“Pattern Coordination and the Theory of Interest”
This was the Hayek Memorial Lecture that I gave at the Austrian Scholars Conference. It is based on Chapter 3 of my dissertation [.pdf]. (BTW early in the lecture I get a laugh at the expense of my dissertation committee. Let me say for the record that my chairman–Mario Rizzo–understood what I was saying. But some of the other guys didn’t.)
In this video I flirt with Keynesianism, though in terms of his analytics, not policy recommendations. Don’t tell Krugman.
Obama on the Pesky Constitution
I have heard clips from this before, but it’s nice to go back to the classics (HT2 LRC). If you’re busy, at least listen to the first two minutes; there’s a nice bombshell just before the 2:00 mark.
Bob Murphy & Jonah Goldberg: Two Special Writers, One Very Special Night
At long last the Dream Team of nerdy right-wing public speaking has been formed! National Review joins forces with the Mises Institute to do battle with the Obama Administration.
This Thursday, April 15, I will be speaking at the Cincinnati Tea Party. Apparently I am the second last speaker, warming the crowd up for Jonah Goldberg!
(Longtime readers will understand the humor. For you newcomers, let’s just say Jonah and I had a public disagreement back in the day.)
See here for full details.
How to Make Another Tom Woods
How can you not watch a video (under 10 minutes) that Tom Woods introduces by saying, “It covers lots of things, from the Tea Party movement to what made me this way” ?
My Superlative Op Ed
This guy didn’t like my op ed calling to abolish the income tax:
The op-ed on income tax by Robert Murphy of Pacific Research Institute (“What do we get in return for our taxes?” April 5) couldn’t be farther from the point. He hates the income tax. Big deal: Everybody hates it. Everybody hates every tax. That means that Murphy is simply complaining, echoing everyone else’s complaint.
Suppose we eliminate the income tax, then what? Do we make massive cuts in the military, Medicare, welfare, highway and education? Or do we massively increase property taxes, or introduce punitive flat taxes or head taxes, or some combination?
Not everything from a think tank contains thought.
George Hastings
Delmar
First of all, of course I am in favor of cutting federal spending all over the place.
Second and more important, I really think people use the “couldn’t be further” phrase way too much. My piece really couldn’t be further from the point?! Suppose I had written, “We should abolish the income tax, because MacGyver didn’t use guns.” Now that would be really off-point.
Love Your Enemies
I think David R. Henderson is great, especially on tough-guy issues of war, but I think even he doesn’t go far enough in this piece, “What Game Theory Can Tell Us About Terrorism”:
In December 1996, I took this other-person’s-shoes approach with a group of Defense Department officials when I commented on a paper by my Hoover colleague Henry Rowen, a former president of the RAND Corporation. I pointed out that, in his paper, Rowen had taken terrorism as a given, but that one should take a step back and ask why terrorism exists. I said:
“What leads the Irish Republican Army to put bombs in Britain? Why don’t they, for example, put bombs in Canada or Bangladesh? To ask the question is to answer it. They place the bomb where they think it will help influence the government that makes decisions most directly in the way of their goals, and the governments in the way of their goals are usually governments that intervene in their affairs.”
Then I concluded, “If you want to avoid acts of terrorism carried out against people in your country, avoid getting involved in the affairs of other countries.” In other words, don’t go around stirring up hornets’ nests. I also advocated completely abolishing U.S. immigration restrictions on nuclear engineers, bio-technicians, and the other technical professions whose practitioners could build weapons of mass destruction, as a carrot to entice them to settle in the United States.
One person in the audience, noted game theory economist Martin Shubik, sarcastically accused me of advocating that “we all love one another.” But he missed the point. A good game theorist puts himself in the shoes of the other person whether or not he loves him. Even if you hate your opponent, and especially if he hates you, it’s good to know what motivates him and what pushes his button[s].
Of course I agree with David as far as his remarks go, and it stuns me that Shubik would crack a tough-guy joke at the expense of the most elementary principle of strategic thinking. But I want to argue that the best response to Shubik–one that an omniscient being would have given–would be to say, “Yes, we should love one another. The more we did that, the happier we’d be, and the safer too.”
Jesus famously taught (Mt. 5:43-48):
43“You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ 44But I tell you: Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, 45that you may be sons of your Father in heaven. He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous. 46If you love those who love you, what reward will you get? Are not even the tax collectors doing that? 47And if you greet only your brothers, what are you doing more than others? Do not even pagans do that? 48Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.
A lot of people–even Christians–think that Jesus doesn’t really mean you should love your enemies, because then we’d all be overrun by criminals within the week. But that strikes me as a misunderstanding, akin to Patriot Act supporters who say, “The Constitution wasn’t a suicide pact.”
In the first place, loving your enemy per se doesn’t rule out violence. (I think other parts of Jesus’ teachings do explicitly command pacifism, by the way.) If a father sees one of his drunken sons about to seriously injure his brother, and lays the kid out, he could still love the son that he punched. In fact, because he loves the drunken son, he will use the least amount of force necessary to protect the other son, whereas he might have stabbed or shot some stranger who was attacking his other son.
But more important for this discussion, is the fact that when you hate someone, you can’t “get inside his head” as easily as when you love him. It’s hard to think through things from the point of view of someone you actually hate. So it’s true, as David says in the quotation above, that even if you hate someone, you still need to think strategically and try to predict his next move, based on your understanding of his motives. What I am saying, however, is that you won’t do as good a job if you hate the person, versus trying to love him.
Please note, to love someone doesn’t mean you condone his or her behavior. (There was some confusion on this point when I urged Free Advice readers to love Ben Bernanke.) It means, rather, that you wish the best for the person, and if he or she really is engaging in destructive behavior, you sincerely hope the person changes course in time. You don’t hope that somebody “teaches him a lesson.”
* * *
Relevant to this discussion is the experience of Jose Fajardo, who is my wife’s grandfather. Jose is a missionary from Colombia, who is famous in certain evangelical circles. (E.g. he translated for Billy Graham when he preached to certain South American audiences.) In his autobiography Jose relates a tale of a period when there was State-sponsored persecution of Protestants by some Catholic Colombians:
…I was building a small church in El Cerrito, a town about fifty kilometers north of Cali. The town evangelicals helped us build one of the church walls, but during the nights and weekends, some Catholic fanatics would destroy it and we would have to start all over again.
Around this time there was an earthquake and the only building that suffered damages was the Catholic Church…
Now let’s stop for a moment. I think a lot of people would say, “Ha! Our God has avenged us by knocking down the Catholics’ building after they’ve been doing the same to us! Give them a taste of their own medicine! There’s justice after all in this world.”
But let’s see what Jose did:
…so I went to the Board of Missions and proposed that we help them with some money to repair it. The missionaries agreed and we raised a good sum of money. I went to El Cerrito and introduced myself to the head of the fundraising committee for the reconstruction of the church. I told him that our church wanted to donate money to help them rebuild. The reader can imagine how much this gesture astonished him because he was well aware of all the damage they had caused us when we were building our small church. We were never again bothered in that town and we were able to finish the building and hold services without any aggression.
We did the former based on what Paul said: “If your enemy is hungry, feed him; if he is thirsty, give him something to drink. In doing this, you will heap burning coals on his head.” Romans 12:20 (Fajardo, pp. 110-111)
“You Don’t Play Around With Those Power Lines!”
Such was the warning that a cartoon lightning bug would sing in a Public Service Announcement on TV when I was a latchkey kid. Today after the Mises Circle ended, I went for a walk around the hotel. I had to cut it short though, because I was waiting for a phone call and noticed that my Blackberry screen showed nothing but a spinning hourglass.
That was quite a weird thing, and I attributed it to the huge power lines that I was walking under. Does that actually make sense? As many of you know, right-wing economists are anti-empirical, so I really can’t say whether my theory makes sense.
Murphy on King
No, Larry didn’t book me for his live show. I’m talking about Stephen King, in my “Faculty Spotlight” interview at Mises:
6. What are your favorite literary works?
John Steinbeck’s East of Eden is the greatest novel I have ever read, but I probably liked Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove more.
I also need to mention that Stephen King’s nonfiction book On Writing is absolutely wonderful for anyone who wants to understand how good fictions “works.” In his horror novels, King does something that I really liked in McMurtry’s books: They both “get inside the heads” of all the characters, and don’t explicitly judge them, but just explain how even the bad guys view the world and why they act the way they do. In contrast, when you read a Dickens’ novel you know who the good guys are–they’re the ones whose actions are comprehensible. The bad guys are black boxes of pure malevolence who are motivated by simplistic things like “I want a lot of money” and that’s that. They’re not depicted as real people.
Really, if you just assumed that Stephen King was the literary equivalent of Howard Stern, I think you should give his books a try. He is a fantastic writer. (Since I’m assuming most of you are not friends of the CIA, try Firestarter for starters.)
My wife informed me of his nonfiction book On Writing which really is amazing. He doesn’t teach you how to write horror books, he teaches you how to write great fiction. (Or at least, he explains what makes for great fiction.)
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