October 2018

The Original Sin can be interpreted as a sign of human metaphysical evil; says James Chastek:

… at the highest point of physical creation, there must be some connecting link between the spiritual and material world. This means at some point making spiritual things that exist with an essential relation to matter.

What an awful idea! Such a being will be subject to chance, to things he is not ready for, to his own impenetrable ignorance, and to the collective burden of all the mistakes, errors and sins that arose before him!

This practically guarantees that the very thing that we put at the perfection of the physical world will be the ugliest thing in it! The whole cosmos will conclude to a monster!

Well, not necessarily, but point well taken.

There is no such thing as an average economist.

An economist is either a glorious and wondrous creature, or a contemptible pathetic fool.

There are 4 kinds of good: physical, moral, metaphysical, and divine;

but only 3 faculties of judgment: prudence, justice, and wisdom. What gives?

Well, the divine good, or that God is goodness itself, is self-evident to any naturally uncorrupt creature and requires no intellectual exertion to grasp. Nor are there any gradations of divine goodness, as better or worse; nor competing goods; nor any occasion for calculating or maximizing this goodness; nor, finally, any divine evil.

Hence there is no need for a separate faculty to judge the divine good.

Bitcoin was the first cryptocurrency ever created, and it is implausible to hold that something so technologically primitive as compared with future crypto offerings would conquer the world.

If Bitcoin is not destined to become universal money due to some fundamental technical problems, such as scalability, then its value soon is going to collapse almost to nothing, as people get wise to this fact.

Hyperinflation: a guy is pushing a wheelbarrow full of paper money toward a store to buy groceries.

He gets mugged on the way.

The mugger dumps the money on the side of the road and steals the wheelbarrow.

The first step to loving people is to think of them, of everyone, as your complements, first and foremost in the worldwide division of labor:

We may call consciousness of kind, sense of community, or sense of belonging together the acknowledgment of the fact that:

all other human beings are potential collaborators in the struggle for survival, because they are capable of recognizing the mutual benefits of cooperation, while the animals lack this faculty.

However, we must not forget that the primary facts that bring about such consciousness or such a sense are the two mentioned above.

In a hypothetical world in which the division of labor would not increase productivity, there would not be any society. There would not be any sentiments of benevolence and good will. (Mises, HA, 144)

Further,

The greater productivity of work under the division of labor is a unifying influence.

It leads men to regard each other as comrades in a joint struggle for welfare, rather than as competitors in a struggle for existence.

It makes friends out of enemies, peace out of war, society out of individuals. (Socialism, 261)

Again, this strengthens the merely natural sentiment. Christian charity goes far beyond it, but it requires nature and crumbles into dust if nature is compromised.

“Ruritania, love it or leave it” is clearly a form of blackmail, because it is never really addressed to those who do not love Ruritania and so who will evil to it as the country’s enemies but merely to those who disagree with the demander on how best to promote Ruritania’s welfare.

The actual dispute is not about different ends but about different means to the same end.

At worst it is insisted that we love Ruritania’s government, as if the government were the country or the government acted in the interests of the country, both obvious falsehoods.

So, who are you to tell me either to agree with you or to get out of the country? (If your reason is that you are in a temporary majority and find it convenient to forget the Golden Rule, wait a little bit, and at some point you‘ll end up the one asked to emigrate.)

How can you impose on me such great costs of maintaining my integrity? A “love it or leave it” guy is like a Roman emperor presenting Christians with a dilemma: worship me or be fed to the lions. In both cases the victim is asked to either betray himself or suffer. It’s disgusting.

What is the reason for Mises’ saying

Bureaucratic management is the method applied in the conduct of administrative affairs the result of which has no cash value on the market.

Remember: we do not say that a successful handling of public affairs has no value, but that it has no price on the market… (Bureaucracy, 47)

Prices of consumer goods presuppose a variety of such goods competing with each other for our money. When I buy a bag of candy, I know, by looking at its price and the prices of all other goods, what exactly and how much of it I have to sacrifice for the candy’s sake. The opportunity cost of the candy is 2 bottles of coffee creamer, 3 pounds of bananas, and so on in innumerable combinations almost ad infinitum.

But the government, specifically the executive branch, is a monopoly by explicit design. It has no competition, other than absence of government. But in Mises’ view, such absence would result in the destruction of society and the market and in a war of all against all. (So, anarchy has no cash value either.) Therefore, the government has no opportunity costs, and it is impossible to assign a money price to it:

It may well be that the greatest thing in Atlantis is its good system of government. It may be that Atlantis owes its prosperity to its constitutional and administrative institutions.

But we cannot compare them with those of Thule in the same way as we can compare other things, for instance, wage rates or milk prices. (48)

Nor are “good government” and “bad government” alternatives, because there can at any time be only one executor for all, whether good or bad.

The NPC memes do not dehumanize leftists; they merely state the fact that the leftists have long ago dehumanized themselves.

It is easy to be convinced of the reality of our corrupt fallen nature by contemplating the topsy-turvy way in which we regulate citizens and give arbitrary powers to the bureaucrats.

Mises identifies the normal and natural situation:

Bureaucratic management is management bound to comply with detailed rules and regulations fixed by the authority of a superior body. The task of the bureaucrat is to perform what these rules and regulations order him to do.

His discretion to act according to his own best conviction is seriously restricted by them.

Business management or profit management is management directed by the profit motive. The objective of business management is to make a profit. …

There is no need to limit the discretion of subordinates by any rules or regulations other than that underlying all business activities, namely, to render their operations profitable. (Bureaucracy, 45-6)

In short, citizens seek their happiness and are free to innovate in the ways of its pursuit.

Bureaucrats (including, by the way, cops) are regimented by strict and minute rules and regulations.

Not the other way around!