Most people instinctively understand the truth underlying the concept of the Laffer Curve. It articulates the elasticity of taxable income, which is to say, it shows how the amount of taxable income tends to change in response to changes in the income tax rate. This is because most people understand that they modify their behavior in response to positive and negative stimuli.
VPFL 2012 week 11
51 Moundsview Meerkats (8-3)
42 Greenfield Grizzlies (4-7)
84 Bane Sidhe (7-4)
63 RR Redbeards (5-6)
84 Luna City Gamma Rays (5-6)
48 Bailout Banksters (6-5)
67 D.C. Hangmen (3-8)
46 Fromundah Cheezheads (8-3)
77 Suburban Churchians (2-9)
52 ’63Mercury Marauders (7-4)
After a fast start, Fromundah has been pulled back to the pack and five teams appear to be in contention for the four playoff spots, although it’s too soon to count out the Gamma Rays or Redbeards entirely. This is the weekly open NFL thread.
The Laffer Curve at work
An Instapundit reader illustrates both the perils of blindly raising income tax rates and the financial pointlessness of many married women working:
After the election, my wife and I are going partial Galt. We’re in
California, so our state income tax went up in addition to what’s sure
to come out of Washington.My wife quit her job last week. I increased my participation in a
tax deferment plan offered by my employer to bring my taxable income as
close to $250K as possible. We’ll be cutting back a little, but the
government is going to getting a whole lot less.My wife’s entire salary barely covered our tax bill – she was 100%
slave to the government, while I was a 10% slave. Now she is 100% free,
and I’ll be a ~35% slave As a couple, 17.5% of our time is slaving on
the government plantation from an astounding 55% previously.My wife is deliriously happy, our children are delighted to have mom
home, the dog gets more walks, and I find not spending money rapturously
satisfying.
Statist theoreticians and bureaucrats never seem to understand that humans always modify their behavior in response to prospective stimuli. And when they finally do, after failing to achieve the results expected, they usually make the mistake of attempting to forcibly limit human options, thereby falling into exactly the same trap. And the smarter and more productive the individual, the more his contributions are required, the more likely it is that he will figure out a way to refuse to participate.
Here is a trivially easy prediction. California will collect less tax revenue than estimated in 2013 despite its newly raised rates that theoretically will cause it to collect more. Moreover, it will probably collect less than it did in 2012, and its budget deficit will rise.
Preorder period ending
In Selenoth, the race of Man is on the
ascendant. The ancient dragons sleep. The ghastly Witchkings are
no
more; their evil power destroyed by the courage of Men and the
fearsome magic of the Elves. The Dwarves have retreated to the
kingdoms of the Underdeep, the trolls hide in their mountains, and
even the savage orc tribes have learned to dread the iron
discipline
of Amorr’s mighty legions. But after four hundred years of mutual
suspicion, the rivalry between two of the Houses Martial that rule
the Amorran Senate threatens to turn violent, and unrest sparks
rebellion throughout the imperial provinces. In the north, the
barbarian reavers who have long plagued the coasts of the White
Sea
beg for the royal protection of the King of Savondir, as they flee
a vicious race of wolf-demons. In the east, the war drums
echo throughout the mountains as orcs and goblins gather in great
numbers, summoned by their bestial gods.
And when the Most Holy and Sanctified
Father is found dead in his bed, leaving the Ivory Throne of the
Apostles unclaimed, the temptation to seize the Sacred College and
wield Holy Mother Church as a weapon is more than some fallen
souls
can resist.
We’re working hard on getting the ebook out on December 1st. The hardcover won’t ship for about two weeks after that, so if anyone spots any errata of any kind in the ebook, be it typos, grammar, or continuity, please don’t hesitate to email them to me immediately and we’ll get them corrected. We will, of course, be providing updated ebooks to those who have purchased them. This is a little unusual, but then, the book is a hefty monster that is going to run around 900 pages in the 6×9 format and given that you guys managed to find over 100 errors in each of the three EW novels published and line-edited by Pocket, I have no doubt we’ll miss a few howlers here.
Marcher Lord also asked me to remind those who are interested in buying the hardcover, but have not yet preordered it that the preorder discount offer will end on Monday, November 26th. Remember that in addition to the discounted price, those who have preordered the hardcover will receive the ebook when it comes out. Thanks to all of you who have preordered already.
Secession enters the mainstream
The New York Times publishes a remarkably balanced article on the topic of Texas secession:
In Texas, talk of secession in recent years has steadily shifted to the
center from the fringe right. It has emerged as an echo of the state
Republican leadership’s anti-Washington, pro-Texas-sovereignty mantra on
a variety of issues, including health care and environmental
regulations. For some Texans, the renewed interest in the subject serves
simply as comic relief after a crushing election defeat.But for other proponents of secession and its sister ideology, Texas
nationalism — a focus of the Texas Nationalist Movement and other groups
that want the state to become an independent nation, as it was in the
1830s and 1840s — it is a far more serious matter.The official in East Texas, Peter Morrison, the treasurer of the Hardin
County Republican Party, said in a statement that he had received
overwhelming support from conservative Texans and overwhelming
opposition from liberals outside the state in response to his comments
in his newsletter. He said that it may take time for “people to
appreciate that the fundamental cultural differences between Texas and
other parts of the United States may be best addressed by an amicable
divorce, a peaceful separation.”
For the record, I am in favor of self-determination. That is the key, I think, for secession supporters to win liberal/progressive support. American liberals, for all their ability to double-think, simply cannot permit themselves to oppose self-determination, since it is one of the foundations of their perspective on foreign policy. While some of them will be able to concoct a convoluted conceptual structure that allows them to vehemently support foreign self-determination while denying it to Americans, most of them will not. It is too integral to their view of the world.
And for the record, I am entirely in favor of self-determination for Texans as well as the other American states. Liberals like to point out that the “Democratic” states subsidize the “Republican” states; a fact which omits one extremely relevant point which I shall point out and walk through the math in a future post. Secession advocates should use this fact and the self-determination argument relentlessly, as encouraging the left to declare “good riddance” will be key to winning their support for the eventual, and inevitable, secession of several American States.
He doesn’t care and here is why
John Scalzi proves he doesn’t care what people think about him by writing yet another post explaining his opinion
concerning what people think about his position on the socio-sexual
hierarchy and why he is not insulted by being identified as a “beta
male”:
I think they are less
concerned about insulting me than they are reassuring themselves that
there is no possible way they could ever be beta males, whatever their
definition of ‘beta male’ is. By all indications their definition is
something along the lines of “a man who sees women as something other
than a mute dispensary of sandwiches and boobies” and/or “a man who does
not live in fear of everyone else not continually affirming his
internal assessment of personal status,” gussied up in language that
allows them not to have to deal with these essential facts of their own
nature. But inasmuch as insulting me is part of the mechanism of
reassuring themselves, I am offered the insult.I’m not insulted because, a) I consider the source, b) I don’t mind
being seen as someone who does not view women through a tangled bramble
of fear, ignorance and desire, c) when I step into a room, I don’t
neurotically spend my time tallying up who in the room has higher status
than I do, and who doesn’t. I am a grown-up, for God’s sake. Paranoid
status anxiety is tiring.
One has to wonder how John knows that paranoid status anxiety is so exhausting considering that he cares so little about what others think of him. In any event, I take a more in-depth look at what his response tells us about his socio-sexual status at Alpha Game.
Feminism ends in the brothel
Back in 2006, I think it was, I wrote about how the combination of feminism, immigration, and post-Christianity would lead inevitably towards reducing women’s choices to the brothel or the burqah. That point is rapidly arriving in both Holland and the UK:
Anything-goes Amsterdam has long been hailed as a sex mecca. The red-light district attracts thousands of customers, many of them tourists, who walk through alleys where half-naked prostitutes prance in the windows of some 300 brothels illuminated with scarlet bulbs.
A century ago, the brothels were banned to stop the exploitation of women by criminal gangs of Dutch men. But gradually the sex establishments crept back, with the authorities turning a blind eye.
In 2000, after pressure from prostitutes (demanding recognition as sex workers with employment rights) and Holland’s liberal intelligentsia (championing the choice of women to do what they wished with their bodies), the brothels were legalised. The working girls got permits, medical care, and now there are 5,000 in the red-light district.
But things went badly wrong. Holland’s newly legal sex industry was quickly infiltrated by street-grooming gangs with one target: the under-age girl virgin who can be sold for sex.
The men in the gangs are dubbed — incongruously — ‘lover boys’, because of their distinct modus operandi of making girls fall in love with them before forcing them into prostitution at private flats or houses all over Holland, and in the window brothels. The lover boy phenomenon has appalled Dutch society, not least because of the sheer numbers of girls involved.
Holland hopes the rot will be halted. Last year, 242 lover boy crimes were investigated by police, half of them involving the forced prostitution of girls under 18. Campaigner Anita de Wit says this is a fraction — ‘one per cent’ — of the true number. ‘There are thousands of girls being preyed on by male gangs in Holland,’ she says. Anita visits schools to warn girls exactly what a lover boy looks like, and makes no bones of the fact that most of the gangs are operated by Dutch-born Moroccan and Turkish men.
‘I am not politically correct. I am not afraid of being called a racist, which would be untrue. I tell the girls that lover boys are young, dark-skinned and very good looking. They will have lots of money and bling as well as a big car. They will give out cigarettes and vodka. They will tell a girl that she is beautiful.
‘The gangs know who to pick out: the girl with the confidence problems, with the glasses, or who looks overweight. They flatter her and seem like the “knight in shining armour”. She is drawn to her new boyfriend like a magnet.’
There has never been a society that survived the loss of its religion and its children. The end game for secularism, equalitarianism, and multiculturalism is not the shiny, sexy, It’s A Small World scientopia of post-religious dreams, it is what is already being witnessed in present-day Amsterdam. This is not progress, this is a return to the pagan world that was defeated with the passing of Julian the Apostate and Diocletian.
The problem isn’t that the feminist revolution “backfired’, the problem is that it was a revolution of 180 degrees that marked a return to ancient societal patterns.
Language signals
Dr. Helen notes an interesting point made by the author of a newly published book:
Only in America does the word “frontier” mean freedom, open space and
opportunity. In every other language, the word “frontier” means the
opposite– border, boundary, and fear of the dangers that lurk in in the
strange and the new.
That’s not insignificant, but potentially more significant is the fact that America is also one of the very few societies foolish enough to forget that the primary difference between “immigrant” and “invader” is one of quantity. One of the reasons that the historical Greek, Roman, Chinese, and Japanese cultures remained distinct and significant for so long is that their words for foreigner translate to “barbarian”, “barbarian”, “barbarian”, and “round-eyed, red-haired, butter-stinking devil”.
Happy Thanksgiving 2012
I hope this Thanksgiving finds you with many things for which you are grateful. Among the many things for which I must give thanks to God are my loyal and intelligent readership, who are as quick to correct my errors as they are to commend my insights.
Even though we dwell in a place where the American Thanksgiving is not celebrated, Spacebunny presented an impeccable turkey, accompanied by her excellent mashed potatoes and other side dishes, then followed that up with home-baked pumpkin and French Silk pies.
The art of the reframe
Heartist discusses the political reframe:
“A commenter at Larry Auster’s accurately imagines what a typical anti-white leftoid (in this case, John Podhoretz) would say to a realist schooled in the facts of intransigent human nature and the evolved preference for tribalism:
“But humanity does not consist of universal individuals. It consists of various cultures, ethnicities, and races all of which have particular identities, characteristics, ability levels, values, and agendas which are different from those of the host society. As a result, the mass presence of those different groups in the host society, far from advancing right-liberal equal freedom, empowers their unassimilable identities, characteristics, ability levels, values, and agendas, and thus changes the host country from a right-liberal society into a multicultural, left-liberal, racial-socialist society whose ruling principle is equality of outcome for all groups.”
To which Podhoretz pere et fils would surely reply, “Why do you hate freedom?”How does a weak-willed, supplicating, betaboy “””conservative””” like, oh, say, Jim Geraghty, respond to this all-too-realistic, imagined Podhoretz coercive frame? Probably something like this: “I don’t hate freedom! Really, I don’t! Look, some of my best friends are freedom lovers. And I promise never again to use the word slut, no matter how applicable it is. Be kind to me?”
Lame. Podhoretz owns the frame, and Geraghty is just playing within its bounds.”
While I agree with the need for a reframe in this sort of situation, the problem with Heartiste’s recommended riposte is that while it avoids acquiescence to the theoretical frame, it fails to destroy it and permits the hypothetical Podhoretz to claim the high ground. Yes, it is true that the question concerning Podoretz’s overt intimacy with Capra aegagrus hircus is as intellectually fair as Podhoretz’s question concerning his interlocutor’s imaginary hatred for freedom. But it sounds less reasonable and will cause said interlocutor to come off looking weak and reactionary by comparison.
A better tactic is a refined version of agree and amplify. In this case, Podhoretz’s interlocutor would do well to simply respond to him: “For the same reason you do.” This immediately turns the frame around and forces him onto the defensive, and has the benefit of being absolutely true. While Podhoretz and his fellow neoconservatives may favor freedom in the form of permitting mass invasion from the Third World, they oppose it in a vast panoply of more important forms. The right-liberal is far more opposed to freedom of speech, freedom of association, and freedom of exchange, and seeks to control the population in a much more coercive manner than the traditionalist right that seeks to protect Constitutional America and the only group with any significant collective regard for it, the descendants of its Christian European colonists.
In the same way that tax revenues are not maximized by maximizing tax rates, as per the Laffer curve, freedom of action and opportunity is not maximized by maximizing legal freedom for everyone on the planet. Podhoretz, for example, would not be more free if Hamas were legally permitted to set up Jew-baking ovens in New York City, just as Americans would not be more free if 50 million Mexicans were legally permitted to enter the country and begin voting for the sort of policies they are accustomed to voting for when choosing between the Partido Revolucionario Institucional and the Party of the Democratic Revolution, both of which are members of the Socialist International.
Since freedom is not easily mathematically quantified, it is not as simple to construct a Liberty curve as a Laffer curve, but the logic is the same.
This is just an example; the point is that reframe is best done in the direct context of the attempted frame. Due to psychological projection, in most cases, those who attempt to frame an attack in an unfair and intellectually dubious manner will reliably choose to attack you on their own point of vulnerability. By way of example, note how yesterday the Neo-Keynesian SK repeatedly insisted that I was a) ignorant, b) didn’t understand anything, and c) needed to read a certain book while simultaneously a) getting most of his basic facts wrong, b) failing to grasp the difference between debt/GDP and federal debt/GDP and trying to discredit the data I’d provided by citing the very source I’d quoted, and, c) believing that I was some sort of monetarist inflationista because he knew nothing about RGD.