What's Wrong with the World Comments

(10:04) Tony on The Theory of the Leisure Class: Application and Illustration

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 21:07:53 -0500

Author: Tony
Date: Mar 11, 2010 10:04 AM

Maximos, the basic thrust of Verblen's division is still wrong, however you slice up the data on this or that tribe in whether they really do end up matching the ideal of a "productive" society. It is fundamentally true that the manager is a productive part of the cog of a large enterprise. But that applies equally to the line manager who oversees 14 mechanics, or the mid-level manager who oversees 14 regional units, or the executive who oversees 14 divisions. Yet the executive is undoubtedly in the class of those who "rules over the productive segment of the population". Again, there is a fundamentally productive aspect to the process a wealthy guy uses to go through a stack of 30 potential ventures to find one that sounds promising and would be a worthwhile investment, and establishing a business relationship with the owners thereof and getting to understand the corporate culture, and then deciding to buy in for 30% of the stock, and who votes the stock towards the company eventually providing a long-term profit margin of 5%. This investor is certainly one who receives "some portion of the production of society," without actually getting his hands dirty on the factory floor, nor even spending his time managing those workers. But he is not "expropriating" something that does not belong to the value of his input. Again, there are indeed people who legitimates its status by elaborating myths according to which this idle exploitation is somehow finer and more noble than actually doing stuff. But the set of these is not coterminus with the people who "rules over the productive segment" by any means. Everyone recognizes that the freeloading son (who parties every night and sleeps in every day) of a rich dad who made a going concern out of a tractor dealership is an abuser of the social fabric. Nobody in his right mind thinks that the fact that there are such freeloaders who abuse the social fabric makes the fabric by which dad became successful a barbaric society. And nobody much minds when the son ends up a poor slob who can neither hold a job nor hold onto the wealth that he inherited from Dad but got squandered to the point he neither lives the high life nor lords it over anyone. The reality is that abusers cut across all social classes, and hard-working sorts who benefit society are found in all social classes as well. Verblen's division of human societies just isn't realistic. Going back to the other side: it was always the case that as soon as you have enough wealth in a society to constitute long-term surplus, you have had people who manage, oversee, and control that surplus. Whether he is called "chief" or "elder" or something else, as soon as he spends significant time in oversight and control, he theoretically falls into the "class" that is distinct from direct production. Since you never choose to vest control in someone who doesn't have some kind of respect, the "legitimizing its status" goes hand in hand with the right to control. (And even in the poorer societies, you still have people who live off the production of others and lord it over them: why don't we re-read the Jesuit Fathers' accounts of the Iroquois Indians, and how the men primarily hunt, wage war, and sit on their cans while the women do everything else; whose "legitimizing" is based on the notion that the brave who hunts and goes to war is too high and mighty to dirty his hands in tanning a hide or cooking.) To the extent it is true, it appears that Verblen's supposed "two kinds of societies" amounts to the division between those who are too poor to have any long-term surplus, and those who do. Big Deal.

(08:31) Matt Weber on Christian missionaries expelled from Morocco.

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 21:32:03 -0500

Author: Matt Weber
Date: Mar 11, 2010 8:31 AM

I don't think the liberals are hypocrites here. If pressed, I'm sure any liberal would agree that the Moroccan government is in the wrong here. But Morocco is remote, both geographically and culturally, so expecting the same kind of reaction to this as to something that happens in France is a little unreasonable. I hear the same sort of charge leveled at liberals with respect to Japan and its immigration restrictions that if duplicated in a Western country would lead immediately to cries of racism and xenophobia. The details are true, but again western liberals just care more about what happens in western countries because that's their turf. It's understandable; and I admit that I feel the same way.

(07:23) Maximos on Apes....

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 20:37:16 -0500

Author: Maximos
Date: Mar 11, 2010 7:23 AM
URL: http://www.whatswrongwiththeworld.net

Why, yes, it is doubly relevant for Randroids, as well as the liberals who pushed deinstitutionalization.

(05:20) Kelly Muller on Christian missionaries expelled from Morocco.

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 21:32:03 -0500

Author: Kelly Muller
Date: Mar 11, 2010 5:20 AM

Robert and Paul Cella, thank you both for your concern and for raising awareness about what's happened. I'm not sure if I remember either of you--a face would probably trigger more than a name--but what group did you come with? The article was acurate--both my parents asked me to circulate it, if you don't mind. It's covered most things we'd hoped to write about, and so, thank you. Very much. Kelly.

(00:34) Gina Danaher on Dutch to the Elderly: Just Die Already

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 08:53:19 -0500

Author: Gina Danaher
Date: Mar 11, 2010 12:34 AM

I hate to bring this down to the level of ethnicity and its idiosyncrasies, but having had a great deal of exposure to many enthnicities in my life I have noticed, regarding the far northern European countries via their American cousins, that there is a certain predisposition to "a place for everything and everything in its place." There is very little patience for the very used, worn, or old. I really am at a loss to explain this tactfully, but living in the Chicago area, surrounded by certain folks of certain ethnicities, I have come to the conclusion that this compulsion to have all of life "ordered" can result in a loss of compassion for the ill, infirmed, and elderly. It is not so much a problem for the American cousins so far because of the conservative nature of the churches related to these folks, but in Europe the church has abandoned its first love and ceased to be the salt and light in society. In contrast, I am not sure what the view of euthansia is in Ireland, but you cannot be with the Irish, here or there, for very long without noticing how laid back they are about their surroundings including whether or not those surroundings are being trampled on by the many children that seem to be everywhere. I do believe things are changing, but at this point the predominant sentiment remains, "It is what it is". The atmosphere surrounding the Irish is always very relaxed whereas the atmosphere surrounding the Nordics is about keeping all things ordered and under control. I am not an academic, but I spend a great deal of time in social circumtances that give me insight to different ethnicities and Christian denominations.

(23:38) Daniel on Christian missionaries expelled from Morocco.

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 21:32:03 -0500

Author: Daniel
Date: Mar 10, 2010 11:38 PM

And it is here that we see the malicious hypocrisy of the Islam-Left axis. Violent ethnic cleansing is being conducted as I write this comment against Christian populations in Iraq, Egypt, Pakistan, and Nigeria by Muslim gangs with the indifference of governmental authorities, and the liberal-left elites say nothing and care not one iota. The Muslims, which whine and riot over every time some Western figure makes the observation that Islam seems to encourage violence, have nothing to say about the forced extinction of Christianity in the land of its birth. Yet when the Swiss people vote to ban minarets, a display of Islamic imperialism, they are threatened not only by jihad-minded Muslims, but the evil pro-multicultural globalist European Union bureaucracy. Westerns are expected to accept the invasion of their countries by masses of third world Muslims and endure the Islamization of their societies, yet ancient Christian communities in Muslim countries cannot even live as quiet, apolitical minorities, much less call to their faith.

(22:02) Kevin J Jones on Apes....

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 20:37:16 -0500

Author: Kevin J Jones
Date: Mar 10, 2010 10:02 PM
URL: http://twitter.com/kevinjjones

"Autonomy is society's excuse for negligence," says a 2006 article on the mentally ill http://bit.ly/cfX4TG (Doubly relevant for Randians?)

(21:40) Maximos on Christian missionaries expelled from Morocco.

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 21:32:03 -0500

Author: Maximos
Date: Mar 10, 2010 9:40 PM
URL: http://www.whatswrongwiththeworld.net

I don't really know what to say about this, though perhaps commentary on a blog is not the important thing. An old friend suffered a similar experience after years of work in Venezuela, after the Chavistas assumed power; they found it expedient to leave the country in haste once the rumour was spread that they were CIA operatives.

(21:37) Maximos on Apes....

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 20:37:16 -0500

Author: Maximos
Date: Mar 10, 2010 9:37 PM
URL: http://www.whatswrongwiththeworld.net

Godwin's Law, whatever. Sometimes, the allusion fits. The Randian conception of selfishness, as the pursuit of one's interests, which are assumed to harmonize with those of others, assuming a 'correct' understanding of such interests, is not identical with the conception of economic rationality predominant in the Dismal Science, though it is sufficiently homologous to serve as a proxy for it. That conception of rationality, undergirding as it does much of the ideological scaffolding of the market instruments and processes which have failed in recent years, is obviously the handmaiden of socially useless rent extraction, the attempt to extract wealth from numerous non-existent sources. The Randian running dog function is thus intrinsic. More specifically, Randroids support Wal-Mart, an 'enterprise' which, even where it does not receive subventions from local governments seeking to lure it to their locales, externalizes certain of its costs of doing business, as when it pays substandard wages and contrives means of preventing its employees from qualifying for its health coverage, thus burdening social service systems with its 'business model' of Low Wages, Always. To be certain, Randroids will oppose those very social service systems, whether food stamps, subsidized housing, CHIP, or mandatory emergency room treatment; but even the protest that these things should be left to charity, if they are at all necessary, only serves to prove the point: if charity is necessary in order to provide for the needs of Wal-Mart employees, then it follows that Wal-Mart is still socializing the some of the costs of its business model. And it does this because it can, which is to state that it is able to socialize some portion of its costs, not because of its stupendous productivity, but because of its position in a network of power - rent-seeking. Then there is this gem of Randian analysis, from a September 2008 Time blurb: Brook doesn't blame speculators, traders or financiers for the market's near-collapse, but instead blames government for having overregulated the markets in the first place. The business leaders bailed out by government this week "are victims," he said, "and the government set it up." Washington underreacted to previous crisis, let Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac spin wildly out of control as quasigovernment agencies while taxpayers piled up unsecured debt in their names. The crisis, he added, was "really fed throughout by government policies." Now, one needn't deny the role of misbegotten government policies in contributing to the genesis of the crisis in order to acknowledge the roles of private sector actors and incentives in creating that same crisis. To the extent that an analyst endeavours to transfer responsibility for a calamity to one actor, while exculpating the others, where that calamity is the product of all the actors, that analyst is 'running interference', intentionally or otherwise, for the parties he seeks to exculpate. Whatever one might say about disinterest in the Randroids, they cannot be severed so easily from their master, inasmuch as they are only applying her theories of selfishness/rational self-interest to disrete policy questions and situations. The claim will be advanced that in the absence of any "intervention" whatsoever, there will be no perverse incentives to distort and misdirect the workings of self-interest and social harmony; but once we've reached that point, we're at the level of ideology proper, floating amidst gaseous billows in Cloud Cuckoo Land.

(20:50) Maximos on The Theory of the Leisure Class: Application and Illustration

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 21:07:53 -0500

Author: Maximos
Date: Mar 10, 2010 8:50 PM
URL: http://www.whatswrongwiththeworld.net

Well, Jeff, you got me: I, writing in haste, in between tedious tasks at the office, wrote that the American economy was nothing but a series of speculative asset bubbles, when what was intended was that its "growth" was the result of a series of asset bubbles. We know that there was no income growth over the course of the Noughties; neither, for that matter, were jobs created, on net - in fact, jobs were destroyed. And this all came to ruination when the rates of default on mortgages began rising precipitously towards the end of 2007, and into the beginning of 2008 - which is taken by just about every serious economist I read as an indication that the "Greatest Story Never Told" was really a rising froth of housing excesses.

(19:57) Just Some Guy on The Theory of the Leisure Class: Application and Illustration

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 21:07:53 -0500

Author: Just Some Guy
Date: Mar 10, 2010 7:57 PM

"Veblen could be as wrong as it is possible to be about the Native Americans" True. Veblen was writing in the 1890's and it would be instructive to discover which particular American Indians he had in mind. (He hardly would have been considering all Native Americans, and he wouldn't have called them that anyways.) In any case, his arguments do not rest on this one facet and as Maximos says, even if he is wrong on this account, it's no defeater for his larger claims. That is why the book is considered an economic/sociological classic. One may find similar questionable elements in, say, Weber and Durkheim, but no one throws them out entirely because of that.

(19:35) Tony on The. End.

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 21:28:23 -0500

Author: Tony
Date: Mar 10, 2010 7:35 PM

I find it curious that Pipes doesn't quote a single source for his pessimistic account. Me too. I might be extremely pessimistic about the Iraq adventure on many fronts, but that doesn't mean that I NOW think that there is no longer any chance for hope where there was just a year ago, for example. Is he basing this on new evidence? Old evidence? New theories on old evidence? Pet peeves? Or just plain dogged pessimism in general? We can't really tell, can we? I think that there are a lot of reasons to doubt overall independent success of Iraq, but I don't know that there are a lot of new reasons to doubt it. Maybe Pipes is just reading into the situation another 3 years of Obama holding his hands over his eyes and saying "see no evil".

(19:30) Lydia on Dutch to the Elderly: Just Die Already

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 08:53:19 -0500

Author: Lydia
Date: Mar 10, 2010 7:30 PM

I'm afraid your pessimistic predictions are right, Tony W. I've never subscribed to the "tipping point" theory myself. What's interesting to see is the "choice devours itself" dynamic. Why, for example, aren't more Dutch people up in arms about the people who are killed without request? Shouldn't this be terribly upsetting as a possible violation of their free choice, their "preferences"? What if that isn't what they would have wanted for themselves? And doesn't this extension to all elderly people mean that there will be a concomitant extension of "killing without request"? That this doesn't worry them tells me that choice was never really the endgame. The endgame was that people should make the choices that the Anointed think they _should_ make. But people are really in denial about this.

(18:53) Paul J Cella on The Theory of the Leisure Class: Application and Illustration

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 21:07:53 -0500

Author: Paul J Cella
Date: Mar 10, 2010 6:53 PM

"If purely private players can screw-up financial markets around the world -- then I agree this is not good." -- Jeff Singer, Jan. 2010. What we learned in 2008, and before that in 1998, is that purely private players can screw-up world financial markets. Thus the infamous Norwegian towns bankrupted on losses in US securities. That's the fragility of globalization. Fund managers all over the world in October 2008 heard from lawyers that they were in technical default because of derivative contracts attached to failed Icelandic banks. Imagine having to explain that to your clients. Now, perhaps you will answer that "purely private" cannot apply to anything related to US housing. Fair enough. I will not gainsay that. That's been true since the 1930s at least. But it emphatically was purely private operations that gathered up all these mortgages into bundles, confected various instruments for betting for or against their values, and refashioned them a thousand other ways to generate a vast worldwide infrastructure of debt finance. If you like, it was globalization that exposed everyone to everyone else's bad bets on US housing securities. Yes, government policy was part of this. But so was an authentic set of free market innovations, which may be properly signified by the word "globalization" -- the integration of world capital markets.

(17:54) Tony W. on Dutch to the Elderly: Just Die Already

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 08:53:19 -0500

Author: Tony W.
Date: Mar 10, 2010 5:54 PM

I'm afraid that such laws are just the logical consequence of the Left's 'tendency to reduce all morality to conflict resolution between self-interested preference satisfiers', as Prof. Feser puts it in his TLS. The idea that the essence of ethics lies in the satisfaction of preferences is deeply entrenched in contemporary Western academia, and the truth of this idea seems to be presupposed by much of Western Europe's public policy. (Or so it seems to me.) Furthermore, I see no reason to think that this kind of thinking will change any time soon; unlike the situation in America, Britain and Western Europe seems to lack anything resembling a Christian right - no widespread phenomenon of Christian home-schooling moms here, I'm afraid, Lydia. And to make matters worse, I don't subscribe to the idea that there's some sort of natural tipping point at which the average European will say 'enough is enough; now you've taken things too far'. Once the average citizen has accepted the aforementioned principle as true, it's just a matter of the state acclimatizing him to the consequences (be that necrophilia, beastiality, killing grandma, or whatever).

(17:07) steve burton on The Theory of the Leisure Class: Application and Illustration

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 21:07:53 -0500

Author: steve burton
Date: Mar 10, 2010 5:07 PM

Jeff - well said.

(16:40) Lydia on Update on Rifqa Bary

Wed, 03 Mar 2010 15:19:53 -0500

Author: Lydia
Date: Mar 10, 2010 4:40 PM

I don't know about inability, strictly speaking, but reluctance, certainly. But if she wants to live and work here long-term, she certainly needs to get her status legalized.

(16:08) Jeff Singer on The Theory of the Leisure Class: Application and Illustration

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 21:07:53 -0500

Author: Jeff Singer
Date: Mar 10, 2010 4:08 PM
URL: http://www.frumforum.com

Paul, You'll have to forgive me for not responding to every twist and turn in the comboxes. Quite frankly, when you get *crickets* from me, it usually means I have thrown my hands up in despair (metaphorically speaking) -- how many times can I say the same thing over and over again. Yes, certain financial products and markets gave us "too big to fail" and I agree with you, Lydia, Maximos, Steve and everyone else that "too big to fail" is NOT GOOD. We should enact regulatory reforms, including restrictions on my beloved free market (e.g. minimum capital requirements for certain asset classes) that help us avoid bailouts in the future. We should also stop using the government to subsidize all manner of risky borrowing, especially homeownership. How any of this has anything to do with globalization, or international trade and investment, or broader economic trends of the past 15-30 years is beyond me. I know that somehow you and Maximos think there is some sort of link but I don't understand how it works and I haven't seen data that demonstrates how it works. So I won't pop up anymore or bother the two of you as your posts tend to follow a certain pattern: 1) find someone who says something inflamatory about the free market and/or Wall Street and/or globalization (preferrable all three for the hat trick); 2) throw in a fun factoid like "financial firms make lots of money"; 3) condemn "banksters" and globalization and call for some vague new order that values old fashioned values of craftsmanship and thrift (as if no one values these qualities today). 4) make sure you don't say much, if anything, about how government incentives played a role in promoting our current situation. 5) "banksters" again.

(15:45) Letitia (The Damsel) on Update on Rifqa Bary

Wed, 03 Mar 2010 15:19:53 -0500

Author: Letitia (The Damsel)
Date: Mar 10, 2010 3:45 PM
URL: http://www.talithakoumfiles.blogspot.com

Here is where the government's inability to actually deport illegals may come into both Rifqa and her parents' favor.

(15:27) Paul J Cella on The Theory of the Leisure Class: Application and Illustration

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 21:07:53 -0500

Author: Paul J Cella
Date: Mar 10, 2010 3:27 PM

Jeff -- part of the frustration some of us have is that your comments tend to follow a certain pattern. (1) Appear in a thread, demanding citations, numbers, links, data. (2) Data, links, citations duly provided. (3a) *crickets* or (3b) Data rejected, citations dismissed, links scoffed at. Last week, for instance, you scoffed at my citation of one of the world's most prestigious financial minds in support of my arguments against globalization, so I backed up and restated the argument, supplied with data, without the argument from authority of citing said financial mind. *crickets* A month before that, we had a discussion on the same topic, where it seems that you can come around a bit: http://www.whatswrongwiththeworld.net/2010/01/the_bailout_of_globalization.html So there is a merry-go-round feel to this, which produces a touch of reluctance to go digging around for new data to fortify the arguments you've already rejected a priori anyway.