The worst review

A review of Whittaker Chambers review of Atlas Shrugged .

Chambers' review of Atlas Shrugged is perhaps the worst review in the history of literature. I do not mean by that that is it the least complimentary (although god knows it's not a love letter) but that it is the least accurate. Generally when a review misreports a work it is perceived as innocent incompetence, but this is hardly likely here. Atlas Shrugged is not a complex work by the standards of a nationally known reviewer and some of the “mistakes” he makes are obvious to anyone of average intelligence who actually read the book. Some of the claims he makes about AS and Rand are merely unsupported, but others are directly contradicted by the work itself. I am forced to conclude that the review isn't just nasty, it's dishonest.

“It is the more persuasive, in some quarters, because the author deals wholly in the blackest blacks and the whitest whites. In this fiction everything, everybody, is either all good or all bad, without any of those intermediate shades which, in life, complicate reality and perplex the eye that seeks to probe it truly. “ 
 This is perhaps just an exaggeration based on the reviewers limited memory of the work, but it is the first claim that can be factually verified or denied by reference to the work, the latter occurs. Is he seriously saying that Hank Reardon, who betrayed the productive class of a whole country so his girlfriend wouldn't look bad, is “only the whitest white”? Or how about “non-absolute”? If he is only the whitest white or the blackest black which is he? And at which stage of his character development*?

“The Children of Light are largely operatic caricatures. Insofar as any of them suggests anything known to the business community, they resemble the occasional curmudgeon millionaire, tales about whose outrageously crude and shrewd eccentricities sometimes provide the lighter moments in boardrooms. “ 
 Right, so Dagny Taggart is a “curmudgeon”, yeah because she hated socialising with her friends. What Chambers seems to misunderstand, perhaps deliberately perhaps not, it that it is not “ curmudgeonly” to not what to socialise with people who you don't like or trust. That is the extent of the “curmudgeon” tendencies of the heroes of AS.  Note also that he is already inserting the impression that the heroes of AS are all millionaires and that we only need to consider whether they might be known in real life to “the business community”, not the arts or philosophical community. I will come back to this.

“All Miss Rand's chief heroes are also breathtakingly beautiful. “ 
 Midas Mulligan is breathtakingly beautiful? Ken Dannager too? Really? There is no accounting for Whittaker's taste.

“Yet from the impromptu and surprisingly gymnastic matings of the heroine and three of the heroes, no children — it suddenly strikes you — ever result. “ 
Chambers here seems surprised that a woman who wants to become chief of a transcontinental railroad and has sex at lot has mastered birth control. “You speculate that, in life, children probably irk the author and may make her uneasy. “ No Chambers, you speculate that. I speculate that she knew little about how to raise children and spent little time with them and so didn't consider it a good idea to write a lot about them. Just as Jane Austen never wrote a scene with no women present so Rand didn't write a lot of scenes with children in them. As for AS depicting a world that isn't a good place for children, it's a dystopian novel, it's not a good place for adults. “How could it be otherwise when she admiringly names a banker character (by what seems to me a humorless master-stroke): Midas Mulligan? You may fool some adults; you can't fool little boys and girls with such stuff — not for long. “ Apparently he thinks naming a character “Midas” means that the author hates children or something, only his bile is clear in this case.

“Their archetypes are Left-Liberals, New Dealers, Welfare Statists, One Worlders, or, at any rate, such ogreish semblances of these as may stalk the nightmares of those who think little about people as people, but tend to think a great deal in labels and effigies. “ 
Note here that he leaves out completely the fact that plenty on the Right also qualify, as do plenty of religious people. The idea that the bad guys in AS are unbelievable caricatures is simply wrong. There are many people who are as bad or worse as the average Ayn Rand villain. I'm looking at you Krugman. In fact the response to one section of Atlas Shrugged perfectly mirrors the response to the statements of one of the characters in that section. You will no doubt have heard of the train wreck where Rand goes through each car and details how someone in that car endorsed the disastrous philosophy that led to it. Francisco comments on this fact and the outrage is greater than the outrage at the wreck itself. What Rand was doing in this piece was talking about a much larger train wreck, which similarly killed people who, by and large, endorsed to a greater or lesser extent the philosophy that caused it. And just like Francisco the torrents of abuse came down on her far more than on those who caused the wreck. The train wreck by the way was the 20th century. How absurd is it to be condemned for writing unrealistic characters by people who are doing what you have your characters doing? 

“This spares her the playguy business of performing one service that her fiction might have performed, namely: that of examining in human depth how so feeble a lot came to exist at all, let alone be powerful enough to be worth hating and fearing. Instead, she bundles them into one undifferentiated damnation.” 
 Actually the entire book is about how these people came to exist and become powerful enough to be worth hating and fearing. I suppose she could have gone into greater depth, but if Chambers really wants this he is the only person I know who thinks AS should be longer.

“Robin Hood is the author's image of absolute evil — robbing the strong (and hence good) to give to the weak (and hence no good). “ 
Here Chambers simply substitutes “Strong” for productive and “Weak” for unproductive hoping we won't see the difference. In fact the heroes in AS are consistently overpowered in almost everything they want for most of the book. To describe that as “Strength” is just a trifle disingenuous. The character arguably depicted as the worst in the book is Dr. Robert Stadler, who is intellectually strong and even brave. It is not strength but willingness to deal with others through consent only that separates the heroes from the villains.

“I submit that she is indebted, and much more heavily, to Nietzsche. Just as her operatic businessmen are, in fact, Nietzschean supermen, “ 
 Note again he gives the impression that al l the heroes are businessmen.

“Happily, in Atlas Shrugged (though not in life), all the Children of Darkness are utterly incompetent.” 
Dr Robert Stadler is utterly incompetent?

“In the end, they troop out of their Rocky Mountain hideaway to repossess the ruins. “ 
 Except that they don't intend to “repossess” anything, simply to deal consensually with those outside Galt's Gulch. There is no hint that the Gulchers even want to take back what was legally there's let alone “repossess” the whole world.

“More importantly, it is meant to seal the fact that mankind is ready to submit abjectly to an elite of technocrats, “ 
 Much of the book is about how dollars mean you don't have to submit to anyone. That Chambers pretends to misunderstand this after over 1000 pages is breathtaking. The whole point is that by trading consensually nobody needs to submit to anyone's will. If Rand had only mentioned this once I could excuse Chambers, who no doubt was distracted by guilt at being a pawn of socialist murderers, for missing it. But as we all know saying something once isn't really Rand's style. The point is hammered home repeatedly, and anyone who pretends not to get it is dishonest either right on the surface, deep down or both.

“by Miss Rand's ideas that the good life is one which 'has resolved personal worth into exchange value,' 'has left no other nexus between man and man than naked selfinterest, than callous cash-payment.' “ 
The idea that Rand thought that only cash should come in to a relationship is similar to the idea that Marx thought laissez faire was a great idea. Throughout Atlas Shrugged the heroes sacrifice material well-being for abstract values like friendship, integrity and pride. Henry Reardon refuses $20 million dollars for the rights to Reardon metal, far more than he could possible gain from selling it (in fact it's not clear that he ever makes a profit from it's sale). His justification? “Because it's good.”. John Galt gives up far more by not patenting his motor, which conservatively would be worth $50 million given the power/weight ratio and feul economy. Quentin Daniels gives up the chance to own a considerable percentage of the profits from making the same motor, just so he can work as an apprentice in Galt's power station. The refusal of Halley to take payment from Dagny for the concert because her satisfaction and it's source are enough is minor in comparison but still significant. It is certainly less impressive than having 40 men ready to die to rescue someone they love. Death of course would make money pretty meaningless. So much for the idea that Rand favors “no other nexus between man and man... than callous cash payment”.

“It is, in sum, a forthright philosophic materialism. “ 
Materialism has two meanings “ 1. preoccupation with or emphasis on material  objects, comforts, and considerations, with a disinterest in or rejection of spiritual, intellectual, or cultural values. 2. the philosophical theory that regards matter and its motions as constituting the universe, and all phenomena, including those of mind, as due to material  agencies.“ (dictionary.com based on the Random House dictionary) Chambers says “philosophic materialism” which means the second, but he's talking about the first. He either doesn't know or doesn't want us to know the difference. With regard to the first meaning Rand was specific that she did not chiefly value material things. Hell the only reason you read John Galt's speech was that she gave up material things to get it printed. Again the heroes of AS gave up material things repeatedly in AS, and not small ones either. Akston gave up salary and tenure and became a sandwich hand. Galt as previously mentioned gave up his rights to his motor, possibly the most valuable possession on the planet at the time.

“Henceforth man's fate, without God, is up to him, and to him alone. His happiness, in strict materialist terms, lies with his own workaday hands and ingenious brain. His happiness becomes, in Miss Rand's words, 'the moral purpose of his life.' Here occurs a little rub whose effects are just as observable in a free-enterprise system, which is in practice materialist (whatever else it claims or supposes itself to be), as they would be under an atheist socialism, if one were ever to deliver that material abundance that all promise. The rub is that the pursuit of happiness, as an end in itself, tends automatically, and widely, to be replaced by the pursuit of pleasure, with a consequent general softening of the fibers of will, intelligence, spirit. No doubt, Miss Rand has brooded upon that little rub. “. 
Yes Rand thought about what it means to pursue pleasure and how it can affect the will, intelligence and spirit. She even wrote about it, chiefly in the voice of Francisco d'Anconia. The claim that the pursuit of happiness tends “automatically” to 'the pursuit of pleasure' which of course Chambers doesn't define , let alone differentiate from happiness is obviously wrong. Not everyone who pursues happiness spends their time getting drunk and laid. That the forms of pleasure seeking are only effective if they have the content of achievement is mentioned at least twice, firstly by Dagny as a comment on her social debut, then by Francisco as he comments on his fake “playboy” lifestyle and the sort of man who would actually seek it and why. It's OK if Chambers doesn't believe what Rand says about pleasure here, but to pretend she hasn't said it just to justify smearing her philosophy is just plain evil.

“For, if Man's heroism (some will prefer to say: 'human dignity') no longer derives from God, or is not a function of that godless integrity which was a root of Nietzsche's anguish, then Man becomes merely the most consuming of animals, with glut as the condition of his happiness and its replenishment his foremost activity." 
Again this is something that Rand specifically dealt with in AS and to just skip over it to pretend that she did is the work of a propagandist not a reviewer. I guess once you learn from the Trots you never forget.

“So Randian Man, at least in his ruling caste, “ 
 Interesting choice of words, “ruling caste”. Note that none of the heroes ruled or sought to rule anyone. The closest any of them came to doing so was Judge Narragansett, writing a constitution, which would give him as judge less power than he had under the previous one. But the word “caste” is even more revealing, since it refers to a class that is determined by birth and impossible to get out of. Given that every one of the heroes in AS changes “caste” and that the only two sibling pairs in the story end up in completely different circumstances how is this word justified? It's not. It's simply another attempt to imply something untrue about AS, in this case that those who triumphed would have some sort of inescapable hold on the world. In fact not only do they not seem to want this but at least one specifically rejects having an inescapable hold over his employees, hiring only those who will quit and become his competitors.

“For politics, of course, arise, though the author of Atlas Shrugged stares stonily past them, “ 
 Right, because AS has nothing to say about how politics works and what it means. God how did this guy not get laughed out of the literary profession.

“In an age like ours, in which a highly complex technological society is everywhere in a high state of instability, such answers, however philosophic, translate quickly into political realities. “ 
Here we come to the real objection, the crux of the matter, even more important than the god stuff. Rand thinks that philosophy should actually be applied to real life. My god doesn't she know that philosophy is to be kept in the drawing room of effete professors and never taken out in public? The relevance of philosophy to our “highly complex society” being “everywhere in a high state of instability” apparently escapes Chambers. 
 “And in the degree to which problems of complexity and instability are most bewildering to masses of men, a temptation sets in to let some species of Big Brother solve and supervise them. “ 
 So naturally we must abandon all philosophy in politics, all attempts to find underlying principles for understanding the world. No instead we must simply base our politics on, what exactly? Not ethics for that is a branch of philosophy? Not logic for that too is a branch of philosophy Nah let's just keep spewing out range of the moment, “pragmatic”, whatever seems to work right now politics, it worked so well for Weimer Germany. Oh no I've done the Godwin's law thing, oh well, at least I didn't start it.

“Miss Rand, as the enemy of any socializing force, “ What the hell does he mean here? Rand had nothing against socialising, and did it constantly. She had nothing against people being “socialised” in the sense of treating people decently either. Neither of these conclusions is in any way justified by AS.

“calls in a Big Brother of her own contriving to do battle with the other. In the name of free enterprise, therefore, she plumps for a technocratic elite (I find no more inclusive word than technocratic to bracket the industrial-financial-engineering caste she seems to have in mind). “ I don't see how a sculptor and a musician count as part of the “industrial-financial-engineering elite”. Although the sculptor did run a foundry for a while. Again he uses the word “caste” to falsely imply that this group is both monolithic and permanent. Nothing in AS even remotely suggests this, in fact one of the main antagonists seem to regard themselves as having a right to be in an elite not the protangonists. Nowhere do any of the protagonists suggest being given the powers of a Big Brother, in fact John Galt specifically rejects the offer, considering it absurd even to command men to be free.

“When she calls 'productive achievement man's noblest activity,' she means, almost exclusively, technological achievement, supervised by such a managerial political bureau. “ Actually she means and says she means whatever expands a man's life. That someone could be ignorant of this is startling but I guess when you're mining a work for things to slander it with it's easy to miss the little stuff. “She might object that she means much, much more; and we can freely entertain her objections. But, in sum, that is just what she means. For that is what, in reality, it works out to. “ Yes she can object but we'll simply make a baseless assertion and that takes care of that.

“And in reality, too, by contrast with fiction, this can only head into a dictatorship, however benign, living and acting beyond good and evil, a law unto itself (as Miss Rand believes it should be), and feeling any restraint on itself as, in practice, criminal, and, in morals, vicious (as Miss Rand clearly feels it to be). “ 
How exactly is not using force against others going to lead to a dictatorship? The only restraint he talks of is the initiation of force, which yes, I do think it should be in practice criminal and in morals vicious. The idea that a group whose only demand was “stop stealing from us” is dictatorial is bizarre, but only if you don't consider the “conservatives” who make it. To them sacrifice to the “greater good” is a god, worshipped far more reverentially than the god they claim to worship. What, we can't extort money from you to enslave your sons to die on a distant field? You dictators!

“I take her to be calling for an aristocracy of talents. We cannot labor here why, in the modern world, the pre-conditions for aristocracy, an organic growth, no longer exist, so that the impulse toward aristocracy always emerges now in the form of dictatorship. “ 
Wow, that's scummy even for him. Note how he goes from a claim (not supported by any textual evidence naturally) that she is for “an aristocracy of talent” and then sleazily transfers from that sort of “aristocracy” to a political one, which she never argued for. He is again trying to plant the seed of a group that controls all and that is difficult or impossible to get into if you aren't born into it. This despite 3 of the central characters being almost literally as different in backgrounds as It is possible to be. The origins of the Gulchers range from heirs to a multi-million dollar fortune, the son of an aristocratic bishop, left an impoverished home at 14 and son of a garage attendant (maybe). And those are the ones we know about. From this we can judge one of his early claims that this book is about a “class war”. This is literally true and yet a lie. There are “classes” of people in the philosophic sense at war in AS. But we know he meant us to take it in the sense of “Haves vs. Have-nots” “Aristos vs. the hoi polloi”. This is as untrue as it could possibly be. Brothers and sisters are born into the same class, but the only two sibling pairs mentioned end up on opposite sides of the “class war”.

“Nor has the author, apparently, brooded on the degree to which, in a wicked world, a materialism of the Right and a materialism of the Left first surprisingly resemble, then, in action, tend to blend each with each, because, while differing at the top in avowed purpose, and possibly in conflict there, at bottom they are much the same thing. The embarrassing similarities between Hitler's National Socialism and Stalin's brand of Communism are familiar. “
Actually she has “brooded” or rather thought about it. That's part of the reason why she suggests a system radically different from either. Of course to Chambers the fact that both systems are allegedly “materialistic” means there are no other relevant details.

“Therefore, resistance to the Message cannot be tolerated because disagreement can never be merely honest, prudent, or just humanly fallible. “
This is said of a book in which the vast majority of the heroes resist the message and the resistance forms a large part of both the page count and the interest of the book. Without resistance to the message by characters presented as morally good AS would be a pamphlet. Seriously this guy is evil, through and through.

“There are ways of dealing with such wickedness, and, in fact, right reason itself enjoins them. From almost any page of Atlas Shrugged, a voice can be heard, from painful necessity, commanding: 'To a gas chamber — go!' “ 
Now you see what I mean about not being the first to invoke Godwin. Chambers is hearing voices. Unfortunately they aren't the voices of those slain by his former comrades, so I guess I was wrong about the whole being distracted by guilt thing. Let us look at what the characters in AS actually do about such wickedness. Nothing. Literally nothing. The closest they get to hostile action is blowing up their own property. Nobody is punished for obscene thefts and blackmails. They don't shoot anyone except in legitimate defence of others or to reclaim property that has been stolen (and only 1 named character does the latter). They don't even hold a grudge much, Hank Reardon being willing to forgive decades of emotional abuse, ingratitude and humiliation for less than a minute of actual fellowship. He doesn't even get that.

“mislaid the discriminating knack that most of us pray will warn us in time of the difference between what is effective and firm, and what is wildly grotesque and excessive. “ 
 Maybe I'm wrong about this guy, maybe he's not lying maybe he just comprehensively missed the point of everything she wrote. Nope, he's evil. But here we see that he's stupid as well. What would be the point of AS toned down? If Rand isn't right that what she says is wrong with philosophy and society is disastrous then she's wrong that it's wrong. There is no middle ground and saying there is, that this plague that has killed millions (many of them while being cheered on by Chambers), would be seen as blatantly dishonest and brain-dead. What Chambers wants is for someone who believe something passionately to write as though she believed it somewhat. The only reason to want someone to do this is if you disagree with them.

“We struggle to be just. “ 
 Always hard for a Trot, but really he doesn't. He struggles to be a lying sleazy, traducing scumbag, or rather he finds it easy.


* It should be noted here that the character development of “Non-absolute” is the most detailed and convincing in the entire work, yet it consumers at least an order of magnitude less words than other characters. What this says about Rand is significant, but I don't know what it is.

Quiggin does the zombie.

Firstly I'd like to thank you for the conciseness of your piece in the Sydney Morning Herald, unfortunately I might not be able to be as concise as the errors in that piece require a great deal of debunking. My appologies.

The idea that the financial markets always make better decisions than governments is wrong (and irrelevant) but it has nothing to do with "imputing wisdom to the rich and powerful" or the efficient market hypothesis. Government in most countries (including the USA) is made up of the rich and in all countries of the powerful. The financial markets on the other hand are to a great extent made up of the middle class and the people who handle their money. If anything you impute far more wisdom to the rich and powerful than the EMH. The efficient market hypothesis is states that it is impossible to beat the market because the market always correctly incorporates and reflects all relevant information. This is saying much more than that the market can beat the government, it's saying that the market beats everyone.

You might actually be thinking of the Austrian School theories that say that "financial [and other] markets always make better judgements than governments", but I doubt you've heard of the Austrian School as it's criticisms of the EMH were not made "in the wake of the crisis" many years before. In fact it is theorectically possible for governments to make decisions that, on occasion, are better than that of markets, it's just not possible for them to make them consistently enough to deliver a net benefit because the information provided by a price mechanism. Look up "economic calculation problem" on wikipedia, it will give you the outline. It may sound patronising to tell a professional economist that he needs to look up wikipedia for basic facts but I can't help that, you do.

It should be noted that you more correctly summerise the EMH further down in your article, which makes it seem like either you're being deliberately deceptive about what it says or you're simply not putting any thought at all what you're writting. If you're going to construct a strawman you should avoid actually stating it's full implications.

Your claim that economic rationalism was the "dominant ideology of the time" is absurd. Throughout the period you discuss the dominant ideology of all Western nations called for a powerful central bank, tarriffs, minimum wage laws, restrictions of nonabusive and consensual child labour, medical. legal and countless other types of professional licensing and so on and so on. The fact that this ideology was dominant is demonstrated by the facts that it dominated (i.e. it's ideas were implemented) and made it's domination seen natural. If you can find any evidence that for instance the idea that we didn't need a central bank was "dominant" at any point during the last 100 years I will recant this. Or if anyone can read aloud all the regulations applicable to financial markets is less than an hour. Please don't try this yourself, Basel II might make your tounge explode (251 pages of just the INTERNATIONAL regulations, thousands more of national and god knows how much state).

Of course the EMT was indeed used to support this "dominant ideology" in that it supported the idea that there wasn't a central-bank-created bubble and that indeed there couldn't be. But this idea is directly opposite to what "economic rationalism" says about bubbles in general and the bubbles you talk about in particular. The "reforms" after the dotcom fiasco were no doubt an overreaction, reforms made is such circumstances always are, but they were also an underreaction. The main cause of the dotcom bubble was the central bank, that is to say government intervention in the market, which has been the cause of all financial bubbles that don't involve tulips.

Of course if the EMH was right then there wouldn't have been a bubble nothing would be overpriced and therefore Julian Robertson would not have been right to bet they were. He was doing exactly the opposite of what EMH said he should. That he failed doesn't mean it's right (it's not as the subsequent collapse shows), but that you don't understand what it says about investing says you're wrong. Not just about what you say but the idea that you are well-informed enough to comment at all.

Of course you made the usual claim that "booms and busts ... can only be curbed by external regulation" despite the comprehensive failure of regulation to do anything of the kind. There are thousands of pages of regulations and god knows how many pages of decisions by bureaucrats about how they are to be interpreted, is there any evidence that they work? In fact there is good reason to believe that they will never will and I've laid out the arguments in my blog post "Systematic risk, markets and the State". Simply put government regulations don't control the booms and busts they are part of it. http://credible.blogspot.com/2009/11/systematic-risk-market-and-state.html Regulations alternatively cripple markets when they are not needed and spur them on at the worst possible time. The simplest way to reduce booms and busts is to simply eliminate the central bank, which is known to have caused this and all previous (non-tulip) booms and subsequent busts.

There is considerable reason to believe the investment decisions generated by private firms, which are under less pressure to produce short term returns than government, will outperfom those governments. Governments have no incentive to produce value, only to reward interest groups. The government has no shareholders to satisfy, only voters, who practice "rational ignorance" about their policies, and who even if they didn't, would have no reason to systematically advance policies that are for the general good. Private firms on the other hand have people with large interests in whether or not they're creating value and for whom ignorance is therefore not rational. While some of these shareholders may value short term gains, they know that sacrificing the long term interests of the company devalues the shares right now as long term investors will not want them, nor will short term investors who plan to sell to long term investors later on.

Of course this has nothing to do with "the case for comprehensive privatisation" since that case depends on the people benefitting from selling the assets, not the financial markets benefitting (at least that's not ostensibly why it's being sought). The idea that there are bubbles and that assets sometimes getting enormously overvalued is in fact damn good evidence for privatisation, comprehensive or otherwise, properly timed. As I said to my father, you were against selling Telstra shares, I was against buying them, who was right? Not only will privatisation during a bubble benefit financially benefit the government and therefore you no doubt believe the people, but it will extract money from the bubble preventing the enormous new bad investments that often occur during them. Everyone's a winner. Of course this depends on governments investing at the correct time, but if you're right that should be easy. It's startling that you don't even get the implications of your own theories right.

I am unable to tell who you thought would be convinced by your article. The things you support are already the opinions of the unthinking majority, so it can't be them. Anyone who does the least bit of research would see the flaws in your piece so obviously they're not it's target. I can only assume that you wish to give people with no economic knowledge an excuse to believe as they do.

How to excuse a murder (copy of letter sent to "The Monthly".

It's not often that journalistic bias in a piece that condemns it in it's subject is as obvious as in John Birmingham's hatchet job on Julian Assange. First there's the entirely irrelevant start that tries to blame him for an attack he had nothing to do with. Then there's the attempt to link greater efforts to not kill civilians with greater civilian deaths. I note that he wasn't quite brave enough to state claim causality, but without it what relevance does this bit have?

Finally after the ground has been fertilized there is the claim that wikileaks identified "hundreds - possibly thousands" of collaborators. I believe the actual number is three. http://www.abovetopsecret.com/forum/thread598661/pg1 That's the only number I could get from any source that actually checked the facts, unlike you Mr. Birmingham. If there had indeed been hundreds let alone thousands of collaborators identified then of course that would "damage national security" in the mind of David Lapan. Since he specifically said there was nothing in them that could damage national security even your own piece implies that there were not these hundreds you claim.

Then there are the absurd attacks on the journalistic ethics of wikileaks. They have not to my knowledge published a single false fact in the affair (except what false facts were in official government documents). They have been substantially less biased than the average news report on TV, which is admittedly not saying much. If mainstream media hadn't been caught parroting lies over both wars the claims that journalistic ethics were important might have some crediblility, but they did and it doesn't. As an example of the "long-established ethics and standards of the reporting profession" when was the last time a report about a proposed law didn't assume that it's authors were telling the truth about what the law was for? For instance a law about searching for knives is always presented as being intended as a way to crack down on criminals when we all know the police already have the power to search with probable cause. I see what you mean about a "compact with the state... authorities" though. Without such reporters might actually say what the laws were for.

Anyone who feels themselves wronged by anything that wikileaks says can of course reply, unless they're too stupid to operate a blog. The purpose of a story is not to give people time to excuse their bad behaviour. They did what they did, here's the evidence.

Finally we come to your pathetic and abominable excuse for the mass murders in the "Collateral Murder" video. You state that there is talk of weapons fire in the video yet nobody killed in the video fires a weapon or does anything that looks like they're about to. There is simply no action by any of those killed that would suggest an attempt to fire on anyone or the thought that they might have to. People who are about to fire on US forces take cover they don't stand around in the middle of the street. I have never been clearer about anything that I've seen in film than I am that these were not people about to engage in combat. Of course you can claim that I'm wise after the event, but that's just bullshit. Anyone can see they're not threatening. There is nothing that looks enough like a weapon to justify taking a life. The claim that weapons were later found merely makes it look like someone brought a throw-down, as is known to happen in Iraq. The video shows NO evidence of them and nobody has claimed it does. Not even you.

Naturally you refer to the graininess of the video to excuse the killers. But they knew of the quality of their equipment and choose to use it, badly, to determine whether someone lived or died. That was their moral decision and if they can't make moral decisions in combat they shouldn't be in it. If they gather and use information in a firefight in way that allows them to act like moral people then they were morally reprehensible for every getting in that chopper. This is not "naive" or "simplistic" or any of the other words horrible people use to describe people who are inconveniently decent. It's is simply the truth.

This didn't need to be leaked you claim, which is a lie and you know it. If the video showed only facts that were previously reported then why was it suppressed for years? I understand that someone who was embedded with the troops and sympathetic to them reported on it, but he didn't see the video did he? So he reported on reports by those involved, which is no substitute for the real facts. He explained "minute by minute" how the reporters came to be fired on. In that report did he mention that at the time NONE of the forces involved was being fired upon or believed that they would be fired upon between the firing and their reaching the site? Because that is obvious from the speed of their arrival and the fact that this non-threat was occupied the Apache's time. Did he leave that bit out or was that just you? I'm trying to pinpoint precisely who is making what excuses for murderers.

Murder, motive and militarism.

Stefan Molyneux's comments on the video of two journalists and several others being killed is correct, but misses something. Sure nobody with even a basic understanding of how the State works is surprised that they murdered people, or that they murdered people that weren't the people they were “supposed” to be murdering. What the video showed to me was that the purposes of the murders was not what even the more cynical observers assumed. The theory that US and allied forces are there to make the world safe for oil corporations is shown to be fundamentally wrong as is the theory that they are there to maintain control of the Iraqi government for whatever purpose. There is only one credible motivation for the actions of US forces as depicted in this video and it's far scarier than anything Molyneux attributed to the politicians.

First of all let's think about the sequence of actions.
1)Helicopter crews observe things that don't look a lot like armed men and report that they are armed.
2)Crew requests permission to fire on these men.
3)Their commander at base gives permission to fire. This third action is the critical point, logically what should have been the third action, if the goal of these actions was as what is commonly claimed either by their supporters or detractors? What should have come between 2. and 3.?
4)Murder, bloody murder.

Ok so to put this in context, the US military has been in Iraq at this point for ~4 years and had examined the reasons for violent action against it using both information from guerrilla conflict and others with similar ethnic groups. From this a basic rule was deduced that killing civilians or even active guerrillas resulted in recruitment of additional opponents for revenge. This was not a secret, it was very well known by this stage of the war. Indeed this principle was well known to military theorists for decades, although of course it is possible that they weren't listened to by those actually in command. By this time however these facts were well known to all commanders in theatre. Additional fighters obviously caused additional casualties and prevented the accomplishment of tactical and through them strategic goals of the coalition. This is true even if the coalition has no clear idea what it's goals are, except if they are a certain set of goals which I will mention later.

So we have personnel acting against the supposed interests of the people they work for. They do so despite their employers being able to easily access audio-visual records that clearly show this behavior and show no concern that they might be fired for being amazingly bad at their jobs. This confidence is well-placed since there is no mention in this controversy of anyone being fired, demoted, redeployed or inconvenienced in the slightest by said bad actions. Numerous other incidents similar to this have been uncovered and yet nobody is getting fired. Nobody is even being warned that they will be fired if this continues. I'm not talking here about morality, only about efficiency in accomplishing things that are claimed to be goals of those involved. This is an own goal, yet the players are still out there next week as center forward and the coach isn't even telling people not to do that, what gives? Is it possible that there are other goals more important than achieving “victory”? Indeed is it possible that “victory” is not a goal at all for the people actually firing the weapons?

One clue to a particular goal is the calls to request firing clearance (or whatever they call it, I don't know the technical term). They consist of unsupported assertions that cannot be checked up on at the time followed by somebody giving permission if the facts reported fit a protocol that the asserter knows. Obviously if permission is wanted all the asserter has to do is concoct a story that fits the protocol for firing. How then is this useful? All it does is delay firing if permission is asked, which could be lethal if it is actually required. If the situation doesn't in fact fit the protocol it does not prevent firing since the assertion can't be checked. The punishment for lying about the situation is presumably no worse than for inappropriate firing if you didn't have to seek permission but simply obey the protocol. Indeed given that any real danger would result in firing without permission (hey would you ask if an RPG went past your head?) asking permission would tend to be positively correlated with bad shootings. So why do it? The answer is simple, CYA. The military needs to prove that it had procedures to avoid bad results and followed them, thus avoiding the criticism that it did nothing to prevent tragedy. The fact that what it did to prevent tragedy is ineffective or counterproductive is irrelevant since the goal is not to avoid tragedy but to look like one is trying to avoid it. Since few people are familiar enough with military procedures (particularly if these can be classified, as they are) to know how bad they are the military gets to say “We're trying our best, it's just really hard not to kill innocent people.”.

Now lets look at why the military isn't taking simple steps to avoid death or injury to it's members or damage to the strategic goals that are assumed important to the US government, from “liberating the Iraqi people” to “boosting oil company profits”. Remember two things, your boss is who can fire or promote you, your job is what you get fired for not doing or promoted for doing. If you can't be fired or not promoted for being a bad teacher but you can be fired for saying “nigger” you are not a teacher, you are a professional non-sayer of the word “nigger”, a pretty stupid job but hey there's a paycheck, someone will do it. If you can't be fired for not achieving victory but you can be fired for making it clear that military success is not in the long term interest of the voters you are not a soldier you're a professional obscurer of that particular truth.

Consider that for about 65 years the net effect of US military activities on the welfare of US citizens has been negative. If US entry into WWI is considered a cause of WWII then the period stretches back to 93 years at least. Yet the generals are still employed, the bases thrum with activity, people are refueling planes, repairing tanks, shooting journalists and otherwise “earning” a paycheck. If the perception of US military activities were to change to a realistic one they'd all get fired. Not immediately of course because the Military Industrial Complex (MIC) wants to protect their pork, but sooner or later other complexes (e.g. the Medical Industrial Complex) will promote a politician that proposes to take MICs pork and slough it in another trough. Said politician will get the votes of the disenchanted and the money of the competing thieves, an unbeatable combination. If you doubt that popularity plus loot can overcome powerful lobbyists I've got three words for you “State Tobacco Lawsuits”.

If a serious review of how the US military operates in Iraq and elsewhere and how this effects the strategic and political aims of the US government were to be undertaken and publicized most of the US military and almost all of it's high command would be fired. This need not occur because of any harm to the interests of the general US public, the harm to special interests is more than sufficient to have the generals canned if the government doesn't give a damn about it's constituents. Needless to say before any of the high command were fired they would certainly make sure anyone who caused the review to happen were taken down with them. Preferably in a manner that made it difficult or impossible for them to get another government job and severely limited their private employment opportunities too. So your job as a lieutenant, captain or other junior officer is to avoid serious examination of the performance of the US military in general and your unit in particular. Failing that allowing the performance revealed to become widely known and believed must be avoided. Whether this performance leads to attaining any goals of the government is irrelevant. While it is possible that non-performance in stated goals might lead to serious examination of the military and it's procedures this is extremely unlikely. This came close to happening after the Vietnam war, but nothing came of it, and nothing will come of it if both Iraq and Afghanistan are “lost”.

So what's the best way to avoid rational discussion of the US military's effects either happening or penetrating public consciousness? Well ironically being in a war helps. So does increasing the size of that war so as to turn as many voters and campaign contributors as possible into members of the MIC. Failure is not only an option for the military, it's the best option. When the military is actually in a war any complaints about it's performance or the cost are deemed “unpatriotic”. It's only in peace, where the activities of the military hardly matter, that it can be questioned. Once they stop performing brave self-sacrificing activities they lose the strange moral shield that self-sacrifice endows. So in the end what the military wants is to lose for a long time but not so badly that their paymasters lose patience with them and give up. Then they want to salvage something that their paymasters ( not their bosses) call victory. This avoiding a backlash for the paymasters that could cause them to come down on the military's masters. As long as those who control the government can be fooled into thinking that the military will serve the government's purposes and that the government's purposes are basically theirs the military will be allowed to do what it wants. That the corporations fall for this over and over again is partly due to the profits for being part of the MIC but mostly because they are run by people already invested in the strategy who would be fired if it's general failure became apparent. Ending the war in Iraq won't happen because people realise that it's unjust but because it's in their interests to oppose it. Telling the corporate elite that you believe they benefit from it won't help that.

The democratic restaurant

Imagine you go to a restaurant and see on the menu two choices
each for apertizers, main course and desert. You order the salad
for starter, then the steak and finally the fruit cocktail, a
nice white would go well with that you think. The waiter tells
you that you can only have either the salad, lasagne and fruit
salad or the garlic bread, steak and ice cream. Only 2 choices
on the menu. You pick the first option figuring you can swap
your main course with someone.

Unfortunately you don't actually get to pick which menu option
you get, you just get to vote for it. If you win then everyone
has to eat what you're eating, if you lose then you have to eat
what the majority ordered. You try to explain that you're lactose
intolerant but the waiter is too busy tallying votes. He doesn't
seem too concerned that half the diners don't bother. After the
vote goes against you, you decide to leave. Security stops you
and insists that you pay for a meal you did not order and have
not eaten. They won't let you leave until you do.

Looking at people's bills you notice that some are larger
than others, although everyone ate the same type and amount of food.
You eat up and leave vowing never to eat there again. The
security guards tell you not to eat at any other restaurant, else
they'll break your legs and that if you eat at home, you still
have to pay for the food here.

This is democractic dining, with as much freedom as voting for the
government allows. Bon appettit.

Vogter2100 and moral stupidity.

AngieAntiTheist has a video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zURPZ6r_fUg in which she describes how she brings up her kid to be moral without religion. It's well thought out and clear both in terms of how she intends to raise a moral child and why.

Then the idiot Vogter chimes in with a response that calls the question stupid. He claims that morality is in our DNA and therefore we don't need to find out anything about it to be moral. As usual he accompanies his claims with insults to anyone who believes differently from him, in this case against their intelligence. Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Nietzsche, Rand, Russel, Molyneux they were all wasting their time according to him. All we have to do is let the instincts flow. Now I don't deny that we have a certain amount of morality encoded in our DNA but that this is sufficient to look after us without thinking. If that's the case Vogter, then how the hell did we get religion? Religion is against practically all the moral instincts that scientists have found to be inherited in our DNA, so how could it arise if simply allowing them full sway works? The fact is that the moral instincts like compassion don't answer often critical questions about morality well and sometimes they don't answer them at all.

For instance should we sterilise retarded people so that future generations aren't forced to take care of their subnormal offspring? Compassion tells us that burdening the poor of the future with the support of these people is bad. It also tells us that taking away the joy of raising a child from someone is also bad. Compassion tells us to help those in sweatshops in the third world, it does not tell us whether we do this better by boycotting sweatshops or by buying as much as possible from them so demand for and therefore the price of sweatshop labour goes up. Should we be compassionate for a whale killed to feed thousands of people or for the hundred of cows that would be slaughtered to feed them if it's spared? Is it better to spend one's time collecting money for Haitian earthquake victims or telling people why so many died in the first place? Because it looks like compassion would recommend the former, but without the later Haiti will continue it's present abysmal system and disasters will continue to kill Haitians in obscene numbers. As usual Vogter doesn't consider any non-obvious facts and even obvious facts that don't fit his viewpoint he ignores. In fact looking at any of Vogter's videos shows me why morality is never easy and what happens to you if you fail at it.

Systematic risk, market and the State.

Market participants have taken taking system-threatening risks in the securities market. Many commentators have taken this to mean that government should intervene to prevent them doing so in the future. I explained previously why this won't work, but now I'd like to focus on how the State encourages and facilitates the taking of "systematic risk". First a definition, "systematic risk" is a risk that could rationally be considered to endanger the entire system it is taken within, necessitating a change to another system if a misfortune occurs. A system is "an assemblage or combination of things or parts forming a complex or unitary whole" (http://dictionary.com).

The theory behind the call for more regulation is simple, market participants have a motive to protect themselves from risk, but no sufficient motive to protect the market from systematic risk. Because any prevention of systematic problems costs the person or institution, but they don't gain the full benefit. Their own risk goes down and that's a benefit, but it's small compared to the full cost of the risk across the market. So the preventer pays the full cost of prevention but doesn't gain the full benefit. It's like paying to purify a entire river so you can take a clean shower. Therefore people theorise that a "domino effect" could happen where one firm goes bust sending one or more of their creditors bust leading to the bankruptcies of their creditors and so on leading to too many bankruptcies for the system to handle.

This analysis ignores the fact risks that could result in defaults to your own creditors are more expensive. Naturally there are creditors out there who will loan to risky people or companies. Just as naturally they charge more than more conservative creditors so announcing that you are taking a risk likely to endanger repayments costs a firm money. This includes any exposure sufficient to destroy the firm no matter how apparently safe the firm you're exposed to. Passively concealing the nature of your risk-taking costs just as much since creditors and investors naturally assume that if what you were doing were safe you'd rush to tell them of it. Actively lying about what financial risks you're taking is called fraud and it's easier to detect and harder to actually profit by than you'd think. Investors and creditors (as well as potential short sellers) have an incentive to ferret out the lies. So any "domino effect" would have to overcome continual barriers to this like bulkheads in a well designed submarine.

A risk to an entire system is more likely if a single factor affects all participants directly, or at least a large number of participants directly and the rest through their connection to those directly affected. A risk is more likely to be systematic if could cause sudden problems, without time for participants to adjust their actions to minimize the problem. Government intervention is of course the most likely thing to create such risks due to the sudden and universal change it causes.

The most obvious government intervention in financial markets is the setting of the "risk free" interest rate by central banks. Since all economic processes include a delay between input and output this affects all economic processes. It also profoundly affects the prices of productive assets. Paying more than the return on an asset divided by the interest rate loses money. For instance if a factory had profits of $1M a year and you paid $10M for it, interest rates of 10% lose you money. So high interest rates mean low asset prices and sudden increases in interest rates mean sudden reductions in asset prices for all participants. This can lead to capital adequacy problems, i.e. a company not a big enough difference between the value of it's assets and it's liabilities. Financial institutions need this gap to be big to reassure investors, creditors and regulators that they're not about to go broke. The usual response to capital adequacy problems is to sell off assets to reduce debt. If many firms have the same problem of course the market is swamped with assets and a good price can't be got for them. This is because the opportunity cost to the buyer of buying your cheap assets is buying someone else's even cheaper assets. Since the government can subject everyone in the system to this same risk the government IS a systematic risk.

So called "credit ratings" were in effect licenses to commit fraud. Since by definition investors in funds lacked either the motivation or the knowledge to investigate individual investments. Therefore they hire someone to do so and get them the best combination of risk and return. Without the previously mentioned motivation or knowledge they had to rely on credit ratings as a proxy for risk. Fund managers delivered not the best combination of risk and return but the best combination of return and credit rating. To make a promise intending to deliver something entirely different is fraud. No fund manager will be prosecuted though because they will all say "But we invested in safe things, look they're all AAA rated.". Indeed the government required that some funds (especially retirement funds) invest only in things rated highly by it's designated defrauders, Moody's, Standard & Poors and Fitch.

Ratings agencies didn't rate unsafe firms or securities highly because the owners and issuers paid them. Although this seems like a good idea a little thought we show that's a bad strategy. If you label every piece of rubbish as caviar why would anyone want to eat in your restaurant? Ratings produced solely because someone pays you to say something are worth about as much as the paper they're printed on, that being how much competitors could produce them for. The only point in producing a rating is having people believe you, and over the long term saying things that aren't true doesn't help that. The reason that ratings agencies went the short term route of simply saying what others wanted them to say is that they have no competition. It's a government-enforced cartel that fund managers can't even refuse to deal with. If they had real competition then people who invest according to what the most credible firms said. But since they don't have to compete they can simply maintain the same low standards as the other two firms and rake in the cash.

Maturity and the State.

I have recently [not so recently now, I left this post as a draft for a long time] been accused of "an impersonation of a spoiled brat" for refusing to take responsibility for the actions of my government. This is a common complaint about the enemies of the State, that they are not mature enough to accept things they ought to. So let us examine the accusation against me in particular and libertarians or anarchists in general.

The reason that "axiomiser" claimed I was immature was I would neither "shut the fuck up and accept the majority vote" or "make some effort to change peoples mind". I was under the impression that I was already doing the latter but let's examine whether this is a reason to accept responsibility for my government.

Let's assume that I can convince 100 people each in Australia, the UK and the US to vote for the candidate that most opposed the war in Iraq. Bear in mind I have NEVER convinced anywhere near this many people to do anything. This is what axiomiser was so upset that I would not accept responsibility for. Of these about half would have voted for that party anyway on other policies. Assuming a two party system and that each person has a 50/50 chance of voting for each party the chance of one vote changing the election is approximately 3/(number of voters). So basically bugger all chance of it EVER happening on a national level. Some chance perhaps that I could change one seat but that rarely changes who forms a government.

So given that I can't change the government, why must I accept responsibility for it? I can't change whether my mother's labor was painful should I accept responsibility for that? I can't change the mind of a terrorist, should I appologise for 9/11? I can't change my socks, should I be blamed if they stink? Oh wait I can change my socks, just a minute... Ok, that's better. But you see the difference, right? Socks, changable by me so I should accept them, or change them. Majority vote not acceptable by me so I need do neither. But the "axiomiser" can't accept this, because he's a spoiled brat. He thinks that he should be given what he wants and everyone should shut up about it. In fact that's what the State is, an attempt to get everyone to shut up about the rights and wrongs of giving the big boy what he wants. Maturity does not consist or resignation to the acts of bullies. It consists of acceptance of reality, and while reality says that the bullies win here, now, it also says that I don't like it. For those that don't wish to hear this, GROW UP!

Swine flu, inefficency and am I crazy again?

Ok, so I've been hearing about the swine flu, which naturally the MSM is declaring as a massive emergency that requires huge government action to prevent thousands of deaths etc. Now I'm not going to talk about the implict assumption that such actions is justified by "emergencies" or the responsbility of government for the rapid spread of such pandemics (given the persistent and large-scale subsidy of rapid transportation). Instead I'm going to make a case that government is seeking to maximise that amount of resources spent on these efforts rather than solve the problem.

This case depends on several things being true and if I'm wrong about any of them, please tell me.

The first is that I'm not an Einstein, a Linus Pauling or indeed the intellectual equal of any Noble prizewinner (with the exception of the "Peace" prize, I'll write something about that farce some other time). By this I don't mean I'm subnormal intellectually, merely that my intelligence is not such that it can routinely find implications of facts that nobody else in the world can. If I can see it, chances are other people can too if they want to.

The second is my understanding of the mathematics of epidemics/pandemics. Basically to be an epidemic the average number of people an infected person will in turn effect must be greater than one. If on average each new victim gives the virus to less than one person the total number of victims will be limited to n = a/(1-r) where a is the number of people infected at a particular time and r is the number of new victims each person infects. This is why schools, swimming pools, etc used to be closed, so that on average each person would interact with and have a chance to infect less people. If these measures reduced r below one then an epidemic could be nullifed without any effective treatment for the disease itself. Traditional responses to Ebola outbreaks (developed well before modern medicine) are an extreme example. Sufferers (or suspected suffereres) are simply left in their hut and food pushed in with a long stick. If the person doesn't collect the food for three days a torch is throw onto the thatched roof destroying the virus present in the victim's dead body.

Third is my understanding of what affects the how many people the average victim infects. One of the chief factors is how many people they come into contact with. This varies enormously over the population. Drivers, door-to-door salespeople, shop assistants and airport ticket personnel contact more people than housewives, computer programmers or carers, I will call the former group "high contact" and the latter "low contact" people. Anything that minimises the chances of high-contact people getting the disease is going to be doubly effective at reducing transmission. Firstly the chance of high-contact people getting the disease is higher because they obviously they have more opportunities to catch it. Once infected they similiarly tend to transmit the virus to more people for the same reason. The average number of people a person will infect during an epidemic is therefore increases with the square of his/her number of contacts minus the number of contacts*. If high contact people have a greater tendency to contact other high contact people (for instance if airports have large numbers of high contact people contacting each other) then the situation is worse, increasing with the cube at least of the number of contacts.

If this is true then it's obvious that a small investment in reducing average chance of transmission (either to or from) high contact people will have a large effect on total infections and therefore deaths. Reducing the chance of someone who contacts 10 times more people than the average person is close to 100 times more effective tranmission chances for the average person. What happens if his contacts are only a 10% more likely to be people like him (10 times as high contact) than the contacts of normal people? Well the average number of people infected by the people he infects goes up by close to 1000%, multiplied together this implies over a thousand times more infections from this person than the average person. All of this is an average which includes the possibility that he is never infected.


So clearly these sorts of people, if they exist, are a huge part of the epidemic pandemic problem, yet the targeting of vacinnes is generally towards the elderly, the young and other people who are likely to die if infected. Many of these people are low contact, in fact in the case of the elderly the lack of interaction is often a serious mental and physical health issue in itself. Now of course likelihood of death or serious illness if infected is rightly a factor in determining who should be protected. However isn't it true that the most effective protection of these people is the dramatic reduction in the transmission of the disease?

Now if I'm right about this then it logically follows that, not being a genius, other people could have also figured this out. This is particularly true of those who job is supposedly to prevent or reduce the death toll of epidemics/pandemics. So if they did so and ignored the implications, what other motive is there to do that but to continue wasting resources? The reason they'd want to do that is clear, so they can keep paying the politically influential drug companies and so that the UN's health employees have something to do.


* Because he can't infect the person who originally infected him, therefore the number of people who could infect him is c and the number of people he can infect is c-1.

The Underbelly of the State or the drama comes to the airport.

I'd like to start by offering my condolences to the family of Anthony Zervas, may you find peace and consolation. Mr Zervaswas murdered in full view of two police officers with guns and numerous security officers with clubs and pepper spray. Later his brother was shot and critically wounded outside his home. The police were waiting for backup, because having a gun against clubs isn't enough for them. Sure there were about 14 thugs, but 4 were fighting the other 10. All they'd have to do would be to scare someone who doesn't have a gun with their own guns, which is not usually difficult. The security officers weren't totally useless of course, they stopped other people from saving Mr Zervas. Now that may not sound useful, but it is. If the general public had stepped in and saved someone when the State, it's agents and those it licenses to protect people it would make the State look stupid. That would be far worse than someone dying. Of course the agents of the State could simply have yelled "Everyone start taking pictures" and the fight would have probably stopped. Not many murderers want their crimes in the holiday snaps of half of Asia. Even if they hadn't stopped at least we would have been able to identify all the attackers. Naturally you can't do this from airport security cameras because, 8 years into the "war on terror" security cameras still aren't good enough to identify anyone.

Of course the small-s state being New South Wales, our old friend Laura has to rear her ugly head. That's Laura Norder, the bitch of Macqurie Street. Every time politicians want to do something bad in Sydney they say it's for "Laura Norder". The murder and later shooting of the victim's brother were part of an ongoing bikie war. The worst kept secret in law enforcement is that this war is over methamphetaimes and hence the fault of the State. Even the mainstream media have said that the violence is the result of drug prohibition with the Sydney Morning Herald editorial openly saying so. The violence of the methamphetamine market was the subject of "Underbelly" the most popular series on australian television. So naturally Premier Rees says nothing about stopping prohibition, instead seeking to make bikie gangs illegal. The proposed law would allow the police to declare an organisation prohibited and not allow it's members to meet. They could also declare people part of these organisations. Of course the police don't have to say why they are making these declarations they just announce that from now on, if you see some of your mates you go to goal for 2 years. They don't have to prove that you and your mates were doing anything illegal, conspiring to do anything illegal or even that you were "consorting" with known criminals. Naturally laws against all these things are already on the books. Only those against whom a case cannot be made for any of these, or indeed anything else, will be caught by this law.

We are supposed to trust that people who let killers drive away in a taxi despite having 22 cops on the premises and cameras all over the place. These are the people who we're supposed to believe will handle their new powers competently and honestly. It's the same everywhere, when they don't have the competence to solve problems they want power to solve them without competence. Of course attempting to solve problems without competence simply creates more problems that the creator isn't competent to solve. Admitting incompetence to solve these new problems would lead to questions about the competence of their previous solutions so of course it doesn't happen. While people are allowed to use power, force in other words, to solve their problems this cycle will continue. While this cycle continues the people will continue to want their leaders to "get tough" because deep down, everyone knows them getting smart is not an option. And when it all goes horribly wrong, when the powers are used in ways that their supporters didn't expect, guys like me will say "I told you so.". When the lastest laws are used to crack down on antiwar protesters, unions, community groups that oppose whatever idiocy the government pushs on us, or bunchs of suspicious looking muslims, I want to be the first to say "No surprise". Because that's all the government ever gives you, the feeling of wisdom that comes with predicting what others wouldn't. Note not couldn't, they could all have predicted it. They just decided not to.

The murderless club basis for objective morality.

It has been claimed by theists that without god it is impossible to have objectively-based morality. Leave aside that doing what someone else says you should do is not an objective morality, how hard is it to make a basis for morality that is objective? Well I thought I'd try and it took it less than 10 minutes.

Imagine a world without rules, no morality, no law, no binding customs (although they might have habits). Obviously you would be better off with some system of rules to limit undesirable behaviour. One of my friends comes up to me and says "I want to be able to trade without fear of being murdered and my cargo stolen. What can I do?". I say well let's form a club with only 1 rule, if you murder someone in the club you are expelled. The only bad thing about being expelled is that members of the club can then murder you without consequence just as they can murder people who never belonged to the club. This club would be very popular. So would a club that had as it's condition that you don't steal from the other members. It is objectively true that if any of these clubs were opened in such a rule-free world I'd join them. I know this objectively because I have sufficent knowledge of my own preferences. These preferences are subjective, but my knowledge of them is objective. So if I base my morality on not doing anything that would get me thrown out of a "rule club" that I join it's objective morality.

Like I said, less than ten minutes.

The regulatory cycle or why new rules aren't the answer.

Deregulation has taken a lot of the blame for the current crisis. Most of the people saying that conclude that if deregulation caused the problem, regulation can solve it. They are wrong.

To understand why you must abandon the common, if largely unconscious assumptions about regulatiors and how they produce regulation. Generally people assume that wise, impartial regulators sit down, look objectively at the facts and, unswayed by intellectual fashion and the irrational exuberance or depression of the market and society, make wise, impartial, objectively based decisions. If that were true then why is it that such decisions are only made exactly when they are not needed, as is presently happening. Currently the US government is writing rules about overextending your company, investing too much in doubtful financial assets and everything nobody wants to do any more because it loses money. No doubt other governments are too. It's like making sure everyone has cleaned the leaves out of their gutters after a bushfire has demolished half the town. To understand why they're passing such laws and regulations now, you must understand the financial regulatory cycle and how it trails the monetary cycle.

Stage one of the regulatory cycle is Crisis, caused by the excesses of monetary expansion. Crisis creates a demand for immediate action to combat the cause of the present catastrophe. The cause is however the state of the regulatory cycle some time in the past so correcting it has no immediate effect.

Nevertheless the second stage, Action occurs. Regardless of the immediate effects of Action the monetary cycle moves on and things correct themselves. The Action may speed this up, slow it down, make it easier or harder, more expensive or cheaper.

This leads to the third stage, Inefficency. During Inefficency actions taken during more frantic times are observed to be hampering the markets efforts to create wealth. Since the market is still in recovering from a bust there is little chance they are actually preventing bad behaviour anyway, since that only happens in the boom phase. Thus their effect is to impose large present costs for very small or nonexistant present gains.

This leads to the fourth stage, Circumvention. Firms in the financial market do two things. Lobbying to remove the restrictions placed in stage 2 occurs to the general appathy of the population. Few if any voters and political masters understand the present rules and why or even if they're important. Resistance to selective deregulation is low as the circumstances that led to the need for the regulation are gone. Firms also develop practices that go around the current rules while having largely the same effects as the practices forbidden. This makes the original regulations even less important, even counterproductive if they simply shift activity to less transparent or accountable sections of the economy. Circumvention accelerates when during times of monetary expansion because during those time the need for caution and restraint is weakest.

The combination of the monetary boom and Circumvention above leads back to Crisis.

You might ask, "Is this cycle inevitable?". Might we act appropriately and promptly to prevent such a destructive turn of events. The answer is "Why would we?". During the times when such action is neccesary by it's nature few people think it's warrented. If people were in general worried about the negative effects of asset price bubble then we would not have one, since a precondition of such a boom is that people don't think it's either happening or going to happen. To impose or keep regulations to prevent it happening regulators must go against the wishes of pretty much everyone who's paying attention to their activities. They must do this despite not being able to offer any evidence that their actions are warranted, predictions being notoriously difficult in economics. Those wanting to remove restrictions can point to solid evidence of costs in the here and now. In any case in many or even most cases they're right about the high costs and low benefits of regulation, because much of the regulation was passed in panic during stage 2 (Action) when it was felt there was little time to think through the costs and problems. A case could and will be made that the actions in the Action stage were hasty and ill-considered and possibly now out of date. A general mood of caution and pessimism will defeat this case, which is another way of saying regulation won't be abandoned until shortly before it's needed.

And yes, my blogposts are like buses, none for yonks then three come at once.

Dexter Morgan for President.

Recently the TV show "Dexter" has won my heart. Something about the deeply flawed individuals struggling both make sense of mysteries and keep their own facinates me. For the uninitiated the title character (Dexter Morgan) is a serial killer who preys exclusively on murderers. His foster father taught him to direct his sadistic and depraved instincts to something approaching justice. He claims not to be able to resist these instincts, but there is little evidence that he tries. Dexter is a bad man, if he makes the world better or fairer, it is in spite of his nature, not because of it. Relief floods his face when he finds out the Ice Truck Killer has not been found and will be killing again. The deaths of the victims are nothing to him compared to the prospect of taping the killer to a table and cutting off his head. Evil dictates, directly or through his efforts to conceal it, almost every one of his actions.

Part of Dexter's appeal is of course revenge fantasy, the idea that there is someone to inflict misery, degradation and death on those who frighten us. Dexter is powerful in a way we cannot and will not be. We are unable to dedicate the time and energy needed to find those who scare us, he gives up almost all his free time for it. We lack the strength and skill to seize them, he has it down to a routine. We fear the consequences of pursuing monsters, he can't be dragged off their track. Our conscience makes us hesitate to wound, his is not a problem. Every angry thought summons up a wish for a tame Dexter, to give us the blood and yet keep it from us.

The State is our tame Dexter Morgan. We know the State is evil. We know of it's murders, it's enslavements, it's discrimination, it's lies, it's unjust imprisonments and inhumanities of every stripe. We excuse them like uncles who get a bit overenthusiastic with the bottle at times. They not alcoholics, not like the neighbour's addict black sheep. But deep down we know the truth, that the State will always come back to badness, to viciousness, to evil, to power. We want to know that we can unlease that badness against our enemies, crush them and yet remain untouched. People who wouldn't shoot a dying dog are willing to let the State commit all sorts of horrors in their name and at their behest, safe in the knowledge that they did nothing.

However Dexter, unlike the State, does not believe in his own goodness. He knows, and we know, that he is deeply evil. He does not contend that he does what he does for the common good, and we would not believe him if he did. We do not celebrate our dedication to helping his bloody work. We do not feel that attacks on his credibility or honour are attacks on our own. Yet with the State we do. We feel insulted by slurs on "our" countries honour, and react emotionally to them, sometimes regardless of the evidence. Yet we know that the State is a far less discriminating killer than Dexter. They get it wrong all the time. Indeed more innocent Americans were killed by American cops (by the State's own figures) than by terrorists in all but 2 of the last 16 years. And in one of those it was pretty close. In none of those years did terrorism kill more Americans than the direct and indirect effects of government violence*. Yet most people defend it and justify and minimise it's crimes. The true danger of the State is not it's evil but the willingness of people to call it good and thus not act against it.

Currently the American State is run by people who openly boast of extrajudicial killings. They are openly declaring themselves to be Dexters, but nobody thinks they have his precision, self-awareness or intellect. So why are we settling for second best? Why not get the real deal? Dexter Morgan for President, because lesser evils are for wimps.




*Even if you don't count terrorism as the indirect effect of government violence.

Counter-arguments to central bank supporters or why you're being given bad paper on this deal.

This paper is written for Michelle, who couldn't think of a good reason why we need central banks but thought it was "silly" not to have them. So this is an attempt to anticipate the arguments for a central bank and counter them.

Firstly there is the argument that the government should determine the rate of interest. Why? Interest rates are a price, the price of future good and services relative to present goods and services. We don't let the government set the prices of petrol, shares, rice, sex, books or chocolate because they set it too high/low and cause shortages/surpluses.

Why would the correct price of getting something earlier be more suitable to government calculation than the price of anything else? The market-clearing price is the price at which as much is produced as is consumed. Interest rates are the same, the correct one is where as much money is availible to borrow as people want to borrow at that price. Any greater and more immediate satisfaction is provided for future reward than people want, any less and the opposite. The correct rate depends on people's personal preference for immediate versus future value. There is no way for the government to know personal preference. That's why they can't efficently decide how much petrol, shares, rice, sex, books or chocolate should cost.
Stability is a common argument for central banks, which is surprising considering that central bankers themselves have admitted to causing the greatest example of instability in economic history. Well perhaps that's unfair, perhaps the great depression wasn't as big as some of the many hyperinflations that central bankers have not admitted to causing. The problem is that central bankers caused all of those too. The extremes of financial and monetary variability are the direct product of the actions of central banks. To argue that they create stability you'd have to find more examples of financial crisis before the advent of central banking than after it. The trouble is that there's only been one real bubble where the government didn't have control of monetary policy and that's "Tulip Mania" (say it with massively overpriced assets). There's been more bubbles than that in America alone in one Fed chairman's reign.

Of course perhaps central bank is more stable but the instability comes in greater doses when it comes. The problem with that theory is 1) there's no evidence of it and 2) there's is good theorectical reasons to disbelieve it. Financial and monetary instability is based in part on perceptions of instabiility itself. If there is a perception that a central bank will lead to large instability then that will by itself cause small instability. We know that there certainly is a perception that central banks contribute to extreme inflationary instability (hyperinflation) because anyone who studies it notices that they're the only known cause of it. And financial markets are comprised of people of people who know at least that much economics. Since at least Bernake's admission that "We [the central bankers] caused it [the great depression] they know that central banks cause extreme deflation too. So why would market be more stable knowing that fundamental decisions are being made by an institution that, every so often, causes massive instaiblity?

Of course there is more to stability than perception. Individual shares, debts and assets values vary depending on individual factors, but the market as a whole varies according to underlying economic facts. So which monetary system would cause these facts to change unpredictably and quckly? The one where a stroke of the pen can increase or decrease money supply by an infinite amount or where it can only increase after years of searching and expensive extraction.

Keynesian theories of economic instability are based on "irrational exuberence" and systematic stupidity of market players. Such stupidity is extremely expensive so why would it persist? Those who resisted such insanity could simply sell assets during the expansionary phase, buy more during the contractionary phase, rinse, repeat. This process would stabilise the market by itself. These "countercyclical investors" might not be rich enough to significantly stabilise the market, but they get rich every cycle. They also get access to greater control of other people's funds as there successful record grows.

Assuming a 4 year cycle with alternative 10% over and under valuations makes a 5.5% return a year on top of normal investment returns. Anyone who gets those returns for say 8 years in a row can easily borrow more to leverage their money. Leverage of only $1 of debt to $1 of your own money gets you 11% p.a. return above market. Such a system working since say 1913 would pay 2,021,543% plus normal investment returns. In other words if you had invested in such a system when America founded it's central bank and borrowed a modest 50% of the funds, you would have 20,215 times your what the average investor would have. And that's assuming you actually buy and sell things, rather than derivatives, which reap higher rewards when you guess right*. The "Mystery of banking" would therefore be, why don't these people own everything? They have had the chance to use this strategy since the first stock exchanges, why weren't they rich enough to stabilise the market by the time America got it's central bank? There must be something actively working against stability. I contend the central bank is it.

It has been contended that central banks should try to set the inflation or interest rate for the common good. This is impossible because, as with all prices there is no common good. That which is good for buyers is bad for sellers. In the case of the inflation and interest rate any movement that is good for those that borrowed money (inflation up, real interest rate down) is bad for those that lent it.
Balancing the interests of these groups is essentially a political decision. In fact it's a class warfare decision since the richer you are after all the more money you usually borrow (the poor can't afford loans). Why would anyone expect that it would be make objectively, if that's even possible? Any government organisation that controls interest rates is either going to be democratically accountable or not. If not then it's going to be used to benefit the ruling class. If it is then it's going to be used to benefit that portion of the population that is most able to intimidate their representatives. In neither case is it likely the good of the country will be the deciding factor.

Without a central bank, who would print the money? Well anyone who wants to and can convince you to accept it. There is no particular reason why printing money should be a government activity, let alone a government monopoly. After all what do you want from your money that only government can provide?

Firstly you want it to be accepted as money worth a predictable amount. You don't want to go to the store and find it's worth less than you expected it would be when you got it. When that happens people's economic plans are thrown into chaos because they cannot properly value things over time. Similarly you don't want it to be worth more than you expected, otherwise those who owe $100,000 suddenly find they need to pay back with goods and services they thought were worth $105,000. Either way people simply can't operate efficently. When people hear that the metric standard for mass is losing micrograms of mass they're rightfully alarmed, they should be just as alarmed when the standard of value unexpectedly changes.

Note that this does not mean that the value of money can't change, just that it should be relatively easy to predict when and by how much. This is not the case in central banks, which even their supporters claim are secretive and operate under principals that most people don't understand (quick what's M3? Is it better than M1? Why?).

Commodity based currencies on the other hand are a constant relative to the difficulty of producing the commodity. If the $US is defined as worth 1/20th of an ounce of gold then any someone can produce an ounce of gold for less than $20 they will. The increased supply of money relative to other goods will push up prices until it costs $20 to produce it again. The only way there could be a change in the value of money is if it became a lot harder or easier to produce the commodity relative to other goods. This happens slower and more predictably than arbitrary decisions of government officials. If a currency is based on a basket of commodities, with each unit entitling them to set amounts of each commodity, it would move even slower and more predictably. I'm not sure the world's ready for the McDollar based on the Big Mac though. These currencies can be issued by anyone who people trust to actually fork over the underlying commodity.

This brings us to the issue of trust. How do we know that private issurers of currency will actually honour their promises? Well the same way we know that the mechanic won't steal our car and that the child minding centre won't sell your kids to white slavers. In any case it's a moot point since we don't know that government will honour it's promises. The American government had promised to provide 1/20th of an ounce of gold per dollar, it then decided to only provided 1/35th. That's better than the British though who only a few years previously had refused to provide anything of value at all for the pound. Various hyperinflations under fiat money make such thefts look like small potatoes.

Secondly money should be transferrable with the minimum of cost. This includes being acceptable in as many places in as wide an area as possible to reduce the costs of changing money into something acceptable to the seller. Governments only advantage here is that it can threaten people with violence if they do not accept their notes. This is somewhat unfortunate to those that don't want to accept them, often with good reason. There is no reason why the free market can't design widely accepted money just like they design widely accepted credit cards. If there is a demand for money that can be spent from Bagdad to Cordova the market will provide it**.

Attempts by governments to provide international currencies depend on unifying fiscal and monetary policy across many nations. That hasn't worked out as well as it should. In the mean time fiat currencies vary in value relative to each other making international trade needlessly risky and therefore expensive. When money was gold and silver people didn't care what country your coinage was from as long as it had the weight of metal***. Imagine getting off the plane anywhere in the world and not changing your money. Well actually you don't need to imagine it, credit card companies already provide that service.

Thirdly money should be hard to fake and easy to differentiate from fakes. That is not only should it be hard to make copies of the money, but when people do it should be relatively easy to detect them. Again there is no particular reason why governments should be better than private enterprise at doing this. It is possible that government monopoly would mean that money is more familiar (since you don't need to remember what several competing firms money looks like) remember there is only a monopoly within the territory. Free market provision of money could easily lead to less issuers of currency.

* Derivatives are financial instruments like puts and calls where you don't actually buy or sell things, you buy or sell the right to buy or sell things. For instance a put is the right but not the obligation to sell a thing at a certain price during a certain time period a call is the opposite, the right to buy. If you buy a put for say 20,000 tonnes of X at a price of $100/tonne and the price goes down to $90/tonne during that period you've got something worth $200,000. If the price is stays above $100/tonne you're not obliged to buy or sell anything, but you've wasted the money you paid for the put. Depending on how likely people thought the price was to go below $100/tonne it could be very cheap. Given that in the "irrationality' theory prices are quite likely to be much higher/lower the market thought they would be profitabe derivatives will often be cheap.
** Those that get the reference will should have a good profit. ;>
*** With some exceptions, the priests at the Jewish Temple insisted on shekels, hence the presence of money changers.

The Dark Knight is darker than you think {SPOILERS}

In the latest Batman movie, the Dark Knight there is a scene with two ferries. Stop reading now if you haven't seen the movie and don't want to spoil the suspense. The Joker plants bombs on each ferry and tells the passengers of each that they can save themselves by pressing a button that will blow up the other boat. One of the boats is filled with criminals that Harvey Dent has arrested under RICO statutes, basically most of organised crime in Gothan, plus guards. None of these have been convicted or tried yet. The other is filled with typical Gotham residents trying to get away.

On the "civilian" boat many people immediately cry out to press the button. Those in charge are intimidated into allowing a vote on whether to murder 500 people. Admittedly many of them have commited heinous crimes, but a deliberate killing without even an attempt at a trial is still a murder. The vote goes something like 350 - 150 in favour of brutal murder but those in charge refuse to push the button themselves. They then hand the button over to on of the passengers who also cannot bring themselves to personally kill 500 people.

I have heard it said that this is a hopeful and positive thing, that it lifts the moral stature of the typical Gotham citizen above the dregs. To me not tripping the switch when you voted for someone else to do so is nothing more than moral cowardice overwhelming physical cowardice. Think about it, why do you vote for something? So that if everyone else is tied on the issue it goes your way. There is no other purpose in voting. If you are on Socrates' jury and you vote for Socrates to be killed and it's not going to be a tie otherwise your vote changes nothing. If it would be a tie otherwise then kill him. To then say "Well I'm not going to do the thing that actually kills him." is a lie, since you already have. Three hundred of that boats passengers tried their best to blow up the other boat when nobody knew who was doing it. None of them had the guts to do it out in the open. To me that puts them beneath contempt. To be a multiple murderer is bad enough, but to be one who doesn't even have the guts to pull the trigger himself? To be willing to sacrifice 500 lives but not your reputation? I call them scum.

That said the reason I would have voted no would be that of course the Joker rigged the triggers to their own boats (remember his "information" on where Harvey and Rachel were?). Whether the convict who threw the trigger out did so because it was the right thing to do or because he realised this we'll never know.

Ron Paul is a conspiracy theorist, are you?

There is a popular saying that if there are two explanations for an event, conspiracy and incompetence, go for the incompetence explanation every time. The problem with this idea is that it's obviously untrue. If a candidate you dislike had recieved political donations from a neo-nazi and failed to report them in accordance with the law, which explaination would you go for? I thought so. Welcome to the "conspiracy theorists" club then, meetings are rarely held and only attended by police spies.

Yet membership in this club is somehow looked down apon as unhealthy, even insane. It's as though no sane person would say that conspiracies happen, and yet every day we see people behaving as though they did. Do act as though everything your government says to be true or do you assume that some of it is lies and distortion? Of course you act as though they lie, which is why you like investigative reporting? How about other governments? Do you get your news about countries from their governments press office or do you prefer that someone digs deeper? Do you think that political parties are engaged in a quest to show you the truth or to spin it? Of course in all cases you answered "cynically" to all these questions. Your beliefs and behaviour were in all cases that of a "conspiracy theorist", yet you are ashamed of it! If asked you'll deny it why?

Well isn't the answer obvious? People have acted in concert to make you feel that way. And have the done so openly or claimed to be merely expressing "common sense"? Yep that's right, it's a
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A moral election.

Imagine if you will going to two job interviews on the same day and telling both that you had the other interview and take the best offer. Imagine also that both employers wanted you and sent you details of pay, conditions and how the company operates including the broad outline of it's business plans. One has a great dental plan, mediocre superannuation, excellent pay and highly successful strategy of firebombing the buisnesses of competitors and murdering their employees if they attempt to bid for the same contract. The other has no dental plan, reasonable superanuation, the opportunity to learn more valuable new skills and does not use violence in it's business. Would you spend any time at all wondering who to work for? Of course not unless you're a sociopath, yet this (Australian) election people are doing exactly that.

They are deciding that although they don't think the use of lethal force in Iraq is justified or rational they are going to vote on the basis of who can give them enough goodies. Free dental work, more free education (if it's worth it why don't people pay for it?), better hospitals, they think of everything that can be taken from someone else's pocket and given to them. In no other situation do people think like this. Only in politics is it OK to be this mercenary when issues of life and death are at stake. And yet people will claim they are voting on the basis of a "fair go" or "moral values". My arse they are.

They're not voting on the basis of common sense either. The latest war on drugs nonsense is proof. I can't fight the war on drugs because they're too expensive so I have to fight the war clean and sober. Anyway they're going to "quarantine" the welfare payments of people convicted but not jailed for drug offenses. The idea I suppose is that they can prevent drug takers spending money on drugs and get them to spend it on their kids, a new bible I don't know I lost interest. Of course this qualifies as the second easiest to dodge bad social security idea in history. The worst was that "work for the dole" scheme where all you had to do was claim to be doing $62 worth of work a fortnight to avoid the obligation. This isn't quite as easy. You actually go into the supermarket, buy things on someone else's shopping list and have them pay you for them later. So really less trouble than getting the drugs in the first place. Fuck I hat it when it takes longer for the government to explain the scheme than for me to figure out how it's fucked.

Oh and BTW remember those new "road safety" laws prohibiting P platers from taking passengers at night (or was it any time? DKDC)? Well it turns out that teenagers responded to said laws by carrying their friends in the boot (trunk) or lying down and thus unseatbelted. So another effort by the powers that be to make us safer through coercion failed. And I also have failed to predict that failure months beforehand. So from now on there's a competition. As soon as I mention an effort to make us safer everyone send in how they think it will bankfire. A special "No Prize" awarded to the first accurate prediction.