The Unbroken Window

On this much celebrated day around the world, I repost my mourning for the hundreds of millions that have been brutally tortured, maimed, and murdered in the name of “the social good” and “brotherhood.” Shame on them. In the language of my postmodern critics – this certainly too was a social construction in the most literal sence, finally there is some common ground to be had between us. Of course, the “data” are not objective, right? They are made up by rich white guys.

UPDATE: here is how the May Day celebrations are going around the world today:

Under a gray, threatening Madrid sky that reflected the dark national mood, 25-year Adriana Jaime confided she turned out because she speaks three foreign languages and has a masters degree as a translator – but last worked for what she derided as peanuts in a university research project that was to last three years but was cut to three months. Jaime has been unemployed for six months, and sees her future as grim at best.

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protesting health care and education spending cuts and other austerity measures.

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the government is doing nothing to help workers and that the economic crisis is benefiting banks.

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Many voters fear Sarkozy will erode France’s welfare and worker protections, and see him as too friendly with wealthy. Challenger and poll favorite Francois Hollande has promised high taxes on the rich.

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In debt-crippled Greece

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Italian Labor Minister Elsa Fornero insisted on the need to reform labor market laws that make it virtually impossible for employers to fire workers in some situations, discouraging hiring …

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The DGB umbrella union group… called instead for a “Marshall Plan” stimulus program to revive the depressed economies of crisis-hit eurozone nations

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Communists and leftists held a separate May Day rally in Moscow that attracted a crowd of about 3,000

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Another group of left-wing workers later burned a huge effigy of President Benigno Aquino III, depicting him as a lackey of the United States and big business

This would be a nice reminder:

When we oppose subsidies, we are charged with opposing the very thing that it was proposed to subsidize and of being the enemies of all kinds of activity, because we want these activities to be voluntary and to seek their proper reward in themselves. Thus, if we ask that the state not intervene, by taxation, in religious matters, we are atheists. If we ask that the state not intervene, by taxation, in education, then we hate enlightenment. If we say that the state should not give, by taxation, an artificial value to land or to some branch of industry, then we are the enemies of property and of labor. If we think that the state should not subsidize artists, we are barbarians who judge the arts useless.

Here is the old post:

Mourning on May Day

May 1st, 2008 by wintercow20

It is criminal and immoral to celebrate, on this day, the social and economic achievements of the Labor Movement. How can one be proud of the fact that those societies that pursued equality were forced to create a new class of individuals to “enforce it” leading to mass murder on a scale that has never been replicated in human history? In honor of the hundreds of millions who suffered under the crippling, despotic, oppressive regimes known as Communism, National Socialism, or Fascism, and to protect the liberties of all people who walk the earth today, the horror of the socialist regimes must not be forgotten.

Over 169 million human beings were killed at the hands of repressive governments in the 20th century.

I reprint here in full a review of Communism,  A History, by Richard Pipes.

Richard Pipes is arguably the world’s foremost experts on the history of the Soviet Union. An Emeritus Professor of History and the former director of the Russian Research Center at Harvard University, Prof. Pipes served as an advisor to President Reagan’s National Security Council in 1981 and 1982.  He is the author or co-author of roughly three dozen books. He describes his latest work, Communism, A History, as “an introduction to Communism, and, at the same time its obituary.” That this slim volume succeeds in doing full justice to its vast subject is the product of, and a tribute to, a lifetime of insightful scholarship.

The Ideal

In western thought, the notion of a “Golden Age” of complete social and economic equality is at least as old as Ancient Greece. In the supposed Golden Age, there was great abundance but no violence or conflict, because all property belonged to everyone. It is sometimes asserted that there was such a Golden Age at some point in the distant past. However, as  Prof. Pipes observes:

“… the ideal of a propertyless Golden Age is a myth-the fruit of longing rather than memory-because historians, archaeologists, and anthropologists concur that there never was a time or place when all productive assets were collectively owned. All living creatures, from the most primitive to the most advanced, in order to survive must enjoy access to food and, to secure such access, claim ownership of territory.”  During the aeons before humans settled down to pursue agriculture, when they lived primarily by hunting and gathering, kinship groups asserted exclusive access to their area, expelling or killing trespassers. Property claims intensified after transition to agriculture…because cultivation is arduous work and its fruits take time to mature.”

More importantly for the present discussion, such a condition of peace and contentment has been held out as an alluring prospect, whether as restoration of the lost and distant past, or as newly constructed perfection. Various philosophers and radical thinkers has toyed with the notion not only of abolishing private property but also that human beings are  malleable-that proper instruction and legislation could not only enable but compel people to be virtuous. However,  according to Professor Pipes, “Prior to the middle of the 19th Century, the ideal of equality was an aspiration that occasionally produced social violence, but lacked both a theory and a strategy.

The Program

What Karl Marx and his friend, supporter, and confidant Friedrich Engels offered was, according to the author, “a theory that purported to show why the kingdom of equality was not only desirable and feasible, but also inevitable. To advance this claim, they resorted to methods borrowed from the natural sciences, which had gained immense prestige in the 19th Century.”

We will not here indulge in an explication of Marxist “theory” in mind-numbing detail. Suffice it to say that Marx claimed that contests for “ownership of the means of production” was the determining force of history, that industrialization had created a new and dominant class conflict (between “capitalists” and “workers”), that competition between workers and the unemployed would drive down wages, and that competition among capitalists would drive down profits, leading to ever more severe crises of production and consumption.

Relations between employer and employee did become more tenuous and remote when people moved to urban areas to take up industrial pursuits. When most laborers worked the land, the landlords and their tenants had been essentially neighbors and long-term partners. This fact gave some resonance to Marx’s notions among actual workers and their advocates, which the earlier radical pronouncements of philosophers had never be able to find outside intellectual salons.

Marx and Engles’s theories were the basis of the program of the International Workingman’s Association, “The First International,” which they founded in 1864, and such theories remained a staple of Socialist political parties for the next hundred years or so, even as they were overtaken by events.

Few things predicted by Marxism proved to be correct.  For example, even well before Marx died, it was evident that, far from decreasing, the wages and living standards of workers were generally rising. That trend has continued up to the present. There were recurrent crises (business cycle contractions), but none brought a collapse leading to revolution.  Where there were revolutions, it was not in the most advanced, urban, industrial societies, but in very backward nations where a large majority remained on the land. These developments were explained away: they hadn’t happened yet, “Imperialism” enabled “capitalism” to extend it life,  etc.

However it was World War I, that produced the first incontrovertible evidence that Marxists had little understanding of human nature: they were ecstatic when the war broke out, because they believed that “workers” would everywhere refuse to become cannon fodder and unite to overthrow their “oppressors.”  Instead, urban workers  flocked  to the recruiting stations and elected socialist politicians were the most ardent supporters of tax levies and bond issues in support of their countries’ war efforts. Ever since, it has been manifestly apparent that the traditional affinities of language, religion, race, and nationality easily trump any feelings of “international worker solidarity.”

The Regime

Professor Pipes recounts the story of how the monstrous state purportedly founded on the ideals and programs of Marxism came to be. Moving within the relatively marginal and squabbling radical left-wing factions of the time, the Russian exile Lenin (born Vladimir Ulianov) developed his own idiosyncratic variants of Marxist theorizing. He concluded that a revolution spontaneously initiated by “workers” was an  impossiblity. Instead, he called for a tightly organized group to bring it about. Lenin implicitly concluded that they, in Professor Pipes’ words,  “of necessity had to be intellectuals…Indeed,” Pipes wryly observes, “only one solitary worker ever sat on the executive board of Lenin’s party, and he turned out to be a police spy.”

There was, in fact, no distinction between Socialism and Communism as political movements until Lenin reached this conclusion, rejecting democratic procedures in favor of the establishment of a “dictatorship of the proletariat.” Marx had believed that full communism would be preceded by a transitional phase, during which the old inequalites would be broken down. It was Lenin who labeled this  transition period as foreseen by Marx “socialism.” At about the same time, he changed the name of his party to “Communist” from “Social Democratic.”

The rapid sequence of events that brought Lenin to power has been often recounted and Prof. Pipes very ably does so again, stressing how Lenin’s ruthless single mindedness of purpose carried the day against his confused and hapless opponents. Summarizing, he notes:

“Viewing the Bolsheviks’ power seizure from the perspective of history, one can only marvel at their audacity… They saw in the overwhelming majority of Russia’s citizens-the bourgeoisie and the landowners as a matter of principle and most of the peasantry and intelligentsia as a matter of fact-class enemies of the industrial workers, whom they claimed to represent. These workers constituted a small proportion of Russia’s population‑at best 1 or 2 percent…This meant that the new regime had no alternative but to turn into a dictatorship-a dictatorship not of the proletariat but over the proletariat and all the other classes. The dictatorship, which in time evolved into a totalitarian regime, was thus necessitated by the very nature of the Bolshevik takeover. As long as they wanted to stay in power, the Communists had to rule despotically and violently; they could never afford to relax their authority The principle held true of every Communist regime that followed.

“Lenin realized this and felt no qualms about imposing a ruthless despotism. He defined “dictatorship” of any kind, including that of the “proletariat,” as “power that is limited by nothing, by no laws, that is restrained by absolutely no rules, that rests directly on coercion.”‘ He was quite prepared to resort to unlimited terror to destroy his opponents and cow the rest of the population… Violence total and merciless (one of his favorite adjectives) had to clear the ground for the new order.”

Professor Pipes continues with a concise narrative of Communist regimes in Russia and many other countries. Everywhere, violence and terror were essential to keeping all power firmly within the Communists’ grasp. However, the author concludes, “In advocating a regime resting on coercion, Lenin ignored [the fact that] the abstraction called “state” is made up of individuals who, whatever their historical mission, attend also to their private interests.”

So it was that violence and terror, which were designed to change human nature as well as preserve the regimes, were sometimes turned against the “new class” itself. Stalin’s  “show trials” in the 1930s, Mao’s “cultural revoultuon,” Pol Pot’s wholesale “cleansing” of the urban and educated population of Cambodia, and any number of other murderous campaigns and purges in Communist societies all failed to resolve this fundamental contradiction. In the final analysis, the author observes:

…Communism failed and is bound to fail for at least two reasons: one, that to enforce equality, its principal objective, it is necessary to create a coercive apparatus that demands privileges and thereby negates equality; and two, that ethnic and territorial loyalties, when in conflict with class allegiances, everywhere and at all times overwhelm them, dissolving Communism into nationalism…

Professor Pipe’s Communism is a very satisfying read. What it lacks is a discussion of why Communism retained its attraction in intellectual circles for so long, especially after it became manifest as perhaps the most despotic system in history and incapable of providing the material benefits it promised. That would be another story well worth recounting.

How about some things to smile about this week? I’ll leave it to you to decide what the real message is behind any of these. First up, Gallium! We ain’t runnin’ out of it anytime soon. According to this report from the US Minerals Management Service (by the way, since reconstituted – extra credit if you can figure out why), world crude gallium production (in 2006) amounted to 72 tons, with an additional 105 tons of refined gallium production, some of which is recycled materials. Let’s assume this is 100 tons per year produced and consumed around the world.

How much gallium (assuming a ridiculously conservative estimation technique that is akin to estimating global reserves of chef-boy-r-dee based on how much is in your cabinet at today’s prices) exists in the world in reserve?

About 1 million tons.

“If present trends continue …” that will last us 10,000 years.

Chew on this on this fine weekend morning: would you rather have $500,000 in your hand or have a completed degree from a 4-year college of your choosing? What about any school outside the Top 25?

UPDATE: Tyler Cowen shares this with us:

Data available from the UC Office of the President shows that there were 2.5 faculty members for each senior manager in the UC system in 1993. Now there are as many senior managers as faculty.  Just think: Each professor could have his or her personal senior manager.

And there is this:

A report on administrative growth by the UCLA Faculty Association estimated that UC would have $800 million more each year if senior management had grown at the same rate as the rest of the university since 1997, instead of four times faster.

What could we do with $800 million? That is the total amount of the state funding cuts for 2008-09 and 2009-10, and four times the savings of the employee furloughs. Consider this: UC revenue from student fees has tripled in the last eight years. The ratio of state general fund revenue to student fee revenue in 1997 was 3.6:1. Last year it was 1.9:1. If we used that $800 million to reduce student fees, the ratio would go back to the 1997 value. To put another way, it could pay the educational fees for 100,000 resident undergraduates.

Here is more.  For the pointer I thank David Colquhoun.

You know what needs to be Occupied. Sadly it will never happen.

The average time to degree at Western Governors University is 2.5 years. By the way, when students wish to complete a degree early at my dear college, the college charges them for virtually the entire year’s worth of tuition to do so. Talk about collegiality! Of course, it IS very costly to attract and retain students, but then again, there are long lines of kids just dying to get into UR. I think we had something like 14,000 applications for 1,000+ undergraduate slots this year.

Last month the Obama Administration pushed to impose tariffs on solar panels that come from China. So apparently the folks in this Administration actually do think that some other things are more important than Global Warming. Solving the greatest crisis humanity has ever seen is only important if Americans do it, I suppose.

Let’s go back to two famous Supreme Court cases from the late 1930s, when the full-force of the Second New Deal was running wild on the country. In the cases of Alabama Power Co. vs. Ickes and the Tennessee Electric Power Co. vs. the TVA, the question of whether the courts should offer injunctive relief to state agencies from intervention by Federal authorities came before it.  In the Alabama Power case, the electric company sued the N.I.R.A. because the N.I.R.A. was making loans and subsidies available to municipalities to construct their own electric generation plants within their city limits. In the Tennessee Electric Power Case, the state of Tennessee requires all electric companies to operate with a permit from the state, which the new Tennessee Valley Authority did not obtain.

Read each case, they are interesting. In each case, the court took the side of the PWA and the TVA (i.e. the New Deal Agencies) on grounds that ultimately will preclude all challenges to the way the federal government spends money when the states themselves have given consent. In other words, both cases denied relief against competition from the federal government on the ground that there is no right to exist free from competition authorized by federal law.

I’ll repeat that, the court basically said, “too bad tough guys, I don’t care if government subsidies unfairly hamper you vis-a-vis the subsidized competitors, you have no natural right to exist free from any competition.”

Which is interesting in lieu of the defense the President is giving for wanting to protect our American solar panel manufacturers. Note too that this has implications for the way the Obamacare case will be decided this summer and also for whether Catholic elementary schools could ever sue the government for unfair competition.

Have a nice day.

By the way, the Republicans do this too. I’ll post the next one that readers send to me. Via Coyote:

The Perfect Example of Politics over Policy

April 27, 2012, 10:08 am

I don’t think you could find any better example of paying off one’s political constituents at the cost of out groups than this:

Congressional Democrats and the White House have agreed to pay for a bill to freeze student loan interest rates for a year by raising taxes on so-called S Corporations, according to a top Senate Democrat and senior House and Senate aides, but Republicans said the tax increase may ensure the bill’s defeat in the Senate.

Apparently, the taxpayer-subsidized rate of 3.4% on student loans is set to go up to a less-subsidized 6.8% in a couple of months.    So to keep this subsidy rolling, Congress is proposing to tax S-Corporations, mainly used by entrepreneurs and small businesses  (disclosure:  including mine) to avoid double taxation of business income.

I don’t think its possible to come up with a real policy reason that money should be taken away from entrepreneurs and given to 18-year-olds so they can overpay for college, especially since most of the subsidy for student loans is captured by universities that have simply raised tuition to soak up each successive college subsidy program.  Note that Congress is instituting a permanent tax hike on entrepreneurs in order to give just a 1-year break (ie through the next election) to students.

But this is the perfect political bill.  It takes money from a group likely to be lost to the Administration in the next election anyway (e.g. entrepreneurs and small business people) and transfers it to a group that is very likely to vote for Obama if it votes at all, but needs to be energized to get to the polls.  The Obama Administration was obviously watching the Occupy movement carefully, and noted that much of the angst seemed to be aimed at student loans.

Expect similar payoffs to other constituencies over the next few months.  Oops, here is one already.

From a new Harvard study showing that the Eastern US was cooler than otherwise over much of the 20th century due to the particulate pollution in the air (now mostly cleaned up):

No one is suggesting that we should stop improving air quality, but it’s important to understand the consequences. Clearing the air could lead to regional warming,” Mickley says.

Tradeoffs everywhere. It’s sort of tyrannical isn’t it?

The topic in her (kindergarten) weekly reader is “Kids Can Care for Earth.” Here is page 4:

In other news, one of my family members was served with a notice for “failure to pay fine” for a traffic violation. Sounds reasonable. The violation date? April 20, 1994.  I think the fine amount was something like $75.

Picked this up on Reddit today (I have no idea if it’s true of course), but … we’re doomed:

This just happened about 20 minutes ago in downtown Boston. I was at the corner of a major intersection waiting to cross when an adorable kid in his Sox garb pulled away from his texting mother and try to cross on his own.

By the time I realized what was really happening the kid was about 10 feet in front of an armored data tape truck which based on how high the cab is I don’t think the driver could have even seen the kid if he was looking. A girl who looked like she was about 25 stepped into the street and lifted the kid up by the arm and pulled him back onto the curb as the truck skidded to a stop.

I was shocked and impressed, I had watched the whole thing happened and in no way could have responded so quickly. Well instead of thanking the woman that just stopped her child from dying in front of her the mother went absolutely bonkers. She started screaming “How dare you touch my child” along with a string of obscenities. The young woman kept her cool for about 30 seconds of screaming before telling the mom that next time she’d just let the kid get hit before storming off.

So reddit – what are you best stories of public stupidity?

Recently I was listening to a conversation about unions. As expected very quickly into the conversation someone mentioned that “unionization rates were really high in the mid-20th century” and that this was also a time of unprecedented US economic growth.

Well, it certainly was a time of robust economic growth. But why must we regularly employ “arguments” like this – they are among the hardest for you to defend (what is the counterfactual) and they open us up to incredible amounts of inconsistency. Why? Two reasons. One of course is that the conclusions do not follow from the premises, but second and more important is because that same “argument” can be used in even more interesting ways.

Here is another example I run into a lot: “tariff rates in the 19th century were a lot higher than today, so much for your so called “free-trade” being important for economic growth!” (the late 19th century saw even faster growth IIRC than the mid-20th.

Here is another example I run into a lot: “the top marginal income tax rates in the US in the mid-1950s were near 100% and not even that prevented the US from achieving massive economic growth.”

Here is another example I run into a lot: “the US has had debt burdens as high as today, if not higher, and not even that prevented robust economic growth.”

Without an exegesis on what is wrong with such Post-Hoc thinking, let me toss out a couple of analogous statements that I would ask defenders of the above positions to also defend:

1. Well, the US economy grew rapidly during the early part of the 19th century, indeed it became a major world power by the end of this period. And this was a period when slavery proliferated in the United States. Clearly slavery is not any serious burden for the economic vitality of a country.
2. Well, the US economy grew rapidly during the late part of the 19th century even as the so-called “Robber Barons” pillaged the American people. Clearly the emergence of massive monopolies does not pose any serious burden on the economic vitality of the country (see this for fun reading).
3. Well,  sure, maybe you think environmental protection and cleanliness is important, but before 1970 there was no EPA. And indeed, economic growth before 1970 was far more robust than it was since 1970. Indeed, all of that pollution didn’t seem to stop life expectancy from rising by 40 years over a 150 year period, it did not stop income from growing by a factor of 12 over a 200 year period. What’s the fuss all about?
4. Well, the US was a deregulated free-market paradise before 1914. It’s growth up ’till then was far greater than its growth since then.

I think you get the point. Readers are encouraged to add their own either to the first list or the second.