Author: VD

Inflation: gasoline prices

Now, this should not be considered a response to Nate’s post on inflation, as it is not an integral part of the great inflation-deflation debate, but rather tangential to it.  It is simply an off-shoot of some research I was doing that is not going to be part of my core argument.  But I’m posting it nevertheless because it is interesting and should help put in context precisely where we happen to be at the moment with regards to recent price movements.  We could, of course, use CPI, but I don’t pay much attention to it since with all of its hedonic adjustments and so forth, I regard it to be as about as relevant to reality as the average science fiction novel.  And while I am very well aware of the various shortcomings of using a commodity price such as gasoline as an inflation metric, given the inevitable effects of supply and demand, it nevertheless can be readily observed that the price of gasoline is an even more “inflationary” one than than simply relying upon CPI.  Which is to say, using gasoline as a metric instead of CPI will tend to be a more favorable one to the inflationary case for those contemplating the inflation/deflation question.

To the best of my knowledge, the price of gasoline was $0.12 in 1913.  Another reference cites $0.25 in 1918, but I will go with the lower and older one as it is less favorable from the perspective of my deflationary position.  Utilizing the CPI, this provides an estimated equivalent price of $2.79, which is much lower than the current national average price of $3.74.

Now, given the massive amount of M2 money creation that has taken place since the financial crisis hit in Q3 2008, we would expect that at least an amount of that $3.62 increase in price per gallon has taken place since then.  But look at the 60-month history of gasoline prices, which actually fell dramatically in the first six months post-crisis, from $4.12 at the onset of the crisis to $1.61.

Prices have gradually worked their way up since then, but from an inflationary perspective, things have remained essentially flat over the last five years, which the observant reader will recall tends to be considerably more in line with the flat state of total credit market debt outstanding than with the continued expansion of M2.

Please note that I am not claiming that this proves anything yet, I am simply pointing it out to counteract the common assumption that price inflation is as rampant as it is presently perceived to be due to gasoline prices threatening to return to their previous all-time highs.

Mailvox: still relevant

While I tend to largely forget about past books in favor of a) the most recent one, and, b) those I’m currently writing, it’s nice to occasionally be reminded that people are still reading the older ones.  SA writes of his recent encounter with TIA:

Nietzsche’s famous response to his critics was, “Swallow your poison; for you need it badly.” There are realizations that begin by tasting a bit like poison, but end up being just the medicine we need. Vox Day’s book is like that — atheists will instinctively hate it at first, not just because of its content but also because of its ironic writing style. “Poison pen” it may sometimes be; but it’s exactly the sort of “poison” they really need. As anyone who can think philosophically, or even anyone with an ounce of common sense knows, atheism is inherently irrational, since it depends on claiming certainty about a matter it obviously could never know for certain.

Day calls the atheist bluff. Teeing off on some of the chief proponents of irrational atheism today — Dawkins, Harris, Hitchens and Onfray in particular — the author debunks their empty rhetoric with the simplest of weapons: facts. Particularly good is the author’s treatment of the old canard “religion causes wars,” for which he provides so much counter-evidence that the reader is left wondering why anyone ever thinks such a thing is true. He simply takes the atheists at their word, and tests their claims against the available evidence.

In a way, it’s unfortunate that Day resorts so often to the ironic tone, because opponents will be all too quick to jump on that stylistic feature and claim the author is a mere stylist without substance. That charge would be untrue, and a more calm tone might prevent that, showcasing the evidence rather than the rhetorical flourishes. However, flamboyancy and irony of tone have never stopped atheists from loving Nietzsche or uncritically embracing the random rhetoric of mere stylists like Harris or Dawkins, so their objections might be a trifle hypocritical.

On the good side, Day’s book is immensely readable, and at times is simply laugh-out-loud entertaining. You can dash through it in a night, and indeed, it’s hard to stop reading once you start. The central argument is not a scholarly approach so much as a popularly-accessible one; but that does not diminish the ultimate seriousness of the arguments advanced therein. Anyone who is already a theist, or anyone who is still seriously thinking about the atheism-theism debate can find in this book a helpful resource for casual debate. But the atheist “faithful” who have already closed their minds to the evidence may simply find it teeth-grindingly irritating.

It probably won’t escape anyone’s attention that the New Atheism is done, having mutated into helpless silence in the face of Islam on the one hand and A+ feminism on the other.  It’s remarkable to see that women can even ruin atheism; it’s a tactic that we theists should have utilized long ago.  After all, the sort of mind that is prone to atheism in the first place is going to be particular susceptible to cries of “sexism” and “racism”, and there are few groups more male and white than a gathering of atheists.

SA’s point that rhetorical flourishes can detract from the dialectic arguments is an accurate one, but the problem is that they are necessary for the majority who are not capable of following the dialectic arguments.  What TIA exposes, in crossing the rhetorical divide, is that there is very little but rhetoric in most of the New Atheist arguments, which is why a dispassionate dialectical critique would have been an error and left its atheist readers unmoved.  The venom and the spite with which so many atheist reviewers have responded to TIA over the years is proof of its effectiveness in that regard.

It’s also good to see SA single out what has probably been the primary accomplishment of TIA, which was the conclusive debunking of the “religion causes war” line.  We’ve seen less and less of that ever since TIA came out, and the historical evidence has even begun to creep into scientific journals such as Nature.  While I have no doubt that the Left will do everything it can to be sure I am never credited with having successfully demolished that line of attack against religion in general and Christianity in particular, (it’s amusing to see all the references to a $300 encyclopedia that it is perfectly clear no one has even seen, let alone read), I’m very pleased to see that mendacious, but rhetorically effective argument increasingly absent from the atheism-religion discourse.

And SA’s email is a useful reminder that as long as atheists attempt to rely upon the arguments it criticizes, TIA will remain relevant.

The Great Inflation-Deflation Debate

Nate forces my hand by kicking it off on his own blog:

It appears to me that there seems to be a bit of confusion out there about what the money supply is doing.  Is it growing?  is it shrinking?  Inflation?  Deflation?  Stagflation?   Obviously I am a hyper-inflationist…   Our buddy Vox is a deflationist.  So what gives?  Does it matter?

Well… if we’re going to talk about this we’re going to have to establish some kind of basic vocabulary.  For example… what is money?  I know… you’re thinking dollar bills and coins.  Yes and no.  Money is an exchange medium that is used to complete a transaction.  The critical characteristic of money is that it does not require any additional transactions to satisfy the terms of the exchange.  You got your money… and that’s good enough.  Lets look at gold for example.  Gold is money.  It always has been money.  You want some of my cattle… you give me a small amount of gold… and we’re done.  Modern cash is similar.  You give me cash.. I give you a cow or two… we’re done.  Cash is money.

What about debit cards?  I swipe your debit card… I give you cows…  we’re not done.  Your bank has to send money to my bank.  That’s an additional transaction.  Debit cards aren’t money.   Same for checks.  Checks aren’t money either.  They are IOUs for money.

Go to his place.  Read the whole thing.  If it doesn’t make sense, read it again.  Grok it in its fullness.  I will respond here within one week.

Umberto Eco on the death of the dream of Europe

I like and admire Umberto Eco for many reasons, but I firmly believe that the great humanist is absolutely on the wrong side of history with regards to the great post-WWII neo-fascist enterprise of the European Union.  And so, it is very satisfying indeed to read of the increasing despair of the bien-pensant intellectuals, and to hear the cri-de-coeur of an elite that is increasingly conscious of its failure concerning an endeavor where, for one brief shining moment around the turn of the millenium, it believed it had succeeded.

These are hard times for those who
believe in the European Union: from Cameron, who calls his compatriots
to decide if they still want it (or if they never had the will), from
Berlusconi who one day declares himself a Europeist but the next,
if he doesn’t make a visceral connection to the old Fascists, says
returning to the lira would be better, to the Lega Nord and its
hyperprovincialism. In summary, one can say that – at a distance
of more than fifty years – the bones of the founding fathers of
Europe United are turning in their graves.
Nevertheless everyone should know that
in the course of the Second World War 41 million Europeans died, (I
say only Europeans, not including the Americans and the Asians), massacred one after the other, and afterwards, saving the tragic
Balkan episode, Europe has known 68 years of peace.  If one
recounts to the young, (who maybe would appreciate it more if they spent a year working in another country on the continent with the Erasmus program, and perhaps at the end of this experience would find a twin spirit with those who speak another language than their own), that the French might today defend the Maginot
line to resist the Germans, that the Italians would want to expand
their borders to incorporate Greece, that Belgium could be invaded, that English
airplanes could bombard Milan, these youth would believe we were
inventing a science fiction novel. It is only the adults who
understand that instead of crossing borders without passports, their
fathers and their grandfathers vacationed with rifles in hand.
But is it really true that the idea of
Europe is unsuccessful in attracting the Europeans? Bernard-Henri
Lévy recently released a passionate manifesto in defense of a
European identity. “Europe or Chaos” begins with a disturbing
threat. “Europe is not in crisis, it is dying. Not Europe as in
the territory, naturally. But Europe, the Idea. The Europe that is
a dream and a project.” The manifesto was signed by António Lobo
Antunes, Vassilis Alexakis, Juan Luis Cebrián, Fernando Savater,
Peter Schneider, Hans Christoph Buch, Julia Kristeva, Claudio Magris,
Gÿorgy Konrád and Salman Rushdie (who is not European but has found
in Europe his primary refuge from the start of his persecution. I
also signed it with some other co-signers, a few days ago, when I was
at the Théâtre du Rond-Point in Paris for a little debate. One of
the themes that quickly emerged, one that I found amply consequential, is
that there exists a consciousness of a European identity. It
occurred to me to cite the pages of Remembrance of Things Past by
Proust when, in Paris during the time of the bombardment by the
German Zeppelins, the intellectuals continue to speak and to write of
Goethe or of Schiller as an integrated part of their culture.
But this sense of a European
identity, certainly very strong among the elite
intellectuals, is it also among the common people? It occurred to me
to reflect on the fact that even today, in every European country, they
celebrate (in school and in their public festivals), real heroes, who
are all men who have valorously slain other Europeans, from the part of
that Arminius who exterminated the legions of Varo, to Joan of Arc,
the Cid, (because the Muslims against whom he fought were of the
European centuries), to various Italian and Hungarian heroes of the
Risogimento, who fell against the Austrian enemy. Is there no European hero of whom we can speak? Did none ever exist? What about Byron and Santorre di Santarosa, who advanced and fought for the cause of Greek liberty,
to say nothing of the not-insignificant numbers of little Schindlers,
who saved the lives of thousands of Jews without concern for what
nation they belonged to. What about the non-martial heroes, such as De
Gasperi, Monnet, Schuman, Adenuauer, Spinelli? And could not
searching into the recesses of history expose others, of whom we could speak
to the children, (and to the adults)? Is it truly possible that we cannot
find a European Asterix of whom we can speak about the Europe of
tomorrow?
The fall of the fraud-imposed European Union will be difficult and painful for many, just as the collapse of its force-imposed American counterpart will cause considerable chaos and suffering.  But in both cases, the pain will be a relatively small price to pay, because the alternative is the material imposition of Orwell’s metaphorical boot-on-the-human-face forever. 
The answer to his question is no.  There can never be a European Asterix.  Asterix is a hero to millions of Europeans because he represents the independent human spirit resisting the force of Empire.  And as such, the new Asterixes of the future will be those who courageously resisted the bureaucratic stormtroopers of the failing Union, not those who marched in their ranks.  The EU is in the imperial tradition of Augustus, Napoleon, and Hitler, and as such, it can never command the loyalty of an Asterix.
The intellectual elite always loves Empire.  They are its parasites, its remoras.  And how they hate that it is so often those men who stand against them and their will to rule that are loved and lionized by generation after generation of the common people.

On the radio

I was on Brian Greenberg’s Philadelphia radio show last night, where we talked all about McRapey, and how terribly persecuted I am, and how bravely and ingeniously I’ve handled being persecuted, and how my books aren’t derivative ripoffs AT ALL.  It was a very courageous performance by me and I feel much better about myself now that my feelings have been affirmed by a sympathetic media figure.

You’re going to want to hear it, because I also gave some important hints about my totally all-original next book!  That’s right, you can squee now!  Here’s a hint: my inspiration rhymes with Why Zack Does Improv and it’s a “reboot” of a certain science fiction classic, only instead of predicting the collapse of the Galactic Empire, Mary Spelltown proves mathematically that by switching over to a matriarchal system of rule by lesbian Empresses of color, the Empire will become even more vibrant and fabulous and fair, thanks to the invisible guidance of a secret dance club of mutant, mind-reading, mixed-race homosexuals that is founded by the brilliant, (and woman!) hard scientist.

And here is the best part.  They communicate by farting!  That’s right.  You may as well pencil in my 2014 Nebula Award for Best Tor Novel right now!

Reeducation for the insufficiently vibrant

Roissy notes that the government’s multicultural reeducation camps for insufficiently vibrant Americans are well underway:

He writes: “Like Communist reeducation camps, the captive (yes, captive, or they
lose their jobs) listeners in the audience are being humiliated by this
piece of shit into participating in de facto forced
confessionals of their imaginary sins, and indoctrination of their
“privilege” and “oppression”. You can hear their humiliating subjugation
in the way they nervously laugh at slander directed against them. This
is the laughter of the bullied beta male trying to go along to get
along, so as to avoid any beatings on the playground later.”

Rushmore isn’t enough

Al Sharpton on the pressing debate of the day:

Last month, MSNBC’s Al Sharpton conducted a spirited debate about whether Obama belongs on Mount Rushmore or instead deserves a separate monument to his greatness (just weeks before replacing frequent Obama critic Cenk Uygur as MSNBC host, Sharpton publicly vowed never to criticize Barack Obama under any circumstances: a vow he has faithfully maintained). Earlier that day on the same network, a solemn discussion was held, in response to complaints from MSNBC viewers, about whether it is permissible to ever allow Barack Obama’s name to pass through one’s lips without prefacing it with an honorific such as “President” or “the Honorable” or perhaps “His Excellency” (that really did happen).

I would absolutely love to see Obama added to Mount Rushmore.  The ears alone would be hysterical.  Given that the great destroyer of American liberty is already up there, it seems only fitting that the penultimate consequence of his actions should be memorialized in stone there as well.

However,  I don’t think Mount Rushmore is sufficient memorial for Barack Soetoro-Soebarkah-Obama.  I think he merits a “Chairman Mao” style statue of the sort that the Chinese carved for Martin Luther King.  The bigger, the better.  I want future generations to be able to see precisely how far the nation descended before its final collapse.  Ideally, it would be atop a square platform decorated by a carved frieze featuring 1) the Folsom Street Fair, 2) a squad of female Marines going into action, 3) an image of 9/11, and 4) Mexicans crossing the border.

Mailvox: which is worse, work or rape?

A drive-by commenter throws out a few questions:

women don’t have to stay home and breed simply because it intimidates
you that we’re in the workforce. What about the fact that women may
wish to work and be very capable of doing so. Are you saying women are
less intelligent than men? Is there any reason that a man couldn’t stay
home and provide childcare if that is best suited to a family? 

1) True.  Women don’t have to stay home and breed because it intimidates anyone that they are in the workforce, about two-thirds of them have to stay home and breed in order to prevent society from either collapsing into demographic and economic ruin or being transformed by the imported replacement workers into a third world society.  The birthrate has already fallen well below replacement level without the rate of female employment even drawing completely even with the male employment rate; one wonders how low it would go if all women were required to enter the workforce.

One can look to Londonistan if one requires an example of this process at work: “[F]or the first time, white Britons are now in a minority in the country’s largest city…. White Britons now make up 45 per cent of the population, compared with 58 per cent in 2001.  London’s population has been boosted by immigrants. Three million foreign-born people now live in the capital.  

2) The fact that women may wish to work and are very capable of working no more implies that they should always be encouraged to do so anymore than the fact that men may wish to rape and are very capable of raping means that they should always be encouraged to do so.  The ironic, but logically inescapable fact is that encouraging men to rape would be considerably less damaging to a society than encouraging women to enter the workforce en masse.  Widespread rape makes a society uncivilized.  Widespread female employment makes a society demographically unsustainable.  History demonstrates that incivility can be survived and surmounted.  Unsustainability, on the other hand, cannot.

3) Are women less intelligent than men?  On average, no.  In terms of the highest standard deviations, yes.  However, I think it is readily apparent that both men and women are to blame for constructing an equalitarian society that, in terms of intelligence, doesn’t even rise to the ability of a dog to avoid defecating in its own bed and staying off the railroad tracks.

4) Yes, there are a number of reasons that a man cannot stay home and provide childcare.  The three most important are that a) most men don’t want to provide childcare, b) most women don’t want to work to support a man, and c) doing so significantly increases the probability that his wife will stop being attracted to him and his marriage will fail.  A woman simply OUTEARNING her husband increases the risk of divorce by 50 percent; this implies that it is untenable to expect women to be willing to completely support their families.  But certainly, if there are women who dream of marrying men who will stay home and play video games with the children while they work 60 hours per week to support the family, there is no reason they should be barred from doing so. 

I tend to doubt there are enough of these hard-working snowflakes to be of any statistical, let alone demographic, significance to society.

Societal devolution

The anti-suffragettes of 100 years ago have been proven correct:

When a smart young man receives a big salary it is a good thing for the race. He can marry and transmit his smartness to posterity.  When a young woman receives a big salary it means disaster for the race, and the wiser, handsomer, more efficient the woman is to-day the more likely she is to have a salary instead of a husband.  You couldn’t run a chicken farm on those principles. Suppose you took all the best hens and set them aside to go to college or run a feather factory for the other hens.  It’s a tragedy!

It has taken the race millions of years to produce the high salaried women of to-day, and now those qualities are allowed to perish. The spark carried through the centuries is snuffed out by a salary!

On the plus side, Powerpoint slideshows have never been prettier and filing clerks now have bachelor’s degrees and $100,000 in student loan debt.

Mailvox: value is not objective

Asher claims to know something of economics despite making a massive and fundamental error that requires complete ignorance of subjective value theory:

My undergrad was economics and my grad work was in philosophy focusing on theory of mind and the social sciences, prompted by investigating whether or not economics is a positive body of knowledge. Yeah, I know just a little bit about the topic.

A little bit is not enough to intelligently discuss these matters.  Other than the Mises Institute, there is not a single undergraduate economics program of which I am aware that is not based on the neoclassical assumption of objective value.  Unfortunately, the state of economic education is now such that one can possess considerable economic academic credentials while still knowing nothing of some of the most fundamental basics.  Subjective value is a proto-Austrian concept that is not taught in either Econ 101 or 301; most economics PhDs, to say nothing of undergrads, are completely unfamiliar with the scholastics and the pre-Smithian economists and genuinely believe that economics is a 200-year old discipline that began with Adam Smith.

This is where Asher demonstrated that he simply does not know what “subjective value” is:

 This is where the subjective theory of value leads. If everything of value has to be reflected in a market price then to not pay anyone for something of value is ‘unjust’.

Subjective value does not lead there; it cannot lead there because it neither requires anything, (much less everything), of value to be reflected in a price nor assigns any significance beyond the immediate exchange to the exchange value.  As it happens, I’ve been reading Volume II of Rothbard’s excellent Austrian Perspective on the History of Economic Thought, which I recommend to everyone, but especially Asher, and happened to read the following at the gym today:

In contrast to the Smith-Ricardo mainstream of Smithians who set forth the labour theory (or at very best, the cost-of-production theory) of value, J.B. Say firmly re-established the scholastic-continental-French utility analysis. It is utility and utility alone that gives rise to exchange value, and Say settled the value paradox to his own satisfaction by disposing of ‘use-value’ altogether as not being relevant to the world of exchange. Not only that: Say adopted a subjective value theory, since he believed that value rests on acts of valuation by the consumers. In addition to being subjective, these degrees of valuation are relative, since the value of one good or service is always being compared against another. These values, or utilities, depend on all manner of wants, desires and knowledge on the part of individuals: ‘upon the moral and physical nature of man, the climate he lives in, and on the manner and legislation of his country. He has wants of the body, wants of the mind, and of the soul; wants for himself, others for his family, others still as a member of society’.  Political economy, Say sagely pointed out, must take these values and preferences of people as givens, ‘as one of the data of its reasonings; leaving to the moralist and the practical man, the several duties of enlightening and of guiding their fellow-creatures, as well in this, as in other particulars of human conduct’.

At some points, Say went up to the edge of discovering the marginal utility concept, without ever quite doing so. Thus he saw that relative valuations of goods depends on ‘degrees of estimation in the mind of the valuer’. But since he did not discover the marginal concept, he could not fully solve the value paradox. In fact, he did far less well at solving it than his continental predecessors. And so Say simply dismissed use-value and the value paradox altogether, and decided to concentrate on exchange-value….

But whereas Say simply discarded use-value, Ricardo made the value paradox and the unfortunate split between use- and exchange-value the key to his value theory. For Ricardo, iron was worth less than gold because the labour cost of digging and producing gold was greater than the labour cost of producing iron. Ricardo admitted that utility ‘is certainly the foundation of value’, but this was apparently of only remote interest, since the ‘degree of utility’ can never be the measure by which to estimate its value. All too true, but Ricardo failed to see the absurdity of looking for such a measure in the first place. His second absurdity, as we shall see further below, was in thinking that labour cost provided such a ‘true’ and invariable measure of value. As Say wrote in his annotations on the French translation of Ricardo’s Principles, ‘an invariable measure of value is a pure chimera’.

Smith, and still more Ricardo, were pushed into their labour cost theory by concentrating on the long-run ‘natural’ price of products. Say’s analysis was aided greatly by his realistic concentration on the explanation of real market price.

– Murry Rothbard, An Austrian Perspective on the History of Economic Thought, 1.5 Utility, productivity and distribution

Not only does Asher not understand what subjective value is, he then compounds his error by leaping to an erroneous conclusion on the basis of his false understanding.  Subjective value severs any possible connection between price and justice; it specifically denies even the possibility that there is necessarily any connection between the exchange value of a particular object to two parties at one point in time and the value of that same object to those two parties at a different point in time, much less any significance to any one else of either of those two different exchange values.

Nor is subjective value theory new.  Rothbard traces it back to Democritus, a contemporary of Socrates, of whom he writes: “Democritus contributed two important strands of thought to the development of economics. First, he was the founder of subjective value theory. Moral values, ethics, were absolute, Democritus taught, but economic values were necessarily subjective. ‘The same thing’, Democritus writes, may be ‘good and true for all men, but the pleasant differs from one and another’.”

Rothbard also noted that Saint Augustine grasped the essence of subjective value: “Augustine’s economic views were scattered throughout The City of God and his other highly influential writings. But he definitely, and presumably independently of Aristotle, arrived at the view that people’s payments for goods, the valuation they placed on them, was determined by their own needs rather than by any more objective criterion or by their rank in the order of nature. This was at least the basis of the later Austrian theory of subjective value.”

There is, there can be, no such thing as a “just price” under subjective value theory because the value placed upon an object by an individual, which is used to establish the price, is both unique and dynamic.  This is in direct contradiction to the objective value concept that has dominated economics ever since Adam Smith revived the ancient value paradox by confusing exchange value with use value.