One of my students—from Moldova—suggested I watch this video. 

I’m not sure I got all of the humor—some of it may have been lost in translation, but I thought it was kind of funny—and perhaps had great economic insight.

I haven’t given up blogging; it just seems like it sometimes.  So, before I head off to a meeting tonight, here is some raw footage of what’s rolling around in my brain right now:

• The U.S. educational system may be good at teaching people specific vocations, but it’s really not very good at teaching people (especially kids) how to love learning.  Grading midterm exams today, I find that there is a vast gulf in the grades on the objective questions between the “traditional” American students; the foreign students; and the “non-traditional” students.  The best grades are coming from the foreign students, followed closely by the non-traditional (older) students.  The body language of a few of the students in class seems to have a direct relationship to their grades (slumped over, napping, or doodling excessively on their notebooks seems to not be an indication of exceptional students who are bored).  I try to remind myself that this IS a community (2 year) college, and so, there may not be as many “serious students” there.  But…
• My daughter tells me that at her liberal arts college some of the students are very unhappy with having to take the “general ed” courses that are required for graduation: so many hours in the “arts” (Music Appreciation, Art Appreciation); some hours in either Philosophy or Religion; a minimal number of Social Science hours (as well as English, Math and Science credits).  It seems that the Arts and Humanities stuff really gets them worked up: “I’m a Math Major. Why not let me take more Math classes instead of wasting time with Music Appreciation?”  Somewhere along the line, it seems that we’ve convinced our students (and ourselves), that there’s no value in knowing a little bit about a lot of things, but rather, we should all become specialists.  I’m not sure that’s good for a society. 
• The weather here in Nebraska has been quite nice for early-mid November.  The weekend had temperatures into the 70s (and Nebraska beat Oklahoma on Saturday, which is a BIG deal around here); today we got into the 60s, and we’re supposed to stay like that through the week.  But since we got snow the first weekend of October, I don’t really see that as a sign of anything—just a nice warm spell before the nasty winter comes along.
• One of my reasons for being scarce around here is that I’ve not only been teaching, but have been continuing to engage the political system.  We need to start DOING, rather than talking.  In other words, Stop Dreaming (and while you’re at it, watch this remastered classic from 2007—in HD!).

Oh, and on the subject of “DOING”:

A bear killed two militants after discovering them in its den in Indian-administered Kashmir, police say. Two other militants escaped, one of them badly wounded, after the attack in Kulgam district, south of Srinagar. The militants had assault rifles but were taken by surprise - police found the remains of pudding they had made to eat when the bear attacked.

Following the outbreak of the insurgency people had to hand in their weapons to police - which put a halt to poaching. As a result, there has been a greater incidence of man-animal conflict, say experts. There have been many reports of bears and leopards killing or mauling humans in different parts of the Kashmir valley in recent years.

"Uns gefällt diese Welt." = "We like this world". "Lieder der frühen DDR" = "Songs from the early years of the GDR.")

... is unhappy, he will ask for more state intervention,

... is eager for change and improvement, he will dream of socialism,

... thinks a real and thorough solution is required, he will demand totalitarian arrangements.

These propensities have characterised the mind of "the average Hans" ever since the German nation state came into existence in 1871.

In his article East Germany's Gone - Boo Hoo, Bruce McQuain seems somewhat taken aback by an East German lady's nostalgic hankering for the GDR.

In fact, the views of the lady are totally ordinary stuff over here. East or West, find a German who isn't hankering after collectivist-socialist-totalitarian "solutions."

Since the nation's founding, the collectivist-socialist-totalitarian approach has been unfailingly popular with the German people, and their leaders, of course.

They loved Bismarck for it, the Kaiser, too, to the extent that he was popular, and the totalitarian parties - Marxist socialists and social democrats, communists, and Nazis - that dominated the Weimar Republic and attracted the majority of votes.

Post-Nazi West Germany saw a collectivist-socialist-totalitarian youth rebel (in the late 60s) against their collectivist-socialist-totalitarian parents; then the rebels embarked on a "long march through the institutions" with so much success that pop marxism and other collectivist-socialist-totalitarian ways of thinking have become completely dominant in the country.

For a German freedom is a dangerous lack of state control.

Politically, there is not much difference between East Germans and West Germans, except that they may favour socialist concepts of differing flavours. 

After the Second World War, the Germans have treated the Hitler phenomenon as a regrettable fluke, an evil sui generis, rather than as the fulfillment of Germany's indestructible penchant for the total state. That is disregarding the large number of Germans (mostly contemporaries of the Third Reich) inclined to think Hitler was "okay," except for this or that silly exaggeration of his.

Many East Germans had hoped, the GDR would remain a sovereign state after the collapse of the Honecker regime in 1989, rather than getting swallowed up by the Federal Republic of Germany. In that way the GDR, they argue(d), may have had a chance to develop a better socialism, instead of becoming part of a capitalist country.

Germans never stop dreaming about "a better socialism", no matter how rotten the last version, Hitler's or Honecker's.

An excellent account of the intellectual roots of the parochial, pettyfogging and arrogant state idolatry of the German mind can be found in Hülsmann's discussion of the Methodenstreit (between the anti-market and pro-government German Kathedersozialisten and the more open-minded Austrians) in his excellent biography Ludwig von Mises: The Last Knight of Liberalism, especially pp 118 - 125:

It is the mentality of officialdom ... that considers as constructive and positive only that ideology which calls for the greatest number of offices and officials. And he who seeks to reduce the number of state agents is decried as a “negative thinker” or an “enemy of the state.” (Mises, A Critique of Interventionism [New York: Arlington House, 1977], pp. 82–83)

Dear Ludwig, nothing has changed since you wrote this, except that the intellectual uniformity of the German mind today is more complete than ever.

See also The Man Who Is So 13th Century.

This is how big Antarctica is.

And this is how Antarctica looks like without ice.

The Greenies

... say that polar ice will melt and cause a big sea-level rise.

Yet 91% of the world's glacial ice is in Antarctica, where the average temperature is around minus 40 degrees Celsius. The melting point of ice is zero degrees. So for the ice to melt on any scale the Antarctic temperature would need to rise by around 40 degrees, which NOBODY is predicting.

The median Greenie prediction is about 4 degrees. So where is the huge sea level rise going to come from? Mars?

And the North polar area is mostly sea ice and melting sea ice does not raise the sea level at all. Yet Warmists constantly hail any sign of Arctic melting.

That the melting of floating ice does not raise the water level is known as Archimedes' principle. Archimedes demonstrated it around 2,500 years ago. That Warmists have not yet caught up with that must be just about the most inspissated ignorance imaginable. The whole Warmist scare defies the most basic physics. Sadly, what the Vulgate says in John 1:5 is still only very partially true: "Lux in tenebris lucet". There is still much darkness in the minds of men.

The source.

Also see Maldives Not Threatened by Rising Sea Level, Yet Deluged by Enviro-Corruption, Epistemic Consequences of Totalitarian Democracie - The Abuse of Environmental Concern, and Common Global Warming Myths.

In a speech delivered at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, California, on November 6, 2009, the president of the Czech Republic Václav Klaus concludes:

In November 1989, I believed that the world in 2009 would be more free than it is now. To my great regret, I see more of government intervention into my life and less of freedom than I – and I believe Ronald Reagan also – expected.

The source.

The day before he explained in a speech given at Georgetown University:

Since the very beginning, I have been advocating the rather unpopular concept that “communism was not defeated. That it collapsed or simply melted down.” I don’t think I have to change my original position. At the end of the 1980’s communism was already too weak, soft, old and emptied of all meaning to exist much longer. Some people are, of course, not happy with this interpretation because it fundamentally diminishes their role in this process. 

I am convinced that the historic autumn of 1989 deserves to be commemorated, and – I would add – not only by the citizens of the countries of Central and Eastern Europe and Russia that were direct victims of the communist regime, but in the whole world. 

It should be, however, not only a commemoration of the past. We should use it as a memento for the future, even if I don’t expect the old communism to come back. I see other collectivistic and dirigistic “isms” waiting for their chance. They will be called differently, they may be softer and less brutal, but their structural characteristics look dangerously similar. 

The well-respected political philosopher Isaiah Berlin once said that “horrors in the 20^th century were not caused by the ordinary negative human sentiments, they have been caused by ideas.” I agree with him. Even if communism is – I believe – definitely over, I am not alone who sees, hears and feels ideas that are potentially explosive and dangerous. We should, therefore, not interpret the end of communism as a final and comfortable victory. We should stay “on guard”. The generation of my parents did not see the danger of communism the night before the communist putsch in Czechoslovakia in February 1948. 

The second topic I would like to mention here today is the current financial and economic crisis. It came as a surprise for the economists, for the politicians, as well as for the public. Almost nobody expected it. Almost everyone shared the belief in the omnipotence of central banks and governments to control the macroeconomy and in the feasibility, rationality and productiveness of microeconomic regulation, especially in financial and banking sectors.  

This belief has not materialized. The economists slowly began to understand the causes of the current crisis, which was a consequence of a combination of failures. On the macroeconomic side, it becomes more and more accepted that the origin of the crisis was connected with the unprecedented build-up of imbalances in the world economy, with the unusually long period of low real interest rates and with political playing with the mortgages. On the microeconomic side, it became clear that the existing partial and very imperfect regulation distorted the rational behaviour of banks and financial institutions and motivated them to look for ways to escape it by means of various “financial innovations”. 

The current crisis was not the result of a market failure or of any inherent deficiency of capitalism. It was a government failure, resulting from the immodest ambitions to insensitively intervene in such a complex system as society and economy. 

Another of my topics is the doctrine of the climate change and the role it has in shaping our society. We do not have time to discuss the ideology of environmentalism and global warming, or its scientific or climatologic aspects. I just want to refer to a book I wrote about it some time ago which has been published already in 12 languages. The title of its English version is “Blue Planet in Green Shackles”. I don’t intend to repeat its main arguments here now, their substance is outlined in the question in the subtitle of the book which asks: What Is Endangered – Climate or Freedom? My answer is simple: freedom is endangered, climate is O.K.

The very problematic issue I would like to mention is Europe, or perhaps, more accurately, the European unification. That I call it problematic may be a surprising statement for some of you. 

In the 1950’s the leading idea behind the European integration was to liberalize, to open-up, to remove barriers at the borders of individual European countries, to enable free movement of not only goods and services but of people and ideas around the European continent. It was a positive concept. It should continue and be promoted by all of those who have liberal (in European terminology), which means not statist or nationalistic, world-view or Weltanschaung. 

The situation changed during the 1980´s and the decisive breakthrough was the Maastricht Treaty in December 1991. Integration had turned into unification, liberalization into centralization of decision making, into harmonization of rules and legislation, into the strengthening of European institutions at the expense of institutions in member states, into the enormous growth of democratic deficit, into post-democracy. 

The current dispute about the Lisbon Treaty, which probably ended two days ago when I signed it, is about whether to go ahead with – this freedom and prosperity endangering – process or whether to interrupt it. Some of us are not happy with being brought back to a centrally organized and controlled world that we got rid of just 20 years ago.

I started by saying that I have several topics today. Maybe I was wrong. It is in fact one topic and its several manifestations. Communism was a utopia to mastermind human society. Current efforts to fight the crisis, to fight climate, to artificially unify Europe belong to the same category.

The source.

"Jim Knopf ("Knopf" = "Button") and the wild [number] 13," the latter being a locomotive, continues to be my favourite piece of TV entertainment.

This is what the speaker in the clip is telling us:

The small island of Lummerland was situated right in the middle of the infinite expanse of the ocean. On the island's rail tracks the two locomotives Emma and Molly would move about. The engine-drivers ("engineers" in American English?) were Lukas and Jim. King Alfons, the quarter-to-twelfth, was in urgent need of a lighthouse. For that reason he sent Lukas and Jim to bring Herr Turtur, the Seeming-Giant (the closer you get to him the smaller he becomes), to Lummerland. However, on their way to Herr Turtur, they encountered the Sea-Fräulein Sursula Pitschi, who asked them to fix the magnet in the magnet mountain, which had lit up the sea for thousands of years.

More on the Augsburger Puppenkiste (literally "the Augsburg trunk of dolls").

Robert Higgs writes:

Max Hartwell

was an outstanding economic historian and contributed greatly to the “Standard of Living Debate,” defending the view that the Industrial Revolution, far from having been a Marxist nightmare for the working class, was the means by which they were gradually lifted from the poverty that had been their lot from time immemorial.

Max was the classical liberal’s classical liberal—always level-headed, always recalling the pitfalls that await every species of single-mindedness. I eventually became more radical than he, but I never lost an ounce of respect for his opinions.

In fact, the interviewer Patrick O'Brien, whom I have the fondest memories of, was my tutor at St.Antony's College, Oxford.

The conversation lasts one hour. Choose from the source the format of the audio file.

Tell your Senators to vote “no”—or maybe get used to this:

My observations suggest that the disconnect that Rand Paul discusses—between the leadership and the primary voter—is a real thing. 

Increasingly, our culture is permeated by illiteracy concerning the foundations of the human advancement embodied in the Western tradition. Rather than a bashful kind of ignorance, it is of a combative and supercilious nature, nourished by emotional dependence on articles of faith that are as powerfully destructive of our civilisation as they are intellectually inchoate.

                                                                                                                   The history of human civilisation is the history of the increasingly successful coordination of differences amongst the members of our species. Inequality makes us human beings. Ignoring or fighting inequality is the same as combating the means that we have for giving the human condition dignity, the gifts of progress and a continual flow of happy prospects.

Income inequality used to be a rabble-rousing issue of the left. Now it is being raised by mainstream figures, from the head of the Federal Reserve to President Bush, who are apologetically trying to offer solutions. But what is the actual problem they wish to solve? Certainly, it is not a growth in poverty. To the contrary, between 1979 and 2006--the period during which income inequality has supposedly become more acute--real wages for the median worker rose 11.5%. Even workers in the lowest tenth percentile had an increase of 4%.

No, the alleged problem is not that some are becoming poor--but that others are too rich. The complaint is that while the bottom tier enjoyed a 4% rise in income, the top tier enjoyed a 34% increase. The complaint is that over the past 25 years, the share of income of the top fifth of households climbed from 42% to 50%, while that of the bottom fifth fell from 7% to 5%.

But this development represents an injustice only if we use a perverse standard of evaluation. It is unjust only if we measure someone's economic status not by what he has, but by what others have--i.e., only if he benefits not by making more money, but by making his neighbor have less.

This is the standard of egalitarianism--the standard that demands a uniformity of income, regardless of anyone's ability or effort. It is the standard of envy, whereby a problem exists whenever some have more, of anything, than others. And the egalitarian's solution is to eliminate all such inequalities.

The source.

The Grail of Equality (9/11)

By P.T. Bauer

From Equality, the Third World, and Economic Delusion

Some modern egalitarians seem readier than their predecessors to recognize personal and group differences in economic endowment and in motivation. This acknowledgment brings into the open previously ignored dilemmas. The recognition of such differences has also induced these egalitarians to advocate the elimination not only of economic differences but also of differences in aptitudes and motivations; that is, the causes of economic differences. Hence, some of the policies and drastic proposals noted above [see below link to previous posts in this series, G.T.].

Although acknowledgment of the determinants of economic differences has helped to clarify some central issues and dilemmas of egalitarian policies, in other ways the level of discourse has remained unsatisfactory. Indeed, in recent decades the standard may even have deteriorated.

The uncritical reliance on statistics in egalitarian discourse and policies provides a major illustration. There is, for instance, the familiar practice of expressing the income or wealth of a small proportion of the population of a country as a percentage of the income or wealth of the whole population. The misleading, even meaningless, nature of this practice should be evident. Thus children have no incomes, or very low incomes; people normally cannot make appreciable savings until well into middle age; many married women have no cash incomes or only low cash incomes. Income differences need to be expressed on a basis which separates different age groups, and also men from women. In technical language, the differences have to be expressed on an age- and sex-standardized basis.

Further complexities and ambiguities ensue if we compare family incomes. A childless couple is likely to have a higher per capita income than a family with children. Bur it does not follow that the former is better off. The conventional method of calculating the national income implies that children are simply an unavoidable cost or burden, and assumes that people do not enjoy the generation and possession of children sufficiently to outweigh any differences in income per capita. It also results in paradoxes, such as the registering in conventional national income calculations of the birth of a calf or the survival of a cow as an increase in per capita income, while the birth or survival of a child is registered as a diminution.

Further problems arise over the definition of 'capita'. For example, should a child be treated as equivalent to half an adult? Moreover, conventional income comparisons do not distinguish adequately between income and the cost of securing income, for instance in such contexts as the cost of training, or of enjoyment forgone in training, or in long hours of work, or in the cost of travel to and from work. And professional people who have invested heavily in a training which has enabled them to earn high incomes are disadvantaged in terms of real income compared with those who have used their time to learn to do things such as household repairs themselves - a consideration of some significance when direct taxation and the cost of labour-intensive services are high.

State-provided or guaranteed pensions represent another example of the intractable conceptual difficulties behind assessment of economic differences. Such pensions can be very valuable to particular individuals, and can represent the equivalent of large capital sums, notably when they are index-linked. But pension rights are unmarketable and cannot be turned into capital; and their value depends on the ability and willingness of future governments to honour them.

Finally, we now come to a wide issue, mentioned briefly earlier in this chapter, which is crucial to an examination of income differences and changes.

Even when income statistics are free of problems of concept and measurement, which is unusual, by themselves they tell us nothing about the background of the situation they reflect. It is indispensable for sensible assessment and policy to know why people are poor and how income differences have arisen. For instance, those who are poor through crippling disease, or unavoidable or uninsurable accident, or erosion of savings through inflation, need to be treated differently from those people whose poverty has resulted from persistent overspending of large incomes.

Again, incomes can become more equal as a result of more people dying or being forcibly sterilized. Yet conventional terminology describes this result as an 'improvement in income distribution'. Conversely, if more very poor people live longer, this registers as a so-called worsening of income distribution.

Some policies, popular beliefs and mores affect income differences between societies so greatly that they are central to any sensible discussion of such differences. The many obvious examples include the persecution of productive groups in Asia and Africa; the subordination of economic advance to egalitarian objectives as in Britain; the refusal to take animal life as in South Asia; or to let women work outside the home as in many Muslim countries.

These pertinent matters are freely ignored by advocates of global redistribution who focus entirely on conventionally measured income differences.Altogether, we have become so preoccupied with quantifiable matters that even such an obvious distinction (and one formerly well-recognized) as that between sturdy beggars and needy poor has come to be neglected or even derided by egalitarians.

Disregard of such basic matters reflects the naif belief that statistics denote facts more effectively and exactly than does qualitative description, or that it is only statistics which objectively depict social facts. These habits of mind are of a piece with Mr. Gradgrind's attitude in Dickens Hard Times.

As I have already mentioned, the time dimension of historical processes is widely neglected in contemporary discourse. This is especially notable and misleading in the context of international income differences. Income and living standards in the West are the outcome of many centuries of cultural and economic progress; they have not come about in one or two generations. It is therefore not surprising, abnormal or reprehensible that many Third World countries (notably in Africa) which do not have centuries of progress behind them should have much lower incomes than the twentieth-century West.

The pertinence of this long period of antecedent development is ignored in the advocacy of global redistribution. It is ignored also in the insistence that Third World countries should promptly reach Western levels of income by a process of virtually instant development. This insistence is apt to issue in coercive policies which not only inhibit a rise in living standards in these countries, but also provoke social tension, upheaval and political conflict.

It just is.

Tricked On Halloween

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