Tag: society

The economics of polygamy

The Economicon explains why we can expect to see polygamy embraced by the state before too long:

Legalizing polygamy, economist David Friedman wrote in his book Hidden Order: The Economics of Everyday Life, “allows some men who before wanted one wife to try to marry two instead — provided that they are willing to offer terms at which potential wives are willing to accept half a husband apiece. So the demand curve for wives shifts out. The supply curve stays the same, the demand curve shifts out, so the price must go up. Women are better off.”

It’s very hard to argue with the economic law of supply and demand. And the flipside of that is the recognition that most men will be worse off, with the obvious exception of those sufficiently rich and powerful enough to both support and attract multiple wives. Given that the general trend of American society is already in motion towards the economic benefit of women in general and elite men in particular, the fact that legalized polygamy fits squarely upon this progressive trend line would appear to make it all but a done deal, especially if one takes into account the decline of traditionally monogamous Christian culture and its replacement by various pagan cultures that range from openly polygamous African and Arabic immigrant cultures to the practical polygamy of the secular divorce culture in which men financially support multiple wives and families while limiting their sexual involvement to the latest wife.

Keep in mind that from both practical and sociological perspectives, the legal status of a woman as an “ex-wife” rather than a “wife” is largely beside the point so long as the man is still responsible for being the primary provider for the familial unit. And please note that I’m not at all interested in the various arguments that can reasonably be made for Christian polygamy on a theological basis as they are an irrelevant tangent in this societal context.

Being eminently practical beneath their superficially romantic exteriors, women can usually be relied upon to politically press for that which leads to the material advantage of their sex. Notice how the historical commitment to “sexual equality” on the part of feminist activists was thrown entirely out the window once it was perceived that the pendulum had swung in the opposite direction. This isn’t to say that millions of American women won’t be continue to be content in a monogamous state-licensed relationship, only that enough of them will be convinced of the material benefits and potential security of not being limited to one that they will be willing to provide the political horses required to ride through the cracks in the traditionalist wall made by the judidical homogamy advocates.

Moreover, invoking supply and demand again indicates that this is an obvious way to counteract the so-called male marriage strike. As the supply of marriageable men dries up due to male inclination and/or male unemployment, the institution of legalized polygamy can not only make up for this shortage, but essentially render future supply deficiencies nonexistent. If Roissy is correct about female hypergamy and “five minutes of Alpha are better than a lifetime of Beta [Gamma]”, then it can only be a matter of time before lower-status women begin to actively demand legal polygamy in order to expand their access to relationships with higher-status men capable of supporting them and their progeny.

The question ultimately boils down to whether women of the politically active sort would prefer half of Prince Charming’s castle to the entirety of a woodcutter’s cottage. The acquisition of male assets through divorce was never going to work for long, as it only took forty years – a little less than two generations – for growing male awareness to break the traditional marital model and reduce marriage rates among the 25-34 age group from 80% to 45% and the overall rate to 52%. In less than three generations from Ronald Reagan’s signing of the California no-fault divorce law in 1969, conventional monogamous marriage will no longer be the statistical norm.

So, women will either have to become the primary familial providers or they will turn to a different wealth distribution model. Both history and economics strongly suggest the latter.

Time preferences

This should serve as a cautionary tale to those who still believe that giving money to the impoverished is a rational solution to poverty. And yet, we can be confident that it won’t.

A short drive away, Hamon Matipe, the septuagenarian chief of Kili, confirmed that he had received that sum [$120,000] four months earlier. In details corroborated by the local authorities, Mr. Matipe explained that the provincial government had paid him for village land alongside the Southern Highlands’ one major road, where the government planned to build a police barracks.

His face adorned with red and white paint, a pair of industrial safety glasses perched incongruously on a head ornament from which large leaves stuck out, Mr. Matipe said he had given most of the money to his 10 wives. But he had used about $20,000 to buy 48 pigs, which he used as a dowry to obtain a 15-year-old bride from a faraway village, paying well above the going rate of 30 pigs. He and some 30 village men then celebrated by buying 15 cases of beer, costing about $800.

“All the money is now gone,” Mr. Matipe said. “But I’m very happy about the company, ExxonMobil. Before, I had nothing. But because of the money, I was able to buy pigs and get married again.”

Now, not everyone is capable of blowing $120,000 in only four months and winding up with nothing but another notch on the old bedpost. But this sort of behavior is seen all the time, from professional athletes to lottery winners. So long as an individual’s time preference is limited to the short term, he will never amass any wealth because he will immediately spend any amount of money that is given to him or earned by him.

This is why societies that insist on transferring wealth from those with long-term time preferences to short-term preferences are ultimately doomed. One can always eat a heartier meal if one does not save the pigs for breeding and the grain for planting, but there won’t be anything left to eat come the winter. And unfortunately, one cannot instill time preferences though education due to the human talent for rationalization.

In defense of double-standards

Donna Reed complains that women are criticized for the same behavior in which men indulge:

Her wanting to explore and have her fun before she settles hardly qualifies as a tramp. Tons and TONS of men do this same thing but what do we call them?

That completely depends upon how “fun” is defined. Considering that the woman concerned a) needed to break up with her boyfriend, b) was by her own admission envious of her single friends being able to go out with other men, and c) Ms Reed claims that “Tons and TONS of men” are doing “this same thing”, it is perfectly clear that what the little would-be tramp wanted to do was exactly what I described in the original post, namely, spend a few years riding the carousel before settling down.

But that’s obvious and one requires a furiously spinning rationalization hamster in order to claim that the young woman merely wanted to break it off with the perfect long-term relationship guy in order to spend time “taking trips with best friends, dancing, and doing anything silly and fun with your pals”. (Of course, as has been pointed out before, “taking trips” aka “travel” is femalespeak for “have sex with strange men”, so I suppose the assertion is not so much incorrect as an incompetent attempt at camouflage.) There is simply no question that the young woman very much wants to go out and get herself ravished a few times by a few different men. It is the bestial temptation that is there to either be resisted by her reason or justified by her hamster.

The more interesting question that Donna Reed raises is this: how and why can anyone object to a sex-based double standard? There is no double-standard if we are discussing morality; fornication and adultery are considered sins for both sexes alike. Therefore, to assert the existence of a double-standard inherently takes the discussion completely outside the subject of morality and puts it in the realm of mere social acceptability.

Now, the supposed double standard is that men who have sex with many women are studs whereas women who have sex with many men are sluts. But different labels for men and women with similar attributes are not a double standard; is it a double standard that attractive men are called “handsome” and attractive women are called “pretty”? Of course not. The labels derive from the observable fact that men’s attraction to women has a negative correlation with her sexual experience while women’s attraction to men has a positive correlation with his sexual experience.

Note that we’re talking about attraction here, not the reasoned pursuit of a life-long mate. As is usually the case, what a woman says about the men to whom she is attracted is irrelevant as the fact of the matter is that the virginal adult male is a figure of scorn in modern society whereas the virginal adult female is despised only by her fellow women in the same manner that they hate beautiful women.

So, the female standard for men is that men with less sexual experience are less attractive. The male standard for women is that women with less sexual experience are more attractive. This is not a single double standard, but rather two distinct standards held by two different groups of people about two different groups.

In which we are called out

Chateau comments upon America reaching the Crazy Cat Lady Stage:

The crazy cat lady stage of America — yep, that about sums it up. So what follows? Who knows. It’s possible the pendulum will swing back, perhaps violently. As we here at the Chateau relish provoking reminding the readers, giving women the right to vote has been a disaster for liberty-loving small-government patriots. Do any of the mainstream conservative or libertarian bloggers have anything to say about Lott’s study? Their cowardly silence speaks volumes.

I responded thusly:

Cowardly silence? On women’s suffrage? Just to just to give one conservative and one libertarian example, Ann Coulter and I have both been very clear on our opposition to women’s suffrage. I have written on the subject numerous times; here’s one example from 2007:

“What Ann understands and so many nominal conservatives do not is that women’s suffrage is completely incompatible with human liberty or a republic as described in the U.S. Constitution. The two cannot co-exist. One cannot defend freedom on the basis of emotion, as fear always runs to promises of security, however nebulous.”

Women’s suffrage has been a complete and unmitigated disaster across the West and it is doubtful that any society can survive it for long.

The fact is that it is impossible to rationally defend women’s suffrage in a system of limited democracy on ANY grounds except to assert that it is an intrinsic and self-evident societal good. One may or may not agree with that, but regardless, to simply label something an intrinsic and self-evident good is not tantamount to actually making a case for it. To even attempt to begin making a genuine argument for women’s suffrage usually requires a fundamental error in confusing “the act of legal voting” with “freedom” and/or “human liberty”. But neither voting nor democracy are synonymous with freedom or societal well-being, which is precisely why the Founding Fathers limited the franchise so strictly and why so many of supposed champions of democracy are actively opposed to further expanding democracy in America beyond the equalitarian expansion of the electorate presently permitted to select its nominal representatives.

If a single American feminist has embraced the concept of genuine democracy with a 100 percent national franchise, which I support as being vastly preferable to modern American pseudo-democracy and in which there are absolutely no anti-democratic strictures on the will of the people of either sex, I have yet to hear of it. Which should suffice to demonstrate that whatever the feminist rationale in support of women’s suffrage might be, it doesn’t appear to be based on a principled commitment to democracy.

Two wrongs and the Rule of Force

Karl Denninger explains why it is justifiable for people to begin seizing property on their own behalf:

Look, this is what happens when you sit idly by and countenance rampant and outrageous lawbreaking: The people decide they’ll do it too!… Two wrongs don’t make a right – just more wrongs. But the lesson here isn’t that a couple and their kids “re-took” possession and claim their original foreclosure was “illegal.” I don’t know if it was or wasn’t – what I know is that the chain of lawlessness didn’t start with them, and it is impossible to condemn their actions standing alone.

If the foreclosure was unlawful and initiated with “robosigned” and bogus documents then it was. The Earls apparently attempted to demand a jury trial on the facts (including these facts) and were told to go to hell. Someone hasn’t read their Constitution lately – it says that for all controversies exceeding $20, you have a right to a trial by jury (7th Amendment). It doesn’t say that if it’s inconvenient for a bank and might expose criminal fraud for which bank officers could be imprisoned the judge can tell you to pound sand. That, standing alone, broke the chain of lawful behavior in the instant case.

This is where lawlessness leads us – to more lawlessness. Once you commit a lawless act against someone and are not punished for it you have invited them to retaliate with complete disregard for the law in their response. You are only required to deal ethically and morally with an ethical and moral entity across the table – one who ignores the law loses their right to demand that respect in return.

Two wrongs don’t make a right, but they do create both a justification and a motivation for human action. Once the government refused to enforce the law that protected the people from the fraudulent depredations of the banks and then denied them their Constitutional right to a jury trial, it abrogated its right to demand that those same individuals behave in a reasonable and law-abiding manner. It’s not a question of the Rule of Law since it is an observable fact that there is no law as such in the United States anymore, there is nothing more than the public pretense of law and the sporadic enforcement of that pretense on parties who do not belong to the government-favored classes. The Rule of Law has been replaced by the much weaker and more delicate Rule of Force.

This is nothing new, as Cicero’s letters make it clear that the latter days of the Roman Republic featured a similarly dynamic and amorphous pretense of law. America as you knew it, as you imagined it to be, is no more. It has been gone for some time now and it was laid to rest by the same cancerous forces of greed, lawlessness, and ambition that have brought every other great society in human history to its eventual end.

The dryer test

One of Catkiller’s readers poses a dilemma:

You have a matching washer and dryer. The washer breaks down to a point it would cost more or as much to repair as it would to replace. Fortunately, it is under warranty and the warranty company replaces the washer with a very nice new washing machine. However, the washer and dryer no longer match. The dryer functions fine, but it is older and a different brand than the new washer.

Do you replace the dryer? Does it even occur to you to consider replacing the dryer?

The murders Americans won’t commit

Exhibit A in the Ricardian argument for the free movement of labor:

Chandler police are investigating the bizarre case of a man who was stabbed, decapitated and left in a pool of blood in a central city apartment. One man has been arrested and police are seeking three more suspects in what may the city’s first beheading. “We don’t go to many cases where the victim has been decapitated,” said Chandler Police Det. Frank Mendoza.

At some point, I wonder if people are going to begin to realize that a) there are more immigrants than ever before, and b) the economy is not growing in proportion with them as the Ricardian argument predicts.

They can’t steal if you don’t work

Gonzalo Lira of Zero Hedge is correct. Once the middle class realizes that they are being scammed and participation in the scam is no longer worth it, what is presently and fraudulently passing for “America” is doomed.

Just like the poker player who’s been fleeced by all the other players, and gets one mean attitude once he finally wakes up to the con? I’m betting that more and more of the solid American middle-class will begin saying what Brian and Ilsa said: Fuckit.

Fuck the rules. Fuck playing the game the banksters want you to play. Fuck being the good citizen. Fuck filling out every form, fuck paying every tax. Fuck the government, fuck the banks who own them. Fuck the free-loaders, living rent-free while we pay. Fuck the legal process, a game which only works if you’ve got the money to pay for the parasite lawyers. Fuck being a chump. Fuck being a stooge. Fuck trying to do the right thing—what good does that get you? What good is coming your way?

Fuckit.

When the backbone of a country starts thinking that laws and rules are not worth following, it’s just a hop, skip and a jump to anarchy.

TV has given us the illusion that anarchy is people rioting in the streets, smashing car windows and looting every store in sight. But there’s also the polite, quiet, far deadlier anarchy of the core citizenry—the upright citizenry—throwing in the towel and deciding it’s just not worth it anymore.

If a big enough proportion of the populace—not even a majority, just a largish chunk—decides that it’s just not worth following the rules anymore, then that society’s days are numbered: Not even a police-state with an armed Marine at every corner with Shoot-to-Kill orders can stop such middle-class anarchy.

It really isn’t even debatable anymore. Does anyone seriously believe that the bankers who are now known to have stolen literal billions from the government and from the public alike are going to spend any time in prison, let alone 12-15 years like my father? There is no rule of law, there is only the massive and ongoing monetary rape of the middle and lower classes by the financial-government complex. The latter have been gambling, and losing, at the former’s expense for decades; they have set up an indefensible system where it is heads they win, tails everyone else loses.

But more and more Americans are finally realizing that they can’t steal what you don’t earn. They may not have minded being milked, at least not within reason, but they also understand that there’s no benefit in being turned into hamburger.

Mailvox: homeschool or die!

Yet another example. Which makes one wonder: what good is that all-important socialization to a corpse?

It was the fourth time in little more than two years that a bullied high school student in this small Cleveland suburb on Lake Erie died by his or her own hand — three suicides, one overdose of antidepressants. One was bullied for being gay, another for having a learning disability, another for being a boy who happened to like wearing pink.

The emailer who sent me this article wondered where the parents were. “How come they never have the parents of the bullies on the news? After all, what kind of kid walks around knocking books out people’s hands and calling them faggot? What kind of kid’s take pleasure in doing these kinds of cruel things to people? They weren’t provoked after all. I mean, I know from experience that the kid with the stuffed toy was just asking to get picked on, but I can’t imagine going out of my way every day to make someone else miserable.”

I don’t think it’s profitable thinking about the parents of the bullies. They may be unintelligent, unreflective bullies themselves, or more likely, they either a) have no absolutely idea what their children are doing to other children, b) they are in denial, or c) they’re total idiots who believe their little cretins are permitted everything. I actually had a run-in with the latter some months ago; the morons actually believed that their little thug-in-training shouldn’t even be threatened with being hit back after he, unprovoked, hit another kid in the face with a hockey stick. Needless to say, the little thug is going to be wondering what the hell happened the first time he runs into someone who doesn’t give a damn that his parents have declared him off-limits to playground justice.

My question is where the parents of the bullied children are. Protecting one’s children is a parent’s paramount duty. If one’s child is genuinely being seriously bullied to the point of personal danger, first train the child to defend himself by massively violent overreaction. Chances are very high that he’d be never be directly bothered again.

But in the unlikely event that fails, then the adult must directly confront the bullies and let them know in no uncertain terms that one will cheerfully spend the rest of one’s life in jail for multiple charges of homicide and desecration of a human corpse rather than permit one’s child to come to harm. And if spending a few days in jail on an assault and battery charge is necessary to send the message in a manner that it is received, then so be it. If your kid knows one thing, just one solitary thing, he should know that you have his back. No matter what.

Worst boss ever

I blame a deeply homophobic society. Clearly poor Mr. al Saud snapped under the pressure of the repression, prejudice and social rejection he had experienced:

A gay Saudi prince beat and strangled his male servant to death in a frenzied sexual assault at their luxury London hotel suite, a court heard on Tuesday. Saud Bin Abdulaziz Bin Nasir al Saud, 34, who is a grandson of Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah, killed Bandar Abdullah Abdulaziz on February 15 after abusing him for weeks, the court heard.

The 32-year-old victim was found with severe injuries including bite marks on his cheeks in a bloodstained bed in the suite at the Landmark Hotel, which he was sharing with the prince, prosecutors said.

Needless to say, this incident doesn’t exactly provide evidence of the psychologically healthy state of the orientaionally challenged that a few commenters asserted the other day. On the other hand, I tend to doubt that we can conclude that Mr. al Saud strangled and semi-cannibalized Mr. Abdulaziz out of shame and remorse over his orientation either.