Vox Popoli

CNN is taking the art of the unscientific poll to new heights:

Fifty-six percent of people questioned say they had a very positive reaction to the speech, with 21 percent indicating they had a somewhat positive reaction and a equal amount suggesting they had a negative reaction…. The CNN/Opinion Research Corporation poll was conducted just before and just after the president’s speech, with 427 adult Americans questioned by telephone. The survey’s sampling error is plus or minus 5 percentage points. The sample of speech-watchers in this poll was 45 percent Democratic and 18 percent Republican.

This is getting absolutely absurd. Why doesn’t CNN just question members of the Obama administration and announce 100 percent American support for his health care speech while they’re at it? If I was a Democrat or an Obama supporter, I would be furious at the total incompetence of my side’s intelligence. Do they genuinely believe it’s going to somehow help the administration to be putting obviously false information out there?

As for the “You lie!” comment, well, all I have to say is that there is no question that Obama was clearly lying about illegal immigrants receiving government health care. Obama is not a king and the American people are neither serfs nor slaves. It seems to me that etiquette does not demand sitting in silent witness as blatant lies are being told. If Obama doesn’t want to risk being interrupted, he should give a speech without a live audience. If he knows he’s giving a speech to a live audience, perhaps he should consider not saying things that everyone knows is not true.

Ian, PeterAnthony, and Gadspeed, please send me your emails today – or if you’ve gotten an invite, please accept it and check out your team – or those three teams will be reassigned to someone else interested in playing. The Meerkats are chilling. It’s too soon to get excited. They’ve won the regular season title before, they’ve scored the most points, but now it’s time to claim a championship.

Ryan Grim shows how the Federal Reserve has bought the academic economists:

The Huffington Post reviewed the mastheads of the American Journal of Economics, the Journal of Economic Perspectives, Journal of Economic Literature, the American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, the Journal of Political Economy and the Journal of Monetary Economics.

HuffPost interns Googled around looking for resumes and otherwise searched for Fed connections for the 190 people on those mastheads. Of the 84 that were affiliated with the Federal Reserve at one point in their careers, 21 were on the Fed payroll even as they served as gatekeepers at prominent journals. At the Journal of Monetary Economics, every single member of the editorial board is or has been affiliated with the Fed and 14 of the 26 board members are presently on the Fed payroll.

It’s no secret that the financial economists employed by the big banks are untrustworthy, being little more than stock market cheerleaders, but the academic economists are arguably even less reliable. This is an excellent article by the Huffington Post, the best I have ever seen published there. The best part is when Milton Friedman is quoted in a damning 1993 letter: “I cannot disagree with you that having something like 500 economists is extremely unhealthy. As you say, it is not conducive to independent, objective research. You and I know there has been censorship of the material published. Equally important, the location of the economists in the Federal Reserve has had a significant influence on the kind of research they do, biasing that research toward noncontroversial technical papers on method as opposed to substantive papers on policy and results.”

While same sort of corruption and monolithic thinking revealed in the economics profession can be seen in other scientific disciplines as well, the difference is that it is more difficult for the Federal Reserve to maintain control of the field despite its massive finances because economic events so easily overwhelm the intellectual edifice that the Fed has constructed.

Alan Greenspan himself has said that the whole intellectual edifice of mainstream economics has collapsed. I very much agree, and further note that it is Greenspan and the organization that employed him which is largely to blame.

Thomas Friedman explodes the myth of the intrinsic liberal attachment to democracy as well as underlining Jonah Goldberg’s basic thesis:

Watching both the health care and climate/energy debates in Congress, it is hard not to draw the following conclusion: There is only one thing worse than one-party autocracy, and that is one-party democracy, which is what we have in America today. One-party autocracy certainly has its drawbacks. But when it is led by a reasonably enlightened group of people, as China is today, it can also have great advantages. That one party can just impose the politically difficult but critically important policies needed to move a society forward in the 21st century.

Remarkable. No sooner do the Democrats have the benefit of a Democratic White House, Senate, and House of Representatives than they start calling for autocratic rule because they dislike the limitations which the remaining tatters of the Constitution place on their ability to achieve their goals. Sooner or later, the Left always ends up pining for a dictator.

Can you even imagine how they’d be howling “Nazi!” at any right-wing writer who wrote in open favor of autocracy? If, at this point, you don’t understand that Communists, socialists, National Socialists, Fascists, Democrats, and neocons are all just different flavors of would-be autocratic authoritarians, you are simply ignorant of ideological history.

JG himself weighs in thusly: “I cannot begin to tell you how this is exactly the argument that was made by American fans of Mussolini in the 1920s. It is exactly the argument that was made in defense of Stalin and Lenin before him (it’s the argument that idiotic, dictator-envying leftists make in defense of Castro and Chavez today). It was the argument made by George Bernard Shaw who yearend for a strong progressive autocracy under a Mussolini, a Hitler or a Stalin (he wasn’t picky in this regard). This is the argument for an “economic dictatorship” pushed by Stuart Chase and the New Dealers. It’s the dream of Herbert Croly and a great many of the Progressives.”

So for the love of your bell-bottoms, pre-Raphaelite hair, and shaggy gay mustaches, just shut up and deal with it already. The Beatles are not cool and even if we assume that they were at some point in the distant past, they have not been for literal decades, except, of course, in the manner that a corpse is cold.

But why should kids care about a group their grandparents danced to forty years ago? There is always a sneaking suspicion that the continued obsession with The Beatles is driven by media nostalgia.

They don’t care. Their parents don’t care. No one under the age of sixty is obsessed with The Beatles except for a few retro-crazed would-be hipsters pretending they are John Cusack selling LPs at independent record stores. And even their obsession is only ironic. As I see it, The Beatles were little more than the Jonas Brothers of their day, which is very, very far from even beginning to approach anything that can reasonably be described as cool. So they wrote a lot of pop songs, had some big hits, and met with a Tiger Beat reception in America. BFD.

Can you even imagine an elderly Generation Xer writing an article about Duran Duran entitled “Are They Still Cool?” in the year 2027?

If you happen to dig The Beatles, then pick up the new Guitar Hero game and have yourself a groovy time. But please also accept the fact of your own mortality and understand that the world does not revolve around the ephemeral tastes of your generation. It never did.

Camille Paglia is deeply displeased with her own Democratic Party:

How has “liberty” become the inspirational code word of conservatives rather than liberals? (A prominent example is radio host Mark Levin’s book “Liberty and Tyranny: A Conservative Manifesto,” which was No. 1 on the New York Times bestseller list for nearly three months without receiving major reviews, including in the Times.) I always thought that the Democratic Party is the freedom party — but I must be living in the nostalgic past….

But affluent middle-class Democrats now seem to be complacently servile toward authority and automatically believe everything party leaders tell them. Why? Is it because the new professional class is a glossy product of generically institutionalized learning? Independent thought and logical analysis of argument are no longer taught. Elite education in the U.S. has become a frenetic assembly line of competitive college application to schools where ideological brainwashing is so pandemic that it’s invisible. The top schools, from the Ivy League on down, promote “critical thinking,” which sounds good but is in fact just a style of rote regurgitation of hackneyed approved terms (“racism, sexism, homophobia”) when confronted with any social issue.

It’s nice to see a genuine 60s liberal noticing that today’s Democrats are the very slavish servants of the authoritarian State they claimed to oppose back then. Of course, the Republican Party isn’t much better and La Paglia doesn’t hesitate to point that out.

Supporting one of the two major parties these days is more akin to cheering for a sports team. All you’re doing is declaring which group of self-serving thieves you wish to benefit by allowing them to make your decisions for you.

Joseph Peden gives an interesting lecture on inflation in the Roman Empire:

I’ve been asked to speak on the theme of Roman history, particularly the problem of inflation and its impact. My analysis is based on the premise that monetary policy cannot be studied, or understood, in isolation from the overall policies of the state. Monetary, fiscal, military, political, and economic issues are all very much intertwined. And they are all so intertwined because any state normally seeks to monopolize the supply of money within its own territory.

Monetary policy therefore always serves, even if it serves badly, the perceived needs of the rulers of the state. If it also happens to enhance the prosperity and progress of the masses of the people, that is a secondary benefit; but its first aim is to serve the needs of the rulers, not the ruled. This point is central, I believe, to an understanding of the course of monetary policy in the late Roman Empire.

We may begin by looking at the mentality of the rulers of the Roman Empire, beginning at the end of the 2nd century AD and looking through to the end of the 3rd century AD. Roman historians refer to this period as the “Crisis of the 3rd Century.” And the reason is that the problems of the Roman society in that period were so profound, so enormous, that Roman society emerged from the 3rd century very different in almost all ways from what it had been in the 1st and 2nd centuries.

The intrinsic link between the interests of the state and the economic policies it pursues is why I suspect that the discipline of political economy is more integral to understanding the way the world operates than the theoretically objective science of economics. The problems that we are facing, courtesy of our fiscal and monetary authorities, are far from new. While the particular form they take is different, the core issues remain the same.

Karl Denninger explains why the inflate-and-grow strategy cannot work in the current situation:

In 1933 Roosevelt devalued the dollar to get out of this death spiral. He was able to do so because the dollar was linked to gold, and thus he could simply sign a document and change the exchange rate, at the same time banning private ownership of the metal (and thus preventing the market from immediately counteracting his devaluation and rending it meaningless.) Today all currencies are fiat and this option is not available – should it be attempted via massive money printing (doing so would require The Fed to literally print the entire asset base underlying the credit system in the US – somewhere on the order of $20+ trillion dollars!) the outcome would be an instantaneous ramp in energy costs (and all other imports) by more than 1,000% and the immediate collapse of both our economy and all banks, including The Fed itself, since wages would not and cannot increase by that same 1,000% in a global economy.

We must force the outstanding credit levels down to sustainable levels. This will cause a huge number of bankruptcies, especially among the financial “heavy hitting firms” on Wall Street and the pension and insurance funds of Americans as the true “value” of their so-called assets are exposed. The problem is that there is no alternative – we squandered the ability to rebuild our safety margins over the previous 30 years, and now we’re into the maw of the parabola with no remaining margin available to exploit. The longer we wait to do the right thing the worse the outcome will be, and if we wait too long we will lose our nation – literally.

History has shown that the 2000-01 recession “avoidance tactic” of more than doubling outstanding consumer credit in mortgages and increasing it by 60% in other debt while income only rose 23% during the same period bought us seven years of delay and a collapse far worse when we hit the wall – unemployment only reached 6.3% during the 00-01 recession (in 2003) while we are now at 9.7% (officially) and climbing. Consumer spending and defaults were a non-factor in 00-01 – today they are the feature of our recession.

Today we simply have no more “forward debt capacity” in our economy. This is not conjecture or belief – it is hard fact and has been proved by the structure of the current recession.

What most people watching the markets for clues about the economy don’t understand is that the markets are operating on misinformation. The “profits” that the financial institutions are reporting are not real, they’re actually smaller than the amount of money being pumped into them by the government. More importantly, the banks are in much worse shape than anyone is willing to admit; as bad as the banking situation looks, it’s reliant upon assigning false values to worthless loans that have already stopped receiving payments and are never going to be repaid.

As Denninger points out, the extend-and-pretend possibilities have been exhausted because there simply isn’t enough consumer income left to support additional debt. The Keynesians and Neo-Keynesians have always insisted that debt doesn’t matter, but they’re about to find out that it is the critical aspect of the ongoing crisis.

JM thinks it’s the right place to write:

As a retired Marine who served in almost every corner of the globe during my two decades, a man who saw the deliberate insidious socialization of our education system before my kids were even in school, and has been expecting the “Manchurian Candidate” since I first read the book, I am rather picky in my choice of news sources….

You could not find a better journal to write for; you obviously are not told what to write or to slant your writing, and most of your peers on board are in the same boat. I don’t always agree with you, but I never have yet found factual reason to dispute you, only opinion-oriented issue. WND is the only place I can go where I can read only fact-based news, or I can wander into the myopia of the liberal side of things and get a feel for what the liars are publishing today.

This is among the first journals I’ve ever had the opportunity to take as a news source that I can expect to find facts, and opinions that are supported by the facts and the events that surround them. Joe Farah has established a new paradigm and someday, he will be noted for it.

Joe always insists that his is not a new paradigm, but rather a return to an old one. Regardless, I admire what he has done even if I would have done it rather differently. And, one must conclude, less successfully. Possibly the best thing about Farah is that he simply does not possess the contempt for the taste of the masses that pervades so much of the media and the intelligentsia.

Bernanke and company don’t have the gold standard to blame this time around:

There are “troubling similarities” between the US President’s actions since taking office and those which in the 1930s sent the US and much of the world spiralling into the worst economic collapse in recorded history, says the new pamphlet, published by the Institute of Economic Affairs. In particular, the authors, economists Charles Rowley of George Mason University and Nathanael Smith of the Locke Institute, claim that the White House’s plans to pour hundreds of billions of dollars of cash into the economy will undermine it in the long run….

The study represents a challenge to the widely held view that Keynesian fiscal policies helped the US recover from the Depression which started in the early 1930s.

The most important thing to keep in mind is that according to those widely held views, neither the financial crisis nor a continued depression next year is even supposed to be possible. If, as they insist, the gold standard was responsible, then how are such similar results even theoretically possible in its absence?

Obama and the Congress are making things worse, of course, but they can’t possibly be blamed for next year’s economic downturn. That’s been in the cards for years, if not decades. My primary concern isn’t the extended downturn itself, but rather the state’s customary resort to war as a distraction for an angry populace. For those interested, the IEA paper, “Economic Contractions in the United States:
A Failure of Government”, is available for download in PDF format.