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Catkiller! has his doubts:

Which would you say has caused more death, the war on drugs or abortion? Sure, you’re pro-life, but aren’t most libertarians pro-choice? If conservatives and libertarians are ever going to form any kind of working coalition, we’re each going to have to give up something. As a Russell Kirk traditionalist, I have no problem giving up the war on drugs. Now, are you going to tell me the rank and file libertarians are going to drop their pro-choice stance?

Abortion, obviously. As for the Libertarian party, I doubt they’re going to go firmly pro-life anytime soon; if they had any capability for political compromise they probably wouldn’t be card-carrying Libertarians in the first place. But, it’s absolutely necessary for conservatives to give up the War on Drugs and for libertarians to give up the fictitious “right” to abortion if the greater Right is ever to come together. Long-time readers will recall that I once wrote a column recommending precisely such a trade-off.

However, it’s much too late. The third-worlders are already inside the gates and claimed the Cherry Blossom Throne. I declared Game Over some time ago and I’ve seen nothing to convince me to even begin contemplating changing my mind. I don’t know why people seem to have such a hard time understanding that once the rollercoaster passes a certain point, there is no going back. Now, there’s nothing to do except do one’s best to enjoy the ride.

Surrender Drug Warriors!

Conservatives tend to assume that, unlike dirty, treasonous liberals, they are on the side of truth, justice, liberty and the American way. This is not without reason, as most of the time, they are. However, for nearly 30 years, conservatives have been guilty of one of the greatest abuses of American liberties in American history, and have actively abetted the growth of central government by their thoughtless support for the war on drugs….

NB adds: “The sainted William F. Buckley, Jr. made the identical point in National Review, years ago. Glad to see Buchanan has come around to his point of view. But it’d be nice if you’d give credit where credit is due. The Old Man of the movement was preaching the truth decades before people started listening.”

To respond with something that isn’t merely stupid, but demonstrates an inability to comprehend what he just read. SM serves up a real humdinger of an example:

what are you talking about blaming Obama for this massive mess we are in? dont you recall the village idiot who has lead this nation for nearly the last decade? that george bush fucker. why do conservatives consistently do two things in common: seemingly conveniently always forgeting history (remember we have been spending billions and billions and billions on endless wars in iraq and Afghanistan (and considering that the war in Iraq was clearly unnecessary, i mean there never were ‘weapons of mass destruction’ that was a LIE fabricated by your conservative leaders because conservatives don’t know what the fuck to do leading people unless its to go to war) second: going back to the last election, Bush/Kerry, your boy Bush constantly called Kerry a ‘tax and spend liberal’ well my words back are ‘what the fuck are you conservatives but a bunch of DEBT AND SPEND CONSERVATIVES, get it? its still all about spending. and we have spent a bundle thanks to George.

My boy Bush? I am not, as I have repeatedly stated for eight years now, a conservative. The fact that SM managed to miss this in a column advocating the legalization of drugs is truly impressive. I was also an early opponent of the twin occupations, nor have I ever blamed the financial crisis on Obama.

Obama is falling backward, yes. however the only reason he is falling backward is thanks to George Bush. who deregulated everything? who has been our captain. remember we have been in recession at least since January of 2008 (thats more than a year ago) and the real shit started hitting the fan in september. ALL UNDER GEORGE BUSH’S REIGN. HOW DO YOU FUCKING FORGET THAT SO EASILY? HOW? HOW? HOW? HOW? HOW? Obama is a fall guy for all of this and if you really look at what has happened there is nothing any one person can do. There is no right answer, we are outside the petrie dish now. why do conservatives always champion god and the right to life while killing people (mostly children and women in foreign lands?) and yet call yourself ‘right to life’ a real right to life conservative would do anything to stop the war, cause thats where all the killing takes place. and why do all you conservatives never balk at endless military spending but then get up in arms (no pun intended) when anyone tries to spend some of our own tax revenue not on the annihilation of other peoples but on helping our own peoples?

George Bush deregulated nothing. He didn’t have the ability to do so. SM doesn’t know that Congress repealed Glass-Steagell in 1999, when Clinton was president; banking deregulation was supported by Democrats and Republicans alike. SM clearly doesn’t realize that the New York banking industry leans more Democrat than it does Republican.

i am going to cite you now: ‘Considering the incredible amount of economic destruction that has occurred in only six weeks of Democratic rule’ okay here you go again forgetting short term history (what did you do smoke too many ‘fattie’s’ before you wrote your article) remember who was the leader that got us into this then retired to Crawford, TX just as it was all crumbling

Obama isn’t responsible for George Bush’s actions. He is responsible for his own actions, which have been incredibly stupid. Since SM believes that George Bush’s DEBT AND SPEND approach was bad, why doesn’t he believe that Barack Obama’s decision to engage in an even bigger DEBT AND SPEND program is worse? The stock market isn’t getting killed because of Bush’s actions any longer, it’s reacting to Obama’s embrace of a ruinous Keynesian approach that will extend and deepen the depression.

‘the thought of four more years of the ongoing presidential debacle’ whoa hold on. presidential debacle? WTF????? who got us into this? i have been watching this whole country loose itself and ruin itself under Bush for the last 8 years, he is the ‘debacle’ if there ever was one. what was his approval 22%? c’mon bro put the blame where it belongs

Bush was a disaster. Obama is already a debacle; it’s interesting to note that at the same stage in his presidency, Bush had higher approval ratings than Obama does now despite the 2000 election controversy. As for putting the blame where it belongs, I am putting it squarely on the monetary authorities, not the guys who do little more than sign the bills passed by the fiscal authorities.

its like this: the captain of the ship steered us onto the rocks and then took the last life boat to safety, leaving someone else to figure out how to stop the ship from sinking, key to remember: the ship was already sinking before the new captain even got on deck. and no matter how you slice it; no good leadership or bad leadership now is going to make a difference. the irreversible damage has already been done. and if there is to be any moving forward in this country then conservatives and all those who voted for Bush need to accept their own responsibility for voting for him and placing us in this grave situation. Bush gave himself more presidential rights/powers than anyone in history, yet you still want to play the blame game like it was someone else to blame. check out the mirror and you will see just who is at fault. Not Barak. he just showed up to the party, but the cops broke it up 15 minutes before he stepped in the door.

I have the feeling that the Obamatons are going to be clinging desperately to the “Blame Bush” notion for the next four years. There’s no shortage of blame to pass around. Bush was terrible. Obama has actually managed to start off worse. We’ll have to wait and see if he improves, or if he gets worse from here on out.

on a different note: i have been saying for years that the only way to win the war on drugs is to surrender, glad you guys have finally figured it out. Amazing how conservatives and libertarians always think of freedom first, but then don’t let you own your own body and make your own decisions.

I’d be very interested to know what libertarian SM has ever heard either try to claim his body or try to make decisions for him. Although, based on this email, one could make a fairly airtight case for SM’s cognitive inability to be permitted outside without a helmet and leash.

How smart can one regard science majors to be when they aren’t intelligent enough to pay any attention to the law of supply and demand? Or when they can’t be bothered to pay attention when a science professor warns them not to waste their time by pursuing a science career.

Science is fun and exciting. The thrill of discovery is unique. If you are smart, ambitious and hard working you should major in science as an undergraduate. But that is as far as you should take it. After graduation, you will have to deal with the real world. That means that you should not even consider going to graduate school in science. Do something else instead: medical school, law school, computers or engineering, or something else which appeals to you.

Why am I (a tenured professor of physics) trying to discourage you from following a career path which was successful for me? Because times have changed (I received my Ph.D. in 1973, and tenure in 1976). American science no longer offers a reasonable career path. If you go to graduate school in science it is in the expectation of spending your working life doing scientific research, using your ingenuity and curiosity to solve important and interesting problems. You will almost certainly be disappointed, probably when it is too late to choose another career.

American universities train roughly twice as many Ph.D.s as there are jobs for them. When something, or someone, is a glut on the market, the price drops. In the case of Ph.D. scientists, the reduction in price takes the form of many years spent in “holding pattern” postdoctoral jobs.

No wonder the Pharyngulan crowd tends to be so bitter and nasty. Over-degreed, unemployable, and angry is no way to go through life. And it’s not exactly hard to figure out why they so often bang on about the desperate need for more government funding for scientists science. The truth is that very few scientists produce anything of value and the university degree bubble means there are far more science-credentialed individuals than are required by the American economy.

Before a science fetishist leaps in to confuse science and technology, it’s worth noting this timely quote from historians Will and Ariel Durant, sent in by EJ last week:

“The influence of science, strange to say, was least and last upon technology. Man’s ways of sowing and reaping, mining and manufacturing, building and transporting, had been formed through centuries of trial and error, and traditions and inertia only reluctantly accepted improvement suggested by laboratory experiments; not till the end of this era did science accelerate the Industrial Revolution.”
– The Age of Voltaire, p.584

VDH explains how conservatives created the pathway to the present situation and the administration that presides over it:

Conservatives created Barack Obama and his vision of the Europeanization of America, and so have themselves to blame for the current recessional, as the present as we have known it fades into the past….. The pillar of conservatism is fiscal responsibility. Why? Balancing budgets and saying no to always expanding government, first, is a moral issue. Just as the individual does not borrow from others to satisfy his own appetite, does not consume what he does not earn, so too government should not spend what the nation has not produced. The conservative, as the custodian of ancient morality, must remind the populace of the thriftiness of our ancestors that explains the bounty we inherited. If not he, who will say that life is not fair, that human nature is predictable and thus tragic, that in our brief corporal lives we can guarantee an equality of rough opportunity but hardly mandate an equality of absolute result—since we are mere mortals, not gods?

VDH’s case is damning indeed. Conservatives foolishly decided that the exigencies of the War on Terror justified their behaving like liberals; instead of guarding against the expansion of central state power, they joined forces with the liberals in growing it. Now, as libertarians like me have been predicting for years, they’re unhappy that the expanded power they helped create is in the hands of their political foes, as if that wasn’t predictable from the start.

Modern politicians didn’t cause the economic crisis, as the seeds for that were planted back when the 63rd Congress elected to turn monetary power over to the Federal Reserve. They merely helped determine the particular form it took. If the credit inflation hadn’t taken place in the tech and housing sectors, it would simply occurred in some other part of the economy. But in first choosing George W. Bush as their standard bearer, then lining up behind him in support of his wars and occupations, conservatives laid the groundwork to put Obama into office at this critical juncture. The insane selection of John McCain instead of Ron Paul as the 2008 Republican Party standard bearer was little more than the foul icing on an excremental cake. Paul might well have lost… but he certainly couldn’t have done any worse than McCain and the Republican Party would have far more credibility with regards to the present crisis than it does now.

Actions have consequences. It’s a genuine pity so many conservatives forgot such a conservative concept.

Those who have read TIA already know my position on the matter. However, I tend to doubt those who attempted to belittle the notion when they encountered it in TIA will understand how it is intimately connected to my skeptical view of rational man theory:

“The rational man theory of economics has not worked,” Roubini said last month at a session of the World Economic Forum at Davos. That’s why he and other prominent economists are paying more attention to behavioral economics, which starts from the premise that economic decisions, like other aspects of human behavior, are influenced by irrational psychological factors.

The most compelling rebuttal of the rational model, paradoxically, was delivered by the ultimate rationalist, Alan Greenspan. “I made a mistake in presuming that the self-interests of organizations, specifically banks and others, were such that they were best capable of protecting their own shareholders,” the former Fed chairman told Congress last October.

That’s why Greenspan didn’t see it coming, argues Daniel Kahneman, a Princeton professor who is often described as the father of behavioral economics. His rational-actor model wouldn’t let him.

The huge chasm between the rational actors required for so many economic models and the actual behavior of acting individuals has long bothered me. But I don’t see how John Maynard Keynes can be reasonably described as the father of behavioral economics, as a few vague references to animals spirits and and liquidity preferences are not integral to his economic model in the way Ludwig von Mises’s conceptions laid out in Human Action are.

But regardless of whether one turns to praxeology or empirical evidence, it’s not difficult to determine that the rational man theory of economics is deeply flawed to the point of irrelevance.

Mises, however, will somewhat confuse journalists as he argues that it is a fallacy to describe objectively sub-optimal decisions as “irrational”, because an acting man’s decision may well be perfectly rational from his perspective and in light of his objectives. But it’s encouraging to see that the mainstream is finally beginning to cast a skeptical eye on the idea that economic actors are absolutely rational in the conventional sense of the word.

John Scalzi notes the iconic passing of an old school newspaperman, James Bellows. My thoughts on the subject he raises, namely, the ongoing decline of the newspaper.

I agree that newspapers have become increasingly boring, but the reason they’re in such dire straits is that they are facing numerous challenges. The technological angle is obvious, but another important element was the decision of too many editors and journalists in the post-Watergate era to become what was in effect the propaganda branch of the Democratic Party. How would an anti-establishment figure like Bellows fight the establishment now that former anti-establishmentarians are the new establishment?

Regardless what one thinks of its product – and I don’t watch it myself – the huge success of Fox News has derived primarily from the fact that ABCNNBCBS and PBS were all devoted to serving the same left-leaning half of the country, leaving the other half with talk radio. In Minnesota, it was always amusing to read the political endorsements of the Star Tribune and the Pioneer Press, both of which inevitably endorsed Democratic Farmer-Labor candidates except when the Independent Republican candidate was a certain winner. My family subscribed to the “Star and Sickle” for many years until my parents just couldn’t stand it anymore, switched to the Pioneer Press for a while, and finally gave up newspapers altogether.

Another element is the mass homogenization of what worked best as a local product. Did anyone seriously expect a bunch of Minnesota Lutherans or Hispanic Catholics to pay to read a New York Jew’s opinion on Likud vs Labor? Until I understood what the AP was, I couldn’t figure out why a Minneapolis paper published more editorials about the mayor of New York City than about its own mayor.

I’m certainly not saying that serving the broad spectrum of the populace would have been enough to save any newspapers from the other challenges facing them, but you know something was fundamentally wrong with the business model when many intelligent, educated, high-income individuals, the very sort of people newspapers needed as customers if they were going to survive, are openly celebrating their demise.

Once more, pornography drives the technology curve upward… but this time it’s chick porn:

Barnes & Noble abandoned ebooks once, so why are they coming back to them now? Because the format is starting to take off. Why is that? What’s popular on Fictionwise? Well, once again it seems like porn is blazing a path to a new media format. Of the top 10 bestsellers under the “Multiformat” category, nine are tagged “erotica” amd the last is “dark fantasy”. Hey, I’m not judging anyone (one of my dearest friends is an erotic romance author) and yes, I’ve used the most salacious Top 10 list on the site in my example, but this data backs up my anecdotal observations. People who read erotic romance and ‘bodice rippers’ love ebooks because of the privacy they offer, both during purchase and when reading.

The best part is the titles. The Demon’s Librarian. Submission. Sinful Treats. Seducing the Wolf. I wonder why we never hear pastors or anti-porn political activists inveighing against the family-destroying problem of textual porn? Say what you will about the male fixation on visual stimulus, but you have to admit that it seldom involves the seduction of forest creatures.

The strangest thing about the “whither Republicanism” crowd is that they’re nowhere nearly as intellectual nor as internationally sophisticated as they would have you believe. The difference between a monolingual New York journalist such as David Brooks and three-quarters of the American expatriate community is actually much greater than the difference between David Brooks and the great quantity of grassroots Republicans throughout the country that he and his tiny band of like-minded cohorts so often affect to despise. Neither the genuine intellectuals nor the genuine upper class of the Old World have much use for the upper middle class American wannabees of the media; they tend to regard them as the same sort of hicks as, ironically enough, George Bush. Most of them don’t know who Sarah Palin is and those who do couldn’t care less about care about her… and the average liberal American would probably have an absolute stroke if they heard the way that the Europeans they so admire talk about American’s new African president.

The truth is that most Europeans don’t regard New Yorkers as being any more sophisticated than Nebraskans, in fact, many of them aren’t really all that clear on the difference between New York City and Nebraska. (Minneapolis… is that closer to Los Angeles or San Francisco?) And, given the fact that the average fat, obnoxious, American tourist wearing shorts and white tennis shoes while making their once-in-a-lifetime pilgrimage to Florence is much more likely to hail from New York than from Nebraska, it tends to be Nebraskans who are tainted by their national association with New Yorkers.

And as Ed Anger points out, it makes no sense to pay any mind to the nonsensical burblings of the GOP’s moderate wing:

Every since their big get-together last week, everybody’s fighting about “the future of conservatives.” Namby pamby Beltway big shots tell us to dump Sarah Palin and Joe the Plumber, and get more classy and “intellectual” like them!

Heck, some of these “conservatives” even voted for Teleprompter Jesus himself!

Don’t listen to these stuck up sons of Benedict Arnold. Has Ross Douthat or David Brooks ever won a chili cook-off or fired a few rounds off a .45? David Frum probably can’t even change a tire without his Filipino nanny helping out.

Yes, yes, that last bit did indeed make me laugh.

Yeah, the US isn’t even close to rock-bottom:

Twitter cofounder and CEO Ev Williams is headed to the White House today. The administration invited him to join a “young business leaders” summit to discuss the economic crises.

Of all the people you could ask about economic advice, you’re going to go out of your way to seek advice from an entrepeneur whose company has insignificant revenue and runs at a loss? I spend more time than most in the company of technology entrepeneurs… believe me, none of them know any more about economic principles than the average Tri-Delt majoring in Art History.