| Friday,
December 10, 2010 .
"Irony alert: The unusually chilly global-warming
summit"
*Snork*
http://theweek.com/article/index/210181/
irony-alert-the-unusually-chilly-global-warming-summit
Bruce
And while we are on the subject of irony
SVR (nee KGB) erect Philby memorial plaque.
<http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-11961131>
-- Roland Dobbins
I suppose it is not so much irony as honesty. Philby did
monumental damage to the CIA, and it was his actions more than anything else
that convinced James Jesus Angleton that the Soviets had moles in the
Company. We can make the case that Philby prolonged the Cold War by a
decade. Tim Powers fantasy novel
Declare gives Philby a much greater role.
It's actually a nice warm day outside, and we've had a warm
week in Los Angeles, so much so that despite the short days which trigger
the undercoat growth for Huskies, Sable is shedding (shedding is triggered
by outside temperatures). And I continue to ask for a narrative
undergraduate level defense of the averaging procedures use to generate an
annual world temperature, but I don't think I will get one. The subject is
just too complex, what with needing coefficients for radiative heating of
water, average surface area of the oceans and effects of waves on such
heating, absorption of re-radiated heat from the oceans partitioned into that
due to Co2 and that due to water vapor -- just to mention a few such
modeling factors.
Spreading the Wealth
And the Democrats are poisoning the Obama Compromise. Obama
was remarkably unenthusiastic about his "reach across the aisle" to begin
with, and Pelosi leaped. So they will now hold the middle class hostage to
the Democrat demands for "spreading the wealth", and all our taxes will go
up -- a lot -- next January 1. Of course this is Washington Theater, but one
hopes that the Republicans understand this and will hold fast. The
Compromise was a bad deal anyway, since it brought us more years of paying
people to be unemployed. The Republicans are well rid of it. Let it go, with
all its "compromises."
If the United States wants to redistribute the wealth, let
us have a debate on it, and what it means. Confiscation of money to pay a
bureaucracy is not redistribution. Increasing the power of the Federal
Government is not redistribution.
If the goal is to spread the wealth around, and distribute
the ownership of the means of production, the method for doing that is
Distributism.
Distributism is not Marxist
socialism/communism, and is worth debating or at least understanding. It
comes from Hillaire Belloc, an uncompromising enemy of the ever more
powerful state, The Servile State, and from Chesterton, and from Pope Leo
XIII's Rerum Novarum. It was pretty well approved by Jane Jacobs because it
promotes subsidiarity. The
premise is that there will always be gaps between rich and poor, and there
ought to be, but very great disparities are dangerous to liberty and should
be eliminated: neither institutions nor individuals ought to be too big to
fail, or so large as to dominate. The Swiss Republic is often held up as an
example (or was in the heyday of Distributism) of a Republic that had
relatively mild disparity between rich and poor (or at least relatively mild
apparent disparities; the reality was not so clear).
Distributism, though, fought against the notion of simply
taking money and putting in the public treasury to be doled out to the
voters: that would be death to freedom and the Republic. If wealth
disparities are to be eliminated, do not do so in a way that encourages more
and more of this.
Chesterton put it this way: "Too much capitalism does not
mean too many capitalists, but too few capitalists." The enemy is not
capitalism and wealth but the great concentration of wealth in the Servile
State, or into Corporations, or into private hands. Too much capitalism
means too few capitalists.
After all, the goal is an increase in individual liberty,
not the mere confiscation of wealth. Wealth is a good thing. People getting
wealthier and wealthier is a very good thing. It is just that when the
disparity in wealth becomes great enough, liberty suffers, stability
suffers, public order and harmony suffers. Therefore Distributism: handing
out the proceeds of confiscation to everyone, meaning that the return to
anyone is trivial, and is not a great incentive to vote for more and greater
confiscations. The goal is to decrease disparities in income and wealth, not
to eliminate wealth or eliminate disparity, and very much not to reward the
voters for confiscating the money.
Arguments were often made for using the confiscated wealth
for public good, like parks and conservation districts, but the mechanisms
for doing that are tricky since they usually involve creating a rapacious
bureaucracy: can you imagine the results of using confiscation to fuel the
public "good" of public education? Would that help the schools? It certainly
hasn't so far. See California public education history as an example.
On the other hand, Distributism was developed in a time when
agriculture was more important, and the notion of Jeffersonian Democracy was
much more popular. It was a time before mass production became the norm,
before World War II and Rosie the Riveter; the world, its opponents say, has
much changed since the time of Leo XIII. Others say, So it has but the
principles remain; it's just harder to do now. But that is no means a reason
to abandon this third way for preserving both capitalism and freedom.
Unrestricted capitalism leads to vast concentration and too few capitalists.
Simple confiscation of wealth builds enormous and all powerful bureaucracies
that become eternal. Das Buros steht immer.
My point being that debate on taxing the rich needs to be
held in a systematic way, examining just what is to be accomplished by
confiscating other people's money. That has not been done. At the moment the
motivation is merely to take money and feed it to the bureaucracy; and the
demand for that is so high that the Democrats will throw out the compromise
and raise taxes on the middle class in order to get their "soak the rich to
pay the bureaucracy" goals. At the moment the Democratic impulses are
greed, envy, and Marxism. So it goes.
And of course the Compromise includes paying people to
remain unemployed, in theory as a way to reduce unemployment. A very odd
theory.
One remedy to unemployment is repeal of all Federal minimum
wage acts. All of them. Leave wage setting to the states. Another remedy is
to repeal all the Federal Labor laws. Leave labor laws to the states. Just
as a major remedy to bad education is to repeal all Federal laws having to
do with education and leave it all, including the ways to finance it, to the
states. Better would be to leave it to local schools and neighborhoods to
finance and control education, but that is not very likely barring utter
bankruptcy and collapse. Which isn't impossible.
We live in interesting times. I wish the Democrats and
Pelosi great success in spiking the Great Compromise. Let's get these
matters out of the hands of the lame ducks and into the hands of the new
Congress. Let the Compromise fail. Let Obama and Pelosi have their way on
this one.
===================
We have ERBE data contradicting the IPCC models. See today's
mail.
==========
And here is interesting if unsurprising news:
I found this:
http://gizmodo.com/5711128/rioting-london-students
-created-live-google-maps-war-room
when I went linksurfing just now. I thought you'd be
interested in the implications. I hope you and your wife recover from your
flu soon.
Regards, Tim Scott
The barricades will never be the same! Think of the
entitlement implications here. Who is entitled to what, and who is obligated
to pay for it? And at what point does "demonstration" become extortion?
========
Chicken Soup. Above
I gave my recipe for chicken soup to be made in a pressure cooker. I didn't
mention why the pressure cooker: I was able to make the soup in an hour and
it was ready to eat immediately; and the bones are softened but not
dissolved, so that they are easy to fish out of the mix. They are then soft
enough to be safe to give to Sable. More, if I miss one, it's edible and
even tasty.
Pressure cookers are a very green way to cook whatever is
appropriate for them. I use them for preparing all kinds of stuff, as for
example a full chicken pressure cooked goes into the dressing for a turkey.
Along with a celery and some onions. Of course we also put in raw celery and
onions along with the cooked and deboned chicken, And it's easy to get the
bones out when you use a pressure cooker. My generation used pressure
cookers a lot; during the Depression and World War II they were extremely
efficient ways to save energy and cook stuff that you otherwise might not
eat. They're still great. I have two, a big one which I mostly use, and a
smaller one that also works.
=================
On Sarah Palin shooting the caribou: I used to hunt when
meat was scarce in World War II. I became a camera hunter when I was able to
hunt again in the 1950's. I didn't need the meat. For those looking for
reasons why someone might hunt in this modern age, probably the internal
dialogue of the Los Alamos scientist viewpoint character of Donald
Hamilton's Assignment: Murder is as good as any I could write.
Ted Sturgeon used to make a big point about being willing to
kill the rabbits he raised for food, and one of his favorite phrases when
someone expressed dismay was to say if you eat beef you have taken out a
contract on a cow. You ought to be willing to do your own killing if you are
going to eat meat. I agree, and I cheerfully take out contracts on lambs,
pigs, cows, and other animals...
=================
Government, economics, and purposes
I am told that the effect of the Bush II tax cuts was not
positive. Being no economist all I can do is point to economists who differ,
but that wasn't the point to begin with. My only experience with tax cuts
and revenue comes from the Reagan era, when supply side economics certainly
seemed to work just fine but again that was not my point. So far as I know
"supply side" is not what Bush I called voodoo economics, but I will leave
the debates to others.
My point then and now is that the government is spending far
too much money, and running up deficits, and this isn't going to be fixed
with tax raises; or at least there seems to be a general agreement that
raising taxed in a depression is a bad idea.
But what's being debated in Washington now has little to do
with economics. What's being debated is spreading the wealth, which is to
say, who is entitled to what, and from whom? If the notion is that the rich
aren't paying enough to support the level of spending we have decided is
"necessary", and a tax raise on the rich will solve the problem, then that
ought to be demonstrated, and it hasn't been. I used to play with matrices
of numbers, who made how much, and what the return on investment (economic
growth) is from each bracket, and it can be fun, but it's pretty hard to
defend the numbers you get as more than speculation.
The real issue is this: without government as we know it,
the result is not good for most people. Conservatives have been saying this
for a long time. Government is not merely a necessary evil, but a positive
good. Thomas Hobbes famously described life in a state of nature as
"solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short." The conditions in several
Mexican areas where government no longer functions would seem to illustrate
this nicely. So do conditions in some prisons. Where there is no government,
the leadership principle reigns: those who can command the loyalty of others
create bands, and those bands compete for supremacy, and soon there are no
"innocent bystanders." You are part of the structure, and you submit to the
conditions of joining the Mafia, The Mexican Mafia, the Black Panthers, the
Aryan Brotherhood, or some similar organization, or you submit to all those
who have joined them. You are entitled to nothing.
The trick, then, is to create conditions to which both the
poor and the rich will submit. The rich are not inclined to hire their own
thugs or make common cause with the common enemy because they are safe in
their property at a price they are, probably reluctantly, willing to pay;
and the poor do not band together to despoil the rich. There will be
criminals who do not agree and attempt to spread the wealth by simply taking
it, but government tries to protect everyone from them, and even those who
have little agree that criminals ought to be discouraged and prosecuted.
When those who rob the rich become sufficiently popular they
either become the government or cease to be criminals and become
revolutionaries, the social order collapses, and is replaced by something.
The American Revolution was unique in that conditions improved greatly and
there was freedom after without too long a period of disruption. It was to
some extent modelled on the English Glorious Revolution of 1688, which
enthroned Whiggism and old-style liberalism of the John Stuart Mill and
Macaulay model. Those who want to know more should study conditions
after revolutions. The French Terror and the rise of Bolshevik power are not
unique consequences.
Government needs to protect everyone so that, in Burke's
words, "we are all safe together." The rich concede a part of their wealth
in order to create a society in which both they and the poor are safe and
not engaged in constant effort to protect or violently acquire wealth. There
are always pressures to increase the list of entitlements to the poor, and
protections for the rich.
It is the interplay among these factors that we call
politics. Conservatives say it is best that these fundamental questions do
not come to light: politics should stay a long way from the brute question
of how much shall we take from whom, and to whom shall we give it; or, to
how much are we entitled and who is obliged to pay it; or how much is
"enough" for anyone, what is the limit of possessions we will allow?
It is much better for campaigns to be on factors of personal
integrity and ability, rather than on "I will soak the rich and give this to
you if you vote for me" vs. "If you elect that chap we will consider hiring
mercenaries to protect us" or "Legions! Declare me Emperor and I will make
your lives and those of your families better. You can trust me. Can your
trust the politicians?"
These questions seldom surface in poor societies. When
everyone is very poor, and yet there are those who will raid them and take
what little they have, it makes sense to hire a knight: that is to pay a
suitable candidate to learn the profession of arms, and protect those who
are not warriors. Soon enough there arises a feudal society, because the
knights are not incorruptible and can become wolves rather than sheep dogs,
and who will watch those watchers? Who will protect us from the protectors?
We need a strong man to protect us from our enemies, but who will protect us
from the strong man? Government must be strong enough to keep order, but not
so strong as to be all powerful. All power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts
absolutely. There few exceptions to Acton's maxim on power, and one of
those, the Ataturk successors, seem headed to a new history even as I write
this.
Who shall watch the watchers? How shall we all be safe?
These are age old questions which aren't so often studied now as they once
were.
Now we are rich -- we live longer, we outlive our teeth, we
can travel across the continent for amounts that almost anyone can raise, those
who don't have a living are often victims of poor management of the
resources they have; since the Industrial Revolution and "Development" the
middle class has enormously expanded, and the number of people who live from
day to day is much smaller than it was in the days of Jane Austen. And now
we are even richer, and the notion is that the distribution pyramid is all
screwed up and those on top have so much more than those on the bottom that
we need to spread the wealth.
Do note that those on minimum wage in today's society
work less and live better than the vast majority of people alive in England
during the time of Jane Austen. In those times the disparity of resources
between anyone in "Society" including those thought poor, and the average
mill worker or tenant or dock worker, was so vast that it could hardly be
thought part of a continuum. On the one had there was one meal a day, one
suit of clothes worn every day with possibly a "Sunday" outfit although
probably not, and essentially no disposable income; on the other carriages,
balls, three meals a day, and concerns about making a good marriage.
I am rambling, and I have work to do: but the questions
remain. To what are those fortunate enough to live in the United States
entitled, and who is obligated to pay it; and is our tax policy intended to
produce revenue or is the goal to "spread the wealth" and reduce the
disparities between the very rich and the rest of us? And if the latter, is
that best done by adding to the power of the state? More another time:
note I have not endorsed the confiscation and distribution of wealth, nor
have I endorsed or condemned raising the taxes on "the rich." I do believe
that before we discuss these things we try being honest about what we are
trying to accomplish.
If the goal is to stimulate the economy, the means are
already known: Freedom and cheap energy. Low taxes, few regulations, and
cheap energy (which latter will result from the lack of regulations given
half a chance). We know how to do that, and all the attempts at an
intellectually dominated command economy have so far pretty well come to
naught.
The mix doesn't necessarily require political freedom. That
may be a goal in and of itself, but the Spanish growth in Franco's time, and
the current boom in China, show that political liberty isn't as important as
economic liberty and limited regulations. One might wish otherwise, but that
seems to be the course of history. Of course without political liberty one needs some
other means for restricting the size of the governing class and Iron Law
parasites. But we all know that...
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