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WND column

Free Trade Harms America

One of the more onerous aspects of being a superintelligence is the way in which many critics have a tendency to erroneously assume one is operating at the same level of near ignorance that they are. In response to the inaugural Voxic Shock podcast, in which I interviewed economist Ian Fletcher about his book, “Free Trade Doesn’t Work,” a number of free-trade champions actually attempted to appeal to David Ricardo’s theory of comparative advantage, which utilizes an example of trade between two countries in two products to argue that trade is intrinsically beneficial to a national economy.

I am never sure whether to be more amused or insulted when I am met with a critical response of this kind. Possessing a B.S. in economics, having published a book on economics and the current economic depression and being one of the millions of college-educated Americans who have passed an Econ 101 class, I am, as it happens, familiar with the theory. Furthermore, I have actually read Ricardo’s 1817 book, “On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation,” which contains the theory and what passes for the reasoning behind it. This does not appear to be the case with most of the free-trade enthusiasts who appeal to it.

Note to the column: This column contains the promised empirical evidence that Felix was demanding. On a related note, if you have not yet heard my interview with Ian Fletcher on the subject of international trade, it is on the Voxic Shock #1 podcast. And further to the subject, a critique of Hazlitt’s chapter 11 will be posted tomorrow.

The Warrior Lives: Remembering Rosenberg

I was a fan of Joel Rosenberg’s work long before I ever met him, but I eventually came to admire him more as a man than as an author. I wasn’t a close friend of his, more the friend of a friend, but I did have the good fortune to get to know him over the last 15 years. It was a privilege for an SF/F fan, but more than that, it was a genuine pleasure. Growing up in Minnesota, which at the time felt rather like the cold side of the back of beyond, I had no idea that there were Real Live Writers living there, never being much inclined to read the author bios at the back. Like many a teenage boy in the Eighties, I had dabbled in role-playing games such as AD&D, Gamma World, and Traveller in the Time Before Girls, and so The Guardians of the Flame were a real revelation to me. Rosenberg’s novels were gritty long before grit became fashionable; he made a distinct impression on a young reader by killing off a major character practically at the beginning of the first novel, then went himself one better by killing off the lead character in only the fourth book in the series. I can’t recall being more shocked while reading fiction any time before or since. Karl Cullinane is dead? But… but what about the series?

Continued at The Black Gate

Mailvox: the double whammy

This may be well be my favorite critical email ever received, as KW manages to not only highlight several of my assertions about the more militant atheists, but to underline, italicize, and bold them as well:

I have been reading assorted texts on the internet and I came across a post that you made a long while back entitled “The socially autistic atheist”. I was particularly interested in your articles because I happen to be both an atheist and an aspie.

It seems to me that the purpose of these articles is to use an ad hominem attack against atheists by calling them “socially autistic” or saying that they have “autistic psychopathy”. You never refute or even address the arguments that these “socially autistic atheists” have in regard to religion or god. In essence, I believe that you are just being a giant asshat troll.

In a previous article you wrote this: Here’s an object lesson that perhaps might be capable of penetrating the skulls of even the most autistically psychopathic. (1) Do you dislike being described as a socially autistic asshole? (2) Would you like it any more if that description was scientifically proven to describe you accurately? (3) Would you consider it polite and/or socially acceptable for me to insist on always describing you to others as an autistic psychopath were this proven to be an accurate description of you?

I assume that this was a reaction to certain aspie atheists spreading the idea that belief in god is a delusion, or that people who believe in god are deluded. well to answer your questions:
1. No of course not. I think that an important distinction to make is that it is an attack on WHO I AM rather than an attack on WHAT I BELIEVE.
2. You are asking a question about a hypothetical scientific description where that hypothetical scientific description would not be scientific. It would however be a logical fallacy (an appeal to authority in this case).I’ll go ahead and say no.
3. No, and I would likely react violently to such discrimination.

Whenever an atheist says that god is a delusion, that is not an attack on any person. It is an attack on an idea. Unlike when you call me a “autistic psychopath”, which is very clearly an attack on who I am as a person. There is no moral equivalence for these statements. TL;DR you are a despicable person who resorts to fighting your intellectual opponents with ad hominem attacks.

I would have expected that you would have already been shamed into making an apology about statements such as this. You are not an expert on autism and you should shut your stupid fucking mouth in my opinion.

With disgust and contempt,
[KW]

Naturally, I replied with all the kindness and moderation for which I am so justly known, considering that the poor lad has about the same chance of ever landing a girlfriend that I have of being named the premier of China. Let’s face it, I couldn’t not respond. I mean, how could I possibly resist the irony of being lectured on the niceties of correct social conventions by an atheist… an atheist with Asperger’s.

My dear boy,

I absolutely believe your claim to be both an atheist and an aspie. Only someone so intellectually handicapped would be so spectacularly stupid as to claim “You never refute or even address the arguments that these “socially autistic atheists” have in regard to religion or god.”

The fact that I have written and published an entire book on the subject that does precisely what you claim I have never done would appear to be sufficient to invalidate your assertion. You can even download a powerpoint slideshow that summarizes some of the more commonly heard arguments from the likes of Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris should you be so inclined. So, congratulations. In ten years of writing controversial op/ed columns and being the recipient of the most vehement forms of criticism from the Council on American-Islamic Relations to godless Sciencebloggers, you have managed to write the single most ignorant email I have ever received. You do Asperger proud.

In respect of your handicap, I shall refrain from pointing out the additional errors you have committed in your response to my questions, although I do invite you to contemplate the moral basis for what you claim is a lack of moral equivalence between the various statements.

With no little amusement,
Vox

And now it’s time for the moral of the story. If you happen to suffer from atheism, Asperger’s Syndrome, or autism, the chances are exceedingly high that your ideas concerning what is and what is not socially acceptable behavior are not going to be in accordance with the societal norms of the neurotypical majority. Therefore, your offers to help others better understand proper social etiquette, however kindly intended they might be, are virtually guaranteed to go badly awry.

Mailvox: Beware the bank runs

Item: The unofficial Problem Bank List is now in excess of 1,000 institutions, 1,002 to be precise, with $417.4 billion in claimed assets. Based on the FDIC reports, I estimate that only $255 billion of those assets actually exist.

Item: One of the Dread Ilk writes of his recent experience with his bank. “I went in to my local [bank] yesterday to withdraw 5k. The fellow behind the counter looks at the number on my withdrawal slip… then whispers to the lady at the next teller station, who rolls her eyes and shakes her head, as if withdrawing that much was a horrible trial.

“I only have $1400!” I hear him say.

They both then departed for the back and came back a minute later with some bills.

“I’m sorry,” my intrepid teller says, “We can only manage $4000.”

He then has me re-write my withdrawal slip… and gives me $4000, of which just over half is hundreds. The rest was scraped together from 50s and 20s.

I said “Huh. You guys are in bank-run territory now, aren’t you?”

He looks up, “Uh… I guess.”

Action Item: If you are living in the USA, you may wish to consider keeping a bit more cash on hand than usual.

There is no God particle

I am not exactly surprised to learn that the optimistic rumors out of Switzerland were unwarranted:

The quest for the elusive Higgs boson seemed over in April, when an unexpected result from an atom smasher seemed to herald the discovery of the famous particle — the last unproven piece of the physics puzzle and one of the great mysteries scientists face today. Researchers were cautious, however, warning that it would take months to verify the finding. Their caution was wise.

Scientists with the Tevatron particle accelerator at Chicago’s Fermilab facility just released the results of a months-long effort by the lab’s brightest minds to confirm the finding. What did they find? Nothing. “We do not see the signal,” Dmitri Denisov, staff scientist at Fermilab, told FoxNews.com. “If it existed, we would see it. But when we look at our data, we basically see nothing.”

As a general scientific rule, if you have a reasonable model that doesn’t quite fit the data and are forced to concoct epicycles and hypothetical substances or particles in order to properly align the model with the observable data, you can pretty much count on eventually having to junk the model. This is why I suspect that the Higgs boson will not be found, the reports that dark matter has finally been found will turn out to be false, and the theory of evolution by natural selection will eventually be abandoned in despair.

Of course, as we’ve seen in economics, Max Planck was an optimist. It will take at least two generations of dead scientists before the scientific mainstream will be ready to admit what has been obvious for years to those whose careers don’t depend upon the survival of the model. Look how long it has taken science to discover that it is carbohydrates, not fat, that makes you gain weight, even though anyone can discern those results by simply paying attention to what happens when they vary their diet for a month.

Debt, not equity

Aligning Compensation Incentives in Higher Education: Is Higher Education Debt or Equity?

It’s debt. You can’t sell a degree or use it as collateral. So, it’s debt… or more precisely, it’s a set of wildly overpriced consumer services that is marketed as a product and is usually paid for with a particularly onerous form of debt. So, however you want to describe it, “equity” isn’t a reasonable way to do so. Sweet Black’s, but how I despise lawyers. They are very seldom anywhere nearly as clever as they would like to believe themselves to be.

George Will fails to follow the logic

This is what happens when you mindlessly assume that free trade is intrinsically beneficial in all circumstances:

Since 1974, Trade Adjustment Assistance (TAA) has provided 104, and then 156, weeks of myriad financial aid, partly concurrent with the 99 weeks of unemployment compensation, to people, including farmers and government workers, and firms, even whole communities, that can more or less plausibly claim to have lost their jobs or been otherwise injured because of foreign competition. Even if the injury is just the loss of unfair advantages conferred, at the expense of other Americans, by government protectionism. And even if the injury results not from imports but from outsourcing jobs. TAA benefited 50,000 people at a cost of $500 million in 2002. In 2010, it cost $975 million for 234,000 people. Its purpose is to purchase support for free-trade policies that allow Americans to benefit from foreign goods and services, and from domestic goods and services with lower prices because of competition from imports…. It is unjust to treat some workers as more entitled than others to protection from the vicissitudes of economic dynamism.

Consider a hypothetical Ralph, who operated Ralph’s Diner until Applebee’s and Olive Garden opened competitors in the neighborhood. With economies of scale and national advertising budgets, those two franchises could offer more choices at better prices, so Ralph’s Diner went out of business. Should he and his employees be entitled to extra taxpayer subventions because they are casualties of competition?

Why should someone be entitled to such welfare just because he or she is affected negatively by competition that comes from abroad rather than down the street? Because national trade policy permits foreign competition? But national economic policy permits — indeed encourages, even enforces — domestic competition.

In 2001, when approximately 80,000 people worked in 7,500 music stores, the iPod was invented. Largely because of that and other technological changes, today only about 20,000 people work in 2,500 music stores. Should those 60,000 people be entitled to extra welfare because they are “victims” of technology? Does it matter if the 60,000 have found work in new jobs — perhaps making or selling electronic devices?

In 2008, Americans bought 1.4 billion books made of paper and 200 million e-books. Soon they will buy more e-books than paper books, and half the nation’s bookstores will be gone. Should the stores’ former employees be entitled to special assistance beyond unemployment compensation?

Will has omitted to take three salient facts into account. First, he fails to note that 234,000 people receiving benefits from the program – up from only 50,000 – do not have any jobs. Therefore, it makes no sense to ask if the 60,000 people who no longer work in music stores have now found work in making or selling electronic devices, especially when none of those electronic devices are made in the USA. It’s a bizarre and uncharacteristically inept attempt at a rhetorical point.

Second, the reason that one could make a case for compensating those who lose their jobs to foreign competition rather than to domestic competition is because a) the former is a direct result of federal trade policy whereas the latter is not, and, b) whereas the worker who loses a job to a domestic competitor can reasonably move elsewhere domestically to find another job, potentially with that very competitor, the worker who loses a job to an overseas competitor cannot.

Third, the advance of technology tends to create new jobs even as it destroys old ones. (This is not always true, an assumption that needs to be examined at some other time.) So the loss of a job in one sector is counterbalanced by the addition of a job in another. However, the loss of a job to overseas competition is a net loss for the national economy and it is not counterbalanced by the addition of a job.

The oxymoronic aspect of free trade in a modern economic system is this. It makes no sense to even attempt managing any aspect of a national economy if national employment is to be left to the vagaries of international competition. This is why “free trade” is not, as many on the right believe it to be, a step towards freedom, it is rather an significant step towards global tyranny and the destruction of the United States Constitution.

Now, I am not defending the Trade Adjustment Assistance program or any other form of welfare or government income redistribution plan. I am simply pointing out that it is totally absurd for George Will and other free traders to complain about the cost of free trade-related welfare to a nation rendered bankrupt, at least in part, by the government’s international free trade policies.

Given that the federal government used to fund itself through the use of tariffs on international trade, it is most strange to argue that direct income taxes and payroll taxes on its citizens are either more liberating or more to the material benefit of those very citizens.

A failure to grow

Susan Walsh notices that median male income hasn’t kept pace with GDP growth:

WHY? Economists can’t explain it, it’s still a matter of conjecture. Alex Tabarrok’s thoughts:

The big difference between female and males as far as jobs, of course, has been labor force participation rates, increasing strongly for the former and decreasing somewhat for the latter. Most of the female change, however, was over by the mid to late 1980s, and the (structural) male change has been gradual.

Female education levels have increased dramatically and male levels have been relatively flat.

Females are also more predominant in services and males in manufacturing: plumbers, car mechanics, carpenters, construction workers, electricians, and firefighters, for example are still 95%+ male.

The primary factor is no mystery and is connected to the labor participation rates, but not for the reason suggested. Both male and female participation rates did most of their changing prior to 1973. That was the year that the number of older men leaving the labor force finally stopped compensating for the number of young women entering it. So, that is the point when wages finally began feeling the effects of the oversupply of labor from the increase in women entering the work force from the 33.9 percent who had always worked.

The secondary factor is the mass transfer of income that takes place from productive private sector men to unproductive public sector women that has been made possible by the mass borrowing in the public sector. More details on this later.

RINO down, RINO down!

Another Republican troll is out of the race:

Newt Gingrich’s campaign manager and a half-dozen senior advisers resigned on Thursday, two aides said, dealing a significant setback to his bid for the Republican presidential nomination and severely complicating his hopes for a political comeback.

Mr. Gingrich’s campaign manager, Rob Johnson, his longtime spokesman, Rick Tyler, and advisers in Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina stepped down together after a period of deep internal disagreements about the direction of the campaign.

The amazing thing isn’t that Gingrich’s campaign self-destructed so soon, it’s that it existed in the first place. No one – NO ONE – wanted a Gingrich presidency.

Republicans to cave on the debt ceiling

Rep. Ron Paul expects the usual kabuki:

Al Hunt: Do you think Congress will pass an Extension.

Ron Paul: I do. This will go up until the last minute, then they will raise the debt ceiling.

Al Hunt: Your speaker John Boehner says he will absolutely insist on a dollar of spending reduction for every dollar the debt ceiling goes up. Do you take that seriously?

Ron Paul: I don’t take that seriously. President Reagan wanted two dollars of cuts. The deficit exploded. Do you think the American people will believe that we are going to cut in the future? The only budget that counts is this year. 10-year programs are pie-in-the-sky talking. This year our obligations are five trillion dollars.

Al Hunt: The idea of a spending cap that takes place in ten years does not appeal to you?

Ron Paul: A 10-year spending cap is too little, too late. No one is going to believe it. All governments when they get this far into debt, default. They don’t default by not paying the bills. We will always pay the bills. The default comes from the devaluation of the currency.

The outcome is predictable enough. Republicans will talk a brave game, come up with some ludicrous “mechanism” that will allow them to pretend that they actually accomplished something, then business will proceed as usual. There is simply no way that the political class in the USA is going to directly address, let alone actually attempt fixing, the severe financial and economic problems facing the nation.

Voting for Republicans or Tea Partiers isn’t going to accomplish anything. I’m not saying you shouldn’t do it if it makes you feel better, just don’t expect anything substantive to come of it. At least the Romans got some music out of it. What do Americans get as their nation burns? Weiner tweets.