Everyone's Playbook? Atlas Shrugged

But Not in the Way You Might Hope...

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Wesley Mouch, Top Co-ordinator of the Bureau of Economic Planning and National Resources, was issuing a great many statements, the content and purpose of which could not be defined, except that the words "emergency powers" and "unbalanced economy" kept appearing in the text every few lines. -- one of many examples of "emergencies" being used to excuse tyranny in Atlas Shrugged

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I occasionally see jokes from conservatives that some work of Ayn Rand's -- usually Atlas Shrugged or Return of the Primitive -- was written as a warning, not a how-to manual. Although "warning" does not capture the full purpose or essence of either work, it does remind most educated people of Rand's prowess as a "prophet". So far, so good, and the jokes -- mostly made at the expense of the political left -- can be funny.

Unfortunately, it might be time for conservatives to take a look in the mirror, and then consider the following from economist Scott Sumner, regarding Trump's abuse of the Emergency Powers Law:

Image by Robert L. Knudsen, via Wikipedia, public domain.

Imagine a Democratic president with dictatorial powers. What would a President Sanders or Warren do if there were no restraints on their power?

What if they could launch wars without involving Congress? What if they could set tariff rates? What if they could spend money that Congress had refused to appropriate? What if they could declare global warming to be a national emergency, and order US companies to divest from polluting countries? What if homelessness was declared a national emergency?

You might argue that the GOP would never stand for this. But the GOP has forfeited all credibility, as it is refusing to oppose Trump's claims that he can declare various "national emergencies" and do whatever he wants. [bold added]

This is something that has bothered me since Day One of the Trump Presidency, and I am glad to see this problem at least being discussed. The entire post is worth a read and the warning in the last paragraph should resonate with anyone who truly values liberty.

Neither foreseeable winner of the next presidential election will feel any shame in abusing executive orders. As far as I can tell, it will -- in the short term -- be up to circumstance (such as a President of one party and a Congress composed overwhelmingly of the other) or an unprecedented discovery of principles and backbone by the Republicans to end this short-sighted and dangerous practice.

-- CAV

The Green New Draft

Conservative commentator Ben Shapiro takes note of the following exchange at a Democrat town hall. The subject? A $16 trillion "Green New Deal" proposed by socialist presidential candidate Bernie Sanders:

I'm not on the "Green" side in this "war." (Image by Stijn Swinnen, via Unsplash, license.)

AUDIENCE MEMBER: You seem adamant about climate change. So what ways would you take to practice what you preach? If you were to become president, I know it's stressful and you have to travel a lot. You have to use fossil fuels.

SANDERS: No, I'm not going to walk to California. All right. You know, look, you know I understand that, you know, we do the best we can as an example. But I'm not going to sit here and tell you that we're not going to use fossil fuels. [format edits]

Shapiro comments:

Oh well, I thought we had no choice. There's no middle ground. I cannot give you any one, even one specific way in which I am reducing my carbon footprint. But it is a war and we must do something, right? This is the beautiful thing about being on the Left. It's a war against poverty. But I'm not going to spend my money on it ... It's a war against climate change. All right. I'm going to continue to fly my private jet to Iowa and out of Iowa.

Shapiro gets around to concluding that the candidates are in a competition to show whose intentions are best. He's right, as far as he goes.

But there's more, and we can get to it by dusting off some advice from the mouth of Ayn Rand's villain, Ellsworth Toohey: "Don't bother to examine a folly -- ask yourself only what it accomplishes."

Sure, Bernie Sanders and his ilk are hypocrites. That's part and parcel of the fact that altruism is impractical, as is this contest to show who can claim to have the "best" intentions. But do not forget that these people in the Democrat primary are after power. Note further how frequently the climatistas -- starting with Sandy Ocasio -- invoke the claim that taking their marching orders is the moral equivalent of a war.

Isn't it interesting that leftists -- who can be counted on to oppose any actual war that involves American self-defense -- are such big hawks now? War. What is it good for? When did they stop asking that question, which was once rhetorical coming from them?

As soon as they found something they could frame as a war and pitch it to people who still understand on some level that wars -- at least real ones -- are sometimes the only resort to solving a problem, as horrifying as they are.

Do not waste your time, mental energy, or psychological currency asking how they manage to evade their own hypocrisy on fossil fuel exhaust or on the invocation of war. Ask yourself what they are trying to accomplish.

Bernie Sanders, Sandy Ocasio, Liz Warren, and the rest want to tell you what to do. And they hope to get you to let them by convincing you that they are good -- that they should be trusted to draft you into an army. Why? Because they want you to regard the cause that they don't even take seriously themselves as a war.

"Climate change" isn't a war or its moral equivalent. But the Green New Deal is the political equivalent of a draft, and it should be fought tooth and nail for exactly the same reasons as a military draft.

And again, this isn't a real war. It is potentially worse, as Ayn Rand pointed out long ago, when she said, "Wars are the second greatest evil that human societies can perpetrate."

The first, she points out, is dictatorship. American culture has not declined to the point that the public will knowingly vote itself into such a suicide, but we are getting closer to that point. At least a few people seem to know this, as evidenced by their brazen hypocrisy and obvious contempt for our intelligence.

-- CAV

'Shinkflation' Affecting Economic Forecasts

Over the years, you have probably noticed prices remaining steady for things you often buy, but their sizes or quality declining. My own mental nickname for this has been stealth inflation, but the Economist calls this shrinkflation.

The piece reads like its author is eager to bring back the good, old-fashioned kind of inflation. And he seems to draw the wrong lesson from the phenomenon, but nevertheless he raises an amusing point on the way.

Shrinkflation and the related phenomenon of "quantum pricing" are giving government forecasters fits:

What's really shrinking, along with government credibility. (Image by NeONBRAND, via Unsplash, license.)

If it happens on a sufficiently large scale, the practice of tweaking quality in lieu of price could play havoc with essential economic data. Statistical agencies do their best to account for changing product quality, but if adjustments are unexpectedly common or subtle then muted inflation figures could easily be concealing a more turbulent economic picture. Central banks watching for big swings in inflation or wage growth as a sign of trouble could be reacting to figures that bear far less relation to business conditions than they used to.

As if the government ever really knew how to measure the havoc it necessarily wreaks by tinkering with money...

The author mistakes familiarity with clarity in his last paragraph when he wishes for a return of perpetual price increases. (A Venezuelan or two might disagree.) The fact of the matter is that, regardless of how it manifests, inflation of any quantity is nothing more nor less than a method by which governments pilfer our savings.

I, for one, could do with the actual clarity that can only come from the certainty that that isn't happening at all.

-- CAV

As a Graduation Speech? Too Late.

Via my favorite idling spot, Hacker News, I got wind of a speech venture capitalist Paul Graham prepared as a commencement address -- but then was criminally not allowed to deliver. Thanks to the marvel of the internet, it's accessible to anyone in its entirety from his web site.

I know I could have used it. With a few unimportant exceptions, this speech is a treasure trove, in my estimation. I liked the following the most, but it was a contest that was close among many entrants.

Image by Cole Keister, via Unsplash, license.

Rebellion is almost as stupid as obedience. In either case you let yourself be defined by what they tell you to do. The best plan, I think, is to step onto an orthogonal vector. Don't just do what they tell you, and don't just refuse to. Instead treat school as a day job. As day jobs go, it's pretty sweet. You're done at 3 o'clock, and you can even work on your own stuff while you're there. [bold added]

In case you were wondering how Graham came up with such good advice, he went around asking his friends what they wished they had known when they were in high school.

If you're around that age, I recommend it; if not, I recommend keeping it in mind for the time you have children that age, or wish to help someone you know of that age.

And, as the title implies, I wouldn't wait until the end of high school to bring it up.

-- CAV

Updates

8-27-19: Removed duplicate title from first line. 

Friday Hodgepodge

Blog Roundup

1. Jean Moroney of Thinking Directions explains what we can learn from the momentary desire for destruction that we all experience from time to time:

Image by Lucija Ros, via Unsplash, license.

Now that I know how to look for those signs of darkness and deprivation, I can catch them sooner, remedy the situation, and reinforce a fully positive context.

I'll write more later about the remedy. The easy-access version is:

• Retreat temporarily.
• Be kind with yourself. You are at the limits of your capacity in some way. What is causing a sense of deprivation?
• If you can identify a rational value you are willing to go after, which seems to address the issue, do so. That will help you out of this state.

The longer version is, you need to "Transform the Pain of Unmet Needs into the Beauty of the Needs." This is a process I learned at the same conference at which I realized a few people were motivated by destruction.

The connection between the "prickliness" and the condition of unmet needs is brilliant. That and the remedy remind me of how (after researching a minor medical condition of mine) I learned to recognize signs of dehydration in myself in time to  avoid passing out.

That said, one of the things I learned then was that, for my condition, both the prodrome and the trigger for syncope can vary among individuals. (e.g., In my case, if I feel averse to food and want to get out of my situation for no apparent reason -- I am dehydrated. I can keep from passing out by reclining and rehydrating.) Obviously, the unmet needs Moroney speaks of will vary by individual and situation. I would not be surprised if introspection might yield a different (though unpleasant) feeling (i.e., not necessarily prickliness) for different individuals as well: As with my dehydration problem, I will need to give this thought.

2. At New Ideal, Ben Bayer discusses the folly of trying to treat an ethical question as if it were solely a scientific one. Here are his closing remarks:

Defenders of abortion rights need to check their philosophical eyewear. Without doing so, they may unwittingly be looking at the world through the same lenses as their opponents. If they don't challenge the assumptions that rights derive from God's will or from our capacity for pleasure or pain, they won't convince anyone that the fetus has no rights and that a woman does. Invoking our uncertainty about science only obscures the real issue. Defenders of abortion rights need a worldview that provides moral clarity.

In addition to explaining the above, the earlier part of Bayer's post raises some interesting (and real) ethical considerations recent scientific work can raise for prospective parents.

3. At How to Be Profitable and Moral, Jaana Woiceshyn considers the false dichotomy between artistic and commercial success:

Creation of high quality products, including paintings, must start with a primary focus on reality, not on other people. While it is true that buyers of products, including art, have needs or wants waiting to be fulfilled, the most successful producers and artists -- painters, writers, musicians, and others -- are prime movers: they create original, innovative products that create their own demand.

Steve Jobs, and other innovators like him in other industries, did not conduct popularity votes among customers (or imitate their competitors) to decide what to produce but focused on creating best personal computers and smart phones, trusting -- correctly -- that in time there would be plenty of willing buyers for them.

Disdaining an audience is absolutely not the same thing as making a well-grounded judgement that that audience will largely disagree with, at least for a time. (Insert joke about price rises and dead artists here -- then give serious thought to marketing.)

4. Over at the blog of the Texas Institute for Property Rights comes a cautionary tale:

Imagine the following scenario: You buy a house and over the next forty years the property significantly appreciates in value. The previous owner then threatens to terminate the sale unless you renegotiate the deal...

Unfortunately, in today's political climate, the lesson is for us, not the previous owner! Too many of us take the right to contract for granted, and unprincipled opportunists are trying to cash in. To see what I mean, read the rest of the post. The fact that you will not be too surprised should serve as a warning: Our courts and legislatures are teeming with attempts (of which this is one) and proposals to undo contracts presumably signed by consenting adults.

-- CAV

Newport on Evaluating Technology

Cal Newport uses email as his example of a common error people make when evaluating a technology: homing in on its superiority to what it replaced with little thought given to how it integrates with the rest of their lives. He calls this the utility fallacy:

[It's] the tendency, when evaluating the impact of a technology, to confine your attention to comparing the technical features of the new technology to what it replaced.

But the superiority of email to, say, faxes, is hardly the whole picture. Newport continues:

In terms of getting news, the internet is better... (Image by Dutch National Archive, via Wikipedia, no known copyright restrictions.)

[A]lmost everything interesting about our current struggles with [these technologies] concerns the impact of these tools on our lives beyond the screen.

The point too often missed in a cooly instrumentalist understanding of technology is that we don't use these tools in a vacuum; we instead participate in complicated social systems that can careen in unforeseen directions when powerful new technological forces are introduced. Features are important, but they're not the whole story. [bold added, link omitted]

I am glad Newport is paying attention to this kind of problem, and will smilingly think of a fax machine burying an old office in paper the next time I tidy up my in-box.

-- CAV

Updates

Today: Made minor corrections to opening paragraph. 

Trump Rage and Psychological Projection

I refused to cast a vote for President in 2016 and am no fan of Donald Trump. That said, I don't generally give him much more thought than any other President I can remember. This apparently makes me a rare bird, if accounts of widespread Trump Derangement Syndrome -- or the infatuation with the Orange Man some acquaintances of mine seem to have -- are any indication.

Since so many of his policies involve government control of the economy, I regarded him as little better than a Democrat on that score before the election, and only the far-left lurch of that party since then has caused me to begin to consider holding my nose and casting a vote for him in 2020. I do not want to starve in the dark, and although Trump is no capitalist, his reelection may afford more time to fight for freedom than any of the likely alternatives.

Enter Heather Mac Donald, and her timely exploration of a topic that seems never to be far from the mind of the typical Trump-obsessed leftist: his alleged racism. Mac Donald makes a succinct case in the Wall Street Journal that, contrary to Respectable Blue State Opinion (aka, Almost All You Ever Hear on the News), Trump is not the one dividing the country by race. (Her points stand even allowing for him stooping to take advantage of the acrimonious climate others have created.)

Here is what she has to say after correctly naming academia as the source of so many of the more fashionable ideas on the left:

Image by Gage Skidmore, via Wikipedia, license.

Ms. Warren recently provided an unwitting summary of academic identity politics. Mr. Trump's "central message" to the American people, she declared, is: "If there's anything wrong in your life, blame them -- and 'them' means people who aren't the same color as you." She has in mind a white "you," but change the race and you encapsulate the reigning assumption on college campuses -- that white people are the source of nonwhite people's problems, and any behavioral or cultural explanations for economic disparities are taboo.

The academy's reflexive labeling of nonconforming views as "hate speech" has also infiltrated popular rhetoric against Mr. Trump. The president's views on border control and national sovereignty are at odds with the apparent belief among Democratic elites that people living outside the country are entitled to enter at will and without consequences for illegal entry. To the academic and democratic left, however, a commitment to border enforcement can only arise from "hate." Such a pre-emptive interpretation is a means of foreclosing debate and stigmatizing dissent from liberal orthodoxy.

I disagree with Trump's immigration policies (among many other things), but I can see them coming from a place other than "hate." Furthermore, since I also disagree with Democrats on aspects of this issue, I do not appreciate their obvious hatred for debate, to say the least.

Mac Donald is on the money here, and it is high time that someone named the real apostles of racial identity politics -- also known in better days as racism. And it is interesting to ask whether psychological projection might at least partially account for the constant accusations that Trump is a racist.

-- CAV