Author: VD

Mailvox: economics and immigration

LR asks about low interest rates:

So this may be a dumb question, but I was reading an article that was talking about the returns bank were receiving on home loans (5-6%) and the returns that savers were receiving on their savings accounts (practically nothing) and how elderly people that had previously been able to live off of Social Security and the interest from their savings were now having to spend their principal. My question is why don’t people take their savings out of the banks so that the banks then have to compete for their business by offering decent interest rates? If enough people did this, could it force the banks to operate differently?

Because people primarily use banks as a place to store their money. They aren’t going to take the risk of stuffing their cash under a mattress and only one in a thousand Americans utilizes precious metals as a store of value, so the Fed has realized that it can crush depositors with impunity without having to worry about mass withdrawals. In other words, what you’re describing is theoretically possible but realistically implausible. If people aren’t withdrawing their money because two percent of the banks are failing every year, they’re not going to withdraw it over zero interest either.

MB wants to know if a Republican sweep in November can stave off economic contraction:

I’m hearing from a few pundits that if the Republicans take the House (at least) the stock market will pick up because business will trust that no more insane bills will pass for two years or more. They’ll “trust” that govt won’t make things worse. If the equities market does swing up, when will this Depression hit home if the day of reckoning keeps getting postponed?

There might be a very short term bump, but the reality is that the central problem with the economy isn’t the Obama administration, the health care act, or the business community’s inability to calculate future employment and regulatory costs. The central problem is the massive amount of debt that is crippling the private sector and no amount of change in the political makeup of Congress is going to change that. Furthermore, there is absolutely no reason to expect that the Republicans aren’t going to do pretty much the same thing that they did before and resolutely defend the interests of Wall Street and the Federal Reserve against the futile fury of the electorate.

MM asks about different waves of immigration:

I would like to first say that though this is my first time to write you, I enjoy reading your blog, and I do so regularly. Second, I would like to ask you a question regarding immigration, I have been reading your posts on that subject, and would like to get a clearer picture of your opinion on the subject (or maybe of the US history as well).

Here is my question: I would like to understand how you differentiate what happened during the 16th and 17th centuries (even the US as a nation was founded by early settlers from other countries or at least their children) from the immigration which is recently happening in the US? If you can label the latter as detrimental do you consider the former to have been so as well?

Again, you mentioned in a previous post that there were 3.3 million more people in the US every year during the period (1997-2010). Do you think that this is necessarily a bad thing to the US nation? What if the 3.3 million were not mostly Mexicans, Somalis and people from the third world, but rather wealthy and skilled western Europeans, would that be okay?

The main differentiation between the various waves of immigration was ethno-cultural. The English and Dutch immigrants were very different from the later Irish, German, and Scandinavian immigrants. They, in turn, were very different from the later Asian, African, and South Central American immigrants. The significance of these ethno-cultural differences is much greater than most people can imagine, let alone understand.

For example, the present American public school system would not exist were it not for the heavy German influence, hence the term “kindergarten”. Having grown up in Minnesota, I can testify the reason the upper Midwest is so inclined to the left is due to the German/Scandinavian heritage of the immigrants who settled there; this is the reason that the University of Wisconsin, Madison is more socialist than the erstwhile Patrice Lumumba University and why Democrats in Minnesota are more properly known as the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party.

So, I don’t regard the formative Anglo-Dutch immigration to have been harmful; that was the America of the Constitution, after all. The German/Irish/Scandinavian immigration transformed the Constitutional Republic into a Progressive Democratic Empire and laid the groundwork for the present Third World immigration that will convert the Democratic Empire into an Authoritarian Oligarchy. I consider that to be detrimental, but those who prefer authoritarian oligarchs will obviously feel otherwise.

In answer to the last question, one percent new immigrants every year is simply too much for any nation that is even nominally democratic. If you consider that the average presidential vote margin is around 3.5 percent, such an immigration rate means that new immigrants can theoretically control national elections within a single electoral cycle. Immigration and democracy are simply not compatible and I am confident this will soon become eminently apparent as the recent wave of immigrants transform the areas they settle into plausible replications of the lands from whence they came.

Hearts and minds

At least they’re not burning Korans. Because, you know, that might upset someone a lot more than merely slaughtering innocent civilians:

A dozen U.S. soldiers are facing trial accused of being part of a ‘kill team’ that allegedly killed Afghan civilians in an arbitrary fashion – and they even collected their victims fingers as trophies of war. Five soldiers have been charged with killing three Afghan men ‘for sport’. And seven more are accused of covering up the murders.

I’m a little surprised the federal appeals court that legalized torture the other day hasn’t weighed in to declare that it is illegal for federal employees to be put on trial for murder on national security grounds. By the way, that decision was even worse than you probably thought, as it barred torture victims the chance to prove that they were tortured even if they only presented evidence that was not classified information.

The amoral essence of atheism

You can lead an atheist to logic, but on the evidence of this professor of philosophy, it’s going to take him at least a decade to follow it:

In a word, this philosopher has long been laboring under an unexamined assumption, namely, that there is such a thing as right and wrong. I now believe there isn’t.

How I arrived at this conclusion is the subject of a book I have written during this recent period (tentatively titled Bad Faith: A Personal Memoir on Atheism, Amorality, and Animals). The long and the short of it is that I became convinced that atheism implies amorality; and since I am an atheist, I must therefore embrace amorality. I call the premise of this argument ‘hard atheism’ because it is analogous to a thesis in philosophy known as ‘hard determinism.’ The latter holds that if metaphysical determinism is true, then there is no such thing as free will. Thus, a ‘soft determinist’ believes that, even if your reading of this column right now has followed by causal necessity from the Big Bang fourteen billion years ago, you can still meaningfully be said to have freely chosen to read it. Analogously, a ‘soft atheist’ would hold that one could be an atheist and still believe in morality. And indeed, the whole crop of ‘New Atheists’ (see Issue 78) are softies of this kind. So was I, until I experienced my shocking epiphany that the religious fundamentalists are correct: without God, there is no morality. But they are incorrect, I still believe, about there being a God. Hence, I believe, there is no morality.

Why do I now accept hard atheism? I was struck by salient parallels between religion and morality, especially that both avail themselves of imperatives or commands, which are intended to apply universally. In the case of religion, and most obviously theism, these commands emanate from a Commander; “and this all people call God,” as Aquinas might have put it. The problem with theism is of course the shaky grounds for believing in God. But the problem with morality, I now maintain, is that it is in even worse shape than religion in this regard; for if there were a God, His issuing commands would make some kind of sense. But if there is no God, as of course atheists assert, then what sense could be made of there being commands of this sort? In sum, while theists take the obvious existence of moral commands to be a kind of proof of the existence of a Commander, i.e., God, I now take the non-existence of a Commander as a kind of proof that there are no Commands, i.e., morality.

Now that Marc “Moral Minds” Hauser has been exposed as a scientific fraud and Sam Harris has spiraled off into weird neuro-Buddhist utilitarian psychophilosophy, it is well past time for atheists to stop avoiding the rational consequences of their godless belief systems and admit what was always obvious to everyone from the start. As I have repeatedly explained to the sort of maleducated overestimator of his own intelligence that actually believes that there is a genuine dilemma to be found in Euthyphro, the essence of morality is, and has always been, God’s Game, God’s Rules. Therefore, no God = no Rules. It takes some serious education to sufficiently confuse an otherwise intelligent individual to the point that it takes him more than a decade to recognize this basic and patently obvious logic.

Hard Atheism isn’t a bad name for the concept, but there is already a more accurate one. It’s called Rational Atheism.

The madness of the monetarists

Citi’s chief economist takes the concept of financial insanity to new heights:

To restore monetary policy effectiveness in a low interest rate environment when confronted with deflationary or contractionary shocks, it is necessary to get rid of the zlb completely. This can be done in three ways: abolishing currency, taxing currency and ending the fixed exchange rate between currency and bank reserves with the Fed. All three are unorthodox. The third is unorthodox and innovative. All three are conceptually simple. The first and third are administratively easy to implement.

The first method does away with currency completely. This has the additional benefit of inconveniencing the main users of currency—operators in the grey, black and outright criminal economies. Adequate substitutes for the legitimate uses of currency, on which positive or negative interest could be paid, are available.

The second approach, proposed by Gesell, is to tax currency by making it subject to an expiration date. Currency would have to be “stamped” periodically by the Fed to keep it current. When done so, interest (positive or negative) is received or paid.

The third method ends the fixed exchange rate (set at one) between dollar deposits with the Fed (reserves) and dollar bills. There could be a currency reform first. All existing dollar bills and coin would be converted by a certain date and at a fixed exchange rate into a new currency called, say, the rallod. Reserves at the Fed would continue to be denominated in dollars. As long as the Federal Funds target rate is positive or zero, the Fed would maintain the fixed exchange rate between the dollar and the rallod.

This helps explain why gold prices have remained so strong despite declining debt and the deflationary environment. The one scenario that makes sense for the price of gold to continue to rise despite deflation (an increase in the value of money due to a decrease in the available supply of it) is if the “store of value” aspect of that money is increasingly under threat. Gold prices rising during deflation indicates that the increasing value of gold as denominated in non-gold goods and services is rising faster than the increasing value of money is rising against them, which is basically what we have been observing for the last two years.

All three of these Citi-endorsed suggestions go significantly beyond the Helicopter Ben’s conventional Keynesian lunacy. It wouldn’t only destroy the global economy, but as Mike Shedlock points out, it wouldn’t even accomplish the increase in credit that the banks are attempting to create in the first place. Implementing any of these three measures, but especially the first, would be rather like burning down the house to collect on fire insurance when you haven’t bothered with the minor step of taking out an insurance policy on the place first.

So this proposal to abolish currency should eliminate any last vestiges of doubt that the banks are a) insane with greed, b) incompetent, and c) totally uninterested in the well-being of the rest of the country. It seems increasingly obvious that abolishing the banking industry would be a much better idea.

Are you ready for some football?

The Vikes will win tonight. The reason is simple. The Vikings reliably beat the team that most recently dealt them a big loss. All Vikings fans know this. In fact, the very first NFL football game I ever attended was a Monday Night Football game in which the Vikings beat the Steelers 17-6 at the old Met stadium. This was, of course, two seasons after the Vikes lost to the Steelers 16-6 in Super Bowl IX.

Minnesota was, and probably is, a better team than the defending champions. (Winning the Super Bowl makes a team the league champion, it does not somehow prove it to be the best team in the league.) The fact that the Vikings took the Saints to overtime despite losing five turnovers as a visiting team is a strong indication that they could have, and probably should have, won last year’s NFC Championship. But they didn’t, and it was not exactly the first time they lost a big game they really should have won. Either way, it’s only Week One, so don’t get too excited or too depressed regardless of how the game turns out.

I’m just glad it’s football time again.

Torture is illegal

But only if it isn’t secret:

A federal appeals court on Wednesday ruled that former prisoners of the C.I.A. could not sue over their alleged torture in overseas prisons because such a lawsuit might expose secret government information. The sharply divided ruling was a major victory for the Obama administration’s efforts to advance a sweeping view of executive secrecy powers. It strengthens the White House’s hand as it has pushed an array of assertive counterterrorism policies, while raising an opportunity for the Supreme Court to rule for the first time in decades on the scope of the president’s power to restrict litigation that could reveal state secrets.

If you don’t understand that the US has completely abandoned even the pretense of the rule of law by now, you’re probably not going to recognize it until either guillotines and/or pyres have been set up on the Mall or you find yourself in a detention camp. This is a truly remarkable and totalitarian decision by the federal court. It has declared that the mere possibility of exposing secret government information to the electorate – in a nominal democracy – trumps all of the unalienable rights endowed by the Creator and delineated in the Constitution.

It was a terrible mistake for the Supreme Court to create the abominable “state-secrets privilege” 50 years ago; this assertion of a privilege to secretly torture and assassinate is merely the inevitable consequence of expanding the central state’s power to conceal its actions from the citizenry.

The anti-book burners

One guess as to my opinion about Terry Jones’s announcement that he intended to burn a Talmud and a Koran on September 11th. Here’s the hint… I’m a libertarian.

I didn’t get outraged by Mr. Myers assaulting a communion cracker or trashcanning a Koran and I’m certainly not bothered by Mr. Jones burning whatever book he wants to burn so long as he happens to own it. What is far more troublesome is the reaction of so many public figures, mainstream and conservative alike, as they fall all over each other to condemn a man exercising his Constitutionally-protected free speech rights. It is obvious that they are far more afraid of provoking the wrath of foreign Muslims than they are of provoking the wrath of the decadent American citizenry.

Needless to say, the anti-book burners won’t decry the Afghans burning American flags and chanting “Death to Christians” in response to the mere suggestion that someone intends to burn a Koran. They are no defenders of freedom or respect for religion, they are already subservient dhimmis.

A futile CYA attempt

It appears that those of us who have been pointing out that Krugman advocated a $600 billion stimulus only two months before claiming a $787 billion stimulus was too small have finally force the man to address the issue. Unsurprisingly, he does so both dishonestly and incompetently:

Oy, it seems that another out-of-context quote of mine is being used to claim that I thought the Obama stimulus plan was just dandy. So: back in 2008, I wrote this piece in which I called for stimulus of 4 percent of GDP, or $600 billion. Didn’t we get that, and more?

No. If you read the actual argument — which explains in detail how I arrived at the number — you’ll see that I was thinking in terms of a one-year program; $600 billion is 4 percent of one year’s GDP. I wasn’t clear about the issue of stimulus spread out over 2 years; but if you apply the math in that post, you’ll see that it implies a two-year program twice that size, which was just about what Christina Romer concluded was appropriate.

There is one little problem here, which should be obvious to everyone. Krugman never said anything about a multi-year stimulus package. The fact that the $787 billion stimulus package covered two years has no bearing on the length of the $600 billion stimulus he was advocating. He can no more claim to have advocated a $1.2 trillion stimulus package over two years than a $6 trillion stimulus package over ten.

Furthermore, as one of his commenters pointed out, he used the specific $600 billion figure – indicating a one year stimulus – only four days later: “All indications are that the new administration will offer a major stimulus package. My own back-of-the-envelope calculations say that the package should be huge, on the order of $600 billion. So the question becomes, will the Obama people dare to propose something on that scale? Let’s hope that the answer to that question is yes, that the new administration will indeed be that daring.”

He was wrong, he was busted and no amount of equivocation on his part can demonstrate otherwise.

Take a look around

What we have here in this prediction of evangelical collapse is a very typically American failure to look beyond the cultural borders while attempting to contemplate global trends:

We are on the verge – within 10 years – of a major collapse of evangelical Christianity. This breakdown will follow the deterioration of the mainline Protestant world and it will fundamentally alter the religious and cultural environment in the West. Within two generations, evangelicalism will be a house deserted of half its occupants. (Between 25 and 35 percent of Americans today are Evangelicals.) In the “Protestant” 20th century, Evangelicals flourished. But they will soon be living in a very secular and religiously antagonistic 21st century.

This collapse will herald the arrival of an anti-Christian chapter of the post-Christian West. Intolerance of Christianity will rise to levels many of us have not believed possible in our lifetimes, and public policy will become hostile toward evangelical Christianity, seeing it as the opponent of the common good.

If the full extent of your cultural awareness is limited to Europe and the United States, as is the case with the New Atheist and most American Christians alike, this perspective makes an amount of sense as long as you ignore the demographic trends. But once you take into account the explosive growth of Christianity in Africa and Asia, the thesis falls apart.

From NPR, of all places: In The land Of Mao, A Rising Tide Of Christianity

Official Chinese surveys now show that nearly one in three Chinese describe themselves as religious, an astonishing figure for an officially atheist country, where religion was banned until three decades ago. The last 30 years of economic reform have seen an explosion of religious belief. China’s government officially recognizes five religions: Protestantism, Catholicism, Buddhism, Islam and Daoism. The biggest boom of all has been in Christianity, which the government has struggled to control….

Some recent surveys have calculated there could be as many as 100 million Chinese Protestants. That would mean that China has more Christians than Communist Party members, which now number 75 million.

I have no doubt that the increasingly “liberal” evangelical church will follow the lead of the old mainline denominations and decline into numerical irrelevance. Once cut off from the nurturing root of the Word of God, Christian churches always die. There are a number of signs, but easily the most reliable one is the establishment of women in the pulpit. An illuminating exercise is to count the number of “I” references in a female “sermon” versus a male one. I can recall one particularly egregious example at Woodland Hills where I finally gave up and stopped counting as the narcissistic monologue was more about this woman and her feelings than the average psychotherapy session.

Because the US government has been fairly successful in bringing the American church to heel through its establishment of federal licenses, it is interesting to note that while China is attempting to utilize the same tactic, the Chinese Christians are familiar enough with the costs of centralization to resist the state’s attempt to control them.

America is following Europe into a secular post-Christian period. But can be seen in Europe, secular post-Christianity is not sustainable and rapidly leads towards rampant paganism. And, as has been repeatedly demonstrated throughout history, paganism is easily trumped by Christianity. It is an observable historical cycle. Unfortunately, History’s cycles are rinsed with blood.

It took them long enough

From the Onion:

At 4:32 p.m. Tuesday, every single resident of New York City decided to evacuate the famed metropolis, having realized it was nothing more than a massive, trash-ridden hellhole that slowly sucks the life out of every one of its inhabitants.

With audible murmurs of “This is no way to live,” “What the hell am I doing here—I hate it here,” and “Fuck this place. Fuck this horrible place,” all 8.4 million citizens in each of the five boroughs packed up their belongings and told reporters they would rather blow their brains out with a shotgun than spend another waking moment in this festering cesspool of filth and scum and sadness.

The fact that one of the chief accomplishments of science and technology is to permit people to live in their own filth like factory chickens without dying like flies should tell you all that you need to know about city life. And spare me the blather about the wonderful museums and so forth. No one actually goes there.

Consider: the Metropolitan Museum of Art is the top ranked museum in the country. It has all of 4.9 million visitors per year. If we assume that absolutely none of those visitors were tourists who don’t live in New York City, that means that the average New Yorker visits the museum 0.58 times per year.

Don’t get me wrong, being a libertarian I fully support the right of moronic urbanophiles to live in ludicrously over-priced and over-regulated squalor. I simply don’t find it sophisticated, enviable, or even fathomable.