Finance
My weekly reading and viewing session for June 9, 2024
by Michael Munger, AIERJune 5, 2024.
Extract:
This seems paradoxical. The commercial system has delivered results, consistently and widely shared among the population. Yet having to participate in a system in which you plan, save, invest, and design an individual “pursuit of happiness” overwhelms the very people who should be seizing all the new opportunities that the system has revealed to them.
I think the explanation for the paradox is simple: Everything difficult is banished. Just as our physiological immune system needs threats to mature and not attack itself, our sense of commercial effectiveness must face challenges, and overcome those challenges, in order to mature into effective citizenship.
Children are told that they can do anything, that they are personally powerful and important. But they never have the experience of daily efforts and failures; In fact, they are urged to avoid anything that might ‘trigger’ them, or allow them to play or act independently, as has been documented by authors ranging from Jonathan Haidtmentioned above Lenore Skenazy. So young people are overwhelmed by fear: if they do anything less than cure cancer or become a U.S. senator, they have failed. But they don’t know how to build a birdhouse from scrap wood. They have no idea how to fix a toilet, or how to replace the inner tube on their $6,000 mountain bike. They are helpless, but burdened with an inflated sense of destiny and self-interest.
DRH comment as I read this: One of my proudest achievements at the Naval Postgraduate School occurred one afternoon about 15 years ago when I saw (and by distinguished I mean he had gray hair and looked old) a distinguished professor looked, which is about how I look now) in the parking lot with a flat tire. I asked him if he wanted me to help. He did. I hadn’t changed a tire in over 30 years, but I remembered all the steps clearly and we were both on our way within 15 minutes.
The DRH comment now: I hesitate to question Michael’s observations because, after all, he interacts with young students more than I do. So my five counterexamples will probably seem weak, laced as they are with self-selection. A local organization I am involved with called the California Arts and Science Institute (CASI) hosted an event last Wednesday for young people – everyone from elementary school students to college students. My friend Francois Melese spoke to three of them; I spoke to two of them; my two were in college, one at Monterey Peninsula College and the other at UC Berkeley. I came away very impressed, as did Francois. I know the danger of anecdotes. What I would say is that the danger of following Mike Munger’s opinion is that you might tell yourself that there is no point in appearing at such events.
by Roger Pielke, Jr., The honest brokerMay 20, 2024.
Democrats – not all, but many – have abandoned the IPCC in favor of an extreme view of climate and extreme events. Republicans – not all, but many – are much more aligned with the IPCC’s findings on climate and extreme events. Likewise, I think this explains why I have been invited to testify by Republicans in recent years.4
Of course, consistency with the IPCC (or not) says little about policy preferences. Democrats remain the party in favor of action on climate policy, and Republicans remain much less supportive. The key question here is of course: what action? I have argued for a long time that there are untapped opportunities for greater bipartisan support for pragmatic energy and adaptation policies that would accelerate decarbonization and reduce vulnerabilities – but that is a topic for another day.
Remark:
Stanford’s classical liberals had Roger speak on Zoom last month. Very impressive.
by John V. Walsh, antiwar.comMay 27, 2024.
Sometimes a book convinces not only because the arguments are sound, but also because of the identity of the author. It would be no surprise to come across a book written by a socialist or Sinophile that adopts the false portrait of China that adorns the American media. But Joseph Solis-Mullen, the author of The Fake China Threat and Its Very Real Danger, is neither socialist nor Sinophile.
Solis-Mullen is a libertarian in the mold of Randolph Bourne and Justin Raimondo. That is why he is classified as a conservative in our impoverished political taxonomy. But his book was not written to appeal to people with a particular political view. It was written with one thing in mind: the interest of the American people and, dare I say, humanity in general, including China. Therefore, it is of great benefit to people across the political spectrum who feel that our people are being misled by false Chinese threats. It can answer your questions about China or those of your friends in a way that the average American can understand.
Comment: I cannot completely discount the threat from China, but I think it is exaggerated. Certainly, when they try to threaten us with trade, they have a strange way of doing it, which is to get their taxpayers to give us money in the form of subsidized exports. As Milton Friedman once said, “Why should we reject foreign aid?” Especially when foreign aid is given to consumers instead of our spendthrift governments.
by Christopher J. Snowdon, Quillette, June 6, 2024.
Extract:
The central assumption at the heart of Orwell’s political writings from the mid-1930s onwards was that capitalism was doomed and would most likely be replaced by totalitarian socialism of the kind satirized in the 1930s. Nineteen eighty-four. Despite his disdain for capitalism, Orwell saw that the world was between a rock and a hard place. “Capitalism leads to queues for benefits, the struggle for markets and war,” he wrote in 1944. “Collectivism leads to concentration camps, leader worship and war.” The only alternative, he believed, was a planned economy that preserved democracy and allowed for the freedom of the individual, but he became increasingly pessimistic over the course of the 1940s about the prospects for his libertarian brand of what he called democratic socialism. Indeed, he saw ‘no practical way to achieve this’.
This explains why he was so despondent about the world’s prospects in the last years of his life and why he decided to write Nineteen eighty-four. But he was wrong. Capitalism did could survive, the subsequent communist revolutions proceeded similarly to those of the USSR, and Orwell’s version of democratic socialism was not necessary to prevent totalitarianism from sweeping the world. It turned out that it was not a direct choice between democratic socialism and communist (or fascist) totalitarianism. There was a third way.
By the way, the quote from 1944 is his review of two booksone of which was by Friedrich Hayek The road to serfdom.
Judge Napolitano, Assessing freedomYouTube, June 5, 2024.
Ritter tells of three U.S. government agents who took him off a plane about to depart for Russia and, without explanation, stole his passport. They would not tell him who had sent them and when asked, told him that the way to get his stolen property back was to contact the State Department.
