| Friday,
December 14, 2007
Before anyone asks, I did not write this speech. It is well worth your
time.
Subject: housing crisis, Gingrich speech
"Are we really saying that the people at the bottom
should lose their houses, and the bankers who sucked millions out of them
shouldn't feel any pain?"
The banks are feeling a LOT of pain - the kind of pain
that means the most to them - $300-400 billion worth of pain. What other
penalties could we possibly assess that would hurt them as bad as this?
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=a3fCFxLIgT2s&refer=worldwide
I wondered if you'd seen this Gingrich speech. Very
sensible and cogent. "We should win" - a daring, even subversive concept!
http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/terrorism.php?id=1385641
Sleepwalking Into a Nightmare
Speech by Newt Gingrich
Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich delivered
the following remarks to a Jewish National Fund meeting Nov. 15 at the Selig
Center.
I just want to talk to you from the heart for a
few minutes and share with you where I think we are.
I think it is very stark. I don't think it is
yet desperate, but it is very stark. And if I had a title for today's talk,
it would be sleepwalking into a nightmare. 'Cause that's what I think we're
doing.
I gave a speech at the American Enterprise
Institute Sept. 10th at which I gave an alternative history of the last six
years, because the more I thought about how much we're failing, the more I
concluded you couldn't just nitpick individual places and talk about
individual changes because it didn't capture the scale of the disaster. And
I had been particularly impressed by a new book that came out called
“Troublesome Young Men,” which is a study of the younger Conservatives who
opposed appeasement in the 1930s and who took on Chamberlain. It's a very
revealing book and a very powerful book because we tend to look backwards
and we tend to overstate Churchill's role in that period. And we tend to
understate what a serious and conscientious and thoughtful effort
appeasement was and that it was the direct and deliberate policy of very
powerful and very willful people. We tend to think of it as a psychological
weakness, as though Chamberlain was somehow craven. He wasn't craven.
Chamberlain had a very clear vision of the world, and he was very ruthless
domestically. And they believed so deeply in avoiding war with Germany that
as late as the spring of 1940, when they are six months or seven months into
they war, they are dropping leaflets instead of bombs on the Rohr, and they
are urging the British news media not to publish anti-German stories because
they don't want to offend the German people. And you read this book, and it
makes you want to weep because, interestingly, the younger Tories who were
most opposed to appeasement were the combat veterans of World War I, who had
lost all of their friends in the war but who understood that the failure of
appeasement would result in a worse war and that the longer you lied about
reality, the greater the disaster.
And they were severely punished and isolated by
Chamberlain and the Conservative machine, and as I read that, I realized
that that's really where we are today. Our current problem is tragic. You
have an administration whose policy is inadequate being opposed by a
political Left whose policy is worse, and you have nobody prepared to talk
about the policy we need. Because we are told if you are for a strong
America, you should back the Bush policy even if it's inadequate, and so you
end up making an argument in favor of something that can't work. So your
choice is to defend something which isn't working or to oppose it by being
for an even weaker policy. So this is a catastrophe for this country and a
catastrophe for freedom around the world. Because we have refused to be
honest about the scale of the prob lem.
Let me work back. I'm going to get to Iran
since that's the topic, but I'm going to get to it eventually.
Let me work back from Pakistan. The
dictatorship in Pakistan has never had control over Wiziristan. Not for a
day. So we've now spent six years since 9/11 with a sanctuary for al Qaeda
and a sanctuary for the Taliban, and every time we pick up people in Great
Britain who are terrorists, they were trained in Pakistan.
And our answer is to praise Musharraf because
at least he's not as bad as the others. But the truth is Musharraf has not
gotten control of terrorism in Pakistan. Musharraf doesn't have full control
over his own government. The odds are even money we're going to drift into a
disastrous dictatorship at some point in Pakistan. And while we worry about
the Iranians acquiring a nuclear weapon, the Pakistanis already have 'em, So
why would you feel secure in a world where you could presently have an
Islamist dictatorship in Pakistan with a hundred-plus nuclear weapons?
What's our grand strategy for that?
Then you look at Afghanistan. Here's a country
that's small, poor, isolated, and in six years we have not been able to
build roads, create economic opportunity, wean people off of growing drugs.
A third of the GDP is from drugs. We haven't been able to end the sanctuary
for the Taliban in Pakistan. And I know of no case historically where you
defeat a guerrilla movement if it has a sanctuary. So the people who rely on
the West are out-bribed by the criminals, outgunned by the criminals, and
faced with a militant force across the border which practiced earlier
defeating the Soviet empire and which has a time horizon of three or four
generations. NATO has a time horizon of each quarter or at best a year,
facing an opponent whose time horizon is literally three or four
generations. It's a total mismatch.
Then you come to the direct threat to the
United States, which is al Qaeda. Which, by the way, we just published
polls. One of the sites I commend to you is AmericanSolutions.com. Last
Wednesday we posted six national surveys, $428,000 worth of data. We gave it
away. I found myself in the unique position of calling Howard Dean to tell
him I was giving him $400,000 worth of polling. We have given it away to
both Democrats and Republicans. It is fundamentally different from the
national news media. When asked the question "Do we have an obligation to
defend the United States and her allies?" the answer is 85 percent yes. When
asked a further question "Should we defeat our enemies?" – it's very strong
language – the answer i s 75% yes, 75 to 16.
The complaint about Iraq is a performance
complaint, not a values complaint.
When asked whether or not al Qaeda is a threat,
89% of the country says yes. And they think you have to defeat it, you can't
negotiate with it. So now let's look at al Qaeda and the rise of Islamist
terrorism.
And let's be honest: What's the primary source
of money for al Qaeda? It's you, re-circulated through Saudi Arabia. Because
we have no national energy strategy, when clearly if you really cared about
liberating the United States from the Middle East and if you really cared
about the survival of Israel, one of your highest goals would be to move to
a hydrogen economy and to eliminate petroleum as a primary source of energy.
Now that's what a serious national strategy
would look like, but that would require real change.
So then you look at Saudi Arabia. The fact that
we tolerate a country saying no Christian and no Jew can go to Mecca, and we
start with the presumption that that's true while they attack Israel for
being a religious state is a sign of our timidity, our confusion, our
cowardice that is stunning.
It's not complicated. We're inviting Saudi
Arabia to come to Annapolis to talk about rights for Palestinians when
nobody is saying, "Let's talk about rights for Christians and Jews in Saudi
Arabia. Let's talk about rights for women in Saudi Arabia."
So we accept this totally one-sided definition
of the world in which our enemies can cheerfully lie on television every
day, and we don't even have the nerve to insist on the truth. We pretend
their lies are reasonable. This is a very fundamental problem. And if you
look at who some of the largest owners of some of our largest banks are
today, they're Saudis.
You keep pumping billions of dollars a year
into countries like Venezuela, Iran and Saudi Arabia, and Russia, and you
are presently going to have created people who oppose you who have lots of
money. And they're then going to come back to your own country and finance,
for example, Arab study institutes whose only requirement is that they never
tell the truth. So you have all sorts of Ph.D.s who now show up quite
cheerfully prepared to say whatever it is that makes their funders happy –
in the name, of course, of academic freedom. So why wouldn't Columbia host a
gen ocidal madman? It's just part of political correctness. I mean,
Ahmadinejad may say terrible things, he may lock up students, he may kill
journalists, he may say, "We should wipe out Israel," he may say, "We should
defeat the United States," but after all, what has he done that's
inappropriate? What has he done that wouldn't be repeated at a Hollywood
cocktail party or a nice gathering in Europe?
And nobody says this is totally, utterly,
absolutely unacceptable. Why is it that the number one threat in
intelligence movies is the CIA?
I happened the other night to be watching an
old movie, “To Live and Die in L.A.,” which is about counterfeiting. But the
movie starts with a Secret Service agent who is defending Ronald Reagan in
1985, and the person he is defending Ronald Reagan from is a suicide bomber
who is actually, overtly a Muslim fanatic. Now, six years after 9/11, you
could not get that scene made in Hollywood today.
Just look at the movies. Why is it that the bad
person is either a Right-wing crazed billionaire, or the CIA as a government
agency? Go look at “The Bourne Ultimatum.” Or a movie like the one that
George Clooney made, which was an absolute lie, in which it implied that if
you were a reformist Arab prince, that probably the CIA would kill you. It's
a total lie. We actually have SEALs protecting people all over the world. We
actually risk American lives protecting reformers all over the world, and
yet Hollywood can't bring itself to tell the truth, (a) because it's
ideologically so opposed to the American government and the American
military, and (b), because it's terrified that if it said something really
openly, honestly true about Muslim terrorists, they might show up in
Hollywood. And you might have somebody killed as the Dutch producer was
killed.
And so we're living a life of cowardice, and in
that life of cowardice we're sleepwalking into a nightmare.
And then you come to Iran. There's a terrific
book. Mark Bowden is a remarkable writer who wrote “Black Hawk Down,” has
enormous personal courage. He's a Philadelphia newspaper writer, actually
got the money out of the Philadelphia newspaper to go to Somalia to
interview the Somalian side of “Black Hawk Down.” It's a remarkable
achievement. Tells a great story about getting to Somalia, paying lots of
cash, having the local warlord protect him, and after about two weeks the
warlord came to him and said, "You know, we've decided that we're very
uncomfortable with you being here, a nd you should leave."
And so he goes to the hotel, where he is the
only hard-currency guest, and says, "I've got to check out two weeks early
because the warlord has told me that he no longer will protect me." And the
hotel owner, who wants to keep his only hard-currency guest, says, "Well,
why are you listening to him? He's not the government. There is no
government." And Bowden says, "Well, what will I do?" And he says, "You hire
a bigger warlord with more guns," which he did. But then he could only stay
one week because he ran out of money.
But this is a guy with real courage. I mean,
imagine trying to go out and be a journalist in that kind of world, OK? So
Bowden came back and wrote “Guests of the Ayatollah,” which is the Iranian
hostage of 1979, which he entitled, "The First Shots in Iran's War Against
America." So in the Bowden worldview, the current Iranian dictatorship has
been at war with the United States since 1979. Violated international law.
Every conceivable tenet of international law was violated when they seized
the American Embassy and they seized the diplomats. Killed Americans in
Lebanon in the early '80s. Killed Americans at Khobar Towers in '95 and had
the Clinton administration deliberately avoid revealing the information, as
Louis Freeh, the director of the FBI, has said publicly, because they didn't
want to have to confront the Iranian complicity.
And so you have an Iranian regime which is
cited annually as the leading supporter of state terrorism in the world.
Every year the State Department says that. It's an extraordinary act of
lucidity on the part of an institution which seeks to avoid it as often as
possible.
And you have Gen. Petraeus come to the U.S.
Congress and say publicly in an open session, "The Iranians are waging a
proxy war against Americans in Iraq."
I was so deeply offended by this, it's hard for
me to express it without sounding irrational. I'm an Army brat. My dad
served 27 years in the infantry. The idea that an American general would
come to the American Congress, testify in public that our young men and
women are being killed by Iran, and we have done nothing, I find absolutely
abhorrent.
So I'm preparing to come and talk today. I got
up this morning, and a friend had sent me yesterday's Jerusalem Post
editorial, which if you haven't read, I recommend to you. It has, for
example, the following quote: "On Monday, chief Palestinian negotiator Saeb
Erekat said, 'The problem of the content of the document setting out joint
principles for peace-making post-Annapolis has not been resolved. One of the
more pressing problems is the Zionist regime's insistence on being
recognized as a Jewish state. We will not agree to recognize Israel as a
Jewish state. There is no country in the world where religious and national
identities are intertwined.' "
What truly bothers me is the shallowness and
the sophistry of the Western governments, starting with our own. When a
person says to you, "I don't recognize that you exist," you don't start a
negotiation. The person says, "I literally do not recognize" and then lies
to you. I mean the first thing you say to this guy is "Terrific. Let's go
visit Mecca. Since clearly there's no other state except Israel that is
based on religion, the fact that I happen to be Christian won't bother
anybody." And then he'll say, "Well, that's different."
We tolerate this. We have created our own
nightmare because we refuse to tell the truth. We refuse to tell the truth
to our politicians. Our State Department refuses to tell the truth to the
country. If the president of the United States, and again, we're now so
bitterly partisan, we're so committed to red vs. blue hostility, that George
W. Bush doesn't have the capacity to give an address from the Oval Office
that has any meaning for half the country. And the anti-war Left is so
strong in the Democratic primary that I think it's almost impossible for any
Democratic presidential candidate to tell the truth about the situation.
And so the Republicans are isolated and trying
to defend incompetence. The Democrats are isolated and trying to find a way
to say, "I'm really for strength as long as I can have peace, but I'd really
like to have peace, except I don't want to recognize these people who aren't
very peaceful."
I just want to share with you, as a
grandfather, as a citizen, as a historian, as somebody who was once speaker
of the House, this is a serious national crisis. This is 1935 or 1936, and
it's getting worse every year.
None of our enemies are confused. Our enemies
don't get up each morning and go, "Oh, gosh, I think I'll have an
existential crisis of identity in which I will try to think through whether
or not we can be friends while you're killing me." Our enemies get up every
morning and say, "We hate the West. We hate freedom." They would not allow a
meeting with women in the room.
I was once interviewed by a BBC reporter, a
nice young lady who was only about as anti-American as she had to be to keep
her job. Since it was a live interview, I turned to her halfway through the
interview and I said, "Do you like your job?" And it was summertime, and
she's wearing a short-sleeve dress. And she said, "Well, yes." She was
confused because I had just reversed roles. I said, "Well, then you should
hope we win." She said, "What do you mean?" And I said, "Well, if the enemy
wins, you won't be allowed to be on television."
I don't know how to explain it any simpler than
that.
Now what do we need?
We need first of all to recognize this is a
real war. Our enemies are peaceful when they're weak, are ruthless when
they're strong, demand mercy when they're losing, show no mercy when they're
winning. They understand exactly what this is, and anybody who reads Sun Tzu
will understand exactly what we're living through. This is a total war. One
side is going to win. One side is going to lose. You'll be able to tell who
won and who lost by who's still standing. Most of Islam is not in this war,
but most of Islam isn't going to stop this war. They're just going to sit to
one side and tell you how sorry they are that this happened. We had better
design grand strategies that are radically bigger and radically tougher and
radically more honest than anything currently going on, and that includes
winning the argument in Europe, and it include s winning the argument in the
rest of the world. And it includes being very clear, and I'll just give you
one simple example because we're now muscle-bound by our own inability to
talk honestly.
Iran produces 60% of its own gasoline. It
produces lots of crude oil but only has one refinery. It imports 40% of its
gasoline. The entire 60% is produced at one huge refinery.
In 1981, Ronald Reagan decided to break the
Soviet empire. He was asked, “What's your vision of the Cold War?” He said,
"Four words: We win; they lose." He was clearly seen by The New York Times
as an out-of-touch, reactionary, right-wing cowboy from California who had
no idea what was going on in the world. And 11 years later the Soviet Union
disappeared, but obviously that had nothing to do with Reagan because that
would have meant he was right. So it's just a random accident the Soviet
Union disappeared.
Part of the war we waged on the Soviet Union
involved their natural gas supply because we wanted to cut off their hard
currency. The Soviets were desperate to get better equipment for their
pipeline. We managed to sell them through third parties very, very
sophisticated American pipeline equipment, which they were thrilled to buy
and thought they had pulled off a huge coup. Now we weren't playing fair. We
did not tell them that the equipment was designed to blow up. One day in
1982, there was an explosion in Siberia so large that the initial reflection
on the satellites looked like there was a tactical nuclear weapon. One part
of the White House was genuinely worried, and the other part of the White
House had to calm them down. They said, "No, no, that's our equipment
blowing up."
In the 28 years since the Iranians declared war
on us, in the six years since 9/11, in the months since Gen. Petraeus
publicly said they are killing young Americans, we have not been able to
figure out how to take down one refinery. Covertly, quietly, without overt
war. And we have not been able to figure out how to use the most powerful
navy in the world to simply stop the tankers and say, "Look, you want to
kill young Americans, you're going to walk to the battlefield, but you're
not going to ride in the car because you're not going to have any gasoline."
We don't have to be stupid. The choice is not
cowardice or total war. Reagan unlocked Poland without firing a shot in an
alliance with the pope, with the labor unions and with the British. We have
every possibility if we're prepared to be honest to shape the world. It'll
be a very big project. It's much closer to World War II than it is to
anything we've tried recently. It will require real effort, real intensity
and real determination. We're either going to do it now, while we're still
extraordinarily powerful, or we're going to do it later under much more
desperate circumstances after we've lost several cities.
We had better take this seriously because we
are not very many mistakes away from a second Holocaust. Three nuclear
weapons is a second Holocaust. Our enemies would like to get those weapons
as soon as they can, and they promise to use them as soon as they can.
I suggest we defeat our enemies and create a
different situation long before they have that power.
I had a conversation to this effect with Newt
when he was Speaker; long time readers will recall that I advocated energy
independence as soon as the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the
Cold War made that feasible, then again on September 12, 2001. Americans can
trust our military power, but armies break things and kill people; they
don't build democracies. We can build auxiliaries who can build societies,
but they will not be Legions; we do that at the cost of military power. It
is also very expensive.
Americans can trust our technologists. I
suppose I ought to revise The Strategy of
Technology, which was written as a strategy for the Cold War, but is
perfectly applicable to the current situation. Technology can be created on
demand, and can form a part of a national grand strategy. Newt understands
that having read Strategy of Technology before he became a Congressman.
Americans cannot trust our diplomats to
win serious conflicts. This is not intended as insult, it is observation
coupled with history. Democracies seldom vote for policies that are good for
democracies; it is even more rare for democracies to pursue diplomatic
strategies over any long period of time, and without stability diplomatic
strategies do not win serious conflicts. America has transitioned from the
Old Federal Republic into a centralized democratic empire; from the Melting
Pot to "diversity". This makes diplomatic strategies even more unlikely.
We can defeat our enemies and we can do so
with a combination of building new auxiliaries and a new strategy of
technology. We can also win the cultural wars if we let the Melting Pot do
its work. Neither is likely, but despair is a sin.
(A pdf copy of The Strategy of Technology
is sent to all patron subscribers.)
Discussion continues
below
=========
Subj: Thomas P.M. Barnett vs CoDominium
Roland Dobbins at
http://www.jerrypournelle.com/
mail/mail495.html#Wednesday says Dr. Barnett advocates an
immediate CoDominium with the Chinese.
I myself described Dr. Barnett's proposed regime as
rather like a CoDominium, with the G-20 for a Grand Senate, at
http://www.jerrypournelle.com/archives2/
archives2mail/mail335.html#Friday
But the CoDominium was an alliance whose parties hated
each other, and who allied only for the purpose of keeping the peace holding
all other powers down. Dr. Barnett's regime would be an alliance of parties
who have no really serious conflicts with each other, just occasional
disagreements on the pace at which they all proceed together -- some maybe a
little ahead of others, but all agreed on where they're all going -- with
inevitable globalization, including globalizing the Gap territories on the
points of bayonets where necessary.
Dr. Barnett's regime is utopian, rather than
dystopian.
Dr. Barnett, when you come right down to it, is
selling Hope: "A Future Worth Creating". And as far as I can see, he's
selling into a marketplace of ideas in which the only other thing on offer
-- in one flavor from the Lind-4GW crowd, in another from such conservative
neo-isolationists as Dr. Ron Paul -- is Despair.
Rod Montgomery==monty@starfief.com
I invite you to read Newt's speech above. I
have always advocated an American strategy of technology including both
military and economic self-sufficiency; trade from a position of strength,
not of need.
The Chinese have never been interested in
partnerships; as the Middle Kingdom they have their notion of their place in
the Sun, and it does not include equality with any other nation.
The United States has had global
partnerships. The special arrangement with Britain was one of them. Alas,
there will not always be an England to work with. The price of this global
"partnership" with the Chinese will not be small.
And See Below
=========
Empire...
http://www.guilford.edu/original/academic/geology/histofexp.html
1405-1433 A.D. Chinese send seven voyages in 317 huge
technologically advanced ships with 37,000 crew. These missions were not for
conquest, religion, or trade, but instead were designed to extend Chinese
influence and impress their neighbor states. Economic pressures ended the
expensive voyages after a short time, and China isolated itself.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zheng_He
"In 1424, the Yongle Emperor died. His successor, the
Hongxi Emperor (reigned 1424-1425), decided to curb the influence at court.
Zheng He made one more voyage under the Xuande Emperor (reigned 1426-1435),
but after that Chinese treasure ship fleets ended. Zheng He died during the
treasure fleet's last voyage. Although he has a tomb in China, it is empty:
he was, like many great admirals, buried at sea."
"His [Zheng He's] missions showed impressive
demonstrations of organizational capability and technological might, but did
not lead to significant trade, since Zheng He was an admiral and an
official, not a merchant. Chinese merchants continued to trade in Japan and
southeast Asia, but Imperial officials gave up any plans to maintain a
Chinese presence in the Indian Ocean and even destroyed most of the nautical
charts that Zheng He had carefully prepared. The decommissioned treasure
ships sat in harbors until they rotted away, and Chinese craftsmen forgot
the technology of building such large vessels."
How would the world be different today had the Hongxi
Emperor of China been interested in colonization and conquest?
Will today's China also turn away at some point,
possibly from space exploration?
Maybe more to the point, has the United States turned
away from space exploration?
NASA converted the last three Saturns...man-rated,
perfect record, most powerful machines ever made by humans...into lawn
ornaments and apparently destroyed all technical records related to their
construction. Sounds like the Chinese after 1433, doesn't it?
Recently, in a nominal effort to get back to the moon,
NASA has indicated it is trying is trying to bring the remaining Saturn team
back on board.
Charles Brumbelow
=========
Soft Power
http://op-for.com/2007/12/soft_power.html
"What is happening in the Marines and the Army, is
that infantry officers are being assigned to conduct civil affairs missions,
with their only training being infantry officer basic. Field artillery
officers are being assigned to run information operations campaigns, and
understand the finer points of media relations when their only training
consists of targeting and gunnery. No one in the [combat arms] military
really wants these jobs, but men step up to do them because they are on the
ground and realize that "hey, someone has got to publicize what we're doing
here." Or "hey, the civil military component of our operations is probably
as important as our kinetic ops." So officers step up and fill the gaps.
These "soft power" billets are jobs that need to be
done. The Army and Marines are trying to be generalists in addressing the
problem, but getting actual experts from other government agencies in the
field to do these jobs."
It would be nice if the rest of the government was
actually playing purple like DoD. We were told they would be there.
Serving Officer
=========
Subject: Regulation &
economic success
The problem with regulation is that the cost of
producing & enforcing regulations seems to be about 1/20th of what they cost
those regulated. If disability rules, or many others, were funded by
government payments then they would be genuine charity (ignoring that taxes
are not paid proportionately to voting strength). Enforcing such costs on
business is not sharing the pain it is merely moving it to somebody else. If
the government had to bear the costs it creates it wouldn't do so.
the 20% figure comes from
http://brianmicklethwait.signal100.com/podcast/
HabitsofHighlyEffectiveCountries.pdf I recommend this though you
really have to be an economics anorak like me to read it all The precis is
that economic freedom is a "necessary & sufficient condition" for success,
that most government spending is counterproductive, though expenditure on
fixed infrastructure like roads is usually worth it & to my surprise, that
education spending does not generally have a positive effect.
Neil Craig
The problem is this:
economic freedom is a "necessary & sufficient
condition" for success
requires some explanation as to what is
"success." Complete unregulated economic freedom will certainly produce a
maximum return on investment to the investor. It can also product social
instabilities. William Lloyd Garrison railed against slavery while
dismissing injured workers without compensation, and dismissed all his
factory workers when they reached the age of 35. This certainly made for
productive mills, and demonstrated the economic superiority of free
enterprise over slavery. Under slavery the social custom (and in some states
legal requirement) was that aged slaves had the right to live in peace on
the land they had worked; when I was a child in the segregated South, it was
still the custom that a sharecropper had the right to live out his life in
the house and on the land he had worked for much of his life. This was
expensive and certainly didn't aid production; turning them out would have
raised production.
I have said this many times: economic
freedom, unregulated, is the sufficient condition for slavery to reappear.
The free market will eventually sell everything for which there is a demand,
including child prostitutes and human flesh.
On the other hand, a command and regulated
economy is massively unproductive, as witness the Soviet system of
Agriculture, NASA, and the American education system.
===========
Subject: At the risk of punning, thank god for
Christian sentiment
Jerry Pournelle wrote:
Thanks
I suspect you would have done well with or
without ADA.
I don't think we can justify ADA on
economic grounds. On religious grounds, perhaps so; a wealthy society
can afford to take care of all its people and for a man to love his
country it ought to be lovely. But pretended equality is probably good
for no one.
Thanks again
Jerry Pournelle
Chaos Manor
Jerry-
We wouldn't want people to make money because of
excessive "Christian sentiment in the American population". My point is that
benefits at the top of the bell curve outweigh the costs on the bottom half.
It can't be proved because the data are at least as hard to get at as the
data on global warming, and there are too many people who want to muddy the
waters on the subject, rather than debate it rationally (such as the
gentleman I choose not to name who had the last comment in yesterday's
mail). And yes, there are costs to the bottom half of the bell curve, but
there are always costs to the bottom of the bell curve, whatever you do.
Having perforce hung out with them for the first half of my work life I am
sympathetic.
Market forces always work, but they are subject to
group think (it is actually formalized as "benchmarking" in the business
schools) which can make the pace of progress glacially slow. For good or ill
sometimes people who have studied the subject know what the right thing is,
but getting it adopted is not easy (Morton Thiokol & Challenger? Or, for a
mixed moral and economic example of government interference, slavery versus
the much more efficient share cropping [I will grant that that might have
gotten out of hand, at least as far as the net economic benefit. But
everyone knows what I am talking about.])
Speaking philosophically and not legally, kicking the
group out of their rut is a legitimate function of government. There are
plenty of balances in the United States to push back if government throws
its weight in the wrong direction. Many of the regulations we live with and
gripe about have economic benefits. I have a friend who brought her Ph.D to
this country after her department chair indicated that the ladder through
the glass ceiling had its base in his bedroom. Yet those laws were
criticized for burdening business with private matters.
I have not tried to counter arguments that
mainstreaming mentally handicapped has had bad results (on some occasions
absurdly bad results), or that your favorite restaurant was unjustly closed.
Believe me, with a bright three year old I am concerned with education. But
I am not aware that employers have been threatened prison on such a regular
basis that it is economically significant. I am sure sure that there is a
bone headed judge somewhere who would do it. Getting judges that bone headed
at the trial and appellate levels would be very bad luck.
Response to your e-mail, and not particularly relevant
to the discussion on the web site, although you are welcome to put it up:
Law school is the last discipline that adheres to the one exam, written
timed essay, per course. It is widely understood there is a premium in law
school to the ability to push a pen across paper, a skill utterly
unnecessary in legal practice (in the last century), but utterly necessary
to passing a law school exam- unless ADA is invoked (yes, there were some
changes for ordinary students, but only after ADA students paved the way,
and this is as of five years ago). I am about four hours into getting these
ideas on paper. There is no possibility that I would pass a law school exam
without it. And I had to go to the Dean in my third year when a new
administrator who was not competent in ADA came in and tried to change the
procedure, with sixty grand in tuition sunk.
And, on a completely different note, you commented
yesterday: "The Federal Reserve is going to make interference with the money
supply an international affair." (For my conservative bona fides (on fiscal
matters), I am a lifelong Republican, and when the Republicans started
spending money like drunken sailors, I ran out and bought a house at the top
of the market, figuring that inflation would bail me out. Democrats as the
fiscally conservative party?) I've spent the last semester taking a three
unit advanced auditing seminar, the one on audit failures a la Enron. I've
spent the last three months with my face down in audit work papers 12 hours
a day, and other financial documents that are pretty current.
With the sub-prime mess still shaking out banks are
scared to lend each other money. They don't trust the auditors as much as
they did ten years ago, and we are inside the annual audit cycle anyway. In
other word the auditors may not have forced all the write downs that are
going to happen, some of which may force banks into insolvency. By holding
cash internally the banks maintain their own liquidity and don't get caught.
That money isn't rushing out to chase goods and
services- hence it is not inflationary. It is sitting in the banks,
effectively missing from the system. But not having it in the system
prevents necessary lending from happening. Trying to stick with a strict
gold standard got us the Great Depression, when everyone put their money in
gold, in their mattress, and deflation resulted.
In this case bankers are figuratively looking out of
the corners of their eyes, waiting for the first bank to fail. When a full
cycle of annual audits is done, the bankers will have more confidence in
each other and start to take that money out and lend it. In the mean time it
effectively isn't in the economy, so it isn't inflationary, its
deflationary. If the central bankers are artful (and the evidence tends to
suggest that they have been far more artful than they were in the Carter
years) the money resulting from this action will be withdrawn from the
system as interbank lending perks up. It is their sole job to regulate the
currency, and they do it well.
Now, in the context of one bank controlled by one man,
in a simple agricultural economy, having a dollar tied to seed wheat made a
lot of sense. But when Lazarus Long burned it he was right too- it is his
IOU, it has no effect on the economy. Likewise, when the banks won't put it
out there it can't be inflationary. The effect of moving this class of
business onto the central bankers is that the central bankers become the
insurer and take losses on whatever banks finally fail. The effect is more
like the government stepping in after 9/11 and issuing terrorism insurance.
They are back out of terrorism insurance now, but it was necessary at the
time.
And as a last comment on the sub-prime crisis, all of
the people who collected a point or two for selling sub prime loans are
licensed by the states. I have not heard anything about tightening
regulations in Sacramento. These are the people who should have the
knowledge to protect people retail, and it is the duty of Sacramento to
regulate them. Trying to insure that that the unsophisticated do not get
hurt hurts the economy, and they don't learn to be sophisticated. And trying
to insure that the stupid not act stupid is futile.
David Schierholz, Esq.
I'll leave it to others to analyze the Great
Depression and the cost of leaving the Gold Standard. As to your view that
mainstreaming adds more productivity by putting smart handicapped people
into classrooms where the teacher spends more time on those who are failing,
I have seen no evidence of this.
Thank you.
==========
Subject: Newt Gingrich's speech
Mr. Pournelle,
I thank you for posting the speech from former Speaker
Gingrich. I think he's touched on the central issue here: we're not treating
this "War on Terror" like a war. I'm too young to remember a time when the
US was not a world super power. However, my grandfather was in the military
during the time after WWII and I learned enough in school to know that
people make sacrifices during a war. People give up metal, rubber, plastic,
sugar, time, money, spouses, children, parents. If this is truly a war, we
must treat it as such. If it isn't, we must come home. Instead the current
administration would rather assure people that everything is fine and
they'll handle the middle east. All we have to do as citizens is trust them
and we'll be safe. We've seen that all that gets us is trillions of dollars
in debt, a ruined international reputation, and a good number of our own
liberties removed.
If we are truly in danger (and a case can certainly be
made for it) then we must defeat our enemies by any effective means
necessary. If this means covertly destroying refinement facilities, so be
it. If it means a public display of force and an embargo of food/fuel into
the enemy nations, so be it. If it means demanding that all nuclear research
stop by a given date and enforcing it, then we should set a date and then
start bombing centrifuges. And if we insist that this is truly a religious
war (which could be assumed based on the assertion that Israel must be
destroyed), then we should make it very clear that for every suicide bomb
that goes off in public place, regardless of whether it's on western or
middle eastern soil, then we will take out mosques starting in Mecca.
If on the other hand we argue that we have no place in
middle eastern politics (similar to how we ignore warlords in much of
Africa) then we must pull out completely, both politically and economically.
You've asserted before that we could have been energy independent for the
cost of what we've spent on this 'war.' Arguably the only reason these
countries have any power at all is the hundreds of billions of dollars that
we, principally America, are pouring into their economies. The kicker here
is that the middle east oil barons don't seem to be any better at saving
than your average American. If we stopped buying oil tomorrow, their
economies would likely implode remarkably quickly.
The core issue here is our indecision. We as a nation
have grown so self involved that we insist on sticking our heads in the sand
and ignoring the situation at hand. Instead of truly fighting this as a war,
we've become world police. If we want to destroy our enemies, then we must
destroy them. If we do not see these people as enemies and want to live
peacably with them, then we must pull out all interference, while at the
same time fortifying our own position. As long as this nation remains
stagnant on this and all issues (energy tech, space tech, transportation,
education, health care) we will very quickly find ourselves outpaced and
overpowered by some new empire. History has shown that it does not go well
for an empire that has fallen. I'd rather see the US become the next step in
Daniel's statue during my own lifetime (or my grandchildren's for that
matter.) And the sad thing is, if we can reclaim our ambition, there's no
reason that the US should fall anytime soon.
Thanks,
Ryan Brown
Discussion
continues next week
========
Subject: Russell Seitz on ocean fertilization
Jerry,
It doesn't look like it went through any peer-review
process, but this is cool! Russell Seitz posts an entry (which he got from
the Nature Climate blog) on early 20th century ocean fertilization as an
unexpected by-product of coal-powered sea transport.
http://adamant.typepad.com/seitz/2007/12/iron-rain.html
- Doug Wilken
We've been talking about this for 30 years. I
probably got the idea from Russell in the first place, but it would have
been a very long time ago. It's in A Step Farther Out. (Available free to
all subscribers.) Actually, the whole notion of
Energy Independence is in that book.
=========
Doug Wilken got it wrong
Dear Jerry
Doug Wilken has kindly referred to an Adamant post
thus :
"Russell Seitz posts an entry (which he got from the
Nature Climate blog) on early 20th century ocean fertilization as an
unexpected by-product of coal-powered sea transport.
http://adamant.typepad.com/seitz/2007/12/iron-rain.html "
He has that slightly wrong- I'm the author-- I
submitted it to Nature as Correspondence and they suggested the beta go up
on their Climate Feedback website.
A more formal and quantified version is being prepared
for peer review best
-- Russell Seitz
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