person who walks into an electronics store should not have to give up their money or else they get electronics. If that last supposition seemed absurd then you’re still sane and the Michael Steele’s of the world are well… politicians.

Today we have an America where members of both political parties act out legislation that supports the Keynesian views of economics, despite Keynes’ himself retracting those views the views themselves are convenient to politicians for many reasons. We the people demand our politicians take actions that best suit out demands; this creates incentive for law makers to craft laws that give them more tools to do the things we demand. This isn’t a one dimensional thing, law makers rely heavily on polling to stay in office and for good reason. You see Keynesian economics is from the perspective of government a method of taking money and giving it to government, because the economics is broken the government applied a patch job to it, that patch job is called income tax, corporate tax, excise tax and we can’t forget regulations and anti-trust laws. Each one of those systems had been in place before Keynes but after Keynes they all have been employed with a ridiculous level of animosity towards the general public’s personal wealth.

Income taxes and regulations respectively for example were made for government to do things with our money that only government can do and regulations were made to prevent people from doing harmful things. The thing about Income tax and regulations is that they place glass ceilings over the average man. The normal person who wants to start a business has to add a third or more time to build a capital and the risk is greater. The government now has subsidies to help small businesses, but that really amounts to government giving you back a portion of what you already had paid and if not then it gets even more insidious as that means they are taking money from consumers to pay for your business.  Regulations are in most cases legislative overkill, individuals have civil courts where the burden on the plaintiff is much lower than in criminal court. Pursuing each case individually has always been more effective in resolving an issue, but excessive all reaching regulations came about because other companies were being disrupted by smaller companies and so the larger companies hire lawyers and lobbyists to win legislation in their own favor. In a previous post I mentioned the Marketplace Fairness Act, this is one such legislation with broad range that hits all fifty states and can in effect end online sales for small businesses. This limits competition for people like Amazon who won’t be affected by the legislation in any meaningful way.

How this election goes could decide if and how the Marketplace Fairness Act will be carried out but it’s too late now for a repeal since the bill received little uproar from the average American and as a result has bipartisan support (meaning Keynesian Republicans are no longer afraid to support the bill because they see no reprisal for enacting it.) I would prefer a third party honestly, but not enough Americans want small government for varying reasons but ultimately it boils down to a lack of faith in “other people” to do the right thing that cultivates the belief that government can do things individuals cannot.

And there we have it, the root of the problem with younger American’s, we were taught that cynicism was a lens that displays reality and somewhere along the road to objectivity we lost a few of the things that helped create modern society and one of them was; solidarity.

Each political member party isn't solid left or solid right, for example a Neocon can be considered either a Republican or a Democrat, the Neocon can have progressive ideals but share ideals that Neocons do. At the same time a conservative can and usually are anti-war which has been a moniker perhaps unfairly monopolized by the Progressives. But in modern day America the way to identify how politicians view out fiscal policy and what they ideology is-is to understand either Hayek's or Keynes' economics.

Do the Hypocrite.

Why the bother about Israel?

I actually drew an agreeable thing from Hilary Clinton this week, it’s that anyone who is against what the Jews are doing in Gaza are racist and either unwittingly or maliciously are propagating the argument of the race bating demagogues they adhere to.  It’s downright disgusting, I mean if people are going to be hooting and hollering about Israel why aren’t these same people going nuts about Tibet? Wait forget Tibet, one of the major lawyers of Hamas are the Turks so why don’t those people first ask the Turkish people to stop being hypocrites and get out of Cyprus! I know a Greek guy who served back then before coming to the US and if you even mention a Turk to him he gets visibly tense. So I think at least for some Greeks the resentment is still strong.  How many more years must go by before we see the outrage by activists in flotillas trying to keep the Turks out of Cyprus? And don’t give me crap about that being too long ago; it was only the 80’s! This shit with Israel has been going on since the end of World War 2!

This kind of thing almost blows my mind but what brought me over the edge is that Hilary Clinton agrees with me. GTFO? What will happen next? Will she suddenly find the records that were subpoenaed from her back when her husband was President and she was a high powered lawyer? Will she stand up and acknowledge how she cost 300 Marines their lives? Will she confess to the conspiring of the murders of several of her once close friends? I doubt it, but Hilary Clinton agrees with me or rather sounds agreeable even if the only reason is because she’s a Liberal that’s been smitten by reality.

There is no better way to say this than to say a norm in all dialog of policy is to speak from ideal. I prefer to think that like me most know when they speak of ideals and so can also speak in a realistic tone. However it gets complex and this is the only complexity of politics: That people start to believe their ideals for good or bad are real enough, for example; one person sees their own ideal as being possible and altruistic and then they logically follow that someone else’s ideal if it poses a direct refutability must then by virtue not be altruistic. Bear in mind altruism in democratic political dialog is Spanish gold; it’s like a diamond in the rough that simply needs more attention until it can properly shine. This means anything that counters a belief that aims to shine that diamond and provide more light through its refraction through altruism is thus poor of altruism and if followed will lead to political bankruptcy.

To be absolutely clear here political bankruptcy isn’t even recognized as that, it is more naturally referred to as moral bankruptcy. But in reality words are like a placebo and in the case of Iraq, Israel, Lebanon, North Korea, Cyprus and so many other instances, placebos are not better than either a cure or preventing the problem.

That above paragraph is politics in a nutshell if you understand it then you understand why the world is the way it is. This is why I don’t see someone being a neoconservative as a negative; it means they are moving closer to my position. So I'll chant the old definition that a neocon is simply a liberal that has been struck with reality. 

The Clinton's are habitual liars and part of the way to identify either a politician, especially a liberal one is to look for the politician with a freshly licked index finger in the air.

Out of the Fire and back into the Frying Pan.

It’s a dead horse, and it’s been beaten leathery by now; immigration in the United States would be a very simple issue if the US citizen didn’t pay an income tax or an excise tax. At that point just about no citizen could line up in front of buses carrying illegal immigrants of nearly all ages taking them to parts unknown within the country for them to “vanish” into American society.  But there is an income tax and years of the same kind of “taxes are just and fair” logic that led to other things like the minimum wage has resulted in a political structure, government a nation that simply cannot handle an unregulated border.

The solutions are really simple then, deregulate the American economy wisely and regulate our borders with similar wisdom.  Not everything in the American economy should be without government oversight, mundane things like making sure contractual obligations when breeched have a channel of recourse is quite needed. But ensuring that businesses don’t sell too much to too many people is not something that should be regulated.

These people who sneaked past the American border seeking a world better than the one their parents birthed them into get no sympathy from me. I know enough people born into similar conditions who played by the rules or their parents played by the rules and they made their way to America and are now welcomed friends and fellow Americans. I know how difficult it is to come from a third world country and get into America, but breaking the laws of a nation of laws to get away from your home nation which suffers from the same lawlessness you’ve employed to enter America… I’m sorry that gets no sympathy from me.

For a moment I’ll note about those illegal immigrants that they or their parents are insane and irresponsible to an incredibly nth degree to allow their children to make the trek through as many countries as they did. It also speaks volumes of the countries these people are coming from and the real effort should be to deal with the situation here by placing those kids back in Mexico and inform them that they can either contact their parents to be picked up or trek back to whatever countries they want to but, should they cross the US border again they will face hard time or worse and when released will be put right back at the border and this time told if they should cross the border lethal force will be employed first.

Now dealing with solutions for their homelands, it isn’t an American responsibility to help fix other countries especially if they don’t believe they need fixing. But an understanding must be made clear that no one knows for certain if the people who cross the border illegally are agents of organizations that want to hurt American citizens and so lethal force will be employed but the bodies when possible will be brought back to the home countries.

As for the solution’s part three “America” it’s complicated, first we need to satisfy the security of individuals who come to the US and then we have to deal with taxation. As I mentioned above if the busses those illegals were on, the rooms they slept in and the roads that they were driving on were not made possible with tax dollars then no one would complain that two hundred thousand people in those bosses.

The reality is right now we have a massive health risk and the government wants to deposit non-inoculated disease carriers in the middle of large populations of people who never did a thing wrong in their life to have earned dying of some mysterious kidney disease from a Nicaraguan who was never checked out. The first line of business would be to have these people checked out by the CDC and the second would be deporting them via boat back to their countries.

When Children Play With Real Guns

Capitalism, capitalism is an observation of what natural courses of action people take when attempting to gain what they want. It’s the answer to the equation that is in the question “what are you willing to give for what I have?” We are all humans, even nations are comprised of humans and as such we need other humans to progress, this is one of the things that helped us move ahead of the other forms of life on this planet socially. Understanding why and how we do things helps us to understand how to repeat those things that lead us to successes and avoid those things that only end in failures.

Capitalism’s “why” was explained after it’s observation as a method of getting what you wanted that you couldn’t otherwise get yourself from someone else through voluntary exchange, the alternative to capitalism is thus the use of force to get something you want from someone else.

Humans have a few recorded ages of changes but each share remarkable similarities, we moved out of the hunter gatherer period which where belief in the supernatural helped us define our world. We carried a similar social necessity with us into our agricultural era and it’s with us even to this day. But as those things that we had no definition for became defined the institutions that developed around the belief in the supernatural became weaker regardless of how much wealth was accumulated over the thousands of years it took for us to get here, needless to say the struggle for these institutions is to rely on areas of the world that aren’t privy to the same dictionary as the world that now has a growing apathy towards them.

Humans have a few recorded ages, and just like with the religious example nations have changed as well. Capitalism’s answer for “how” for the first time in history showed we did not need a government to have a wealthy nation. How mankind came to that conclusion was by finding the answer to the question as stated above: “what are you willing to give for what I have?” and the answer does not involve government. The formula was the Rosetta stone to the emancipation of man from king or lord. And from it rose a period called the enlightenment.

Capitalism is an observation that people would normally say trading goods was better than taking goods. As the way government had always taken goods was through war or economic subterfuge, nations were always subjected to power plays but this observation marked the first time power plays had a set formula that was mutually beneficial. The problem for nations is that they involve governments and government must have the ability to craft law. Governments recognizing their lessening strength then go about ways of crafting law to keep itself in business, after all we can’t have unemployed politicians.

A side effect of having things like Government and Religions is that ideological baggage comes hunkered with it. In the case of Islam the fundamentalist type will attempt to sway the masses or kill them and the justification for all of this is that it is gods will. This mentality of agree with me or die is something from humanities barbaric past that we have by chance and good fortune been able to avoid with our sometimes failing but best effort. Governments carry the same tone of voice but with different words, instead of justification from god it’s justification from the nation. What is the nation? Can someone speak for the nation? Does government even know what a nation is? But regardless of the answers to those questions it becomes in the national interest or national security or really anything national is where government finds warrant to act with authority. And when challenged they will always point to a greater good of the people who are too stupid or inept or nihilistic to do this good for themselves.

Having that ideological baggage mentioned above while having social and technological advances that come with being an increasingly wealthy nation means that those with the ability to apply force will find better ways to apply force by using new toys. Iran for example is one of the world’s few remaining theocracies and still carries the ideology of one religion to rule the masses, and will see it as justified to use a nuclear bomb to destroy the freedom of others to say no to their subscription plan. World Wars were ripe with examples of governments run amuck, back then governments didn’t have the machines for propaganda that they do now and yet each Dictator and President or Prime Minister was able to convince each nation to go to war for some of the dumbest reasons.

The situation got so bad that there was actually justification for using a nuclear bomb in the second war. Heck so bad that firebombing to death double the number of people that died in the nuclear bomb didn’t even seem like too bad a thing. That’s how ugly the other sides got and let’s not forget that. Today we have government and religion with toys of the 21^st century and ideologies of the 1^st century about conquest.  The impatience of man to see success is a proven path for the suffering of every warm body used to pave it and when it comes to government most of those bodies are cold.

Russia and China are both making power plays using the ideologies that government is supposed to use. And the world will soon realize that the ones who were doing this government thing only partially right was the US, the US as Churchill observed “will always do the right thing only after exhausting all the alternatives.” The alternatives were exhausted from 1873 to today and the right thing to do is now ahead of us or we can continue to skirt around the issue of fascism with alternatives. And if we do continue China and Russia will continue to do things the right way and it will ultimately lead to war.

China has been sabotaging the American economy for the last twenty five years by pandering to the greed of politicians and corporations and is now bold enough to subjugate its neighbors and claim their land as part of China. Russia no longer sees NATO as a threat, it would be one thing if they saw America as a sleeping giant but what they do now see is a rotting infested corpse courteously provided by China that needs to be disposed of with nostril pinched closed. If at this point this isn’t what it will take for the American government to wake up and stop treating the American people as the enemies  or hindrance and start treating us like not just allies but as the boss then historically that-that spells doom for politicians and the nation alike..

The Coward's (dis)Honesty

One person swears he’s told the truth but not holding long his audience exhales, one person swears he’ll right all wrongs and simplify the world and the insane man thinks he’s sane. Ambitious or prideful, when it all goes wrong a coward will have a truth to explain. Doing what hurts least is really the only good that can be done.

Some take on the challenge of justifying the conscience of the means by marking the nobility of the ends. And even then some see a noble thing covered in its corrosive corruption as something to disdain. Some see this clearly as a fall from grace; others see it as a man’s burden; the consequence of true love.

A few years ago an ambassador was slain along with three other people who charged themselves with defending the indefensible, they were all Americans and are the ones that went into harm to save lives and died protecting the diplomatic mission and are heroes for it. They saved the lives of at least thirty people who now have a gag order placed on them by a government that by issuing a stand down order had for all intents and purposes previously left them for dead.

This web isn’t quite entangled yet, for all its intricacy the simple answer is that the poison in this case is sweeter than the fruit. The ambassador was placed there most likely on a cover up mission to reclaim weapons traded originally to the Libyans for the purposes of ousting Ghadafi; part of the leading from behind policy employed months before. That and that it was an under guarded American consulate gives motive for the consulates destruction to be of value to a terror cell.  The American government at the point of the altercation could have made history but opted not to and instead allowed for the continued victimization of America and Americans by issuing a stand down order.

In the interest of fairness no one can confirm or deny the source of the stand down order only that one had been given to not scramble (a) fighter jet(s). In fact the only order was the launching of a scout drone to give the viewer a good perspective on what they thought were thirty four Americans being bombarded and killed.  There are only three places the order could have come from though; AFRICOM General Carter Ham, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta and the President. If there was already a negotiation not to use force then only the Secretary of Defense and the President have the ability to still issue the go order. Putting all that complication aside we must remember that the parties noted above had seven and a half hours to put this information together before the first Americans died from a mortar strike.

General Ham isn’t exactly the silent type either; he expressed his opinion about the impact America was having on the Libyan effort to penalize (remove) Ghadaffi. Leading from behind was an overt-covert operation and it is my belief that Stevens was in Benghazi to try to cover up the American foot print, I feel it’s worth noting that it is fairly important politically that no one can say America was giving guns to al-Qaeda. As such Ham made it explicitly clear the US was not giving the rebels weapons… at least not directly. What we actually did was sell the weapons to the Saudis who in turn sold it to the Libyans.   

The cover up of the cover up of the cover up shows how distrustful the American government is of its own constituency as the motivation behind every action during September 11, 2012 was handled militarily incompetently but with political deft.

The solution to all this mayhem would be smaller government. I am in support of having the biggest gun at any shoot out but a leaner more efficient gun doesn’t have to be a big gun, after all we don’t run around with musket rifles anymore do we? Smaller government lends itself to a more cost effective government and the decision making process that led to the selling of weapons at dirt cheap prices to have them eventually end up in our apparently no so close friends hands may not have been as appealing without the near unlimited funds to back it.

There are from my perspective several candidates for surreptitious behavior in this debacle but jail time could only be issued to a few. And possibly even a resignation from office or impeachment could be in order. The way I see it, this is the first time Americans have seen in front of them while the responsible parties are still in office a clandestine, illegal, morally bankrupt, and undignified effort be as exposed as it is, and Americans have the opportunity to react to punish such corrupt, indignant and negligent behavior by those who not only ignored their duties but believed themselves untouchable for it.