I believe, an employer should be allowed to make any demands whatsoever on a prospective employee, like having to recite a chapter from Hitler's Mein Kampf ("My Struggle") during lunch break. And the prospect ought to have the right to turn the proposal down or accept it. Make no mistake, the employer may have rather cogent motives to ask for such like and the employee may comply on the strength of equally weighty considerations, as German history will tell you.
What worries me regarding the below dispatch, is the percolation of tyrannical conditions created by the government into the sense of justice that individuals derive from living in a sanctuary delineated by absurd choices.
Government forces people to seek medical relief in ways it seems fit, thereby inflating health costs and twisting "options" preposterously. Government usurps and manipulates the institutions that define health and illness. Government - the ultimate fatso - sets the trend in any number of ways, always relying on a monopolistic (over)weight not remotely approached by any other structure in society. It squeezes, moulds and brainwashes its subjects, who then...well, read the below:
(I do not subscribe to a conspiratorial view of government; its eventual products are as unpredictable as a free society's results, but its mode of operation can be clearly assessed as bringing forth - of necessity - fruits that no one intended nor prefers to arrangements crowded out by the Leviathan.)
Source: LA Times
Looking for new ways to trim the fat and boost workers' health, some employers are starting to make overweight employees pay if they don't slim down.
Others, citing growing medical costs tied to obesity, are offering fit workers lucrative incentives that shave thousands of dollars a year off healthcare premiums.
In one of the boldest moves yet, an Indiana-based hospital chain last month said it decided on the stick rather than the carrot. Starting in 2009, Clarian Health Partners will charge employees as much as $30 every two weeks unless they meet weight, cholesterol and blood-pressure guidelines that the company deems healthy.
"At first, I was mad when I thought I would be charged $30 for being overweight," said Courtney Jackson, 28, a customer service representative at Clarian. "But when I found out it was going to be broken into segments — like just $10 for being overweight — it sounded better."
Jackson said she was going to try to slim down before the plan took effect. "If I still have weight to lose when it starts," she said, "I'll deserve to pay the $10."
Read more: http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-obese29jul29,0,64...
Monday, 30 July 2007
Sunday, 29 July 2007
[16] - News from Absurdistan - The Health of The State
Of Fuckors and Fuckees or Being Run (over) by The State. By Jacob Sullum Wednesday, July 25, 2007 http://www.townhall.com/Columnists/JacobSullum/2007/07/25/buy_cigarettes_for_the_kids Politically, making smokers pay for children's health insurance is a Everybody loves children, and everybody hates smokers. But once you get As a group, smokers are less affluent than nonsmokers, and a poor person's
According to a Tax Foundation analysis, the Senate proposal to pay for a $35-billion SCHIP expansion by raising the federal cigarette tax from The foundation's Gerald Prante calculates that "the burden of the Some supporters of higher cigarette taxes argue that smokers should bear Because smokers tend to die earlier than nonsmokers, they do not consume Leaving aside Social Security savings, a 1997 study in The New England Even if smoking does, on balance, increase government outlays, a 1994 Since then, the average cigarette tax (state and federal combined) Relying on yet another cigarette tax hike could mean that the people The current Senate bill would raise the family income cutoff for SCHIP, Some legislators prefer a limit of 400 percent, which comes out to A decade ago, SCHIP's supporters sold the program as a way of President Bush is not the most credible opponent of a new federal health SCHIP expansion is especially worrisome in light of research by economists According to a 2007 paper co-authored by Gruber, "the number of privately This research suggests that much, if not most, of the money spent on |
Jacob Sullum is a senior editor at Reason magazine and a contributing columnist on Townhall.com.
And:
Don Boudreaux on liquor - quoted from the Mises Economics Blog
http://blog.mises.org/archives/006907.aspPrior to the creation in 1913 of the national income tax, about a third of Uncle Sam's annual revenue came from liquor taxes. (The bulk of Uncle Sam's revenues came from customs duties.) Not so after 1913. Especially after the income tax surprised politicians during World War I with its incredible ability to rake in tax revenue, the importance of liquor taxation fell precipitously.By 1920, the income tax supplied two-thirds of Uncle Sam's revenues and nine times more revenue than was then supplied by liquor taxes and customs duties combined. In research that I did with University of Michigan law professor Adam Pritchard, we found that bulging income-tax revenues made it possible for Congress finally to give in to the decades-old movement for alcohol prohibition.
Before the income tax, Congress effectively ignored such calls because to prohibit alcohol sales then would have hit Congress hard in the place it guards most zealously: its purse. But once a new and much more intoxicating source of revenue was discovered, the cost to politicians of pandering to the puritans and other anti-liquor lobbies dramatically fell.
Prohibition was launched.
Despite pleas throughout the 1920s by journalist H.L. Mencken and a tiny handful of other sensible people to end Prohibition, Congress gave no hint that it would repeal this folly. Prohibition appeared to be here to stay -- until income-tax revenues nose-dived in the early 1930s.
From 1930 to 1931, income-tax revenues fell by 15 percent.
In 1932 they fell another 37 percent; 1932 income-tax revenues were 46 percent lower than just two years earlier. And by 1933 they were fully 60 percent lower than in 1930.
With no end of the Depression in sight, Washington got anxious for a substitute source of revenue.
That source was liquor sales.
Sa, Jul. 28, 2007 4:17
[2] - A Walk through Liberty Garden - Jefferson on Rightful Liberty
Rightful liberty is unobstructed action according to our will within limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others. I do not add 'within the limits of the law' because law is often but the tyrant's will, and always so when it violates the rights of the individual.
– Thomas Jefferson
– Thomas Jefferson
[15] - News from Absurdistan - Democracy against Democracy (Part II)
Why the European Union Must Go
From the desk of Fjordman on Wed, 2007-07-25 17:12
At the EU Observer, Anthony Coughlan, a senior lecturer at Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland, notes that in every EU member state at present the majority of laws come from Brussels. Why do national politicians and representatives accept this situation? He suggests a plausible explanation:
"At national level when a minister wants to get something done, he or she must have the backing of the prime minister, must have the agreement of the minister for finance if it means spending money, and above all must have majority support in the national parliament, and implicitly amongst voters in the country. Shift the policy area in question to the supranational level of Brussels however, where laws are made primarily by the 27-member Council of Ministers, and the minister in question becomes a member of an oligarchy, a committee of lawmakers, the most powerful in history, making laws for 500 million Europeans, and irremovable as a group regardless of what it does.
"National parliaments and citizens lose power with every EU treaty, for they no longer have the final say in the policy areas concerned. Individual ministers on the other hand obtain an intoxicating increase in personal power, as they are transformed from members of the executive arm of government at national level, subordinate to a national legislature, into EU-wide legislators at the supranational."
EU ministers see themselves as political architects of a superpower in the making. By participating in the EU, they can also free themselves from scrutiny of their actions by elected national parliaments.
According to Coughlan, "the great bulk of European laws are never debated at council of minister level, but are formally rubber-stamped if agreement has been reached further down amongst the civil servants on the 300 council sub-committees or the 3,000 or so committees that are attached to the commission."
EU integration represents "a gradual coup by government executives against legislatures, and by politicians against the citizens who elect them." This process is now sucking the reality of power from "traditional government institutions, while leaving these still formally intact. They still keep their old names — parliament, government, supreme court — so that their citizens do not get too alarmed, but their classical functions have been transformed."
Tony Blair, in one of his final interviews as British PM, stated that "The British people are sensible enough to know that, even if they have a certain prejudice about Europe, they don't expect their government necessarily to share it or act upon it." In other words: The British people should be sensible enough to know that their government will ignore their wishes and interests if it deems this appropriate, as it frequently has in its immigration policies.
The European Union is basically an attempt – a rather successful one so far – by the elites in European nation states to cooperate on usurping power, bypassing and eventually abolishing the democratic system, a slow-motion coup d'état. Ideas such as "promoting peace" are used as a pretext for this, a bone to fool the gullible masses and veil what is essentially a naked power grab. It works because the national parliaments still appear to be functioning as before.
This is perhaps the most dangerous aspect of the EU: It is increasingly dictatorial, but it is a stealth dictatorship, whose most dangerous elements are largely invisible in everyday life. What the average person sees is that the EU makes it easier for him to travel to other countries without a passport, and use the same Euro currency from Arctic Lapland in Finland to Spain's Canary Islands off the African coast.
This appears convenient, and on some level it is. But it comes at the price of hollowing out the power of elected institutions and placing it into the hands of an unelected oligarchy conspiring to usurp ever more power and rearrange the lives of half a billion people without their consent. That's a steep price to pay for a common currency. But people do not clearly see this is their daily lives, and seeing is believing. The enemy that clearly identifies himself as such is sometimes less dangerous than the enemy who is diffused and vague, since you cannot easily mobilize against him.
Alexander Boot, a Russian by birth, left for the West in the 1970s, only to discover that the West he was seeking was no longer there. Boot believes that democracy, or in the words of Abraham Lincoln, the government of the people, by the people and for the people, has been replaced by glossocracy, the government of the word, by the word and for the word.
Glossocracy can be traced back at least to the slogan of the French Revolution in 1789, "Freedom, equality, brotherhood." As it turned out, this meant mass terror, martial law and authoritarian rule. The more meaningless the word, the more useful it is for glossocrats. This is why the notion of Multiculturalism has been so useful, since it sounds vaguely positive, but ambiguous and could be used to cover up vast changes implemented with little public debate. The impulse behind Political Correctness consists of twisting the language we use, enforcing new words or changing the meaning of old ones, turning them into "weapons of crowd control" by demonizing those who fail to comply with the new definitions. The European Union, a French-led enterprise, is currently the world's pre-eminent and most unadulterated glossocracy.
...Italian President Giorgio Napolitano, apparently afraid of what he perceives as growing opposition to the EU project, thinks Eurosceptics are "psychological terrorists." So, European leaders won't use the word "terrorist" about Muslims supporting suicide bombers, but they have finally found somebody deserving the label: Europeans who oppose the EU.
In a frank moment, Jean-Claude Juncker, Luxembourg's PM, once described the EU's "system" in this way: "We decide on something, leave it lying around and wait and see what happens. If no one kicks up a fuss, because most people don't understand what has been decided, we continue step by step until there is no turning back." In The Economist, columnist Charlemagne writes: "What Mr Juncker and those who think like him are trying to do is, in essence, to drown opposition to European federation in a mass of technical detail, to bore people into submission. As a strategy, it has gone a long way. The greatest single transfer of sovereignty from Europe's nations to the European Union took place, in 1985, as part of the project to create a single European market. Even [British Conservative PM] Margaret Thatcher, not usually slow to spot a trick, later claimed that she had not fully appreciated the ramifications of what she was then signing up to."
In 2005 (and again in 2006), the EU's financial watchdog refused to approve the EU's accounts for the 11th year in a row because they were so full of fraud. The European Court of Auditors refused to give a statement of assurance on the EU's $160.3 billion budget for 2004. "The vast majority of the payment budget was again materially affected by errors of legality and regularity," it said. It specifically refused to approve the budgets for the EU's foreign policy and aid programs... Half of the project budgets approved by the European Commission were inadequately monitored.
This story of fraudulence was largely ignored by the media. The EU Commission is the government of half a billion people from Hungary to Britain and from Finland to Spain, yet it can release accounts with massive flaws for over a decade straight. Such a lack of oversight would have been unthinkable in the USA. The EU gets away with it because it appears distant in people's everyday life and is not subject to any real checks and balances.
[14] - News from Absurdistan - Democracy against Democracy (Part I)
In future entries to this blog, we shall have to look more closely at the disappearance of a vital distinction from the modern mind - the distinction between law and legislation.
A people incapacitated to discern the distinct features of law and legislation lives in chaos, while unwittingly escaping into the delusion that order persists, for order is supposed to derive from legislation and nothing but legislation.
We have grown so incompetent as to the safeguards that alone will make us human beings participating in a civilised society that those, who we like to recognise as the best jurists we could have, reflect nothing but our own ignorance.
A people that does not know the distinction between law and legislation cannot be saved by a Congress equally uninformed - that is, taking Congress as a whole, rather than individual members of it, such as the honourable Mr. Specter.
The crux "hidden" in the below exchange is this: Gonzales is focused on statutory matters, as opposed to constitutional content. "Statutory" stands for legislation, "constitutional" for law. Gonzales is interested only in legislation, not in law.
As everywhere in the West, the legislation of the day is considered conterminous with law.
Law is being legislated, i.e. turned into a matter of gratuitous fiat.
However, legislation is meant to stipulate the limits imposed on the tasks and resources given to the government to enforce the law.
And the law ensures that the people can expect to live their lives as free agents within a self-generating order that relies on generally applicable rules of just conduct - and not on the latest rulings of those empowered to overstep genuine legislation to tell people what they must do.
Law, though it can be given a positive interpretation, is in essence a collection of negatives. Do not murder, for instance. Refrain from trespassing, and so on.
Law does not tell you what to do specifically, but what to refrain from generally, so that no one must be told what to do within the domain of private discretion accorded to every human being, whose protection is the whole point of law - the science of freedom, as it used to be called.
Law is that human project that aspires to the utmost parsimony in telling people what they must not do.
By contrast, legislation is much more meddlesome, owing to its fundamental administrative mission of regimenting the operations of agents of strictly limited power. Legislation is about the budget granted a judge to acquire his robe and wig.
By confusing law and legislation, by turning law into a synonym for legislation, we have allowed "law" to become a manual of obedience to be heeded so that government may run people's lives as it sees fit.
Mr. Gonzales, like most of us, has never given consideration to this reading of the proper relationship between law and legislation.
He is the eclipsing star of a generation that reacts with moral shock and bottomless incomprehension when you tell them: "the rule of man" is evil.
Who else but man is to rule - is what they ask.
Who else but me, my peers, or my Führer?
A people incapacitated to discern the distinct features of law and legislation lives in chaos, while unwittingly escaping into the delusion that order persists, for order is supposed to derive from legislation and nothing but legislation.
We have grown so incompetent as to the safeguards that alone will make us human beings participating in a civilised society that those, who we like to recognise as the best jurists we could have, reflect nothing but our own ignorance.
A people that does not know the distinction between law and legislation cannot be saved by a Congress equally uninformed - that is, taking Congress as a whole, rather than individual members of it, such as the honourable Mr. Specter.
The crux "hidden" in the below exchange is this: Gonzales is focused on statutory matters, as opposed to constitutional content. "Statutory" stands for legislation, "constitutional" for law. Gonzales is interested only in legislation, not in law.
As everywhere in the West, the legislation of the day is considered conterminous with law.
Law is being legislated, i.e. turned into a matter of gratuitous fiat.
However, legislation is meant to stipulate the limits imposed on the tasks and resources given to the government to enforce the law.
And the law ensures that the people can expect to live their lives as free agents within a self-generating order that relies on generally applicable rules of just conduct - and not on the latest rulings of those empowered to overstep genuine legislation to tell people what they must do.
Law, though it can be given a positive interpretation, is in essence a collection of negatives. Do not murder, for instance. Refrain from trespassing, and so on.
Law does not tell you what to do specifically, but what to refrain from generally, so that no one must be told what to do within the domain of private discretion accorded to every human being, whose protection is the whole point of law - the science of freedom, as it used to be called.
Law is that human project that aspires to the utmost parsimony in telling people what they must not do.
By contrast, legislation is much more meddlesome, owing to its fundamental administrative mission of regimenting the operations of agents of strictly limited power. Legislation is about the budget granted a judge to acquire his robe and wig.
By confusing law and legislation, by turning law into a synonym for legislation, we have allowed "law" to become a manual of obedience to be heeded so that government may run people's lives as it sees fit.
Mr. Gonzales, like most of us, has never given consideration to this reading of the proper relationship between law and legislation.
He is the eclipsing star of a generation that reacts with moral shock and bottomless incomprehension when you tell them: "the rule of man" is evil.
Who else but man is to rule - is what they ask.
Who else but me, my peers, or my Führer?
Prologue:
During Senate Judiciary Committee hearings, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales was involved in the following exchange with Sen. Arlen Specter (R-PA):SPECTER: Where you have the Constitution having an explicit provision that the writ of habeas corpus cannot be suspended except for rebellion or invasion, and you have the Supreme Court saying that habeas corpus rights apply to Guantanamo detainees — aliens in Guantanamo — after an elaborate discussion as to why, how can the statutory taking of habeas corpus — when there’s an express constitutional provision that it can’t be suspended, and an explicit Supreme Court holding that it applies to Guantanamo alien detainees.
GONZALES: A couple things, Senator. I believe that the Supreme Court case you’re referring to dealt only with the statutory right to habeas, not the constitutional right to habeas.
SPECTER: Well, you’re not right about that. It’s plain on its face they are talking about the constitutional right to habeas corpus. They talk about habeas corpus being guaranteed by the Constitution, except in cases of an invasion or rebellion. They talk about John Runningmeade and the Magna Carta and the doctrine being imbedded in the Constitution.
GONZALES: Well, sir, the fact that they may have talked about the constitutional right to habeas doesn’t mean that the decision dealt with that constitutional right to habeas.
SPECTER: When did you last read the case?
GONZALES: It has been a while, but I’ll be happy to — I will go back and look at it.
SPECTER: I looked at it yesterday and this morning again.
GONZALES: I will go back and look at it. The fact that the Constitution — again, there is no express grant of habeas in the Constitution. There is a prohibition against taking it away. But it’s never been the case, and I’m not a Supreme —
SPECTER: Now, wait a minute. Wait a minute. The constitution says you can’t take it away, except in the case of rebellion or invasion. Doesn’t that mean you have the right of habeas corpus, unless there is an invasion or rebellion?
GONZALES: I meant by that comment, the Constitution doesn’t say, “Every individual in the United States or every citizen is hereby granted or assured the right to habeas.” It doesn’t say that. It simply says the right of habeas corpus shall not be suspended except by —
SPECTER: You may be treading on your interdiction and violating common sense, Mr. Attorney General.
GONZALES: Um.
Sept 11th Advocates Seek Admin Accountability
Saturday, July 28, 2007 - FreeMarketNews.com An Open Letter To All Senate Judiciary Committee Members
Watching Attorney General Alberto Gonzales testify before Congress on July 24, 2007, for the third time, was excruciatingly painful.
During Gonzales' testimony, it became abundantly clear that Americans were witnessing the unraveling of the fabric of America. We do not feel that this is an overstatement.
The Attorney General, a man who supposedly personifies America's rule of law, obfuscated, committed perjury, and belittled the very institution, the Congress, which makes America a great Democracy. Over and over, we publicly witnessed Gonzales' refusal to answer the questions posed by you - a Committee authorized to conduct oversight duties. You were made to look frustrated and foolish as your attempts at Executive Branch oversight were thwarted by the bizarre, circular non-answers of Attorney General Gonzales. For the third time, you were unable to penetrate his stonewalling.
We want to know, is it not a crime to mislead and outright lie to the Congress? How many more opportunities will you give Attorney General Gonzales to make a farce of our system by denying Congress information that would allow you to do your job and properly perform your oversight role?
The Bush Administration has repeatedly told us that American troops are fighting to spread democracy in Iraq. Ironically, here in America we seem to be losing the core principles that make us one. Mr. Gonzales' testimony and the Administration's refusal to have key people testify at the hearings, without any accountability, make a mockery of our system of checks and balances. We are supposed to have three equal branches of government: the Executive, Judicial and Legislative. While they are often on opposite sides of an issue, the three branches are to be unified in the maintenance of American civil liberties, not working in concert to covertly undermine and rescind them. Again, no one branch is supposed to have absolute power, nor should any combination of the other two be cowed or manipulated into consensus against the interests of the American people.
And, while we support these inquiries and applaud your patience and attempts to solicit truthful and substantive answers to your questions during all of the Gonzales hearings, it was disconcerting to watch the disdainful contempt that the Attorney General exhibited for the entire process.
Sadder still, it appears that you are becoming unwittingly complicit in your own undoing. It is evident that what we are watching is the U.S. Congress in the process of making itself irrelevant. When the Executive Branch alone is allowed to act without any oversight, or any accountability, then what we will become is a dictatorship. And once all Americans realize that Congress is unable to perform any oversight, whether it is due to lack of will or complicity, you will no longer be needed. Once it becomes apparent that the Executive Branch is not only making the laws but also deciding which laws to follow, the Congress will be just a quaint, unnecessary and useless artifact.
This Administration, aided and abetted by some members of Congress, has repeatedly deceived the American people by allowing the Executive Branch to ignore the rule of law and divisions of power specifically stated in the Constitution. This Administration's "constitutionally and legally challenged" activities include, but are certainly not limited to: taking America into a pre-emptive war on false pretenses, warrantless wiretapping, illegal torture, and the political firing of attorneys. Where are those who took an oath to uphold the Constitution and are supposed to represent us in our government ... our Congress?
While we understand that you only have limited tools in your arsenal to address these matters, what we don't understand is why you have yet to use them. We also understand that using these tools may involve a lengthy and highly contentious process that we will all have to endure. Yet in the annals of history, the only thing that will count is whether or not you upheld the rule of law and fulfilled your Constitutional responsibilities. The mere countenance of argument and eventual capitulation will only ensure our collective demise, and the continued abuse of power by others in the future. But by seeking the truth and reestablishing the balance of power you can negate the current Administration's unilateral quest for domination, and hopefully, begin to restore the United States' international and regional standing in the world.
Thus, all options for achieving these goals should be put back on the table.
Show the American public and the world that our democracy has been reinstated. That the system put in place by our forefathers, the system that this Administration says it wants to spread throughout the world is once again viable and indeed worth saving. Fight with all that you have to save our democracy here in America. You owe it to every American, but most of all you owe it to the men and women in the military that have been repeatedly put in harm's way attempting to establish a democracy overseas.
The future of our Democracy is in grave danger. It is imperative that you act immediately.
September 11th Advocates
Patty Casazza
Monica Gabrielle
Mindy Kleinberg
Lorie Van Auken
(Ed. Note: The open letter is signed by three of the "The Jersey Girls." Wikipedia states that these are, "American activist women, each, as of September 11, 2001, a resident of New Jersey and married to a man who died in the terrorist attacks that day. Together with William Rodriguez, the Jersey Girls were instrumental in the creation of the 9/11 Commission. Matthew Purdy noted that 'The commission grew largely out of pressure from families of victims, including four New Jersey widows who call themselves the Jersey Girls.'")
Watching Attorney General Alberto Gonzales testify before Congress on July 24, 2007, for the third time, was excruciatingly painful.
During Gonzales' testimony, it became abundantly clear that Americans were witnessing the unraveling of the fabric of America. We do not feel that this is an overstatement.
The Attorney General, a man who supposedly personifies America's rule of law, obfuscated, committed perjury, and belittled the very institution, the Congress, which makes America a great Democracy. Over and over, we publicly witnessed Gonzales' refusal to answer the questions posed by you - a Committee authorized to conduct oversight duties. You were made to look frustrated and foolish as your attempts at Executive Branch oversight were thwarted by the bizarre, circular non-answers of Attorney General Gonzales. For the third time, you were unable to penetrate his stonewalling.
We want to know, is it not a crime to mislead and outright lie to the Congress? How many more opportunities will you give Attorney General Gonzales to make a farce of our system by denying Congress information that would allow you to do your job and properly perform your oversight role?
The Bush Administration has repeatedly told us that American troops are fighting to spread democracy in Iraq. Ironically, here in America we seem to be losing the core principles that make us one. Mr. Gonzales' testimony and the Administration's refusal to have key people testify at the hearings, without any accountability, make a mockery of our system of checks and balances. We are supposed to have three equal branches of government: the Executive, Judicial and Legislative. While they are often on opposite sides of an issue, the three branches are to be unified in the maintenance of American civil liberties, not working in concert to covertly undermine and rescind them. Again, no one branch is supposed to have absolute power, nor should any combination of the other two be cowed or manipulated into consensus against the interests of the American people.
And, while we support these inquiries and applaud your patience and attempts to solicit truthful and substantive answers to your questions during all of the Gonzales hearings, it was disconcerting to watch the disdainful contempt that the Attorney General exhibited for the entire process.
Sadder still, it appears that you are becoming unwittingly complicit in your own undoing. It is evident that what we are watching is the U.S. Congress in the process of making itself irrelevant. When the Executive Branch alone is allowed to act without any oversight, or any accountability, then what we will become is a dictatorship. And once all Americans realize that Congress is unable to perform any oversight, whether it is due to lack of will or complicity, you will no longer be needed. Once it becomes apparent that the Executive Branch is not only making the laws but also deciding which laws to follow, the Congress will be just a quaint, unnecessary and useless artifact.
This Administration, aided and abetted by some members of Congress, has repeatedly deceived the American people by allowing the Executive Branch to ignore the rule of law and divisions of power specifically stated in the Constitution. This Administration's "constitutionally and legally challenged" activities include, but are certainly not limited to: taking America into a pre-emptive war on false pretenses, warrantless wiretapping, illegal torture, and the political firing of attorneys. Where are those who took an oath to uphold the Constitution and are supposed to represent us in our government ... our Congress?
While we understand that you only have limited tools in your arsenal to address these matters, what we don't understand is why you have yet to use them. We also understand that using these tools may involve a lengthy and highly contentious process that we will all have to endure. Yet in the annals of history, the only thing that will count is whether or not you upheld the rule of law and fulfilled your Constitutional responsibilities. The mere countenance of argument and eventual capitulation will only ensure our collective demise, and the continued abuse of power by others in the future. But by seeking the truth and reestablishing the balance of power you can negate the current Administration's unilateral quest for domination, and hopefully, begin to restore the United States' international and regional standing in the world.
Thus, all options for achieving these goals should be put back on the table.
Show the American public and the world that our democracy has been reinstated. That the system put in place by our forefathers, the system that this Administration says it wants to spread throughout the world is once again viable and indeed worth saving. Fight with all that you have to save our democracy here in America. You owe it to every American, but most of all you owe it to the men and women in the military that have been repeatedly put in harm's way attempting to establish a democracy overseas.
The future of our Democracy is in grave danger. It is imperative that you act immediately.
September 11th Advocates
Patty Casazza
Monica Gabrielle
Mindy Kleinberg
Lorie Van Auken
(Ed. Note: The open letter is signed by three of the "The Jersey Girls." Wikipedia states that these are, "American activist women, each, as of September 11, 2001, a resident of New Jersey and married to a man who died in the terrorist attacks that day. Together with William Rodriguez, the Jersey Girls were instrumental in the creation of the 9/11 Commission. Matthew Purdy noted that 'The commission grew largely out of pressure from families of victims, including four New Jersey widows who call themselves the Jersey Girls.'")
Wednesday, 11 July 2007
[13] News from Absurdistan - The Sun Queen of Germany
Here is a sure sign revealing the fact that most people in the West do not care much about democracy: they do not seriously ask themselves what democracy can do and what it cannot do.
Instead, what actually prevails is a fervent though hollow belief according to which majority consent is the be-all and end-all of political wisdom and legitimacy.
A welcome invitation for democratically elected politicians to extend their effective powers ever wider.
The political agendas advertised to the electorate are, of course, hardly a reflection of the true powers that a democratically elected government inherits from a long-standing history of runaway state expansion. These agendas highlight a small number of hyped issues, only to divert attention from the much larger number of competencies assumed upon being inaugurated by majority consent. "But, I have been democratically elected," effectively becomes an excuse to exert influence far beyond anything that can be seriously regarded as backed by intended consent.
In this way, democracy has moved in a direction opposite to where it ought to go if it is to serve as a means of empowering the electorate. Most democratic decisions should be taken in a local context, where people understand the issues at hand from immediate acquaintance of the contentious questions and the persons affected by them, the personal risks and consequences, morally and materially, entailed by advocating this cause or another.
The touchstone of democratic procedure - and democracy is a counting device, by the end of the day, nothing more - the touchstone, therefore, of the procedure's merits in any given context is whether it promotes personal responsibility or incites the opposite: the shunning of personal responsibility - deference, cowardice or indifference, as the case may be.
The big democratic issues to be decided by the population in its entirety ought to be restricted to the question, how government can be restrained so it would do the least of the damage it is capable of, and what provisions should be in place to guarantee that government protect liberty and facilitate the ability of the people to look after themselves.
If a democracy is not subject to the rule of law, i.e. a set of principles intended to protect individual liberties, restricting government to actions that preserve and foster a free society, and if instead democratic approval is a blank cheque for the ruling to do what they like, democracy is bound to regress to the level of a pluralistic dictatorship, a mechanism by which to replace holders of unrestrained power with new holders of unrestrained power.
Little wonder that those inebriated with a democratic license to power increasingly grow accustomed to hubris, conceit and delusions of grandeur reminiscent of or even wilder than those characteristic of central planers of the Soviet type.
Democratic leaders, like Merkel or Blair, try to outshine one another in megalomaniac promises that surpass their terms of government and accountability by decades, let alone their true powers over whatever issue in question.
One vows to reduce global temperature by two centigrade, only to tickle the other to promise a reduction by three centigrade.
In actual fact, they are using far away future scenarios - that are in reality under nobody's control - in order to leverage self-aggrandizement. Soviet planers had the relative humility to restrict their powers over the future to a five year time horizon. Germany's chancellor, Merkel, seems to tend toward the time frame of Hitler's tausendjähriges Reich (a plan for the Reich's next thousand years) by giving precise directives on how to fix the weather in 2050. Maybe she should do a little advance training by ordering meteorologists to ensure that the weather tomorrow or the day after is in line with what she thinks it should be.
What we are facing with respect to global warming is not an environmental crisis, but a political one.
Unfortunately, there are few indications that the population is getting indignant out of a sense that their intelligence is being insulted.
Even the rare critical responses (in Germany) - to what would be ludicrous if it were not monstrous - turn out to be entangled in unquestioned suppositions of a dubiously subservient kind. Thus, there are some who argue:
How is controlling global climate supposed to be feasible when something comparatively easier such as simplifying the tax code proves impossible to accomplish by the very politicians who purport to act as the masters of global climate.
The tax burden and its rightfulness is not questioned, the demand is rather to make it easier for us to understand the levies we "owe" our government, getting more efficient at being obedient. There is a German word for it: Sklavenmoral - the moral attitudes of slaves.
The Sun Queens and Sun Kings of this world feed on Sklavenmoral. This is why environmental issues are prone to be accounted for in terms of human folly, guilt and the need to regiment human beings, who are depicted as the originators of apocalyptic vices unless shaped into wisely governed collectivities.
Genuine insight into the environment is secondary, at best. The true motive is to present man as evil and, therefore, in need of tutelage.
The same media that, twenty years ago, assured us of the prospect of the world freezing over, are now talking us into deadly global warming. Then as now, cause and culprit are sought in human behaviour - axiomatically.
In fact, the astounding reversal in climatological divinations of global perishing was brought about by a politician with an agenda of accusation: Margaret Thatcher, fighting the coal miners on the brink of civil war, heard of a fringe conjecture by a Swedish scientist, who surmised that anthropogenic CO2 emissions may contribute to global warming. Ms. Thatcher was looking for arguments to strengthen her case against coal and in favour of nuclear power, and discovered a convenient "truth". Desperately hoping for scientific substantiation of the Swede's humble conjecture, she embarked upon subsidizing supportive research, which, in the meantime, has grown to represent a multi-billion industry. For more on this, consult the documentary "The Great Global Warming Swindle", available on YouTube.
Today's Sun Queens and Sun Kings may soon discover that the task they think incumbent upon them is really to get the sun to shine a little less brightly. Rather a tall order for those passionately dedicated to leaving nature untouched by man, revealing the contradictions of people who do not wish the supposed equilibrium of nature to be meddle with by human interference, with the exception of their interfering conception of this equilibrium. (Nature, like the economy, is not an equilibrium affair, but one of permanent change and turbulence, which should not be forgotten when taking equilibrium snapshots of strictly limited heuristic value to begin to understand elements of the Universe.)
It is a question of time until the junk science championed by them will be discredited - at which point they will move on to new scare stories which, they hope, will take more time to debunk than is needed to accumulate powers that seem reasonable while the fake apocalypse has the majority still in its grip.
My prediction is that the massive cuts in pension entitlements awaiting us will be couched in terms of green "emergency" requirements or a "humanitarian" war.
The Center of Global Food Studies has this report: (http://www.cgfi.org/cgficommentary/canadian-climatologist-says-sun-causing-global-warming)
Instead, what actually prevails is a fervent though hollow belief according to which majority consent is the be-all and end-all of political wisdom and legitimacy.
A welcome invitation for democratically elected politicians to extend their effective powers ever wider.
The political agendas advertised to the electorate are, of course, hardly a reflection of the true powers that a democratically elected government inherits from a long-standing history of runaway state expansion. These agendas highlight a small number of hyped issues, only to divert attention from the much larger number of competencies assumed upon being inaugurated by majority consent. "But, I have been democratically elected," effectively becomes an excuse to exert influence far beyond anything that can be seriously regarded as backed by intended consent.
In this way, democracy has moved in a direction opposite to where it ought to go if it is to serve as a means of empowering the electorate. Most democratic decisions should be taken in a local context, where people understand the issues at hand from immediate acquaintance of the contentious questions and the persons affected by them, the personal risks and consequences, morally and materially, entailed by advocating this cause or another.
The touchstone of democratic procedure - and democracy is a counting device, by the end of the day, nothing more - the touchstone, therefore, of the procedure's merits in any given context is whether it promotes personal responsibility or incites the opposite: the shunning of personal responsibility - deference, cowardice or indifference, as the case may be.
The big democratic issues to be decided by the population in its entirety ought to be restricted to the question, how government can be restrained so it would do the least of the damage it is capable of, and what provisions should be in place to guarantee that government protect liberty and facilitate the ability of the people to look after themselves.
If a democracy is not subject to the rule of law, i.e. a set of principles intended to protect individual liberties, restricting government to actions that preserve and foster a free society, and if instead democratic approval is a blank cheque for the ruling to do what they like, democracy is bound to regress to the level of a pluralistic dictatorship, a mechanism by which to replace holders of unrestrained power with new holders of unrestrained power.
Little wonder that those inebriated with a democratic license to power increasingly grow accustomed to hubris, conceit and delusions of grandeur reminiscent of or even wilder than those characteristic of central planers of the Soviet type.
Democratic leaders, like Merkel or Blair, try to outshine one another in megalomaniac promises that surpass their terms of government and accountability by decades, let alone their true powers over whatever issue in question.
One vows to reduce global temperature by two centigrade, only to tickle the other to promise a reduction by three centigrade.
In actual fact, they are using far away future scenarios - that are in reality under nobody's control - in order to leverage self-aggrandizement. Soviet planers had the relative humility to restrict their powers over the future to a five year time horizon. Germany's chancellor, Merkel, seems to tend toward the time frame of Hitler's tausendjähriges Reich (a plan for the Reich's next thousand years) by giving precise directives on how to fix the weather in 2050. Maybe she should do a little advance training by ordering meteorologists to ensure that the weather tomorrow or the day after is in line with what she thinks it should be.
What we are facing with respect to global warming is not an environmental crisis, but a political one.
Unfortunately, there are few indications that the population is getting indignant out of a sense that their intelligence is being insulted.
Even the rare critical responses (in Germany) - to what would be ludicrous if it were not monstrous - turn out to be entangled in unquestioned suppositions of a dubiously subservient kind. Thus, there are some who argue:
How is controlling global climate supposed to be feasible when something comparatively easier such as simplifying the tax code proves impossible to accomplish by the very politicians who purport to act as the masters of global climate.
The tax burden and its rightfulness is not questioned, the demand is rather to make it easier for us to understand the levies we "owe" our government, getting more efficient at being obedient. There is a German word for it: Sklavenmoral - the moral attitudes of slaves.
The Sun Queens and Sun Kings of this world feed on Sklavenmoral. This is why environmental issues are prone to be accounted for in terms of human folly, guilt and the need to regiment human beings, who are depicted as the originators of apocalyptic vices unless shaped into wisely governed collectivities.
Genuine insight into the environment is secondary, at best. The true motive is to present man as evil and, therefore, in need of tutelage.
The same media that, twenty years ago, assured us of the prospect of the world freezing over, are now talking us into deadly global warming. Then as now, cause and culprit are sought in human behaviour - axiomatically.
In fact, the astounding reversal in climatological divinations of global perishing was brought about by a politician with an agenda of accusation: Margaret Thatcher, fighting the coal miners on the brink of civil war, heard of a fringe conjecture by a Swedish scientist, who surmised that anthropogenic CO2 emissions may contribute to global warming. Ms. Thatcher was looking for arguments to strengthen her case against coal and in favour of nuclear power, and discovered a convenient "truth". Desperately hoping for scientific substantiation of the Swede's humble conjecture, she embarked upon subsidizing supportive research, which, in the meantime, has grown to represent a multi-billion industry. For more on this, consult the documentary "The Great Global Warming Swindle", available on YouTube.
Today's Sun Queens and Sun Kings may soon discover that the task they think incumbent upon them is really to get the sun to shine a little less brightly. Rather a tall order for those passionately dedicated to leaving nature untouched by man, revealing the contradictions of people who do not wish the supposed equilibrium of nature to be meddle with by human interference, with the exception of their interfering conception of this equilibrium. (Nature, like the economy, is not an equilibrium affair, but one of permanent change and turbulence, which should not be forgotten when taking equilibrium snapshots of strictly limited heuristic value to begin to understand elements of the Universe.)
It is a question of time until the junk science championed by them will be discredited - at which point they will move on to new scare stories which, they hope, will take more time to debunk than is needed to accumulate powers that seem reasonable while the fake apocalypse has the majority still in its grip.
My prediction is that the massive cuts in pension entitlements awaiting us will be couched in terms of green "emergency" requirements or a "humanitarian" war.
The Center of Global Food Studies has this report: (http://www.cgfi.org/cgficommentary/canadian-climatologist-says-sun-causing-global-warming)
Another scientist has added his voice to the Global Warming debate. Canadian climatologist Tim Patterson says the sun drives the earth’s climate changes—and Earth’s current global warming is a direct result of a long, moderate 1,500-year cycle in the sun’s irradiance.
Patterson says he learned of the 1,500-year climate cycle while studying cycles in fish numbers on Canada’s West Coast. Since the Canadian West had no long-term written fishery records, Patterson’s research team drilled sediment cores in the deep local fjords to get 5,000-year climate profiles from the mud. The mud showed the past climate conditions: Warm summers left layers thick with one-celled fossils and fish scales. Cold, wet periods showed dark sediments, mostly dirt washed from the surrounding land.
Patterson’s fishing profiles clearly revealed the sun’s 87 and 210-year solar cycles—and the longer, 1500-year Dansgaard-Oeschger cycles found since the 1980s in ice cores, tree rings, and fossil pollen.
“Our finding of a direct correlation between variations in the brightness of the sun and earthly climate indicators is not unique,” says the climatologist from Carleton University. “Hundreds of other studies, using proxies from tree rings in Russia’s Kola Peninsula to water levels of the Nile, show exactly the same thing: The sun appears to drive climate change.”
But there was a problem. By themselves, the variations in solar irradiation were too small to account for the big variations his research team found in the Canadian fish catches.
“Even though the sun is brighter now than at any time in the past 8,000 years, the increase in direct solar input is not calculated to be sufficient to cause the past century’s modest warming on its own. There had to be an amplifier of some sort for the sun to be a primary driver of climate changes. Indeed, that is precisely what has been discovered,” says Patterson.
“In a series of groundbreaking scientific papers starting in 2000, Vizer, Shaviv, Carslaw and most recently Svensmark et al., have collectively demonstrated that as the output of the sun varies . . . varying amounts of galactic cosmic rays from deep space are able to enter our solar system. . . . These cosmic rays enhance cloud formation, which, overall, has a cooling effect on the planet.”
“When the sun is less bright, more cosmic rays are able to get through to Earth’s atmosphere, more clouds form and the planet cools. . . . This is precisely what happened from the middle of the 17th century into the early 18th century, when the solar energy input to our atmosphere . . . was at a minimum and the planet was stuck in the Little Ice Age.”
The Canadian expert concludes, “CO2 variations show little correlation with our planet’s climate on long, medium and even short time scales.” Instead, Earth’s sea surface temperatures show a massive 95 percent lagged correlation with the sunspot index.
Patterson says climate change is the most complex field we’ve ever studied. He notes that a 2003 German poll of 530 scientists from 27 countries found two-thirds of the respondents doubted that “the current state of scientific knowledge is developed well enough to allow for a reasonable assessment of the effects of greenhouse gases.”
Attempting to stop global warming with the Kyoto Protocol, he warns, could be as useless as King Canute commanding the tides to cease.
Monday, 9 July 2007
[12] News from Absurdistan - The German Revolution of 1989
http://www.ronpaulforums.com/showthread.php?p=59007#post59007
In a recent post to the Ron Paul Forums (see above for the link or click on the post's headline), reference is made to the German Revolution, suggesting that a small movement can take on tremendous momentum to bring about a sea change all of a sudden. Fair enough.
However, the Ron Paul movement is a completely different animal compared to the German Revolution of 1989 which toppled the wall that severed East and West Germany.
The Ron Paul movement is a force seeking and understanding freedom in the libertarian sense of the word. It is grounded in the traditions of a country that was founded to ensure that its citizens would live in freedom. These traditions are deep-seated in the American mind, and the decline of an utterly corrupt political system in the entire West and, of course, in the USA, gives impetus to hidden legacies - of freedom in the USA, of super-statism in Europe.
My entire blog is about the unhappy fact that freedom is not even remotely understood in Germany.
The German Revolution of 1989 was an uprise, whereby people marched away from one kind of socialism hoping to arrive at another form of socialism, supposedly of a better sort (notice the strong support for Communist politicians in East Germany nowadays; as pointed out previously, Germans always hope for a better socialism).
One would be amiss to discount the courage of hundreds of thousands of Germans taking to the streets all over the GDR in 1989. But it would be equally ill-advised to mystify the events.
The tough resistance work had been done in other countries of the Warsaw Pact (notably in Poland and Afghanistan).
Approximately a year before the Mauer ("The Wall") actually fell, I made a winning bet to that effect. Why had I been so "daring"? Why did I seem to know? Well, as will transpire in a moment, I was not the only one at the time who began to sense that the GDR regime was finished.
Consider two rooms separated by a door guarded by a vicious Schäferhund. People in room A want to cross into room B, but the Schäferhund discourages them to even try. Get rid of the Schäferhund. What do you think will happen?
It may have taken a lot of courage for a lot of Germans to take to the streets in 1989, but 40 years of subservience and compliance with the regime do not exactly suggest that they would have done this if they had not reckoned, as I had, that the seminal job had been done by some one else and that risk had declined to a tractable level. After all, the Schäferhund had been removed.
When Gorbachev, on a visit to East Germany, stated unequivocally that his tanks would no longer protect the Communist regime in Berlin, the "Revolution" had become a foregone conclusion - roughly a year before Communism collapsed in Germany. It was just a matter of time before people would dare a passage through the open door.
In a recent post to the Ron Paul Forums (see above for the link or click on the post's headline), reference is made to the German Revolution, suggesting that a small movement can take on tremendous momentum to bring about a sea change all of a sudden. Fair enough.
However, the Ron Paul movement is a completely different animal compared to the German Revolution of 1989 which toppled the wall that severed East and West Germany.
The Ron Paul movement is a force seeking and understanding freedom in the libertarian sense of the word. It is grounded in the traditions of a country that was founded to ensure that its citizens would live in freedom. These traditions are deep-seated in the American mind, and the decline of an utterly corrupt political system in the entire West and, of course, in the USA, gives impetus to hidden legacies - of freedom in the USA, of super-statism in Europe.
My entire blog is about the unhappy fact that freedom is not even remotely understood in Germany.
The German Revolution of 1989 was an uprise, whereby people marched away from one kind of socialism hoping to arrive at another form of socialism, supposedly of a better sort (notice the strong support for Communist politicians in East Germany nowadays; as pointed out previously, Germans always hope for a better socialism).
One would be amiss to discount the courage of hundreds of thousands of Germans taking to the streets all over the GDR in 1989. But it would be equally ill-advised to mystify the events.
The tough resistance work had been done in other countries of the Warsaw Pact (notably in Poland and Afghanistan).
Approximately a year before the Mauer ("The Wall") actually fell, I made a winning bet to that effect. Why had I been so "daring"? Why did I seem to know? Well, as will transpire in a moment, I was not the only one at the time who began to sense that the GDR regime was finished.
Consider two rooms separated by a door guarded by a vicious Schäferhund. People in room A want to cross into room B, but the Schäferhund discourages them to even try. Get rid of the Schäferhund. What do you think will happen?
It may have taken a lot of courage for a lot of Germans to take to the streets in 1989, but 40 years of subservience and compliance with the regime do not exactly suggest that they would have done this if they had not reckoned, as I had, that the seminal job had been done by some one else and that risk had declined to a tractable level. After all, the Schäferhund had been removed.
When Gorbachev, on a visit to East Germany, stated unequivocally that his tanks would no longer protect the Communist regime in Berlin, the "Revolution" had become a foregone conclusion - roughly a year before Communism collapsed in Germany. It was just a matter of time before people would dare a passage through the open door.
[11] News from Absurdistan - European Democracy
To keep you posted on European matters, I insert this:
Christopher Booker's notebook
By Christopher Booker, Sunday Telegraph
Christopher Booker's notebook
By Christopher Booker, Sunday Telegraph
Last Updated: 11:36pm BST 07/07/2007
EU treaty: the great double deception
Many people must have rubbed their eyes in disbelief at Gordon Brown's statement to MPs last Tuesday when, in announcing his new "constitutional settlement", he promised to give "more power to Parliament and the British people" on the one hand while, on the other, ruling out a referendum on the new EU treaty - which would take away a lot more power from Parliament and the British people.
The layers of spin and deceit that surround this wretched EU treaty are so convoluted that it takes some working out to disentangle the contradictions, U-turns and straight lies it has come to involve. The fundamental problem is that the EU's leaders are determined to foist on the peoples of Europe the final components of a supranational government, as agreed in their constitution, without giving the peoples of Europe any say in the matter.
Ever since the constitution was rejected by the people of France and Holland, they have been trying to find a way of smuggling it back in, by pretending it was something else.
What they cleverly came up with last month was a document which looked very different and much shorter. But this was only because the original version, scrapping all the earlier treaties, reincorporated them in the new constitution.
The new document simply leaves the old treaties on the table, but adds as amendments to them all the new bits included in the constitution, such as giving the EU a full-time president and granting it a mass of other new powers.
Apart from a few cosmetic changes, such as changing "Foreign Minister" to "High Representative", and leaving out the flag and the anthem (which the EU has had since 1986 anyway), the net result is precisely what the French and the Dutch rejected in 2005.
Many Continental politicians have been quite happy to admit this. As Luxemburg's prime minister Jean-Claude Juncker put it, the new treaty contains "99 per cent" of what was in the old "Constitution for Europe".
But their hope is that, because the list of amendments making up the new document look so impenetrable, they can be slipped through without the people noticing.
This Continental trickery, however, looks quite mild compared with the sleight of hand being practised by Gordon Brown. Because he was elected on the Labour manifesto of 2005, which promised a referendum on the constitution, he dare not, like his Continental colleagues, admit that it is the same thing.
He must pretend it is something totally different. And here he has immediately become ensnared in all sorts of difficulties, because this is so blatantly not true.
One of Mr Brown's excuses for not having a referendum was that the new treaty doesn't give away as many powers as Maastricht, on which there was no referendum, But up then pops his new Foreign Secretary, David Miliband, to blurt out that it in fact gives away much more power than Maastricht.
Mr Brown's other excuse was that Britain has held onto all its "red lines", such as being given an opt-out from the Charter of Fundamental Rights.
But up jumps the EU's former justice commissioner, Antonio Vittorini, and a gaggle of lawyers to point out that this is nonsense. A cross-reference in the treaty shows that Britain is just as much subject to the charter as anyone else.
The title of the EU's Foreign Minister may have been changed, on Tony Blair's insistence, to High Representative, but he is still being given new powers to decide EU (i e our) foreign policy which Jack Straw, when foreign secretary, described as "simply unacceptable".
As the think-tank Open Europe and others have pointed out, it is truly astonishing that Mr Brown should begin his premiership, while promising to be "open" with the British people, with a deceit so shameless as to make his predecessor look like an honest man.
It is made even more remarkable by the fact Mr Brown should do this in the very week when he was busy wrapping himself in the Union Jack and ordering that our national flag should be flown on every government building.
The British people should not just be rubbing their eyes in disbelief at Mr Brown's behaviour: they should be shouting with anger.
Pay through the nose for an eye in the sky
If the reluctance of our politicians to admit the ever-growing weight of EU laws that govern our lives has long made the EU "the elephant in the room" of British politics, at least last Monday MPs were for once allowed a brief debate on the ever-soaring expense to British taxpayers of the EU's ill-fated Galileo satellite programme.
As the EU's most ambitious project to date, Galileo is a complete shambles. Running six years late, its commercial backers having pulled out, only one little satellite (made in Britain) has yet been put up (by a Russian rocket), and the European Commission now wants EU taxpayers to foot the colossal bill for an ongoing programme which will cost UK taxpayers alone an estimated £1.3 billion, and will run at a massive loss. All to no discernible purpose.
Originally we were told that Galileo, as the EU's rival to the USA's perfectly adequate and free GPS system, was going to be a huge moneyspinner. Taxpayers would only have to make a modest initial outlay and then the profits would roll in, an estimated £8 billion, plus billions more in commercial spin-offs.
One by one, however, all the original claimed purposes of Galileo have dropped away: that it would be the key to an EU-wide road charging scheme; that every aircraft in the "single European sky" would have to pay to use it; that it would enable the French to sell Galileo-dependent weaponry to China.
Although various Tory MPs, led by their front-bench spokesman Owen Paterson, tried to point all this out on Monday (completely ignored by the BBC's travesty of a report of the debate on its website), the minister, Rosie Winterton, simply insisted that we must carry on paying for it, without being prepared to admit any of its true costs (the figures she cited were way out of date).
She could not come up with a single good reason for continuing with what has now become the EU's "white elephant in the sky". But if the commission insists we must go on forking out hundreds of millions of pounds more, for nothing, who are we British to say no?
Friday, 6 July 2007
[10] News from Absurdistan - The North Korean and the German Notion of Solidarity...
...are identical.
My insistent contention that totalitarian elements prevail in Germany may appear objectionable to some readers - especially German readers.
I only wonder at the extent to which our sensitivities have been blunted vis-à-vis the destruction of freedom in our country.
Germans are required to pay a special tax, the so-called Solidaritätszuschlag ("solidarity surcharge"). It is irrelevant what type of purpose this tax is dedicated to. First, the government does not typically stick strictly to promises of apportionment. Second, and for the present purpose more importantly, it is decidedly not the government's prerogative to dictate to the population that and to what end it should practice solidarity. But this is precisely what the German government does.
Admittedly, the coercive assignment of ostensible collective duties of solidarity is being resorted to almost routinely in many other instances. Germans with no connection to the Nazi past whatsoever are inculcated the notion of partaking in an original sin, an eternal culpability (Kollektivschuld, "collective guilt"), the atonement of which being oddly biased in favour of the regime's Jewish victims - an observation that will bring forth knee-jerk accusations of anti-Semitism, while I am merely suggesting that all victims (and thus also the non-Jewish majority of victims) of The Third Reich's atrocities and the Nazi genocide deserve the same standing. One wonders whether Ben Gurion would have had occasion to suggest that "there is no business like Shoa business", if all victims had been subject to the same standards of compensation.
And while at it, let me add that the state-run, bureaucratized rituals of contrition, the erection of sterile monuments to commemorate the Holocaust etc., bear the mark of evasion so typical of that aspect of German Vergangenheitsbewältigung ("coping with the [Nazi] past"), too. Germany has never recovered from the annihilation of its Jewish citizenry that represented less than 1% of the German population in 1933 (the perfect target for a majority), yet making hugely disproportionate contributions to German life and culture. The intellectual mediocrity into which the country has sunk attests to it.
With a fraction of the money that goes into dead symbols one could have avoided the ignorance that most Germans display regarding the history and the contemporary panorama of Jewish life. Recently, a German student majoring in History complained to me that she spent the last three years (before qualifying for University) six hours a week studying all aspects of the Holocaust. Had she ever met a Jew? No. Did she have an inkling of Jewish culture, present or past? No. What had she learned? The Holocaust was evil. Well, a decent person does not need an education to understand that. Or are we that uncertain about the decency of our young folks that we make them study the obvious for years? The girl's time would have been spent more usefully, if she had been told about the connection between disrespect of personal liberty and the Third Reich. But the logic of freedom is not part of the syllabus in Germany.
In the manner of a Mantra, Germans are incessantly told to be part of a Solidargemeinschaft (forming a union of solidarity) or party to a Generationenvertrag (a contract supposedly entered into by the population's different generations. I certainly have never signed any such contract).
While this is supposed to be taken for granted, what it means is that people are forced to pay the government money that is partly passed on to recipients of retirement benefits and partly squandered on whatever other projects the government cares to finance. While this type of state coercion is thought right and indispensable because people cannot be trusted to use their money responsibly, there can be no doubt that most of us would commit an appropriate portion of the funds to judicious savings, something the government is incapable of. Not to mention that it is none of the state's business to tell people what to do with their money, let alone forcing them to apply it in a specific way.
Back to the Solidaritätszuschlag.
The money thus raised has been used to subsidize consumption in East Germany after the fall of the Berlin wall (redistributing wealth from one part of the country to another to buy contentment), rather than the government creating conditions conducive to productive investment that would allow sources of genuine prosperity to thrive.
The merger of the formerly severed parts of Germany turned out to be the final proof that Germany is politically and intellectually incapable of returning to economic realism. The country is inextricably wedded to what the present political system can only achieve: redistribution, but not productiveness.
One of the unintended consequences of this tax is "intra-Teutonic" racism. There are many West Germans who make no bones about their disdain for their East German brethren, and the effect that the latter's welfare receipts had or are having on the wallets of the former bears a distinct relation to the emergence of hard feelings between the not so happily reunited compatriots.
Let me tell you what a German will never think: Solidarity is a matter of voluntary resolve. It is up to the individual to decide whether he wants to form a bond with others, enter a relationship of solidarity, join a community whose interests, objectives and standards he shares and intends to support.
No, one prefers the North Korean reading: The government knows what is best for us, including the time and circumstances that necessitate our being ordered to practice solidarity. If the citizen does not comply, he is subject to severe punishment, draconian fees or incarceration.
To be clear: if a person does not heed the call to solidarity in Germany, his existence will be destroyed, just as he goes to prison if he refuses to send his child to a government-licensed school (there are no other schools allowed in the country). North Korean ways.
When I make these points to Germans, they have a hard time following me.
The situation is taken for granted by most of them; there are some sighs and complaints, rather of the inward looking type - boy, where is all my money going -, but some care to reason, and here is their logic: If we do not feed the East Germans, we are going to end up with more crime, unrest and such like, plus some will argue that they do not mind sharing some of their wealth with the poor relatives (which is perfectly fine as long as no one is coerced to pay in accordance with feelings that not they but others have).
So, we have a government that tells us why, when and how to practice solidarity, and a citizenry that complies out of unthinking habit or because they reckon making forced payments is the way to deal with extortion (their assumption, not mine).
If freedom is not an option available to the minds of people...Pyongyang is not far away.
My insistent contention that totalitarian elements prevail in Germany may appear objectionable to some readers - especially German readers.
I only wonder at the extent to which our sensitivities have been blunted vis-à-vis the destruction of freedom in our country.
Germans are required to pay a special tax, the so-called Solidaritätszuschlag ("solidarity surcharge"). It is irrelevant what type of purpose this tax is dedicated to. First, the government does not typically stick strictly to promises of apportionment. Second, and for the present purpose more importantly, it is decidedly not the government's prerogative to dictate to the population that and to what end it should practice solidarity. But this is precisely what the German government does.
Admittedly, the coercive assignment of ostensible collective duties of solidarity is being resorted to almost routinely in many other instances. Germans with no connection to the Nazi past whatsoever are inculcated the notion of partaking in an original sin, an eternal culpability (Kollektivschuld, "collective guilt"), the atonement of which being oddly biased in favour of the regime's Jewish victims - an observation that will bring forth knee-jerk accusations of anti-Semitism, while I am merely suggesting that all victims (and thus also the non-Jewish majority of victims) of The Third Reich's atrocities and the Nazi genocide deserve the same standing. One wonders whether Ben Gurion would have had occasion to suggest that "there is no business like Shoa business", if all victims had been subject to the same standards of compensation.
And while at it, let me add that the state-run, bureaucratized rituals of contrition, the erection of sterile monuments to commemorate the Holocaust etc., bear the mark of evasion so typical of that aspect of German Vergangenheitsbewältigung ("coping with the [Nazi] past"), too. Germany has never recovered from the annihilation of its Jewish citizenry that represented less than 1% of the German population in 1933 (the perfect target for a majority), yet making hugely disproportionate contributions to German life and culture. The intellectual mediocrity into which the country has sunk attests to it.
With a fraction of the money that goes into dead symbols one could have avoided the ignorance that most Germans display regarding the history and the contemporary panorama of Jewish life. Recently, a German student majoring in History complained to me that she spent the last three years (before qualifying for University) six hours a week studying all aspects of the Holocaust. Had she ever met a Jew? No. Did she have an inkling of Jewish culture, present or past? No. What had she learned? The Holocaust was evil. Well, a decent person does not need an education to understand that. Or are we that uncertain about the decency of our young folks that we make them study the obvious for years? The girl's time would have been spent more usefully, if she had been told about the connection between disrespect of personal liberty and the Third Reich. But the logic of freedom is not part of the syllabus in Germany.
In the manner of a Mantra, Germans are incessantly told to be part of a Solidargemeinschaft (forming a union of solidarity) or party to a Generationenvertrag (a contract supposedly entered into by the population's different generations. I certainly have never signed any such contract).
While this is supposed to be taken for granted, what it means is that people are forced to pay the government money that is partly passed on to recipients of retirement benefits and partly squandered on whatever other projects the government cares to finance. While this type of state coercion is thought right and indispensable because people cannot be trusted to use their money responsibly, there can be no doubt that most of us would commit an appropriate portion of the funds to judicious savings, something the government is incapable of. Not to mention that it is none of the state's business to tell people what to do with their money, let alone forcing them to apply it in a specific way.
Back to the Solidaritätszuschlag.
The money thus raised has been used to subsidize consumption in East Germany after the fall of the Berlin wall (redistributing wealth from one part of the country to another to buy contentment), rather than the government creating conditions conducive to productive investment that would allow sources of genuine prosperity to thrive.
The merger of the formerly severed parts of Germany turned out to be the final proof that Germany is politically and intellectually incapable of returning to economic realism. The country is inextricably wedded to what the present political system can only achieve: redistribution, but not productiveness.
One of the unintended consequences of this tax is "intra-Teutonic" racism. There are many West Germans who make no bones about their disdain for their East German brethren, and the effect that the latter's welfare receipts had or are having on the wallets of the former bears a distinct relation to the emergence of hard feelings between the not so happily reunited compatriots.
Let me tell you what a German will never think: Solidarity is a matter of voluntary resolve. It is up to the individual to decide whether he wants to form a bond with others, enter a relationship of solidarity, join a community whose interests, objectives and standards he shares and intends to support.
No, one prefers the North Korean reading: The government knows what is best for us, including the time and circumstances that necessitate our being ordered to practice solidarity. If the citizen does not comply, he is subject to severe punishment, draconian fees or incarceration.
To be clear: if a person does not heed the call to solidarity in Germany, his existence will be destroyed, just as he goes to prison if he refuses to send his child to a government-licensed school (there are no other schools allowed in the country). North Korean ways.
When I make these points to Germans, they have a hard time following me.
The situation is taken for granted by most of them; there are some sighs and complaints, rather of the inward looking type - boy, where is all my money going -, but some care to reason, and here is their logic: If we do not feed the East Germans, we are going to end up with more crime, unrest and such like, plus some will argue that they do not mind sharing some of their wealth with the poor relatives (which is perfectly fine as long as no one is coerced to pay in accordance with feelings that not they but others have).
So, we have a government that tells us why, when and how to practice solidarity, and a citizenry that complies out of unthinking habit or because they reckon making forced payments is the way to deal with extortion (their assumption, not mine).
If freedom is not an option available to the minds of people...Pyongyang is not far away.
[1] A Walk Through Liberty Garden - Principles and Expediency
"Freedom can be preserved only by following principles and is destroyed by following expediency
From the insight that the benefits of civilization rest on the use of more knowledge [dispersed across a given population] than can be used in any deliberately concerted effort [directed by government or any other commanding force], it follows that it is not in our power to build a desirable society by simply putting together the particular elements that by themselves appear desirable."
(Hayek, "Law, Legislation and Liberty" [LLL], Volume 1, Chicago, 1973, p. 56. All additions, included in square brackets, [ ], are from the author of the blog.)
This passage is very important, as it contrasts the liberal ( = libertarian) view against the approach taken and accepted by the vast majority - certainly in Germany.
Due to the almost irresistible lure of a false analogy, the non-libertarian concept of government is widely adopted - i.e. the fundamental idea that a country needs to be "run" by government .
Our perceptions are geared toward controlled environments, for in life, we are quite naturally preoccupied with planned efforts such as managing the household budget, putting together a piece of furniture, and even much of science, which we study at school for years on end, tends to focus on scenarios that are under our control or ought to be (- ever noticed that physics is hardly ever dealing with more than two or three variables, relatively simple relationships, which admittedly may be very hard to find out about?)
By contrast, the unseen, roundabout and abstract is not within our natural purview.
Therefore, it is tempting to conceptualize as many aspects of life in terms of a controlled or controllable environment, which by definition contains a conveniently finite number of variables, a manageable set of operative factors . Thus, it is convenient to explain the fortune of an entrepreneur by the idea that he has exploited someone - taken away something from someone. It is much harder to reconstruct and have clear perceptions and strong feelings about an almost infinitely complex process in which the creation of an entrepreneur's fortune is truly embedded.
Incidentally, this kind of attention deficit vis-à-vis the complex gives anti-capitalist intuitions and prejudices an enormous advantage over accounts more faithful to the authentic goings-on.
In the 2001 edition of his "The Market System", Charles Lindblom writes: "Indeed, in our time the market system has become a global coordinator of cooperative performances of at least 2 billion people. No other method of social cooperation matches the market system in scope and detail. We are often disposed to give first place to the state as an organizer of cooperation. But no government has ever organized so many people in such an articulated and detailed assignment of performances...which lock many millions of people into specific coordinating roles. Moreover, there exists a global market system but no world state. Even within one country the market system organizes a detailed cooperation - millions of assignments to precisely defined roles - that state or government has rarely attempted and never accomplished." (p. 41)
We are dealing with an immensely intricate universe of relationships that can, at best, be accounted for in terms of an abstract pattern. It is not something that can be experienced in its whole.
Any effort to achieve this kind of coordination by fiat, any attempt to treat it as something within the purview of a planner has failed miserably, without ever coming remotely near to the quality and wealth produced by the market system.
Stalin and Mao brought about abject failure because they thought it within their power "to build a desirable society by simply putting together the particular elements that by themselves appear desirable."
To all intents and purposes, this mindset is also characteristic of politicians in the West, who must sell to the electorate concrete goals, concrete causes and concrete effects, promising "to build a desirable society by simply putting together the particular elements that by themselves appear desirable."
But then, what is required to make people coordinate spontaneously, thereby achieving feats "that state or government has rarely attempted and never accomplished"?
The answer: "[A] condition of liberty in which all are allowed to use their knowledge for their purposes, restrained only by rules of just conduct of universal application, is likely to produce for them the best conditions for achieving their aims; and...such a system is likely to be achieved and maintained only if all authority, including that of the majority of the people, is limited in the exercise of coercive power by general principles..." (Hayek, p.55)
The human individual has unfathomable potential, knowledge and purpose that can never be known and appreciated by central agents wielding power over him. To ensure that this potential is put to best use, people must not be told what to do, instead they ought to be left to their own devices and be restrained only by rules that guarantee to each an inviolable private domain within which he is free to act as he sees fit. Within that framework the nexus of mutual adaptations and cooperation is so vast and resourceful as to surpass any arrangements that can be effected by conscious design and command.
This is why I call our society an abstract order, it is not a controllable environment and can only be turned into a controlled environment in parts (always only in parts) on pain of terrible destruction in material and human terms.
It is essentially a self-generating order. As such it is subject to different rules than a controlled environment. The latter depends heavily on commands, specific directives, which reflect the intellectual and operative control of the maker.
A self-generating order, however, relies on rules designed to maximize the knowledge and operative capabilities dispersed among millions of people and that no single "maker" can ever acquire. That is why freedom is indispensable in a self-generating order of human beings.
"The Socratic maxim that the recognition of our ignorance is the beginning of wisdom has profound significance for our understanding of society. The first requisite for this is that we become aware of men's necessary ignorance of much that helps him to achieve his aims. Most of the advantages of social life, especially in its more advanced forms which we call 'civilization,' rest on the fact that the individual benefits from more knowledge than he is aware of. It might be said that civilization begins when the individual in the pursuit of his ends can make use of more knowledge than he himself has acquired and when he can transcend the boundaries of his ignorance by profiting from knowledge he does not possess himself. " (Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty, Chicago 1978, p. 22)
By applying rules (of the command type) as if a ruling body were not subject to such limitations of knowledge, we reduce the intelligence of a society to the purview of a narrow selection of minds and, hence, force it to be infinitely less intelligent than it would be in the presence of free interaction among its members. Thus, the defence of civilization requires principles that defend the free interaction of people against the expediency of the moment or the expediency of a group. Free people, while able to follow their own aims and live by their personal values, generate far more and better knowledge than the pawns of a collective marshalled by the pragmatism of their leaders, which inexorably leads to socialism, the inefficient and inhumane outcome when a few commanding minds acquire the power to replace the hyperintelligence of a civilizatory order.
Freedom can be preserved only if it is treated as a supreme principle which must not be sacrificed for particular advantages.
We need to adhere to strict principles in order to protect individual freedom, whose suppression has negative consequences that are hard to put a finger on, while the pragmatists' promises of concrete attainments take advantage of our propensity to value graphic stories:
"Since the value of freedom rests on the opportunities it provides for unforeseen and unpredictable actions, we will rarely know what we lose through a particular restriction of freedom. Any such restriction, any coercion other than the enforcement of general rules will aim at the achievement of some foreseeable particular result, but what is prevented by it will not be known. The direct effects of any interference with the market order will be near and clearly visible in most cases, while the more indirect and remote effects will mostly be unknown and will therefore be disregarded. We shall never be aware of all the costs of achieving particular results by such interference." (LLL, Vol. 1, p.56)
From the insight that the benefits of civilization rest on the use of more knowledge [dispersed across a given population] than can be used in any deliberately concerted effort [directed by government or any other commanding force], it follows that it is not in our power to build a desirable society by simply putting together the particular elements that by themselves appear desirable."
(Hayek, "Law, Legislation and Liberty" [LLL], Volume 1, Chicago, 1973, p. 56. All additions, included in square brackets, [ ], are from the author of the blog.)
This passage is very important, as it contrasts the liberal ( = libertarian) view against the approach taken and accepted by the vast majority - certainly in Germany.
Due to the almost irresistible lure of a false analogy, the non-libertarian concept of government is widely adopted - i.e. the fundamental idea that a country needs to be "run" by government .
Our perceptions are geared toward controlled environments, for in life, we are quite naturally preoccupied with planned efforts such as managing the household budget, putting together a piece of furniture, and even much of science, which we study at school for years on end, tends to focus on scenarios that are under our control or ought to be (- ever noticed that physics is hardly ever dealing with more than two or three variables, relatively simple relationships, which admittedly may be very hard to find out about?)
By contrast, the unseen, roundabout and abstract is not within our natural purview.
Therefore, it is tempting to conceptualize as many aspects of life in terms of a controlled or controllable environment, which by definition contains a conveniently finite number of variables, a manageable set of operative factors . Thus, it is convenient to explain the fortune of an entrepreneur by the idea that he has exploited someone - taken away something from someone. It is much harder to reconstruct and have clear perceptions and strong feelings about an almost infinitely complex process in which the creation of an entrepreneur's fortune is truly embedded.
Incidentally, this kind of attention deficit vis-à-vis the complex gives anti-capitalist intuitions and prejudices an enormous advantage over accounts more faithful to the authentic goings-on.
In the 2001 edition of his "The Market System", Charles Lindblom writes: "Indeed, in our time the market system has become a global coordinator of cooperative performances of at least 2 billion people. No other method of social cooperation matches the market system in scope and detail. We are often disposed to give first place to the state as an organizer of cooperation. But no government has ever organized so many people in such an articulated and detailed assignment of performances...which lock many millions of people into specific coordinating roles. Moreover, there exists a global market system but no world state. Even within one country the market system organizes a detailed cooperation - millions of assignments to precisely defined roles - that state or government has rarely attempted and never accomplished." (p. 41)
We are dealing with an immensely intricate universe of relationships that can, at best, be accounted for in terms of an abstract pattern. It is not something that can be experienced in its whole.
Any effort to achieve this kind of coordination by fiat, any attempt to treat it as something within the purview of a planner has failed miserably, without ever coming remotely near to the quality and wealth produced by the market system.
Stalin and Mao brought about abject failure because they thought it within their power "to build a desirable society by simply putting together the particular elements that by themselves appear desirable."
To all intents and purposes, this mindset is also characteristic of politicians in the West, who must sell to the electorate concrete goals, concrete causes and concrete effects, promising "to build a desirable society by simply putting together the particular elements that by themselves appear desirable."
But then, what is required to make people coordinate spontaneously, thereby achieving feats "that state or government has rarely attempted and never accomplished"?
The answer: "[A] condition of liberty in which all are allowed to use their knowledge for their purposes, restrained only by rules of just conduct of universal application, is likely to produce for them the best conditions for achieving their aims; and...such a system is likely to be achieved and maintained only if all authority, including that of the majority of the people, is limited in the exercise of coercive power by general principles..." (Hayek, p.55)
The human individual has unfathomable potential, knowledge and purpose that can never be known and appreciated by central agents wielding power over him. To ensure that this potential is put to best use, people must not be told what to do, instead they ought to be left to their own devices and be restrained only by rules that guarantee to each an inviolable private domain within which he is free to act as he sees fit. Within that framework the nexus of mutual adaptations and cooperation is so vast and resourceful as to surpass any arrangements that can be effected by conscious design and command.
This is why I call our society an abstract order, it is not a controllable environment and can only be turned into a controlled environment in parts (always only in parts) on pain of terrible destruction in material and human terms.
It is essentially a self-generating order. As such it is subject to different rules than a controlled environment. The latter depends heavily on commands, specific directives, which reflect the intellectual and operative control of the maker.
A self-generating order, however, relies on rules designed to maximize the knowledge and operative capabilities dispersed among millions of people and that no single "maker" can ever acquire. That is why freedom is indispensable in a self-generating order of human beings.
"The Socratic maxim that the recognition of our ignorance is the beginning of wisdom has profound significance for our understanding of society. The first requisite for this is that we become aware of men's necessary ignorance of much that helps him to achieve his aims. Most of the advantages of social life, especially in its more advanced forms which we call 'civilization,' rest on the fact that the individual benefits from more knowledge than he is aware of. It might be said that civilization begins when the individual in the pursuit of his ends can make use of more knowledge than he himself has acquired and when he can transcend the boundaries of his ignorance by profiting from knowledge he does not possess himself. " (Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty, Chicago 1978, p. 22)
By applying rules (of the command type) as if a ruling body were not subject to such limitations of knowledge, we reduce the intelligence of a society to the purview of a narrow selection of minds and, hence, force it to be infinitely less intelligent than it would be in the presence of free interaction among its members. Thus, the defence of civilization requires principles that defend the free interaction of people against the expediency of the moment or the expediency of a group. Free people, while able to follow their own aims and live by their personal values, generate far more and better knowledge than the pawns of a collective marshalled by the pragmatism of their leaders, which inexorably leads to socialism, the inefficient and inhumane outcome when a few commanding minds acquire the power to replace the hyperintelligence of a civilizatory order.
Freedom can be preserved only if it is treated as a supreme principle which must not be sacrificed for particular advantages.
We need to adhere to strict principles in order to protect individual freedom, whose suppression has negative consequences that are hard to put a finger on, while the pragmatists' promises of concrete attainments take advantage of our propensity to value graphic stories:
"Since the value of freedom rests on the opportunities it provides for unforeseen and unpredictable actions, we will rarely know what we lose through a particular restriction of freedom. Any such restriction, any coercion other than the enforcement of general rules will aim at the achievement of some foreseeable particular result, but what is prevented by it will not be known. The direct effects of any interference with the market order will be near and clearly visible in most cases, while the more indirect and remote effects will mostly be unknown and will therefore be disregarded. We shall never be aware of all the costs of achieving particular results by such interference." (LLL, Vol. 1, p.56)
[9] News From Absurdistan - Irrelevant Indignation
Click on the post's headline for the dpa news item to which the below comment refers.
I am not disturbed about Messrs. Grass, Lenz and Walser (leading German novelists) having been part of the Nazi machinery before coming of age. The exact circumstances of their involvement are nebulous, hard to research and it is not unlikely that they were excusably tricked or forced into compliance.
What does worry me is the fact that all three of them - self-styled and hugely acclaimed upholders of moral standards in Germany, mandatory reading to generations of force-fed pupils - never seriously analysed the deeper roots of totalitarianism.
After the war, they were quick to seek the public stage as energetic and enduring proponents of the idea that dominates modern Germany to this day: there can be a good variant of socialism and we should adopt it.
Walser was even a supporter of the DKP, the West German communist party.
These leading Moralapostel ("moralizers") have not learned a thing from the past, building reputations and fortunes by beating a dead horse: national socialism. The subtle continuity or re-emergence of totalitarian structures in Germany has never entered their purview.
The terms "politically correct" and "politically opportune" are synonymous. In their dotage now, these gentlemen have never had much else but "political correctness" to steer them through life. Whether keeping silent about their Nazi-past, condemning the Nazi machinations or pontificating about the need to get socialism right for once in Germany, all along they merely put a wet finger up to test for clement winds.
Do not expect to learn of and understand freedom by reading their literature. These famed writers do not know what it means to do damage to liberty. They are just another brick in the wall, just another example of Germany's supposed elite not having a clue.
Blustering fellows good at selling self-righteousness.
See also my earlier post:
I am not disturbed about Messrs. Grass, Lenz and Walser (leading German novelists) having been part of the Nazi machinery before coming of age. The exact circumstances of their involvement are nebulous, hard to research and it is not unlikely that they were excusably tricked or forced into compliance.
What does worry me is the fact that all three of them - self-styled and hugely acclaimed upholders of moral standards in Germany, mandatory reading to generations of force-fed pupils - never seriously analysed the deeper roots of totalitarianism.
After the war, they were quick to seek the public stage as energetic and enduring proponents of the idea that dominates modern Germany to this day: there can be a good variant of socialism and we should adopt it.
Walser was even a supporter of the DKP, the West German communist party.
These leading Moralapostel ("moralizers") have not learned a thing from the past, building reputations and fortunes by beating a dead horse: national socialism. The subtle continuity or re-emergence of totalitarian structures in Germany has never entered their purview.
The terms "politically correct" and "politically opportune" are synonymous. In their dotage now, these gentlemen have never had much else but "political correctness" to steer them through life. Whether keeping silent about their Nazi-past, condemning the Nazi machinations or pontificating about the need to get socialism right for once in Germany, all along they merely put a wet finger up to test for clement winds.
Do not expect to learn of and understand freedom by reading their literature. These famed writers do not know what it means to do damage to liberty. They are just another brick in the wall, just another example of Germany's supposed elite not having a clue.
Blustering fellows good at selling self-righteousness.
See also my earlier post:
[3] News from Hypocristan - Cheap Talk and the Armchair Resistance Fighter
Thursday, 5 July 2007
[8] News from Absurdistan: Germany - A Less Developed Country
[In statu nascendi]
A country of might is a more worrisome receptacle of evil than one with fewer resources to do bad.
Historically, Germany has shown a proclivity to combine features of advanced development and backwardness at the same time. Call it negative leverage - when awesome material and intellectual power is marshalled to promote the primitive, become efficient at regression or be a leader in reactionary matters.
I propose that it is easier to find funds and friends to help the libertarian cause in Malawi than to attract foreign aid for the purpose of educating the Germans about freedom. Your gut tells you: Malawi needs help, no doubt. But does Germany?
Back in the days of the GDR, the communist regime in East Germany was blessed with a peculiarity known as Das Tal der Ahnungslosen - the vale of the clueless. Given technology at the time, for geographic reasons, an important province of the communist country was cut off from Western TV broadcasts - namely, the area around Dresden.
When I see what tremendous advances knowledge about the importance of liberty and efforts to disseminate the message (internet) have made in other countries, especially in the USA, I cannot but help think that 'the vale of the clueless' has expanded to extend over the entire surface of German territory.
What I am saying is this: every day, I listen to radio broadcasts directed to a military audience - some 40 thousand Americans in my German home town. And what do I hear? I hear things otherwise never talked about in Germany. American syndicated radio is full of libertarian ideas. True, these ideas are not exactly preponderant in the broadcasts, but they are around, they are being discussed - increasingly it seems - and what is particularly encouraging: a significant number of people can effortlessly relate to them and actually understand the basic concepts, even though they may still end up supporting political forces of the mainstream.
In fact, my impression is that there are huge numbers of Americans who welcome and endorse the libertarian message. This trend is strengthened by the emancipation of the mind afforded by the internet, which turns hapless consumers of spin (offered by the leading usurpers of conventional mainstream media outlets) into purposive seekers of truth and high quality information. People begin to define what they want to hear, rather than being defined by what they hear.
Millions of Americans are ready for the libertarian turn in politics, ready to see the political duopoly of the Democrats and Republicans give way to something - in its composite fabric - uniquely American: constitutionalism, individual liberty, limited government, free markets and peace.
By contrast, these values have no resonance in Germany.
As if living in the vale of the clueless, Germans, like their formerly communist brethren in East Germany and fellow-citizens of today, have never been educated in the meaning and import of individual liberty, limited government and free markets.
They believe that a constitution is an instrument rightfully catering to strong government - deeming the national government too puny to cope with the challenges of today and in need of supersession by a more powerful European hyper-government. And a strong government, they feel, is required to keep in check individuals and free markets, both being looked upon as sources of abominable vice. War is considered an expedient way to bestow the blessings of Western democracy upon countries thought savage, too weak to muster much resistance to the intruders (or else the Germans are adamant that their soldiers facilitate combat action but do not take part in it) or holding treasures easily reaped (oil or opportunities for [using military force to achieve] humanitarian feats).
With Germans, freedom evokes images of the Marlborough man, a holiday leave from the constraints of everyday life, rascals overstepping the bounds of decency. Freedom has no political connotations in Germany, least of all any to do with a libertarian order.
While freedom shows promise of a comeback in the States, in Germany it is drifting farther and farther out of sight.
Before the fall of the Berlin wall, you would still hear the odd German politician making mention of our freiheitlich-demokratische Grundordnung ( a political order based on freedom and democracy).
One no more hears any of this - as trite and hollow as the phrase used to sound in the mouths of gentlemen like the former Chancellor Helmut Kohl.
We have gotten rid of the "freiheitlich" bit, the thing about being based on freedom. "Democratic" is sufficient now.
As I am trying to demonstrate in this blog, Germany is uncharted territory in terms of libertarianism, there are no forces to speak of promoting liberty, no resonance to it in the populace, scarce literacy of the matter among intellectuals and almost complete philosophical Gleichschaltung (complete subservience of all members of society) along the lines of ignorance or rejection of the basic concepts of liberty.
Excellent sources of knowledge about liberty, e.g. the websites of American think-tanks such as The Cato Institute or the Future of Freedom Foundation, laudably offer their publications in foreign languages such as Arabic, Russian and Spanish.
Urgently needed are German editions.
Germany needs foreign intellectual aid.
The only original political innovation to have emerged and spread globally from postwar Germany comes from the ecologists, die Grünen (The Green Party), who figured out how to instrumentalize ecological concerns for populist power grabbing, using a shrewd strategy that combines the bias of our political system in favour of well-organized special interests with the art of vulgarizing ecological issues to foster powerful demagoguery.
Long before Al Gore, green politicians in Germany knew how to get big business to treat them more solicitously than politicians taking a pro-business stance. After all, who is more important to you? The guy who leaves you unhindered in your progress, or the guy who threatens to break your leg, unless you are ready for a little detour?
Corruption is supposed to be a sure sign of LDCs - less developed countries.
Go back to earlier posts at this blog and you will see just how corrupt Germany is.
The benefit/cost of corruption in a less developed country in the common sense of the word may be small - a rush fee of a couple of hundred dollars to get the utilities to link you up for business -, in Germany you may be dealing with a multi-billion stake to avoid derailment of large investments.
To repeat myself: a country of might is a more worrisome receptacle of evil than one with fewer resources to do bad.
Germany is rather advanced at being less developed.
A country of might is a more worrisome receptacle of evil than one with fewer resources to do bad.
Historically, Germany has shown a proclivity to combine features of advanced development and backwardness at the same time. Call it negative leverage - when awesome material and intellectual power is marshalled to promote the primitive, become efficient at regression or be a leader in reactionary matters.
I propose that it is easier to find funds and friends to help the libertarian cause in Malawi than to attract foreign aid for the purpose of educating the Germans about freedom. Your gut tells you: Malawi needs help, no doubt. But does Germany?
Back in the days of the GDR, the communist regime in East Germany was blessed with a peculiarity known as Das Tal der Ahnungslosen - the vale of the clueless. Given technology at the time, for geographic reasons, an important province of the communist country was cut off from Western TV broadcasts - namely, the area around Dresden.
When I see what tremendous advances knowledge about the importance of liberty and efforts to disseminate the message (internet) have made in other countries, especially in the USA, I cannot but help think that 'the vale of the clueless' has expanded to extend over the entire surface of German territory.
What I am saying is this: every day, I listen to radio broadcasts directed to a military audience - some 40 thousand Americans in my German home town. And what do I hear? I hear things otherwise never talked about in Germany. American syndicated radio is full of libertarian ideas. True, these ideas are not exactly preponderant in the broadcasts, but they are around, they are being discussed - increasingly it seems - and what is particularly encouraging: a significant number of people can effortlessly relate to them and actually understand the basic concepts, even though they may still end up supporting political forces of the mainstream.
In fact, my impression is that there are huge numbers of Americans who welcome and endorse the libertarian message. This trend is strengthened by the emancipation of the mind afforded by the internet, which turns hapless consumers of spin (offered by the leading usurpers of conventional mainstream media outlets) into purposive seekers of truth and high quality information. People begin to define what they want to hear, rather than being defined by what they hear.
Millions of Americans are ready for the libertarian turn in politics, ready to see the political duopoly of the Democrats and Republicans give way to something - in its composite fabric - uniquely American: constitutionalism, individual liberty, limited government, free markets and peace.
By contrast, these values have no resonance in Germany.
As if living in the vale of the clueless, Germans, like their formerly communist brethren in East Germany and fellow-citizens of today, have never been educated in the meaning and import of individual liberty, limited government and free markets.
They believe that a constitution is an instrument rightfully catering to strong government - deeming the national government too puny to cope with the challenges of today and in need of supersession by a more powerful European hyper-government. And a strong government, they feel, is required to keep in check individuals and free markets, both being looked upon as sources of abominable vice. War is considered an expedient way to bestow the blessings of Western democracy upon countries thought savage, too weak to muster much resistance to the intruders (or else the Germans are adamant that their soldiers facilitate combat action but do not take part in it) or holding treasures easily reaped (oil or opportunities for [using military force to achieve] humanitarian feats).
With Germans, freedom evokes images of the Marlborough man, a holiday leave from the constraints of everyday life, rascals overstepping the bounds of decency. Freedom has no political connotations in Germany, least of all any to do with a libertarian order.
While freedom shows promise of a comeback in the States, in Germany it is drifting farther and farther out of sight.
Before the fall of the Berlin wall, you would still hear the odd German politician making mention of our freiheitlich-demokratische Grundordnung ( a political order based on freedom and democracy).
One no more hears any of this - as trite and hollow as the phrase used to sound in the mouths of gentlemen like the former Chancellor Helmut Kohl.
We have gotten rid of the "freiheitlich" bit, the thing about being based on freedom. "Democratic" is sufficient now.
As I am trying to demonstrate in this blog, Germany is uncharted territory in terms of libertarianism, there are no forces to speak of promoting liberty, no resonance to it in the populace, scarce literacy of the matter among intellectuals and almost complete philosophical Gleichschaltung (complete subservience of all members of society) along the lines of ignorance or rejection of the basic concepts of liberty.
Excellent sources of knowledge about liberty, e.g. the websites of American think-tanks such as The Cato Institute or the Future of Freedom Foundation, laudably offer their publications in foreign languages such as Arabic, Russian and Spanish.
Urgently needed are German editions.
Germany needs foreign intellectual aid.
The only original political innovation to have emerged and spread globally from postwar Germany comes from the ecologists, die Grünen (The Green Party), who figured out how to instrumentalize ecological concerns for populist power grabbing, using a shrewd strategy that combines the bias of our political system in favour of well-organized special interests with the art of vulgarizing ecological issues to foster powerful demagoguery.
Long before Al Gore, green politicians in Germany knew how to get big business to treat them more solicitously than politicians taking a pro-business stance. After all, who is more important to you? The guy who leaves you unhindered in your progress, or the guy who threatens to break your leg, unless you are ready for a little detour?
Corruption is supposed to be a sure sign of LDCs - less developed countries.
Go back to earlier posts at this blog and you will see just how corrupt Germany is.
The benefit/cost of corruption in a less developed country in the common sense of the word may be small - a rush fee of a couple of hundred dollars to get the utilities to link you up for business -, in Germany you may be dealing with a multi-billion stake to avoid derailment of large investments.
To repeat myself: a country of might is a more worrisome receptacle of evil than one with fewer resources to do bad.
Germany is rather advanced at being less developed.
Wednesday, 4 July 2007
[7] News from Absurdistan - The Rule of Men and Bad Economics
While Germans are proud of their Rechtsstaat ("a state/country/government under the rule of law"), it is, in fact, the 'rule of men' not the 'rule of law' that they practice. Yet, they cannot have their cake and eat it. If democratic license entitles certain agents to determine at will what the law is to be and to shift the posts while the economic game is under way to serve certain groups or goals in violation of general rules applicable to all, you might end up with a soziale Marktwirtschaft but you cannot have a Rechtsstaat.
If you do not wish to have capitalism, you must relinquish the rule of law. If you insist on the rule of law, you cannot have a soziale Marktwirtschaft.
It is amazing that no one seems to notice the contradiction.
Why such incongruence would go unnoticed has to do both with the tradition of legal positivism in Germany - the idea that law is whatever those (legitimately) in power declare it to be - and with the fact that economists (not only in Germany but all over the world) have lost sight of their subject-matter.
Economics ought to explain that self-generating order that comes about when free individuals do commerce with one another based on generally applicable rules of just conduct. However, in economics, little attention is paid to freedom and justice and the discovery process set in motion by them, the dynamics and evolution, the creative destruction inherent in a free economy. The most essential features of a capitalist economy are excluded from the models purporting to represent it: instead economics focusses on equilibrium, precisely the kind of state at hand when the driving forces of a vibrant capitalist economy - change, competition, discovery, innovation - have lost their relevance and disappear from sight.
Economists are eager to be seen as practitioners of an exact science and, therefore, awkwardly and obsolescently, try to satisfy the scientific ideal of the 19th century - the precision of mechanics. To that end, they must turn their subject-matter into something tractable in terms of mechanics. The anally retentive fetish of precision supersedes the business of comprehension.
Their description of the economy is a travesty of the "real thing", an embarrassment that does not fail to be noticed. Rather than realizing that their approach to conceptualizing the economy is wrong - oh no, it is mathematically too beautiful to be given up - the incongruence of the theoretical and the real economy is assiduously ascribed to something being wrong with the economy - namely, the tremendous incidence of "market failure" - meaning: equilibrium does not work, does not show up in the evidence - ah, hence, the economy does not work.
Not economics is flawed, but the capitalist economy is. In fact, it is, due to all that "market failure", a pretty wobbly something that, indeed, needs a lot of fixing. That is why the majority of economists are easily convinced of the need of intervention in the economy, and - in Germany - very fond of the soziale Marktwirtschaft.
In this way economists, who should know better, act as an authority that rehabilitates the propaganda lies of 19th century socialists, on which the general disdain for "pure capitalism" is entirely based - to this day, July 4, in the Year of The Lord 2007.
There is something inherently wrong, fundamentally vicious about the unfettered capitalist economy - actually, an idea intrinsically pre-economic, a savage notion held when economic analysis had not yet been at the disposal of mankind, and the roundabout, counter-intuitive workings of anonymous interactions by suspicious individuals such as traders insulted the values and thinking habits of close-knit tribal communities.
Thus, let us appeal to wise men (the rule of men) to straiten things out.
Let us not follow impartial rules designed to set free the enormous powers of a spontaneous order coordinating billions of people (as opposed to the commands that give cohesion to a horde), let us go for persuasive whims and interests and hope for share outs and windfalls for you and me.
Let us pretend that we are still a smallish community tied together by similar experiences and circumstances, a great family of hunters and gatherers, rather than six billion human beings, who form an abstract order that must follow abstract rules, not parochial conceit, if its incalculable, unbounded, unsurveyable diversity is to bring forth prosperity and peace, not strife, not "order" by domination and subjugation.
Let us make promises of the familiar, even more: of the familial, let us be guided by tribal instincts...and...bang goes the rule of law. Bang comes the soziale Marktwirtschaft.
If you do not wish to have capitalism, you must relinquish the rule of law. If you insist on the rule of law, you cannot have a soziale Marktwirtschaft.
It is amazing that no one seems to notice the contradiction.
Why such incongruence would go unnoticed has to do both with the tradition of legal positivism in Germany - the idea that law is whatever those (legitimately) in power declare it to be - and with the fact that economists (not only in Germany but all over the world) have lost sight of their subject-matter.
Economics ought to explain that self-generating order that comes about when free individuals do commerce with one another based on generally applicable rules of just conduct. However, in economics, little attention is paid to freedom and justice and the discovery process set in motion by them, the dynamics and evolution, the creative destruction inherent in a free economy. The most essential features of a capitalist economy are excluded from the models purporting to represent it: instead economics focusses on equilibrium, precisely the kind of state at hand when the driving forces of a vibrant capitalist economy - change, competition, discovery, innovation - have lost their relevance and disappear from sight.
Economists are eager to be seen as practitioners of an exact science and, therefore, awkwardly and obsolescently, try to satisfy the scientific ideal of the 19th century - the precision of mechanics. To that end, they must turn their subject-matter into something tractable in terms of mechanics. The anally retentive fetish of precision supersedes the business of comprehension.
Their description of the economy is a travesty of the "real thing", an embarrassment that does not fail to be noticed. Rather than realizing that their approach to conceptualizing the economy is wrong - oh no, it is mathematically too beautiful to be given up - the incongruence of the theoretical and the real economy is assiduously ascribed to something being wrong with the economy - namely, the tremendous incidence of "market failure" - meaning: equilibrium does not work, does not show up in the evidence - ah, hence, the economy does not work.
Not economics is flawed, but the capitalist economy is. In fact, it is, due to all that "market failure", a pretty wobbly something that, indeed, needs a lot of fixing. That is why the majority of economists are easily convinced of the need of intervention in the economy, and - in Germany - very fond of the soziale Marktwirtschaft.
In this way economists, who should know better, act as an authority that rehabilitates the propaganda lies of 19th century socialists, on which the general disdain for "pure capitalism" is entirely based - to this day, July 4, in the Year of The Lord 2007.
There is something inherently wrong, fundamentally vicious about the unfettered capitalist economy - actually, an idea intrinsically pre-economic, a savage notion held when economic analysis had not yet been at the disposal of mankind, and the roundabout, counter-intuitive workings of anonymous interactions by suspicious individuals such as traders insulted the values and thinking habits of close-knit tribal communities.
Thus, let us appeal to wise men (the rule of men) to straiten things out.
Let us not follow impartial rules designed to set free the enormous powers of a spontaneous order coordinating billions of people (as opposed to the commands that give cohesion to a horde), let us go for persuasive whims and interests and hope for share outs and windfalls for you and me.
Let us pretend that we are still a smallish community tied together by similar experiences and circumstances, a great family of hunters and gatherers, rather than six billion human beings, who form an abstract order that must follow abstract rules, not parochial conceit, if its incalculable, unbounded, unsurveyable diversity is to bring forth prosperity and peace, not strife, not "order" by domination and subjugation.
Let us make promises of the familiar, even more: of the familial, let us be guided by tribal instincts...and...bang goes the rule of law. Bang comes the soziale Marktwirtschaft.
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