On the WaPo Hit Piece on DiLo
In this article I become the anti-zombie, and defend Tom DiLorenzo from the shocked finger pointing of the Washington Post’s Dana Milbank (who is a guy, I have verified). An excerpt:
If someone (like DiLorenzo) wants to praise the good things in the writings of the Founders, and also of the arguments in favor of Southern secession, that’s consistent. If someone else (say a Black Panther) wants to denounce the Confederacy, but also all the hypocritical Dead White Males who signed the Constitution and endorsed its offensive 3/5 clause, that too is consistent; fair enough.
But what doesn’t make any sense is for Milbank (and related critics like Paul Krugman and Matt Yglesias) to go along with the standard American civics lesson, which teaches that slave-owners George Washington and Thomas Jefferson were heroes of liberty, but then to recoil in horror at the idea that the Southern states should have been allowed to secede, because they had slaves and therefore forfeit any possibility of our (qualified) endorsement in that terrible episode in American history.
Twin Spin on Inflation Fears and Monetary Aggregates
With my crazy traveling I didn’t post last week’s article on “Investors Finally Fear the Inflation Precipice.” Here’s an excerpt:
When Bernanke made his infamous appearance on 60 Minutes, most analysts understandably focused on his absurd claim that he wasn’t printing money. But the thing that most alarmed me was this exchange (starting at about 7:20 in this video):
BERNANKE: There really is no problem with raising rates, tightening monetary policy, slowing the economy, reducing inflation at the appropriate time. …
Q: You have what degree of confidence in your ability to control this?
BERNANKE: A hundred percent.
Now that should be terrifying. Realistically, Bernanke shouldn’t have 100 percent confidence that he can control his toaster. I mean, he might turn the dial up too high, or someone might spill water on it. It could happen.
Then today I have an article explaining why economists use different monetary aggregates (M1, M2, etc.) and how Rothbard/Salerno decided to engage in product differentiation. In all seriousness, I think I give the rationale behind some of the classifications that you wouldn’t get in a standard list of definitions.
#Jan25
Yo yo yo, this song goes out to Jeff Tucker and all the other virtual revolutionaries around the world. Free your mind and the rest follows.
Is God Hiding?
In the comments of last week’s post, Gene Callahan and I argued that some of the “unexpected” features of mathematics–such as the expansion of e, or how often pi pops up in nature–are surely evidence of the existence of an intelligent Creator of the universe and the structure of our minds.
In contrast, various agnostics (such as Daniel Kuehn) offered the (common) view that if a God did exist, He had withdrawn Himself from view. To that, I wrote:
In my view, the God of the Bible exists. He has given us a wealth of evidence in the natural world that He exists, and on top of that, He personally inspired a whole book about His nature. Then He became a human being and performed a bunch of miracles, such that people all over the world still daily attest to His existence and nature.
And [agnostics] are still saying, not merely that [they] reject this evidence, but that God has withdrawn Himself from our scrutiny.
In response to my comment, someone else came along and wrote:
I can’t speak for Daniel, but if there was an all-powerful god that wanted everyone to believe in it, that would be trivially easy to accomplish.
For starters, it could speak to everyone at the same time, saying, “I am god, I exist, and I am in your head”. Then, it could make the sun, the moon, and the stars dance around in the sky, turn day into night and back again repeatedly, faster and faster, while playing techno music.
Then, it could launch everyone into space and take them on a one-minute tour of the solar system, bring them back to earth, plunge them into a volcano, take them to the molten core, teach them Austrian economics, and put them back where they started unharmed.
Contrast the above with “the ‘unexpected’ appearance of pi in different spots” and mathematics applying to the material world.
1. Which strategy would an intelligent being be more likely to pursue: Magical Mystery Tour or Blues Clues?
2. Why would an all-powerful being that wanted humans to believe in it not make its existence more obvious?
3. What kind of god would try to convince people of its existence by inserting pi into places where humans would not expect it to be?
4. Why would this god that wants humans to believe in it limit the evidence for its existence to that which would only be appreciated through the intuition of uniquely perceptive mathematicians (or economists)?
I wanted to take this challenge head-on, because I think I would have laughed out loud at the above, back in my days as an atheist. In other words, I would have thought the guy who wrote the above, had really blown up the ridiculous arguments for the existence of God.
Naturally, I no longer think that. So let me walk through a few points in response:
* God does make the sun, moon, and stars dance around the sky. And He puts on an occasional laser light show that blows Disneyworld out of the water. But agnostics don’t appreciate that, because it’s “nature.”
* If the Christian Bible is true, then God did do all sorts of things besides the clues in nature, mathematics, etc. Specifically, He directly manifested Himself to plenty of people, He inspired a rather famous book to tell His side of things, and He actually came down in human form, told everyone who He was, and gave us instructions on how to live.
* Now what my critic above means, of course, is, “Why doesn’t God directly reveal Himself to me? Why am I supposed to do all this work, when (say) Moses saw a burning bush, or the apostles saw a resurrected Jesus?” Well, for one thing, I note that even if God did do all the stuff above–techno music, tour of the solar system, etc.–then at best there would be a lot of new theists for a few generations. But our great-grandkids would think we all had mass hallucinations, or that aliens had played a trick on us, etc. Eventually our stories of techno music and seeing the molten core of the earth would be dismissed as religious balderdash–modern science would have proven that people can’t survive a plunge into lava, duh.
* Finally, the question boils down to: Why doesn’t God directly appear personally to every single person who ever lives, so that there is absolutely no doubt about His existence? Well I’m not sure, exactly; that ranks up there with, “Why do bad things happen?” But I think maybe part of the answer is contained in my critic’s own joke: Why do we humans use Blue’s Clues when teaching our children? Once you answer that, then maybe it will make more sense that God uses a similar approach with His children.
Parsing Krugman’s Joke
Usually I get Krugman’s jokes, but this one is unclear to me. I’ll just give the whole blog post:
Mike Konczal has a post about Ron Paul’s first hearing on monetary policy, in which he points out that the lead witness is a big Lincoln-hater and defender of the Southern secession.
And it’s true! I went to his articles at Mises, and clicked more or less idly on the piece about American health care fascialism — I guess that’s supposed to be a milder term than fascism, although he seems to equate the two. And sure enough, he ends:
This is not likely to happen in the United States, which at the moment seems hell-bent on descending into the abyss of socialism. Once some states begin seceding from the new American fascialistic state, however, there will be opportunities to restore healthcare freedom within them.
I presume that Amity Shlaes is already working on her Lincoln assessment, The Even More Forgotten Man.
I know Robert Wenzel has posited an elaborate shape shifter / CFR connection, but I’m not sure that’s it. I think it’s possible that it is a joke fired from the hip, with the general tie-in being right wing morons who write books about presidents that get other right-wing morons all fired up.
But I’m saying, even working within that analogy, I don’t get the joke. So can the resident Krugman apologists explain it please?
Paul Krugman Hearts Sweatshops
Not really, but then again neither does Tom DiLorenzo support slavery. Anyway, David R. Henderson does a great job defending Tom from Clay’s attacks.
(Sorry for people who don’t know what I’m talking about–I refer to Ron Paul’s first hearing on the Fed since assuming his new post. But I’m finally back home from a 4-day anti-Fed tour and I’m too tired to do a proper post.)
Let me make some basic points, kids, because I’ve seen some complaining in the blogosphere and some people have been emailing me too:
(1) I’m no expert on how government works, but I’m pretty sure Ron Paul gets more than one committee hearing. So if you can’t understand why he didn’t invite economist X, Y, Z, realize that Dr. Paul and his staff are probably as familiar with various Austrian economists as you are.
(2) Given that there are a whole host of people he can invite, it is strategically wise to get the idiotic zombie stuff out of the way on the first round. I was elated when I saw the response of Yglesias and Krugman to this. By all means guys, quote DiLorenzo listing tyrannical things, and then referring to them as the actions of a tyrant, and assume that that is sufficient to exonerate the Fed. Well played.
(3) There are lots of things one might say about Ron Paul. One thing I don’t think we can say is that he has no idea what he is doing, when it comes to getting the public whipped up into an anti-Fed frenzy. I’ve said this before: When he started talking about the Fed in his 2008 campaign, I thought, “Oh my gosh, don’t do that! Just talk about bringing the troops home and legalizing pot. That will make the college kids think you are cool. Don’t bring up nutjob stuff about the Fed; let that be our little secret.” Well, it looks like Ron Paul knew what he was doing.
(4) At what point are people going to stop referring to him as an inconsequential crank in the corner, as opposed to the real movers and shakers who can get things done? He is the freaking head of the subcommittee that oversees the Federal Reserve. That’s not bad for someone who is a goofy old man who doesn’t know how to sell his message (as his critics and some of his friends alike are alleging).
Not Evil, Just Lazy
Sometimes it occurs to me that maybe my conspiratorial views are totally baseless. For example, maybe the government wasn’t really trying to take over the banks or the energy sector. Here’s Arnold Kling:
As reporters ask me about the report, I in turn ask them where the real report is. I mean, I cannot believe that such a sketchy, half-baked proposal was given an official seal (two of them, one each from HUD and Treasury). My first reaction was that this was like a bad term paper from a public policy grad student.
I was close. As I reached out to colleagues to find out more, someone suggested I look up David Scharftstein a professor at The Business School, which is how Harvard folks refer to it. The resemblance between the Administration report and this paper by Scharfstein and Adi Sunderam is eery. Sunderam is a Ph. D candidate in the econ department at Harvard. So, basically, the Administration outsourced its policy on the entire future of housing finance to a professor and a grad student, neither of whom appears to have spent a single day working the mortgage industry.
Two Views of Egyptian Protestors
Since I’ve been on the road, I haven’t had time to listen to my usual suite of AM talk radio guys (which I normally hear on the way to work/lunch/etc.). I have just been getting my views of the Egyptian protests from people like Jeff Tucker (who gave a great talk at the Infinite Banking Concepts meeting in Birmingham on Wednesday) and Lew Rockwell:
“Peaceful, Peaceful”
That is the chant of the non-violent Egyptian resistance, as its members march on the Mubarak presidential palace, guarded by scared-looking young soldiers behind razor wire. The US media and State keep calling for the army to take over to prevent “chaos,” i.e., freedom. Yet what a model for all the world’s oppressed peoples these resisters are. They are showing us, once again, that non-violence can overcome the State and its armies and secret police, whereas returning violence for violence ends in massacre. Threats, torture, murder, beating, caging, these are the tools of the State. We, the opponents of the State, cannot possibly beat it at its own game, nor should we try. But with non-violence, we have a chance. Conscripted soldiers, break your weapons and go home to your families. Those you love need your hands and your brains, not your bullets.
But then on the road today (going from my “debate” with Atlanta Fed economist Jerry Dwyer to the Mises high school seminar outside of Knoxville) I heard Sean Hannity talking about it. I only listened for a few minutes, but the take-away message was: This is very bad. The radical Muslims are taking over in Egypt just like they did in Iran. When will leftists (in the media and the Obama administration) realize that these people want to kill us?
My point in the present post isn’t even to pick sides (though you can guess where my sympathies lie). Rather, I was just astounded at how diametrically opposed the reactions were. Since I had been isolated for a few days, it hadn’t occurred to me what the “conservative” take would be. I just sorta figured everybody would be in favor of peaceful people demanding that a murderous dictator step down.
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