New Low
If this is NRx I’m Mao Zedong.
20
Jan
Failure
Markets fail, so we need to rely on government sometimes (or often) to set things straight. — That’s probably the single most comical piece of commonplace insanity in the world today. All kinds of people fall for it, even those who seem otherwise capable of coherent cognitive processing.
Chris Edwards puts together an impressive short (and implicit) demolition.
Fernandez’ summary of the Edwards post is even better (so I’ve left the link to him):
Chris Edwards at the Cato Institute believes there should be a National Museum of Government Failure. He argues that the displays at the Smithsonian would pale into insignificance if set beside the awe-inspiring sight of such things as the “$349 million on a rocket test facility that is completely unused“, the Superconducting Collider whose ruins include nearly 15 miles of tunnel and the ex-future Yucca Mountain nuclear waste site. Yet these artifacts, whose scale would surpass many a Lost City, are far from the worst failures. The biggest fiascos by dollar value are the various government programs designed to win the war on drugs or poverty which after having spent trillions of dollars fruitlessly, lie somewhere in an unmarked bureaucratic grave.
A price tag doesn’t do justice to these calamities, which are not only wasteful, but positively and perversely harmful, but it’s a start. The category of ‘waste’ itself fails here, because it would actually be less culturally toxic for all the resources squandered on social programs to be simply annihilated into hyperspace without remainder. Ruinous dependency incentives would then be hugely lessened.
Of course, the idea that dysfunctional political institutions will cooperate with their own public humiliation is also a piece of lunacy (and this time, one that beltway libertarians are peculiarly prone to).
ADDED: Highly relevant.
19
Jan
Quote note (#145)
Joichi Ito on why Bitcoin is not like the Internet:
The founders of the Internet may have been slightly hippy-like, but they were mostly government-funded and fairly government-friendly. Cutting a deal with the Department of Commerce seemed like a pretty good idea to them at the time.
The core Bitcoin developers are cypherpunks who do what they do because they don’t trust governments or the global banking system and are trying to build a distributed and autonomous system, one that is impervious to regulation and meddling by anyone at any time. At some level, Bitcoin was designed to not care what regulators think.
ADDED: More Internet / Bitcoin comparison.
18
Jan
Chaos Patch (#45)
(Open thread + links)
Some initial reacto-chatter — Sex and natural law (don’t miss the comment thread). Prepare for World War P. Inception politics. Battered West syndrome. The new alchemy. A new behaviorism. Exosemantics (are we going to get a Coles Notes for this?). A routine that’s still working well. Social Matter audio. “We shall never truly defeat socialism until we abolish private property” (apparently). Secular religion. Whose side is history on? Round-ups from FN and Steves, and continuous flow here.
The compression of ritual space (and a reading list from hell). Scale-free patterns.
Putin, international man of misery. A Pope beyond hope. Romney is perfect (for 1996). Awkward words in China (related). Unthinkable fears. Much of interest here (especially this).
Gibson’s ‘the Jackpot’ — or cross-lashed, polycausal catastrophe — makes a real contribution to contemporary apocalypticism (this article offers no more than a hazy clue).
More Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare reactionary succulence.
Much entertaining frivolity this week (unless it’s just me) — “quite possibly the most racist article you will ever read” (I doubt it, but still …). Racism. Racism and hate. More racism and hate. Not racist. (This is how it used to be done.)
17
Jan
Space is Big
… even just the solar system. ‘Awesome’ is a word destroyed by casual over-use, but I’m groping for an alternative right now, and not finding it. This has to be one of the best uses of a website out there — meaning: really out there.
(Via.)
15
Jan
Progress (II)
When socialism puts a ratchet into your churn, this is what happens.
(Via.)
The first XS ‘Progress’ post was also a chart — and it dove-tails with this one uncannily.
14
Jan
Quote note (#144)
Pete Dushenski on the reactionary case for Bitcoin, the lead up:
Gold balanced the forces of the world. As such, no matter where you went, gold was transferable to the local currency. Whether you were in France or Florence, your gold was good. In fact, if you weren’t in your own backyard, using your own community’s debt instruments, gold was basically the only thing that was accepted. So whether you wanted to buy a copy of the Bible, fight a foreign war, or build a palace, you needed gold.
Then came The Revolution: replacing the Monarch, the Church, and generally anything good by instituting “reforms” and encouraging “progress” in the name of “the people.” At first, the sheer number of supporters of constitutional democracy was sufficient to establish this social experiment. Eventually, however, sheer numbers would prove insufficient. Why? Because this “new” system failed on every account to educate its supporters on the essential matters of politics and economics, leaving them intellectually high and dry and prone to the exact golden calves that the Church and Monarch were protecting them from. As a result, after experiencing a bit of lifestyle creep, an newfound and ever-growing sense of entitlement began to take root. And oh did those roots grow deep.
The roots grew so deep that the electorate began knocking on democracy’s door, demanding more and more. Where once they were thankful for their new liberties and freedoms, they soon found themselves adrift at sea, lost and without cause. To unyoke this infinite expansion of wants from the finite, gold-bound resources of the state, the Revolutionaries had no choice but to take hold of the money supply of their nations, wresting it from the grasp of sound money and all the goodness and balance it had fostered. This was the only way to keep up the ruse and placate the electorate. So they instituted Central Banking at a scale never before seen. …
(The whole thing is glorious, including — in the original — footnotes.)
13
Jan
Romney 2016
If this analysis is right, Romney would be sure to lose a 2016 presidential bid. “Voters will compromise on a lot of issues on Election Day but they won’t ever vote for you if they don’t like you or worse yet, think you don’t like them.” That makes him the perfect GOP candidate — delegitimating the opposition, without seizing the poisoned chalice of democratic leadership (i.e. increasingly vacuous symbolic authority). If the electorate grudgingly concede, after renewing his humiliation, he was right, but we voted against him anyway because he didn’t kiss my baby, it’s NRx gravy.
This has to be in some way related:
Romney 2016: Reform conservative. Romney 2020: Buchananite. Romney 2024: Rothbardian. Romney 2028: Neo-reactionary.
— Ross Douthat (@DouthatNYT) January 13, 2015
13
Jan
Sentences (#5)
Half a sentence this time, from Charles Hugh-Smith. It’s rare for me to agree with anything quite this much:
… deflation is the natural result of a competitive economy experiencing productivity gains.
(He continues: “isn’t this the ideal environment for innovation, enterprise and consumers? Yes, it is.”)
According to the Outside in definition, deflation is the basic signature of capitalism. It’s the politically-undirected (i.e. spontaneous) distribution of positive externalities from sound economic order. Inflation — or mere deflation-suppression — is the unambiguous signal that something very different is going on.
ADDED: Related.