Über die Freiheit / de libertate

In the past, most if not all North American indigenous peoples had a strong belief in individual property rights and ownership. Frederick Hodge (1910) noted that individual private ownership was “the norm” for North American tribes.Likewise, Julian Steward (1938, 253) asserted that among Native Americans communal property was limited, and Frances Densmore (1939) concluded that the Makah tribe in the Pacific Northwest had property rights similar to Europeans.’ These early twentieth-century historians and anthropologists had the advantage of actually interviewing tribal members who had lived in pre-reservation Indian society.

By the late 1940s, however, these original and firsthand sources of information had died, and false myths and historical distortions began to take dominant shape. By the mid–1960s, the tone in many college history books, history-inspired films and novels, and even speeches had completely changed (Mika 1995). A typical historical distortion, for example, is found in Baldwin and Kelley’s best-selling 1965 college textbook, The Stream of American History, where they write, “Indians had little comprehension of the value of money, the ownership of land . . . and so land sharks and grog sellers found it easy to mulct them of their property”(208). These myths were further fueled by popular books such as Jacobs’ (1972) Dispossessing the American Indian, which suggested that Native Americans felt that land (and other property) was “a gift from the gods” and as such not subject to private ownership. Gradually more and more people started to honestly believe that the indigenous people of North America had been historically communal, non-property oriented, and romantic followers of an economic system more harmonious with nature.

Read the rest here.

If you haven’t read this yet, do it!

 
Source: The Wall Street Journal

is Alberta’s economy collapsing.

U.S. stocks fell for the first time in three days, pushed down by concern General Motors Corp. may file for bankruptcy and a plunge in energy shares following Merrill Lynch & Co.’s prediction that oil will hit $25 a barrel. [Bloomberg]

I’ve always found the idea of adopting babies abroad a little unsettling, but I usually accepted the practice under the idea that children are being removed from a bad situation. I no longer think so.

Westerners have been sold the myth of a world orphan crisis. We are told that millions of children are waiting for their “forever families” to rescue them from lives of abandonment and abuse. But many of the infants and toddlers being adopted by Western parents today are not orphans at all. Yes, hundreds of thousands of children around the world do need loving homes. But more often than not, the neediest children are sick, disabled, traumatized, or older than 5. They are not the healthy babies that, quite understandably, most Westerners hope to adopt. There are simply not enough healthy, adoptable infants to meet Western demand—and there’s too much Western money in search of children. As a result, many international adoption agencies work not to find homes for needy children but to find children for Western homes.  

Do read the whole thing.

This just reinforces my belief that we need more open immigration.

Next to the wholly offensive video by the loathsome Naomi Klein and unscrupulous Alfonso Cuarón, Annie Leonard’s The Story of Stuff is the dumbest anti-business, anti-corporate, anti-market web video in existence.She starts her video with a simplistic account of the economy, consumer products, or as she calls it, “stuff”. She breaks it down into 5 parts, Extraction, Production, Distribution, Consumption and Disposal which she labels the “materials economy”. She then proceeds to explain how this “linear system” is a failure because it doesn’t account for all the variations and people in evolved. This is supposed to be a critique of the standard capitalist economy, but instead it is merely a straw man. No reputable economist would pretend that the market breaks down into such neat little categories. Indeed, the standard market-oriented economist, and indeed any economist to the right of Mao would emphasize the incredibly complex system that the international markets have become.

In the second section on production Leonard argues that world has already used one third of the world’s resources. This is nonsense for a couple of reasons. First, what defines a resource? What man considers a resource depends upon the time and technology available. Prior to the late 19^th century most discoveries of oil were a nuisance because they contaminated the land for agricultural use. Second, world market price determines the amount of exploration and extraction. With the rapid increase in oil-prices (ignoring the recent plummet of the past few months) oil companies ‘discovered’ a vast amount of new oil reserves. As such the resource base estimates have to adjust to the new discoveries. Likewise, it is possible that a resource will find a new use or an entirely new resource could be found. Thus to say that a third of the worlds resources have been irrevocably used ignores reality. If she had argued that one third of recognized reserves of products X,Y & Z had been used she would have had a point, at least to some degree.

Her example of the $4.99 radio is a prime illustration of her economic ignorance. The fact that a radio-an exemplar of modern technology if there ever was one-could cost less than $5 completely confounds her. She does, however, recognize the disparate nature of technology with various products coming from international locations, as the famous I, Pencil article by Leonard Read (and the subsequent explanation by Milton Friedman) showed. Yet, this doesn’t enlighten her to the complexity of a modern industrial economy, it instead it convinces her of a nefarious plot by multi-national corporations. To account for the seemingly impossible price of $4.99 Leonard invokes the idea of “cost externalizing”. What she means here is that the ‘true’ costs a product are dumped upon others: the environment, the workers and any other so-called victims she can invent. It appears to me that this idea is merely a bastardized version of the concept of externalities, or indirect costs placed on others (which can be both positive and negative). There is a legitimate critique here, but instead she sticks to anti-market buzzwords.

More to the point of the $5 price tag, she is woefully ignorant about the concepts of advantage (both competitive and absolute), division of labor, and productivity. The reason a radio can be sold for $5 dollars is because its cost to produce, market and sell is lower than $5. The raw materials can be extracted and sold in bulk, refined in bulk and assembled quickly in low-cost factories on a mass scale. Due to the invention of container shipping the products can be transported for very low cost and sold to consumers at stores who determine amount of shelf-space by the amount of profit that can be made. There is nothing especially difficult about understanding this. If she had wanted to say that the $5 radio is too low because it doesn’t pay for the environmental damage and low wages she’s free to do so. She’s all free to boycott radios or send money directly to affected areas.

Leonard is also bewildered-and mistaken-about computers. She claims that she opened up her desktop computer to learn about them, yet somehow she came back with the most ludicrous notions I’ve ever heard. She claims that the only than changes on a computer from year-to-year is “one little thing in the corner.” I’m going to be generous and assume that she is referring to the processor. She claims that this cannot be replaced because they deliberately-due to planned obsolescence-change the connection style. I’ll admit that Intel and AMD (the two most popular chip makers) have changed their socket design over time, but it’s just not true that you can’t upgrade.

Processors can and are upgraded. The current Intel Socket 775 has a variety of options available. But even moving beyond the processor, Leonard claims are mistaken. Much more on a computer is changed as technology is developed. The motherboard of a computer contains a number sockets, slots, chipsets and connectors. These, like all technology, are subjection to revision. Importantly many of the functions on a computer, like the chipset (Northbridge and Southbridge), are not upgradable, thus computers don’t change by “one little thing in the corner.” RAM, Hard drives, and a whole host of other things all need changing as the needs of computers and their users change. Computer makers aren’t changing things just to force people to buy new ones (though I’m sure they would like that), but they are also constrained by the need to innovate. Her ignorance about computer serves as another illustration of her dishonesty.

Leonard also likes to play fast and loose with the facts. She claims that happiness has declined in American since the 1950s citing one source. She connects this fact with the rise of consumerism as defined by Victor Lebow, ignoring any context of his article. She also claims that Americans have less leisure time than since the Feudal Era, as though the backbreaking agricultural and industrial labor provided immense free time and holiday pay. She claims that dioxins are the most toxic chemicals known to science despite the fact that dioxins are broad classification of toxins. Most of all she romanticizes the past, arguing that our relatives in the 1950s new about environmental stewardship and sustainability. No Annie, people just didn’t have money back in the day. Otherwise they were busy polluting the earth unwittingly.

Overall this “documentary” is a piece of garbage. It is a slick, sophisticated mix of lefty buzzwords and ignorant pontification. It presents a case to return the world to harshness our descendants worked so hard to get their children out of. There is plenty of room for criticism of corporations, government and of pollution, but this video only continues to spread ignorance of economics and reality.

Russia’s Communists expect the global financial crisis will cause social unrest and help them challenge for power, the party’s leader said on Saturday.

Gennady Zyuganov told the party’s annual congress the Communists should make maximum use of the growing public discontent caused by the economic downturn to try to restore their political strength. [Reuters]

Facts.

In reading for my honours thesis I have to slog through many ideologically driven works bemoaning the supposed rise of free-market ideology in the 1970s and into the 1990s. A prime example of this is and edited work by Robert C. Allen and Gideon Rosenbluth called False Promises: The Failure of Conservative Economics. It’s hard to be a historian and read works with blatant falsities and partisan nonsense.

On page 8 in the introduction Allen argues that Milton Friedman and David Meiselman’s 1963 “The Relative Stability of Monetary Velocity and the Investment Multiplier in the United States, 1897-1958″ had “since been discredited”. This is misleading at best and a lie at worse. This paper stood, with Friedman and Schwartz’s A Monetary History of the United States, 1867-1960, as the foundation of the monetarist school in economic thought. Throughout the 1960s and beyond there was much debate over the paper, but to say it was “discredited” without qualification or comment demonstrates the ideological blinders employed by the authors.

Factually speaking, Tim Hazledine contribution in chapter 6, “A New Direction for Macroeconomic Policy”, features some lazy errors. On page 79 he claims that “John Maynard Keynes had no formal training in economics; no PhD; was never a professor, and did not even hold an official university (as opposed to college) teaching position.” It is true that Keynes did not hold a PhD. In today’s intellectual climate this would be a significant issue, but at the turn of the century the PhD had not yet become the requisite for university teaching. (For example, teaching history at the University of Toronto in the first half of the twentieth century required merely an Oxford BA. See: Wright, The Professionalization of History in English Canada.) Many economists of the era did not have PhDs: John Stuart Mill, Alfred Marshall, and A. C. Pigou.

As for Keynes training, Keynes spent much time around Cambridge at Marshall’s lectures, though not as a student. He completed a BA and MA and much of his effort was spent on economics, though formally his education was focused on mathematics, classics and philosophy. I don’t think it would be unfair to call him autodidactic in economics. Nevertheless, Hazledine glosses over the intellectual climate in which Keynes learned economics, including his father, an economist himself. I would compare this to David Friedman, son of Milton. David never formally studied economics, but he’s an economist.

Hazledine also attempts to make a point out of the fact that he Keynes never held an official university position, though he did hold a college position. For the remainder of his life Keynes was affiliated with King’s College, Cambridge. Though he spent much time as an advisor to the government and a public intellectual, he was also a lecturer. Thus to say he held no “official university teaching position” is wrong. This represents a misunderstanding of the constituent college system at Cambridge. Students and many professors are affiliated through the colleges but this doesn’t somehow negate their position with the university. Just because a scholar is at All Souls College, Oxford or Trinity Hall, Cambridge doesn’t, in any meaningful way, mean they aren’t part of the “official” university system.

Hazledine also exclaims that “Somehow, this did not prevent him from becoming one of the four or five truly great economists, and certainly the only one of this century.” It’s one thing to disagree with Milton Friedman, but it’s another thing to exclude him due to partisan bickering. There is no question that Keynes and Friedman together make up the two giants of twentieth century economics. Aside from calling Milton Friedman “conservative” throughout he also says that Friedman was “never really…happy with the activist, interventionist government polices of the ‘new economics’”. Unless Hazledine is trying to split hairs over the word “really” then he is ignoring the fact that Friedman Freidman was, at first, a through Keynesian. It was only in the 1950s that he began to change his mind.

If I have to read much more like this I don’t think I’ll ever finish my thesis.

Tonight the Canadian debate overlapped with the American debate. First and foremost the Canadian debate, though less elegant, is much, much more entertaining. Indeed the Canadian debate was largely and interrogation of incumbent prime minister, Stephen Harper. I don’t actually think that is completely unreasonable. The moderator was quite good, though there were times where people talked over each other. At least, however, they actually addressed each other and were expected to put forth actual policy ideas.

The American debate, by contrast, was dry and sterile. It was heavily structured and enabled the candidates (read: Palin) to stick to their talking points, while limiting the opportunity for gaffes. As such I concur with those who considered the debate to be boring.  I would argue, though, that this debate was more entertaining than the first Obama/McCain debate. Yet overall neither debate provided any insight into either campaign that was not already evident.

So while the Canadian debate occasionally lowered itself to a more juvenile level, as one would expect with 3 party leaders with no hope of forming a majority in parliament, it did provide some entertaining and saddening quotes:

[Key: JL: Jack Layton, NDP, GD: Gille Duceppe, Bloc Quebecois, EM: Elizabeth May, Green, SD: Stephane Dion, Liberal]

JL: “The Economy is not fine and if you talk to Canadians today, that’s what they’ll tell you. Now either you don’t care, or you’re incompetent. Which is it?”

“I think Mr. Harper what we’re seeing is a cold and callous side here.”

EM: “And that’s…no that’s not just my opinion…that’s the conclusion-again, I hate to tell you, you really should read the OECD report on Canada’s economy ‘cause it gives you some good advice you’ve seen to ignored.”

EM: “So your government which promises billions of dollars for coast guard vessels should build them in Canada to create jobs here. It is false economics to try to save money by building those ships in South Korea rather than giving people jobs here at home.”

JL:”Absolutely. And not only that, but we shouldn’t be shipping raw logs off to other countries. I can’t think of anything they make with wood we couldn’t make here.”

GD: “Do you know what [is] really astonishing…The only party proposing a Buy Canada Act is the Bloc Quebecois. […] It would let Canada…the possibility to help the clothing and textile industries and for all the uniforms that the RCMP or the armed forces. I mean that’d be easy to do. […] I just don’t see why you don’t do it.”

JL: “I thank the Bloc for that imitative and we fully support the buy Canadian approach.”

EM: “A ‘Buy Canada’ policy makes sense. Even our defense department now is contracting out to get cheaper products from China when better quality products for our military are found right here in Canada.”

JL: “You say you’ve got a plan, where is it? Where’s the platform? Under the sweater? You haven’t presented one in this election. I find that shocking. I can’t remember in history when that’s happened.”

SD: “It’s a lie. Why are you saying that to Canadians? That’s not true at all.”

SD: “I think Mr. Harper considers our artists as enemies. When they are our inspiration.”

JL: “If you can’t do your job as leader of the opposition I don’t know what you’re doing running for prime minister.”

GD: “Well, I know I won’t be prime minister and three of you won’t be prime minister neither. Some of you know it but you don’t say it. But very clearly, I know I won’t be prime minister.”

Notice, if you will, that none of these quotes come from Stephen Harper. To my mind, there is little question that Harper comes across the best in this debate. Jack Layton comes off as an ignorant, spiteful mustachioed man. Nevertheless, Harper has serious deficiencies and I’m not voting for anyone.

On Thursday the Leader-Post reported that a number of “underage” employees were let go from a local Dairy Queen.

On Friday the Leader-Post editorialized in support of the law banning “underage” workers.

On Friday I sent a letter to the editor:

In the Friday, September 26, 2008 edition of the paper (”Protections serve
young workers”) the Leader-Post editorialized in favor of “arbitrary” laws preventing 15 year olds from working certain jobs.

The editorial goes as far as to attempt to link the current state of affairs with that of industrial Britain in the 19th century, as though voluntary, consensual part-time work is akin to forced child labor.

Likewise the editorialist decries the interest in “buying frills and gadgets,” calling it, “the sad detritus of a materialistic age.” First, can one honestly argue that adults don’t partake in such a shameful materialistic age? Secondly, a desire for the latest technological frivolities is not shameful, rather it should be encouraged as a privilege we now have thanks to the hard work of those in the past.

The Leader-Post advocates a blanket policy preventing young people from working, while admitting that many students are fully capable of handling school and part-time work. To create policy based on the notion that some might not be able to handle both is fallacious and offensive. Drafting legislation which punishes individuals for the sake of the collective is not the proper role of government.

Most egregiously, while defending the arbitrary and unnecessary law with one side of its mouth, on the other side the Leader-Post continues to employ youths-indeed children-as deliverers of its papers in the early hours of the morning.