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.

The menace of hope

The NYT smells Republican blood in the water and goes for the kill:

 Funny how quickly some principles collapse when given the right kind of shove. One day, the Republican Party is rock-ribbed restrictionist, dedicated to the proposition that unauthorized immigrants are an invading army of job stealers, welfare moochers and criminals whose only acceptable destiny is to be caught and deported — the border fence forever, “amnesty” never. The next day: never mind. The party suddenly discovers the merits of a working immigration system. Senators like John McCain and Lindsey Graham, who once bravely supported bipartisan reform but slunk away late in the last Bush administration, are scratching at the door again, as if the last five years never happened.

All it took was an election in which millions of Latino voters — many of them the wives and husbands, sons, daughters, grandchildren, cousins, co-workers and friends of those despised “illegals” — overwhelmingly chose President Obama over the man who promised to be deporter in chief. They rejected Mitt Romney by 3 to 1, according to exit polls. Asian-Americans did, too. Republicans looked at a changing America, saw a future of decline and irrelevance for the party, and concluded that immigrants weren’t so bad after all.

One more amnesty and we’ll establish the permanent left-liberal majority!  You can almost feel them desperately trying to conceal their glee.  What is remarkable is that they can’t seem to understand that the current travails of Illinois and California are what happens when left-liberals get what they want.  It’s like letting a five year old kid child drive.  There’s going to be a crash, it’s going to be bloody, and everyone is going to blame those who weren’t behind the wheel.

This is much more A Phantom Menace than A New Hope.

End this depression II

In Chapter Two, Depression Economics, Krugman resorts to his favorite analogy, the babysitting coop, whose travails were chronicled by a 1977 article in the Journal of Money, Credit and Banking.  This is at least the third book in which he has resorted to the analogy, this time to demonstrate that overall lack of demand can’t hurt the economy and that “your spending is my income and my spending is your income.”  But this time, he also cites the 150 babysitting couples as an example of his proposed cure for the global economy

“That’s where we come to the third lesson from the babysitting co-op: big economic problems can sometimes have simple, easy solutions. The co-op got out of its mess simply by printing up more coupons.

This raises the key question: Could we cure the global slump the same way?  Would printing more babysitting coupons, aka increasing the money supply, be all that it takes to get Americans back to work?

Well, the truth is that printing more babysitting coupons is the way we normally get out of recessions. For the last fifty years the business of ending recessions has basically been the job of the Federal Reserve, which (loosely speaking) controls the quantity of money circulating in the economy; when the economy turns down, the Fed cranks up the printing presses. And until now this has always worked. It worked spectacularly after the severe recession of 1981–82, which the Fed was able to turn within a few months into a rapid economic recovery—“morning in America.” It worked, albeit more slowly and more hesitantly, after the 1990–91 and 2001 recessions.

But it didn’t work this time around. I just said that the Fed “loosely speaking” controls the money supply; what it actually controls is the “monetary base,” the sum of currency in circulation and reserves held by banks. Well, the Fed has tripled the size of the monetary base since 2008; yet the economy remains depressed. So is my argument that we’re suffering from inadequate demand wrong?

No, it isn’t. In fact, the failure of monetary policy to resolve this crisis was predictable—and predicted. I wrote the original version of my book The Return of Depression Economics, back in 1999, mainly to warn Americans that Japan had already found itself in a position where printing money couldn’t revive its depressed economy, and that the same thing could happen to us. Back then a number of other economists shared my worries. Among them was none other than Ben Bernanke, now the Fed chairman.

So what did happen to us? We found ourselves in the unhappy condition known as a “liquidity trap.””

Krugman’s first claim is harmless enough.  Obviously, an overall lack of demand can hurt the economy, those who erroneously insist that supply is always capable of creating demand notwithstanding.  His second claim is partially true, but incomplete, because not all spending comes from income.  A considerable amount of spending also comes from credit, but since that is neither part of the Neo-Keynesian aggregate model nor the babysitting coop story, Krugman simply omits it.  And it can’t be denied that the babysitting coop did appear to get out of its impasse by printing more coupons.

However, Krugman is guilty of a significant omission when he claims that Fed inflation – cranking up the printing presses – worked spectacularly in ending the 1981-1982 recession.  And what he omits is that one of the chief causes of the recession was the Fed’s need to slam on the brakes due to the rampant inflation of the 1970s, inflation that completely failed to cure the high rates of unemployment as it was supposed to according to conventional Neo-Keynesian economic theory.  In fact, it was this failure that led to the widespread rejection of Neo-Keynesianism and the adoption of Milton Friedman’s monetarist spin on it.

Also, when Krugman claims that the Fed was cranking up the money presses in 1983, he omits to mention that throughout that year, which more than covers his “few months” the interest rate never fell below 10.5 percent, which is higher than it was at any time after November 1978!  Somehow, we’re supposed to believe that observably tighter monetary policy amounts to cranking up the money presses!

That being said, the money supply did observably begin increasing in 1983.  From mid-1982 to mid-1983, M2 rose $228 billion.  However, L1, total credit, grew $598 billion over the same period.

Now, Krugman admits that tripling the monetary base has not succeeded in moving the economy out of depression.  If the true lesson of the spring 1983 expansion is that credit, and not money supply is the issue, then we can assume that the current dearth of economic growth should be correlated with a similar lack of growth in Z1.

As it happens, that is precisely what we see.  Z1 has been very nearly flat since 2008 and is currently $5 trillion lower than its 60-year historical rate of growth would predict.  So, the basic foundation for Krugman’s case is not only incomplete and historically inaccurate, but flawed in precisely the way that those familiar with the Neo-Keynesian model would expect.

Church of England delays suicide

I’m a little surprised at the result of the Synod vote as I was confident that the Anglicans were literally Hell-bent on following the Episcopalians in their death spiral into the historical dustbin of post-Christianity:

In a knife-edge decision at a special sitting of the Synod in London, bishops
and clergy voted through the change by large majorities.  But the measure failed to secure the required two thirds support among
representatives of the laity by just 6 votes.  Although 324 members of the Synod voted in favour of the change, 124 voted
against and 11 abstained.

It’s amazing that so many churches are determined to follow the world rather than the Word.  But then, it was written that they would do precisely that.  I wouldn’t go so far as to say that a nominally Christian denomination that ordains women isn’t Christian, merely that it won’t be Christian for long.

End this depression I

I’m going to take a slightly different approach to reviewing Paul Krugman’s latest book, End This Depression Now!.  Ever since writing TIA, I have found it frustrating to read a book, accurately summarize the arguments it contains, critique those arguments, and then find myself addressing various complaints about my summaries and critiques from those who readily admit they have not read the book.  This is particularly annoying because the percentage of people who actually bother to read a book appears to be a small fraction of those who are interested in discussing its contents and its implications.

So, instead of writing a general review and critiquing the summarized arguments, what I’m going to with this book is systematically highlight the 16 sections that I bookmarked and identify the specific claims being made as well as any fundamental flaws I believe are thereby revealed.  This approach should make it easier for people to understand exactly what Krugman has written and reduce any derailing of the discussion on the basis of the supposed inaccuracy of my summaries.  One could, if one liked, also consider this a 101 level course on Krugmanomics.

In Chapter Two, Depression Economics, Krugman explains his thesis:

“The central message of all this work is that this doesn’t have to be happening. In that same essay Keynes declared that the economy was suffering from “magneto trouble,” an old-­fashioned term for problems with a car’s electrical system. A more modern and arguably more accurate analogy might be that we’ve suffered a software crash. Either way, the point is that the problem isn’t with the economic engine, which is as powerful as ever. Instead, we’re talking about what is basically a technical problem, a problem of organization and coordination—a “colossal muddle,” as Keynes put it. Solve this technical problem, and the economy will roar back to life.

Now, many people find this message fundamentally implausible, even offensive. It seems only natural to suppose that large problems must have large causes, that mass unemployment must be the result of something deeper than a mere muddle. That’s why Keynes used his magneto analogy. We all know that sometimes a $100 battery replacement is all it takes to get a stalled $30,000 car back on the road, and he hoped to convince readers that a similar disproportion between cause and effect can apply to depressions. But this point was and is hard for many people, including those who believe themselves well-informed, to accept….

What I hope to do in this chapter is convince you that we do, in fact, have magneto trouble. The sources of our suffering are relatively trivial in the scheme of things, and could be fixed quickly and fairly easily if enough people in positions of power understood the realities. Moreover, for the great majority of people the process of fixing the economy would not be painful and involve sacrifices; on the contrary, ending this depression would be a feel-good experience for almost everyone except those who are politically, emotionally, and professionally invested in wrongheaded economic doctrines….

Think of it this way: suppose that your husband has, for whatever reason, refused to maintain the family car’s electrical system over the years. Now the car won’t start, but he refuses even to consider replacing the battery, in part because that would mean admitting that he was wrong before, and he insists instead that the family must learn to walk and take buses. Clearly, you have a problem, and it may even be an insoluble problem as far as you are concerned. But it’s a problem with your husband, not with the family car, which could and should be easily fixed.”

In summary, Krugman is aggressively asserting that the problems with the U.S. economy are trivial, technical, and easily solved by the economic equivalent of changing a car battery by people in positions of power.  He sees no serious structural economic problems stemming from the trade deficit, the demographic changes in the population, the educational system, the financial system, the shift to a service economy, or the record levels of public and private debt.  He also expects that the process of fixing it will be close to painless for nearly everyone in the country.  He does not, however, claim that it will be politically easy to solve the problem, in fact, the solution is a political one and primarily concerns overcoming those who are “invested in wrongheaded economic doctrines.”

Is everyone clear on this?  Does anyone see any reason to take exception to this summary or claim I am erecting a strawman?  I’ll also be interested to know your opinion of whether this approach is effective or not.

VPFL 2012 Week 10

73 Fromundah Cheezheads (8-2)
30 Greenfield Grizzlies (4-6)

65 Moundsview Meerkats (7-3)
63 Bailout Banksters (7-3)

80 ’63Mercury Marauders (7-3)
66 RR Redbeards (4-6)

88 Bane Sidhe (6-4)
46 D.C. Hangmen (2-8)

60 Suburban Churchians (2-8)
41 Luna City Gamma Rays (4-6)

A little late on this one, sorry.

Krugmanocracy

Tim Geithner is going to end this depression now!

Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner said Friday that Congress should
stop placing legal limits on the amount of money the government can
borrow and effectively lift the debt limit to infinity.  On Bloomberg TV, “Political Capital” host Al Hunt asked Geithner if he believes “we ought to just eliminate the debt ceiling.”

“Oh, absolutely,” Geithner said.

Not satisfied with this intellectual victory, Paul Krugman celebrated by calling for a 91 percent tax rate.  The amazing thing is that wasn’t even the craziest thing in his column.  He also asserted: “We are, morally, a much better nation than we were.”

His claim puts me in mind of the Book of Isaiah. “Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for
light and light for darkness, who put bitter for sweet and sweet for
bitter.”

The Government’s Other Party

Jim Geraghty laments the growing libertarian distaste for the Republican Party:

Considering how there was little dispute that another four years of
Obama would mean another four years of government growing bigger and
taking a more active role in citizens’ lives, and how no one really
thought Johnson would win, it would appear that the 1.22 million
Libertarian voters were content to “send a message” with their votes… a
message that will now be almost entirely ignored in Washington.

It’s their right; every vote has to be earned, and surely a Romney
presidency would have offered its own disappointments to the Libertarian
worldview. But it may be a continuing liability for the GOP that
roughly one percent of the electorate believes strongly in limited
government, but votes in a way that does not empower the GOP to do
anything to limit that government.

Even more problematic was the larger number of libertarians like me and Karl Denninger, who didn’t even vote for Johnson because we knew that while he was the nominated Libertarian candidate, he was no libertarian.  After eight years of unmitigated government growth under George Bush, several of them with the Republicans holding the White House, House, and Senate, many libertarians are completely done with the Republican Party.  We simply will not support the party of not-quite-so-big government.

The fact of the matter is that it makes no sense for any advocate of small government to vote to empower the GOP to do anything to limit government because the Government’s Other Party has absolutely no intention of doing so.

Yeah, I don’t call myself one either

Mr. John Scalzi explains, in considerable detail, why he does not call himself a feminist.  Even though he is.  He just doesn’t deserve to call himself one.  But don’t think he cares what anyone thinks, because he doesn’t.  And if you don’t believe him, he’ll write another 12 posts about himself just to prove you’re wrong.

I am a feminist in the most general sense of believing that women
are entitled to the same rights and privileges as men, with everything
that implies in terms of access to education, economic opportunity and
personal liberty. However, as far as I know most people don’t use the
term “feminism” in this most broad of definitions, either positively or
negatively. This is another reason I don’t tend to use the term to apply
to myself.

A third reason I don’t apply the term feminist to
myself is that, again to be blunt about it, I don’t think I deserve to.
I know myself well enough to know where I fall down on the subject. On a
very superficial level, I’m wary of touting myself as a feminist and
then doing something that shows my ass on the subject in a very public
way. Best not to set myself up for such a fall.

On a slightly deeper level, I know the personal journey I’m taking in
terms of my relationships with women, individually and generally. I’ve
always tried to be a good person to women in my life, and to women in
general, but there have been times I’ve fallen short of those goals,
through ignorance or through being (for lack of a better term) a dick. I
work at these things. I keep working at them.

Ye cats.  This post was poorly titled.  It should have been “Quick Notes on My Personal Effeminacy” or perhaps “Delving Into the Depths of My Navel: the Self-Portrait of a Gamma Male”.  Anyhow, if John wants to call himself a feminist, he’s certainly got my permission.  I don’t happen to call myself a feminist because feminism is the only ideology that is more intellectually incoherent than communism and more societally suicidal than the Skoptsy.

This is the best part: “I am delighted to annoy this category of status-anxious, woman-fearing moron.”  The President of the SFWA calling anyone “status-anxious” and “woman-fearing” tends to strike one rather like Charles Manson saying that someone else is “a little out there”.

WND column

No column this week.  I’ve just been extremely busy with some projects coming to a head and couldn’t take the time to write one.  All is well.