So the liar known as agapeiron said he will resond.

Specifically to this:

www.jim/cat/terror.htm
Let's see if he does.

The reason the State is desperate.

Stefan Molyneux claimed that the US state has become more tyrannical and violent because it's running out of money to bribe their constituents. While this certainly adds a level of desperation the primary cause is an accelerating cycle of propaganda and failure. The State is fundamentally trapped by the expectations it creates and every time it expands it's power and expense to escape this trap it makes this worse. One of the problems is that the State's agents are highly propagandised themselves and therefore cannot adjust policies even to benefit the state.

The drug war is a great example of the propaganda/failure cycle. It started with a flawed idea of removing drugs from America. Naturally this failed. In response to any failure the person or group who fails has four options. Firstly they could state that the original concept was fundamentally flawed and unachievable. Secondly they could state that while the concept is sound, they are not competent to execute it. Thirdly they could claim that they could achieve it but were not allowed to do the things neccesary to do so. Fourthly they could claim that the policy suceeded, possibly by redefining "success". A propaganda/failure cycle occurs when the first two options are extremely undesirable in career and pyscological tersm for those participating and the fourth is not credible. The drug war is a prime, but by no means only, example of this in government.

As failed results for a policy accumulate the part of the state held responsible for it has a problem. This includes not just cops and civil servants, but senior policy makers and politicians. They must maintain the belief that the policy is worthwhile and best achieved by keeping the current personel largely intact. Of course the occasional sacrifice, even a high ranking one, can be made. One or two can retire to spend more time with their families, the interests of the families of course being irrelevant. However if the participants are to retain their careers, their prestige and most importantly their self-belief then the main body of them must continue doing the jobs they're doing. Therefore they insist that they must be less restricted if they are to achieve their goals. The two main forms of this are requests for more resources and for greater ability to violate traditional liberties.

If this approach results in something that can credibly be called a "success", at least at a minimal level, then further attacks on liberty, fraternity and prosperity are unnecessary. That doesn't mean they won't happen, but they will certainly be less rapid and may be abandoned in the face of determined opposition. If the project, like the drug war, is fundamentally flawed and incapable of any but small and transitory sucesses then each expansion of resources and powers must be followed by another. Not to do so is impossible because the people making the decisions have a combination of interest and propagand-created belief in the program that makes it impossible to abandon it. There are occasional exceptions to this for instance Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, but the vast majority of the people in the apparatus will be effectively rock solid on continuing.

To understand why this is so consider that they are the prime recipients of State propaganda for the project. Obviously those who believe most in the project will be more likely to be recruited for it. After recruitment their leaders will have an interest in continuing the propaganda so as to get the best motivation and results. This is true even if adequate results are impossible to achieve since the leader of each section wants to have his team shine compared to other teams. Those who are not effectively propagandised will tend to leave the project as it's failure becomes more and more evident. Those that remain have invested more and more time, knowledge and esteem (including self-esteem) in the project and lose it if failure is ever acknowledged. Therefore they have an interest in never admitting defeat and that interest is abetted by their bosses.

Each time the participants attempt to increase the money and power available to them they must propagandise the people who determine whether or not they are allowed to do so. This is to some extent the general public, to some extent business leaders, special interests, politicians, foreign governments and anyone else whose support or at least non-opposition could prevent the increase. A certain power balance must be achieved to actually advance, and since the policy is fundamentally flawed it cannot deliver net benefits. Therefore some must be deceptively convinced they gain by the policy and those who lose must be propagandised to ignore their costs. The resultant propaganda is a trap. The relevant parts of the State cannot be "depropagandise" these people, or even attempt to do so, without a backlash of anger and resentment. They effectively become part of people held responsible for the policy, since they supported it. To see it end would implicate them in the abuses inflicted for it which were justified "pragmatically". This would make the supporters even since once the ends that justified the means are gone, there is just the evil means. Therefore they form part of the reason that going back on the policy is "politically impossible". That is to say no sufficiently powerful combination of political forces exists opposed to the policy. Too many people have too much to lose from it's ending.

Not only that but the project must continually seek to expand it's size, power and abusiveness. Since the excuse for failure is insufficient size, power and abusiveness in the inevitable absence of sucess a vote not to expand these is effectively a vote to end the project. If the statement is made "We must allow (warrantless searches/confiscation without trial/abusive detention/etc) if we want to end (insert problem)." then a refusal is effectively saying it's not a gaol worth pursuing. If the goal is not worth pursuing then the conclusion will be reached that obviously the current costs in liberties and money aren't worth it either. Since the entire aim is to avoid that conclusion this is unacceptable and the people held responsible for the project will do anything to avoid it. Thus the cycle ends only when the expense and abuses are so egregous a fundamental political realignment, possibly a revolution occurs. This stage is fast approaching in the USA.

Lastly the reason I don't believe that bankruptcy and subsequent ending of goodies for the people are the reason for the most recent new tyrannies. The powers that be are fully aware that they don't have the strength to suppress the parasite classes. There are simply too many people who get goodies from the current system to jail them all or even a large enough part of them to intimidate the others. Naturally both wings of the Demopublican party will be bribed but there comes a point at which even the most extravagent campaign donations and ludicrously biased coverage won't make up for the votes lost from no longer divvying up the loot. Therefore it's politically impossible to pursue this as well. Indeed attempting to use these tactics against the parasite class will destroy their support for it's use against others massively eroding the power of the State.

Murder, Purpose and the State.

How to make tax-funded sadistic serial killers scarier.
By Michael Price

Once again I learn of brutal, tragic murders by US forces from Stefan Molyneux. Once again I am struck not just by the brutality, but the incompetence of the US forces. This might seem besides the point, it would be little comfort to the victim's relatives that they were murdered by people who could actually win wars. But in fact it is the key to a much darker, much more horrifying side of the story than Molyneux, or indeed anyone that I can find has detected.

It is well known that murdering people makes people want to kill you. Indeed blood-feuds were common in pretty much every ancient culture we know of and never stopped in some areas (Afghanistan in particular). An armed force that genuinely hopes to gain control of an area without exterminating it's inhabitants needs to minimise it's killing to avoid retaliation. Naturally armed opponents still need to be killed or at least run off, but killing civilians is VERY counter-productive. This is not just my view, it is official US counterinsurgency doctrine. No competent coalition officer would be ignorant of this. Yet such killings occurred in this unit and kept occurring for months, raising the anger at US forces and encouraging attacks. Further more the breakdown in discipline makes the whole unit much less effective at actually fighting. How can one explain such a lapse, not just in the morality of the troops but their effectiveness in what is allegedly the chief goal of the occupation, winning over the Afghans?

Several explanations are possible, firstly that such activities are so difficult to detect that dedicated officers simply weren't capable of curbing the violent impulses of the troops. However this explanation is wrong on two counts. Firstly the criminals weren't hard to detect, they were known to everyone with remarkable speed. Suspicions were raised possibly before the first victim was even dead and they openly showed signs of exactly the behaviour they were subsequently found guilty of. Secondly officers made little or no effort to determine if these soldiers were murdering civilians even when they had good reason to suspect them. They did have suspicions from the very start of the killing spree, yet the officer's first act was to ensure one source of information, the first victim, was destroyed.

There was no attempt to search for other evidence, for instance the pin and spoon of the grenade the victim was supposed to have thrown. Significantly the murderers knew to conceal these as they were US issue and might have pointed to their own guilt. But their absence was scarcely less incriminating. The pin on a grenade keeps the “spoon”, a spring-loaded lever, in the safe position. If not held by the pin, the throwers hand or some obstacle the spoon revolves away from the body of the grenade and then completely separates from it. The spoon is normally released either before the weapon is thrown (if you wish to shorten the time between throwing and detonation) or as it is. In the former case you would expect it to be fairly close to the original throwing point, in the later further towards the target but probably still close. In neither case should a metal object be hard to find with metal detectors. Yet no attempt was made to do this, despite Afghanistan being notorious for mines and other traps.

When suspicions were raised officers didn't seem to take even the most basic steps to find the truth. At the scene a village elder accused Morlock of throwing the grenade. The obvious response would be to ask Morlock how many grenades he had checked out and how many he had now. A discrepancy would be obvious evidence of wrongdoing. Officers have every reason in the US army to keep track of grenades, as they can be used to kill them without leaving forensic evidence. Killing one's commanding officer during Vietnam was called “fragging” (after “fragmentation grenade”) for a reason. Another would be to ask him where he was when the grenade exploded and to search the area for the spoon and pin, exactly what Morlock anticipated when he was “careful not to leave the grenade's spoon and pin on the ground”. Which leads to the question, where did he leave them? The obvious answer is on him, in a pocket or in his webbing. This means that at the very start a suspicious officer could have searched the murderer and found part of the murder weapon on him. You don't have to be CSI-qualified to make a conclusion from there.

So why didn't he? One explanation is that he's bad at his job, which is controlling his men in such a way that they both say within the approved methods of war and achieve their strategic objectives. However nothing bad seemed to happen to the officers in charge of these men, even those who knew about the killings don't seem to have suffered. They haven't even lost out on promotions. The obvious answer is his job and that of other officers isn't to wage war within approved methods of war and achieve the strategic objectives. In fact their job isn't to do either.

If they wanted to achieve their strategic objectives they would eliminate soldiers under their command who went around murdering people and thus undermining everything the US government is (supposedly) trying to achieve. And by “eliminate” I don't necessarily mean try or transfer, the odd “coordinate mistake” with the artillery will work just as well. Even better if the troops suspect the truth. If the troops can be intimidated to cover up a murder of an innocent they can certainly be intimidated into not talking about the execution of said murders. Particularly since the executioners control their deployment and whether they get reinforced. Even if the leadership aren't prepared to treat their troops that badly* they could still mount courts martial against the suspects and make it clear that anyone even thinking of doing this is in for hell on earth.

Obviously if they were trying to wage war within approved methods they weren't trying that hard.

So what was the job of these officers? What were they in Afghanistan to do if not to achieve the strategic objectives of their masters and thereby the political objectives of their master's masters? Well they were in Afghanistan to be in Afghanistan. “We're here because we're here because we're here because we're here” as the old song goes. The purpose of the killing (both “legitimate” and “illegitimate”) is to persuade the ones with the purse-strings that killing needs to be done. Their function is propaganda, not on behalf of the state, but on behalf of the armed forces in general and the army in particular. This propaganda is aimed not just at the people of the United States but at the United States Government itself. They are their to convince politicians that a force capable of action such as they take is needed. In this context, the murders and the official response to it make perfect sense. The more killing the more it looks like they are facing great opposition and therefore the more justified their presence is. The only problem was that the “kill-team” (a grandiose title for a “team” that would have been useless in a firefight) couldn't keep their mouth shut and eventually told someone who had no reason to be loyal to them.


* note the troops that aren't murdering people actually benefit from such a brutal regime towards murders, it reduces murder of civilians which reduces retaliation attacks which makes them safer.

Oil, scarcity and US foreign policy, A response to Michael Klare's “The collapse of the old oil order”

Klare's article http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/MC05Ak02.html

Modern US and Western foreign policy in the middle east has been going on for at least 60 years. In that time much evidence about it's nature, intention, extent and effectiveness has been observed. Michael Klare's piece references this evidence, but primarily to directly contradict it. There is little evidence that the survival or authoritarian governments in the middle east is necessary, sufficient or even helpful to “the expansion of Western economies after World War II” or the “current affluence of industrialised societies”. If every one of the authoritarian regimes in the middle east were to perish there is no indication that oil production would fall. Indeed it might rise. The interventions in the Middle East are even less helpful to this and were and are generally a hindrance to oil production.

Klare's first historical reference is to Iranian oil and imperial ambitions towards it and machinations about it. Aside from replacing a pro-German with a pro-British shah however none of these developments would have increased Iranian oil production. During WWII Iran would have had little problem selling all it's oil, the only possible interruption to the supply would be if a pro-German Shah refused to sell oil to Britian even if he couldn't transport his whole production to Germany. No doubt up until December 41 he could still sell to Russia. Increasing production was therefore not realistically the goal of British policy, only ensuring that the production was available to them. This is the closest thing in the entire article to a Western power putting a despot in charge to increase oil supply.

Klare then talks about the 1951 coup against Mohammed Mossadeq, prompted by the proposal to steal I mean nationalise the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. If the Brits thougth nationalisation was so bad for production why did Winston Churchill nationalise the same company (then known as Anglo-Persian Oil Company) in 1914? The simple answer is they didn't, they just didn't want powerful British interests to get ripped off by the Persians. They had less objection when British interests were ripped off by the British government. To what extent the widespread unpopularity of Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi impacted oil production isn't addressed in the article so perhaps it's negative effect wasn't significant. What cannot be doubted is that it was a negative effect. A government that is extremely corrupt, unpopular and oppressive doesn't get the best out of it's workers, not even the ones in potentially very lucrative businesses. A less corrupt, more accountable, more popular government would certainly have outproduced Shah Reza, the only question is was the amount significant?

After the Shah was thrown out in 1979 Iranian oil production “never recovered” (his words). Why is that? Is it because the revolutionaries restricted supply? Did they hate the West or getting it's money? Not according to Klare; “To punish Iran’s new leaders, Washington imposed tough trade sanctions, hindering the state oil company’s efforts to obtain foreign technology and assistance. Iranian output plunged to two million barrels per day and, even three decades later, has made it back to only slightly more than four million barrels per day, even though the country possesses the world’s second largest oil reserves after Saudi Arabia.”. So the first time that US and Western policy affects Middle East oil production the result is to cut a countries oil production by 2/3. So much for promoting production. Nor is this an unforeseeable outcome, it hardly takes a genius to see that restricting a Middle East nation to using the technology it [EDIT: cannot] make itself will substantially cut oil production. Iran at the time simply didn't have the skills to substitute for Western know-how, and everyone knew it. They still don't.

Then we come to the Iraq war. Production dropped from 2.8m b/day to 0.5m b/day after the war and sanctions took their toll. Again this is not an unpredictable occurrence, when you bomb somebodies oil fields and then forbid them from trading naturally their production of oil for international markets drops. A policy of refusing to buy oil and preventing others from doing so is not a policy designed to increase oil production or the prosperity that flows from it. This policy was however kept up long after it became clear it's alleged goals (removal of Saddam or destruction of his weapons of mass destruction, which did not exist) would not be achieved. In spite of these efforts production was up to 2.5mbd by 2001.

Another war against Iraq was launched which did increase Iraq oil production, but only because sanctions were lifted in it's wake. Klare uses the claims of Bush officials that after an invasion the privatization of State oil companies and Western investment and technology would life production to support the claim that this was the aim of the invasion. Does he take other Bush claims, such as the claim that they would destroy Saddam's WMDs as seriously? If the US government had seriously wanted to sell oil technology and investment to the Iraqis it would have been as simple as letting them buy it. Yet they went the tremendously expensive route of invading, with all the predictable disruption this causes.

Given the extensive politicisation of the State oil company it was the opposite of surprising they would resist privatisation. Why would a group that got it's highly lucrative jobs from elite friends want to compete in the market? Especially when the beneficiaries killed their former patrons? Obviously such a move would encourage sabotage both of the privatisation itself and of production efficiency. If the Bushrangers could have presented privatisation as a genuine market reform designed to get the most benefits for the Iraqi people (or at least government) from their oil there might have been some public support. However the administration mostly put it's faith into no-bid contracts often with firms of questionable competence (KBR couldn't even construct barracks without dangerous electrical faults). There is no reason to believe that Bush administration aims included greater production, even allowing for their incompetence.

The Iraqi people on the other hand have every reason to promote oil production, provided distribution of rewards is even close to equitable. Unlike Bush administration officials they do not have monetary interests in American oil resources that compete with Iraqi oil.

Klare mentions that Egypt and Jordan guard vital oil pipelines and/or canals, but guard them from who? The only time since WWIII a major oil sea-lane has been threatened that I can remember is when the US and the Iranians went at it for years in the Gulf of Oman. Since as previously mentioned this resulted from US hostility to Iran including sanctions and a proxy war that reduced it's oil output what is the point of “guarding” any of the routes? Why not simply not cause trouble along them? Even assuming there are those who would disrupt the routes for political or monetary gain why should the US or other Western powers pay for the protection as opposed to the oil sellers? They have the most to lose after all. If Western policy was truly aimed at maximising production they would stop angering the “Arab street” with support for Israel thus making disruption of oil supplies by governments and other groups seeking to cash in on anti-western sentiment less likely.

Libyan production is off for obviously reasons and Klare presents this as a serious problem. If so the solution is to back whichever side looks like winning so the revolt is over as soon as possible. Obama did the opposite, and was supported by France and England as well as other countries. Egypt and Tunisia are “expected to restore production, modest in both countries, to pre-rebellion levels soon,” which is the complete opposite of the point of his entire essay. He continues however by saying they “are unlikely to embrace the sorts of major joint ventures with foreign firms that might boost production while diluting local control.”. This he bases on, what? No evidence is given that popular politicians are more adverse to joint ventures than dictators. In Russian joint ventures ground to a halt because the foreigners were getting constantly ripped off by an unaccountable government and it's cronies. This suggests joint ventures are easier with an accountable government, not harder. Again the main problem with joint ventures in the two countries he mentioned as having lower production after becoming more anti-western resulted from WESTERN GOVERNMENT RESTRCTIONS, not native public opinion or policy.

He finishes off the paragraph by saying that Iran and Iraq “exhibit no signs of being able to boost production significantly. Iran is currently under sanctions for alleged misdeeds and Iraq has an ongoing civil war as a result of Western policy. Lack of expanding production in either cannot be blamed on the sort of change that Egypt and Tunisia experienced.

Nor can stagnant production in Saudi Arabia be blamed on such change, which has not occurred. Klare makes it quite clear that “The Saudi royals have expressed reluctance to raise output much above 10 million barrels per day, fearing damage to their remaining fields and so a decline in future income for their many progeny. “. So much for the dictators keeping production up. Klare then asserts that “rising domestic demand is expected to consume an ever-increasing share of Saudi Arabia’s net output”. He only names one person who expects it and that is someone with every reason to push scarcity fears, Khalid al-Falih, CEO of Saudi Aramco, the state-owned oil company. He predicts a 260% increase in domestic oil consumption in 18 years or about 7.4% a year, which would be impressive for a tiger economy, which SA is not. Nevertheless Klare takes this figure as gospel, or at least does not indicate it might be even slightly doubtful.

His pronouncements on Saudi domestic oil consumption are at least based on some evidence. His claim that “no other area is capable of replacing the Middle East as the world’s premier oil exporter“ is based on nothing but ignorance of oil's history. The big players in the oil market were always surprised by the next big field, let alone the general public or the intellectuals. To claim that because you don't know what could replace the Middle East and therefore that nobody knows it and theefore no such field exists goes against everything observed about the oil business for decades. Which is pretty much par for the course with this essay and one's like it.

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.