Beyonce Being All She Can Be?
OK we haven’t had a TV for years, so you young whippersnappers will have to explain this to me. What’s up with the storm troopers? (HT2LRC)
And why the homage to You Can’t Do That on Television around 3:30?
A Helpful Idea From National Review
Von Pepe tries to prevent me from working by sending me this NRO article by Daniel Pipes, but–like Odysseus with the Sirens–I will only allow myself to copy and paste the headline:
Read at your own risk; I’m outta here.
Mises’ Accent Is Even Cooler Than George Harrison’s
This is awesome. If you’ve never heard an audio of Mises, you should check out a new recording that the Mises Institute got its hands on.
Caplan Calm
[UPDATE below.]
Over at EconLog Bryan Caplan writes:
Two years ago, I was worried by the “Obama as FDR” scenario. That cloud is lifting. Now two alternate scenarios for Obama keep coming to mind.
Scenario #1: Obama as Carter. He’ll ineffectively stick to his guns, seem weak, become a one-term president, and be replaced by a Republican who pulls the plug on a lot of accumulated statist nonsense.
Scenario #2: Obama as Clinton. He’ll move to the center, let his opponents shoot themselves in the foot, win re-election, and preside over four more years of salutory gridlock.
Take your pick.
I’m not sure why Bryan is calm. I guess it’s because of the loss in momentum on health care “reform” etc. in the wake of Scott Brown’s election.
I agree that Leviathan’s juggernaut has been slowed for various reasons, but I still think this will go down in history as the second Great Depression. The government has already set in place several mechanisms for keeping the economy in the toilet, and for ramping up its power, when the public demands it in the next crisis.*
And there will be a next crisis.
More generally, if we really have turned the corner, and we just go on from here with output steadily expanding and unemployment slowly moving down, then I think we free marketeers have been spending way too much effort on economic freedoms. If all the stuff the government/Fed have already done really just spell two years of harsh recession, then what’s the big deal? We should be focusing on civil liberties or war or adult literacy or neutering your pets or something.
UPDATE: * In the original text I said the public would demand huge government interventions during the next crisis, but that’s actually inaccurate. Really, what I think will happen is the public will be terrified and then the government will ram through an outrageous new set of measures, saying it is necessary to pull back from the brink. Even if people are very much opposed, they won’t start rioting (a lot) because the situation is so dire. Over time, once the new measures are a fait accompli, the public’s memory of what happened will be shaped by the official narrative offered by “both sides” in the media. This is exactly what happened with TARP, which you may recall was rejected around 9-to-1 by constituents phoning their Congresspeople back in 2008.
Who Said It?
“The grant of a 1974 Nobel Prize in Economic Science to the great Austrian free-market economist Dr. Friedrich A. von Hayek comes as a welcome and blockbuster surprise to his free-market admirers in this country and throughout the world. For since the death last year of Hayek’s distinguished mentor, Ludwig von Mises, the 75-year-old Hayek ranks as the world’s most eminent free-market economist and advocate of the free society.”
Potpourri
UPDATE below.
* One thing that really bothers me in our political discourse is that people in favor of more US military action abroad treat it as self-evident that the troop surge “worked” in Iraq. Yes, conditions did improve, at least in the short run after the surge, and the predictions of some of the most pessimistic critics were wrong. But Iraq is hardly an example of a successful US liberation effort. If George W. Bush had told the American people on the eve of the invasion, that almost seven years later, Iraq would still be plagued by suicide bombings that took 54 lives in a single attack, would Americans have been gung ho about the plan? (The latest body count is 3,478 U.S. combat fatalities, and some 100,000 Iraqi civilian deaths from violence.) And yet people who are urging restraint in sending more troops to Afghanistan are being ridiculed for failing to learn from our “success” in Iraq.
* Here’s a scary summary: “The White House budget proposal released Monday assumes the U.S. economy is heading for a six-year run of above-average economic growth with no sign of a worrisome spike in inflation or interest rates.” And it’s not as if, in exchange for such rosy scenarios, the White House forecast shows balanced budgets as far as the eye can see…
* You ever notice how in the midst of a crisis, government officials lie through their teeth, and then after the crisis has passed, versions closer to the truth start trickling out? Here’s Paulson admitting that his remarks about Lehman Brothers at the time of its collapse were “a ploy” (which I guess is not the same as a lie), and here’s Kurt Haskell’s brave article spelling out just how much the U.S. government has been lying in the wake of the Underwear Bomber incident (HT2LRC). If you have followed the story, you know that Haskell got a lot of attention immediately after the event, because he had been a passenger and swore that he saw a “sharp dressed man” trying to get the Underwear Bomber on the plane, despite his lack of a passport. The government pooh-poohed his account. Well guess what? The “sharp dressed man”…may have worked for the U.S. government!
Now Haskell isn’t saying the feds plotted the attack. And maybe they didn’t. But my point is, why should we listen to anything they say at this point? U.S. government officials lie to us repeatedly, day in and day out. We know they do; all you have to do is compare one statement to the press with a previous one issued a month beforehand. So the fallback position for conspiracy doubters is, “Well, sure they lie, but only to protect us. They have to lie to us all the time. We can’t handle the truth.”
UPDATE: My apologies, in the original version of this post, I said categorically that the “sharp dressed man” who helped the Underwear Bomber get on his plane, worked for the U.S. government. I misinterpreted Haskell’s blog post. I thought the government itself had admitted this, but they haven’t; they have only admitted that they intentionally didn’t revoke the Underwear Bomber’s visa, because they wanted to keep tracking him and not tip him off. It is Haskell’s (very plausible) hypothesis that the “sharp dressed man” he saw, worked for the U.S. government in some capacity.
Potpourri
* A Fed official tells us (price) deflation is no longer a worry. Phew!
* Viresh Amin sends this video of three young guys harassing Bernanke as he checks into a hotel. The video reminded me of those 1960s alien invasion movies. I always thought it was funny watching them, because you understood why the people who had seen the aliens take over their neighbors etc. were going nuts, and running around warning others, but you also understood why–given their presentation style–they sounded crazy and nobody listened to their completely accurate warnings.
* Jeff Tucker damns my high school curriculum with faint praise (just kidding).
* At Mises.org today I have an article on “The Fed as Giant Counterfeiter.” I think many of you, like me, have known for years that the Fed was “like” a guy running the printing press to pay his bills, but until about a month ago it never really clicked with me just how close the analogy was. Even old pros may want to skim this article to make sure you already had considered the similarities.
Do You Love Big Ben (Bernanke)?
In one of His most famous and controversial teachings, Jesus instructs His followers to love their enemies:
27″But I tell you who hear me: Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, 28bless those who curse you, pray for those who mistreat you. 29If someone strikes you on one cheek, turn to him the other also. If someone takes your cloak, do not stop him from taking your tunic. 30Give to everyone who asks you, and if anyone takes what belongs to you, do not demand it back. 31Do to others as you would have them do to you.
32″If you love those who love you, what credit is that to you? Even ‘sinners’ love those who love them. 33And if you do good to those who are good to you, what credit is that to you? Even ‘sinners’ do that. 34And if you lend to those from whom you expect repayment, what credit is that to you? Even ‘sinners’ lend to ‘sinners,’ expecting to be repaid in full. 35But love your enemies, do good to them, and lend to them without expecting to get anything back. Then your reward will be great, and you will be sons of the Most High, because he is kind to the ungrateful and wicked. 36Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful. (Luke 6: 27-36)
So for me, I don’t really have any “enemies” in my personal life. It’s probably partly because I’m a consultant and so I don’t have any corporate rivals or a jerk boss I can’t stand.
But there still is a temptation for me to hate the official power brokers in DC and other heads of state and militaries around the world, for all the carnage that they unleash on innocent people. If my worldview is correct, then the world could be incredibly better on so many levels, if these guys (and a few gals) would abandon their lust for power.
So in that context, it’s a useful exercise as a Christian to work yourself up into at least trying to love someone like Ben Bernanke. (Or if you don’t really have a strong feeling for him one way or the other, try Barack Obama or George Bush or Dick Cheney or Kim Jong Il.)
So for Bernanke, even though I am positive he is wrecking the US financial system and I am 90% confident that he is at least vaguely aware of what he is doing, I occasionally will try to recalibrate my indignation by stepping back and trying to understand “how could this have happened?” And in the process of doing so, I end up being a lot less angry. So I think (as usual) Jesus’ command wasn’t some pointless task of obedience that He threw out there for us; if you actually try to love your enemies, you gain a much greater understanding of how the world works. (And note I use that common phrase quite deliberately–in an important sense the ruler of the world is Satan, and it’s important to analyze how he manipulates things without focusing your judgment on the weak people who facilitate his plans.)
OK then, if you’re starting out in a fury and you think there’s no way in the world you could ever sincerely have feelings of sympathy and compassion for someone like Ben Bernanke–and yet you are a Christian and intellectually know that you should–here are some methods that I use.
First, notwithstanding John Steinbeck’s theory in East of Eden, I don’t think we should assume that a particular adult who is doing really evil things, came out of the womb with no conscience. Steinbeck may be right that some people just never really had a conscience, but I think that’s too easy and incorrect when trying to understand the development of adults who do astonishingly wicked things. So even though I haven’t researched it, I’m willing to say that Benny Bernanke was a cute little kid who played with kittens and read Moby Dick to shut-ins every other Saturday at the nursing home.
Second, realize that Bernanke probably faces far more constraints on his actions than you realize. C’mon, do you really think the most powerful bankers and other men in the world, would sit back with bated breath to see what a former Princeton econ chair decides with regard to the fate of the world economy? So when you are trying to interpret some of his actions–such as bailing out foreign banks–keep in mind that part of that might be Bernanke trying to buy himself some friends to give himself more options. It doesn’t make those actions right, but my point is simply that we don’t really know what’s motivating him. I don’t for one second believe we’re seeing the maximization of Bernanke’s utility function, where the two inputs are his paramaters for distaste of inflation and the “output gap,” but on the other hand it’s probably also not correct to view Bernanke as sitting in his quarters twirling a mustache and saying moo-hoo-ha-HA!
Third, realize that whatever awful decisions Bernanke is “forced” to make right now–and which he himself probably recognizes as placing his own career / family’s survival above the interests of average people–he probably didn’t realize that, going into things. He must have been an incredibly ambitious and very talented guy, to even be a candidate for Fed chief. He probably was very familiar with previous Fed actions and thought he could do a better job, or at least thought he would do at least a good a job as any of the other people in the running.
For the above point, consider your own job experiences. Haven’t you ever been disillusioned once you got into a job, and actually became somewhat disappointed (or even disgusted) with how it “made” you act? For example, I used to have this hallowed conception of the mighty Peer Review Process for journal articles. I was picturing scientific economists sending journal articles into an editor, who would then distribute them to the world’s experts on the subject. The experts would spend days carefully vetting the submission, reproducing its claims and subjecting it to all sorts of stress tests to judge the robustness of its results. After such a grueling process, only the most airtight articles would see the light of day. And if any economics professors are reading this right now, I hope I gave you a good belly laugh. (I’m not even talking about the CRU email scandal; I’m talking about regular academic discourse here. In practice referees don’t have nearly enough time to provide more than a cursory line of defense against erroneous journal submissions.)
So for Bernanke (or Obama or Bush) think of how much “on the job” training he must have received. Whatever promises (implicit or explicit) he made in order to get the job, he had no idea what certain powerful people were going to ask of him. It wouldn’t surprise me if, in reality, Bernanke’s true job is to take his marching orders from other people, and then come up with the way to sell it to the financial markets so it sounds like a coherent plan. Now even if that’s true, note that Bernanke isn’t a complete puppet. He always has the option of pushing the boundaries of what his handlers want him to say or do, because ultimately it would look really weird if all of a sudden his brakes didn’t work next Tuesday. So once he got into power and (let’s suppose) realized the people “coaching” him weren’t doing their level best to help average Americans, even if he wanted to repent at that point, it would be pretty difficult. It would be very very very easy–and I bet many of us have thought like this in some of our jobs–for him to say, “This whole organization is going down the wrong path, but I’ll do what I can to check its worst excesses and avoid disaster. Mr. X and Y and Z are some seriously bad influences, but I can steer things away from what they want.” I’m not saying that is what’s going on, but it could be.
I’ll stop here because I think you get the point. As crazy as it sounds, try to work up some sympathy for the Fed chief. Jesus told us to.
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