Author: VD

Digital Cowboy has been kind enough to set up a website hosting, among other things, the Canon of Answers Vox Explained, at voxday.net. The site is open for perusal, but not for business as I have yet to order the books from the publisher. There is still some work to be done, (the CAVE isn’t numbered, I haven’t written a bio, etc), but DC has done yeoman’s work in constructing a complete and searchable column archive, and the two MP3s from the Northern Alliance Radio Show can be found there as well.

Finally, the much-requested Powerpoint slides for alphabet and phonics instruction are also available for download. So, check it out if you are so inclined.

I recently coached a team of little kids in a big soccer tournament. I’ve been the assistant coach for three summers, and we’ve been consistently terrible. This year, I was the head coach and I made a few changes, most of which consisted of teaching the more skilled kids a few basic tactics as well as the concept of positioning.

It paid off rather nicely, as for the first time we managed to knock off the always-dominant heavyweights, the children’s adjunct of a professional team. Since they beat us 12-0 last year, they were shocked to get knocked off 4-2 in the first group game. We went undefeated the rest of the way, and had to meet them again in the finals. They were even more surprised when our best scorer didn’t drive straight towards the goal when he had the ball in the open, but instead lured the goalie and two defenders towards him then slipped a pass across the middle for an easy goal by one of his teammates. It was the game’s only goal.

For me, the best part was seeing the happiness in one little boy’s face, whose father – a divorced European professional player – had flown in to see him play. The boy doesn’t see his father very often, so I named him captain for the tournament and started him although he’s usually a substitute. He really put on a show in return, scoring a lovely goal in the first game, crossing the ball for a headed goal in the semifinals, and getting the team out of trouble in front of our own goal with an incredible step-on-the-ball-and-spin move that somehow evaded two opposing players in the finals. He is eight years old.

When the whistle blew, you would have thought from the kids’ reaction that we won the Super Bowl, the World Cup and the NBA Finals combined. I have no patience for those parents who attempt to live their lives vicariously through their children, but there is something to be said for being reminded, even for a brief shining moment, of a time when small and simple things could fill our hearts with such utter joy.

In the morass of Eleanor Clift’s ramblings, an interesting quote appeared:A Republican on the Senate side predicted that the debate here at home would take a nastier turn as a backlash builds among the right. “The right is red hot in going after the traitors among us who are weakening our resolve to win the war.”

I have little but contempt for the “weakening resolve” argument. When a nation’s interests are clear and its survival is on the line, there is no question of resolve. It is only when the nation’s leadership decides to force a questionable war with largely abstract justifications that this becomes a potential issue.

Consider, for a moment, the half-hearted way war was waged in Vietnam, Somalia, and to a certain extent, in the Iraqi Occupation. The lack of resolve started at the top, and from the beginning. This is not the way that WWII was won, when whatever needed to be done and many things that didn’t were performed without hesitation or delay. To blame those who notice the increasingly bad performance of the administration and comment on it for a lack of resolve that has been apparent from the first evasion of the truth of the enemy is ridiculous.

This is not to say that some of the administration’s opponents are not anti-American traitors. But there’s certainly an element of the pot calling the kettle black, too, as no administration hoping to hand over sovereignty of anything to the United Nations can be considered fully innocent of anti-American treason itself.

In any event, there was probably more resolve among Americans for attacking Saudi Arabia or Iran after September 11th than there was for attacking Iraq. Iraq had a few ties to terrorism, but nowhere nearly as many as the two exporters of global jihad. Anyone who wants to point fingers at weakening resolve has no better target than the White House.

Bob Novak writes: During George W. Bush’s keynote address to the 40th anniversary black-tie banquet of the American Conservative Union (ACU) last week, diners rose repeatedly to applaud the president’s remarks. But one man kept his seat through the 40-minute oration. It was no liberal interloper but conservative stalwart Donald Devine. As ACU vice chairman, Devine was privileged to be part of a pre-dinner head-table reception with President Bush. However, Devine chose not to shake hands with the president. Furthermore, he is one of about 20 percent of Republicans that polls classify as not committed to voting for Bush’s re-election.

The conventional wisdom portrays the latest Zogby Poll’s 81 percent of Republican voters committed to Bush as reflecting extraordinary loyalty to the president by the GOP base. Actually, when nearly one out of five Republicans cannot flatly say they support Bush, that could spell defeat in a closely contested election. When Don Devine is among those one out of five, it signifies that the president’s record does not please all conservatives.

Actually, I think 19 percent not being committed to a sitting President is shockingly high. That’s NOT including people like me, who left the Republican party because of its lack of commitment to its professed ideals. But Novak is right to point out what may be the president’s political salvation – Kerry may be even less popular among Democrats. There’s nothing quite so timely as a self-destructing opponent on a day when you aren’t on your A game.

Marcotti writes on SI:BAD WEEK: For Real Madrid, which lost its fourth straight game. It’s the first time in the club’s history that this has happened. So much for the Galacticos, the Zidanes y Pavones and the rest of the smoke chairman Florentino Perez tried to sell. Many, including yours truly, predicted it would all ends in tears. And it did.

It never ceases to amaze me that coaches and managers in every team sport manage to forget that a team is more than a collection of individuals. My high school soccer team had only about two-thirds the talent that my younger brothers’ team had – they had two 30-goal scorers, I think our leading scorer racked up about 12 – but we finished third in state while they were upset in the second round of regionals.

I was so disappointed for my brothers, who were crushed, but unsurprised. The team plays against its alumni every year, and while my team had simply abused the alumni, theirs didn’t take the game seriously and lost 3-1. It’s a bad sign when a team doesn’t mind losing, especially games they should win. I’ll take eleven players with mediocre talent who hate to lose over a squad of Galactic Superstars who think they deserve to win just by showing up every single time.

It’s just so fitting that once it became clear they couldn’t win La Liga or the Champions League, the Real Galacticos would give up and finish the season by embarrassing their historic club.

As some of you know, I write a bit of fiction as well as the occasional column. And as Nate has already gleaned, the CAVE is close to opening for perusal, not that there’s a whole lot there now. Anyhow, as some people have expressed an interest in my novels, I wanted to find out how many people think they might be interested in acquiring said books before ordering a box from the publisher. There’s three in all, one sci-fi, two fantasy. I’m not asking for a firm commitment, just trying to estimate if I need ten or one hundred.

Unfortunately, it won’t be possible to sign them since they won’t ever pass through my hands. Of course, if you’d ever seen the painful, quasi-legible scribble that passes for my signature, you wouldn’t think it was much of a loss.

I am frequently asked why I am so utterly dismissive of socialist economics. The reason is that its foremost variant – Marxian socialism – is constructed upon a foundation that is completely out of date. This foundation is the Labor Theory of Value, presented by Marx and Engels in Das Kapital.

The question of value is one of the most important in economics, as it lies at the heart of all supply and demand. The value inherent in a given object was, in the nineteenth century, generally considered to consist of its cost. This cost was comprised of the capital that had gone into the means of production plus the labor required to put the object together. This seemed fairly obvious, as something that demanded a great deal of material and a lot of labor, such as a palace, was of much greater cost, and presumably, value, than something that required little capital and little labor, such as a loaf of bread.

Marx’s clever sleight-of-mind was to posit that capital was nothing more than what had previously been skimmed off underpaid workers. If a baker underpaid his employees, then used that “surplus value” to buy a new oven, what looked like capital was really labor. Therefore, if value was capital + labor, and all capital was expropriated labor, value was labor. Or, to put it another way, value is abstract labor time.

Now, the flaw in this is immediately obvious. Value is not objective. A glass of water is essentially worthless to a man who lives by a lake, but is more precious than diamonds to man dying of thirst in the desert. Furthermore, it is quite clear that labor cannot be used as a viable means of determining value even when one examines a product that is nothing but pure labor. Is a musical work on which a team of five musicians have labored for two years of inherently more value than a little piece that a single man dashed off in an hour? By the labor theory of value, the answer is yes. Few who have listened to Mozart or Bach would agree.

The labor theory looks particularly outdated in the information age. When digital bits are worth more than physical objects, when robots are constructing billions of dollars worth of automobiles, it becomes hard to imagine that all that value is being expropriated from the mass of clerical workers who are doing little but moving information from one place to another. Either we are all expropriating the value of those few Atlasas who are still engaged in what Marx would recognize as labor, or the theory is absurd.

The reason that socialists cling, however unknowingly, to the labor theory, is that accepting any notion of subjective value is tantamount to utterly destroying the entire basis for distributionism – a philosophy of which socialism is only a subset. Mises explicated the impossibility of socialist calcluation* in 1920, predicting the very shortages of goods and services that have been seen in every historical socialist society**. Central planners face a tremendous challenge in simply replacing known capitalist market mechanisms, but adding to that the concept of capricious value determinations on every single product by every single actor makes the task utterly impossible, since there is no way of knowing these independent valuations, much less taking them into account.

Furthermore, if the laborers are not having their surplus value expropriated by the capitalists, there is no need to expropriate from the expropriators, and no need for a vanguard to establish a more equitable system of distribution.

A few years after graduating from college with a degree in economics, I called my old history professor and asked him how my old Marxian professors were handling the increasingly obvious fact that the labor theory of value had no relevance to modern economics. “They’re in denial”, he said, chuckling. Then he added “But really, what choice do they have?”

*”The paradox of “planning” is that it cannot plan, because of the absence of economic calculation. What is called a planned economy is no economy at all. It is just a system of groping about in the dark. There is no question of a rational choice of means for the best possible attainment of the ultimate ends sought. What is called conscious planning is precisely the elimination of conscious purposive action.” – Von Mises, HUMAN ACTION

**”Not one of the 170 essential sectors has fulfilled the objectives of the Plan a single time over the last 20 years … this has brought about a chain reaction of hardship and imbalance which has led to ‘planned anarchy'” – Pravda, May 1988

Elsewhere in Massachusetts, a newborn baby recently was left on the doorstep of a Catholic church in Boston. The priest took in the baby girl, and immediately thought of a childless married couple in the church who were desperate to adopt. But when the priest called the social-services agency, the baby was shipped off to two homosexual men in the western part of the state. By design, this girl will never know a mother’s love.

I blame the priest. This demonstrates precisely the problem of a crippled mentality conditioned to turn to the state for help. He had the baby, he knew the couple, so, naturally, he called social services. Stupid. It’s like when you have ten dollars in your pocket, you see someone in need holding out his hand, and you proudly remind yourself that you’ve paid your taxes so you’ve done your part.

Never, ever expect the government to do the right thing. It occasionally may, but the odds aren’t high. If something needs doing, do it yourself. Let the bureaucrats pick up the pieces and clean up the mess later, that’s all they’re capable of anyhow.

I suspect that most of you did not get the chance to hear either of my two appearances on the Northern Alliance Radio show. I’ve just received both MP3s, courtesy of 1280 Patriot, and should have them available for everyone by the weekend, along with a few other things that have been requested in the past. Just in case anyone’s interested.

As a part of their annual fund drive – which always seems a little strange coming from a conservative organization, I might add – NRO is going to be auctioning off one of the superflous letters from Ramesh Ponnuru’s last name. As I am a fan of NRO, I’m thinking of bidding on it.

I’m trying to decide on which letter I want. Voxu Day or Vox Nday. I think I’m leaning towards the latter.

“How do you pronounce that?”

“The three is silent.”

“Oh, ah.”