Author: VD

The diversity dilemma

Thomas Friedman can be a clueless buffoon at times, but the one thing he does know about is the Middle East.  What I find fascinating about his nightmare scenario is the way it shows how left-liberals who clearly recognize the structural problems in other countries can nevertheless turn around and advocate the continuing construction of the same sort of problems in the United States:

Ever since the start of the Syrian uprising/civil war, I’ve cautioned
that while Libya, Egypt, Yemen, Bahrain and Tunisia implode, Syria would
explode if a political resolution was not found quickly. That is exactly what’s happening.  The reason Syria explodes is because its borders are particularly
artificial, and all its communities — Sunnis, Shiites, Alawites, Kurds,
Druze and Christians — are linked to brethren in nearby countries and
are trying to draw them in for help.

 That’s an astute observation, Tom.  Now, guess what’s going to happen when the various communities inside the United States, the Mexicans, the Colombians, the Muslims, the Chinese, and the Jews, can’t make any more headway in collecting resources from the central government and start battling it out amongst themselves as is already taking place in places like south central LA, which the Aztecs have 65 percent ethnically cleansed already.

Now, why isn’t all that diversity making Syria stronger?

Bitchslapping the anklebiter

Tad tees himself up:

@Vox Day “They can’t assert that debt doesn’t matter at all anymore…”

No, they can’t assert this. But, then they never did.  Burn that straw man down!!! 

It’s hard for me to clearly communicate how much I despise anklebiting little bitches like Tad.  They’re as stupid as they are ignorant, and yet they somehow manage to act smug whenever they are “correcting” their intellectual superiors.  The fact that such a cretin is willing to publicly assert I am attacking a straw man when I am doing nothing more than citing literally TEXTBOOK mainstream economics would alone be enough to make me reject democracy.  Three points:

1)  Debt isn’t even listed in the extensive 13-page index of the most important textbook in economic history, Paul Samuelson’s Economics.  622 pages and Samuelson devotes all of a paragraph to it, mostly to explain why it’s irrelevant.

2)  In his latest book, Paul Krugman openly argues that debt is irrelevant for any nation with a central bank that borrows in its own currency because it cannot default, and since the nation cannot default, it can eventually grow its way out of debt through a combination of time, GDP expansion, and inflation.  He writes: “Governments depend on being able to roll over most of this debt, in effect selling new bonds to pay off old ones. If for some reason investors should refuse to buy new bonds, even a basically solvent government could be forced into default.  Could this happen to the United States? Actually, no—because the Federal Reserve could and would step in and buy federal debt, in effect printing money to pay the government’s bills. Nor could it happen to Britain, or Japan, or any country that borrows in its own currency and has its own central bank.”

3)  In his landmark Neo-Keynesian textbook, Paul Samuelson expressly pointed out that domestic debt did not matter in the aggregate.  He wrote: “The interest on an internal debt is paid by Americans to Americans; there is no direct loss of goods and services. When interest on the debt is paid out of taxation, there is no direct loss of disposable income; Paul receives what Peter loses, and sometimes – but only sometimes – Paul and Peter are one and the same person…. In the future, some of our grandchildren will be giving up goods and services to other grandchildren. That is the nub of the matter. The only way we can impose a direct burden on the future nation as a whole is by incurring an external debt or by passing along less capital equipment to posterity.”

So, the Neo-Keynesians have ALWAYS argued that debt doesn’t matter in the aggregate so long as it is internal.  This is a fundamental aspect of their core view of economics, and this is why they don’t understand bubbles as well as why their solution to economic depression always involves more debt and more spending.

I’ve noticed that as a general rule, if someone uses the phrase “straw man”, they are almost invariably the same sort of mindless yapping idiot that used to make a habit of pointing out “correlation is not causation” and claiming “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence”.  It’s almost as if there is someone programming these morons to say demonstrably ludicrous things and inflicting them upon the public en masse.

UPDATE: Since Tad has somehow managed to conclude that economists explicitly arguing that debt doesn’t matter is evidence that they believe it does, in fact, matter, let’s add a few more Krugman quotes from “the document where this assertion was made by, say, Krugman”, namely, his latest book,  End This Depression Now!  Tad clearly doesn’t understand that the entire point of Krugman’s book is not only to convince readers that debt doesn’t matter, but to convince them that adding massive quantities of government debt to the existing debt is the actual and only solution to the speedy end of the current depression.  Here is Krugman writing in the chapter entitled “But What About the Deficit?”

“Where the harm done by lack of jobs is real and terrible, the harm done by deficits to a nation like America in its current situation is, for the most part, hypothetical….

The key thing to bear in mind is that the $5 trillion or so in debt America has run up since the crisis began, and the trillions more we’ll surely run up before this economic siege is over, won’t have to be paid off quickly, or indeed at all. In fact, it won’t be a tragedy if the debt actually continues to grow, as long as it grows more slowly than the sum of inflation and economic growth….  

Now let’s consider what all this implies for the future burden of the debt we’re building up now. We won’t ever have to pay off the debt; all we’ll have to do is pay enough of the interest on the debt so that the debt grows significantly more slowly than the economy.”

End this depression now!

Paul Krugman has the solution to the economic crisis in his book published earlier this year.  You’ll never guess what it is!

Spend Now, Pay Later

The basic situation of the U.S. economy remains now what it has been since 2008: the private sector isn’t willing to spend enough to make use of our full productive capacity and, therefore, to employ the millions of Americans who want to work but can’t find jobs. The most direct way to close that gap is for the government to spend where the private sector won’t.
There are three common objections to any such proposal:

1.    Experience shows that fiscal stimulus doesn’t work.
2.    Bigger deficits would undermine confidence.
3.    There aren’t enough good projects to spend on.

I’ve dealt with the first two objections earlier in this book; let me briefly summarize the arguments again, then turn to the third.

As I explained in chapter 7, the Obama stimulus didn’t fail; it simply fell short of what was required to offset the huge private-sector pullback that was already under way before the stimulus kicked in. Continuing high unemployment was not just predictable but predicted.

The real evidence we should be considering here is the rapidly growing body of economic research on the effects of changes in government spending on output and employment—a body of research that relies both on “natural experiments” such as wars and defense buildups and on careful study of the historical record to identify major changes in fiscal policy. The postscript to this book summarizes some of the major contributions to this research. What the work says, clearly and overwhelmingly, is that changes in government spending move output and employment in the same direction: spend more, and both real GDP and employment will rise; spend less, and both real GDP and employment will fall.

What about confidence? As I explained in chapter 8, there’s no reason to believe that even a substantial stimulus would undermine the willingness of investors to buy U.S. bonds. In fact, bond market confidence might even rise on the prospect of faster growth. Meanwhile, both consumer and business confidence would actually rise if policy turned to boosting the real economy.

One would probably have to read this book to believe the astonishing simplicity of his Neo-Keynesian approach.  I could have written it in in a single page.  Actually, I could have written in in a single sentence: More public debt and more government spending is the solution to this economic depression because government spending is capable of creating the jobs necessary to produce economic growth, while the resulting public debt is not a problem because any country with its own central bank can issue an infinite amount of it without any long-term costs.

I think what we are seeing here is the beginning of the death throes of Neo-Keynesian economics.  They can’t assert that debt doesn’t matter at all anymore, since the conventional Samuelsonian argument was blown away by the growth of foreign debt and the financial crisis of 2008, so now Krugman and company have shifted to arguing that a certain and specific type of debt can be amassed infinitely.  Time will soon prove this move of the goalposts to be false as well.

There is a lot to question in Krugman’s book and I will be addressing those questions over the next few weeks as I have 16 sections bookmarked.  But this is the essential summary.

String theories in trouble

As supersymmetry looks as if it’s going down:

Researchers at the Large Hadron Collider have detected one of the rarest particle decays seen in Nature.  The finding deals a significant blow to the theory of physics known as supersymmetry.  Many researchers had hoped the LHC would have confirmed this by now.  Supersymmetry, or SUSY, has gained popularity as a way to
explain some of the inconsistencies in the traditional theory of
subatomic physics known as the Standard Model.

The new observation, reported at the Hadron Collider Physics
conference in Kyoto, is not consistent with many of the most likely
models of SUSY.

Stickwick can explain this much better than I can, but while string theory would survive the shooting down of the supersymmetry concept, at least for a while, the falsification of three of the seven string theories would seem to reduce the likelihood that it is scientifically viable.

On the other hand, it would be a useful demonstration of the intrinsic bankruptcy of democratic popularity in science.

A fitting tribute

When I was a boy, I used to love spending Saturday afternoons in the fall watching SWC and Pac-8 football on TV.  I liked the tearaway jerseys and the powerful, wide-open running games, which seemed so different than the plodding Big 10, three years and a cloud of dust game that was dominated by Schembechler’s Wolverines and Woody Hayes’s Buckeyes.  For reasons I cannot explain, most likely related to my intense dislike of Arkansas and Oklahoma, I was a Texas fan, and one of my favorite shirts was a white mesh jersey with the orange Texas Longhorn on the front.

While I much prefer NFL football to the NCAA these days, mostly due to the better competitive balance in the pro game, there is still something about seeing the fall colors and the leaves fallen from the trees that makes me hear a horn section and the voices of Brent Musburger and Keith Jackson in my mind.  So, I found this respectful tribute to the late Texas coach, Darrell Royal, by the team he once coached with such success, to be a beautifully fitting one.

I especially liked how the crowd recognized it and began to cheer as soon as the Longhorns lined up in the old, familiar formation.

Decline and fall: the picture

As you look at this graph produced by Steve Sailer, keep in mind that, with a few exceptions, America was founded by married white Protestants of English extraction.  Then recall that there is not a single white Protestant on the Supreme Court and neither party saw fit to nominate one for President. And then recall that demographics is destiny.

Some on the right claim that it would be a mistake to engage in the same racial politics that have created a left-wing majority.  That is like trying to play football without acknowledging the newfangled rule that permits the forward pass.  Racial politics are now the rule, and the only way the right can win is to start playing the game and taking advantage of its numerical advantages while it still can.  The conventional abstract appeals to “freedom” and “America as an ideal” so beloved by conservative Republicans are the political equivalent of “three yards and a cloud of dust”.

WND column

Obama and America’s End

Eight years ago, I wrote a column about “the continued stink of an
extinct republic as it decomposes into dictatorial empire” titled, “You can’t fix a corpse.”
It was readily apparent, even then, that the constitutional nation,
founded upon the revolutionary tradition of the rights of Englishmen,
was already dead. So why does it feel as if something important has
changed as a result of the recent presidential election? Why is there a
sense of significant and lasting change for the worse in the political
wind due to the re-election of Barack Obama?

VPFL 2012 Week 9

81 Bailout Banksters (6-3)
76 Fromundah Cheezheads (7-2)

82 Luna City Gamma Rays (4-5)
75 Moundsview Meerkats (6-3)

84 ’63Mercury Marauders (6-3)
54 Greenfield Grizzlies (4-5)

73 Bane Sidhe (5-4)
71 RR Redbeards (4-5)

65 Suburban Churchians (1-8)
26 D.C. Hangmen (2-7)

Close games this week.  I’m disappointed the mighty Meerkats didn’t take advantage of Fromundah’s two-game losing streak to move into a tie for first, but as the recap had it, “Moundsview Meerkats had 6 of their 9 starters score less than their projected points.”  But in brighter news, the Suburban Churchians blew away the Hangmen to avoid the prospect of being the first winless team in VPFL history.

The poison is the antidote

Or so numerous pundits, a number of whom actually voted for Obama in 2008, would have us believe given their advice to the Republican Party:

It was a crushing defeat.  Despite
an economy as underpowered as a cheap flourescent light, Mitt Romney
somehow failed to unseat Barack Obama.  And now it is time for the
Republicans to rethink their platform in order to attract new voters–or
doom themselves to permanent minority status.

I
think the obvious place to start is with immigration reform.  Increase
the number of visas available.  Explore guest-worker programs.
 Establish a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants who were brought
here as children and have never known any other home.  This not only
gives the GOP a shot at the Latino vote, but also softens their image in
the eyes of the professional class, who might be willing to give the
party another look if it didn’t seem so committed to deporting poorer,
darker skinned people who just want a shot at picking fruit, trimming
lawns, and cleaning houses.

The
GOP would also help itself with those people by embracing gay marriage.
 To be sure, this might cause them some problems with the evangelical
base whose organizing support is crucial to Republican get-out-the-vote
efforts.  But the GOP could assuage that tension by promulgating a
hard-core, Republican version of gay and straight marriage.  That’s why
they should pair it with making marriage mandatory, and eliminating
no-fault divorce.  The message should be that if everyone can get
married, then there’s no really excuse not to be.   Oh, I know, the
divorce changes might cause friction with the kind of Republicans who go
through wives the way other men go through undershirts, but this seems
like a small price to pay for a shot at the 1-3% of the electorate that
is eligible for gay marriage.  

The frightening thing here is that McCardle attempts to portray herself as an economist.  My suggestion is that one never take either political or economic advice from an economist, however tall, who cannot figure out that 20 percent is larger than 2 percent….

Regardless, there is only one viable long-term solution for the Republican Party, indeed, for the survival of constitutional America throughout the current territorial limits of the United States, and that is a repeat of Operation Wetback on a vastly larger scale. Such an action would require the banning of all dual-citizenships, mass deportations on an unprecedented scale, and likely inspire violence of the sort that has not been seen in America since the riots of the 1960s.  And, needless to say, it is clear there is now no chance that it is ever going to happen.

Which is a real pity, because it would actually have been the lesser of the two probable evils.  What is going to happen instead is some sort of civil war following the next major stage in the ongoing economic meltdown.  How big it will be and how it will turn out, I don’t pretend to know.  But it is as easily predictable as the wars in the former Soviet Union, the former Yugoslavia, and the former British empire in India, because war is how diverse groups of people usually negotiate imperial divorce.  The USA has not truly been a single nation since imperial rule was forcibly imposed upon the southern states in 1865, but the difference is that it is no longer possible to plausibly pretend that it is still one any longer.

It’s not a question of hate, race, or religion.  It is the simple historical observation that the Kuomintang will not voluntarily live under the same governance as the Chinese communists.  Pakistanis will not voluntarily live under the same governance as the Indians.  Americans will not voluntarily live under the same governance as Mexicans, Chinese, Indians, or Arabs.  They just will not do it, and to pretend otherwise isn’t so much foolish as insane.

It doesn’t matter what you do.  It doesn’t matter what you think.  Winter is coming.  The only question is whether it will take you by surprise or not.  And there really isn’t much excuse for being surprised when the temperature has been dropping and the leaves have been falling for quite some time now.