Among literary genres, horror cannot claim an exclusive right to make contact with reality. Superficially, its case for doing so at all might seem peculiarly weak, since it rarely appeals to generally accepted criteria of ‘realism’. Insofar as reality and normality are in any way confused, horror immediately finds itself exiled to those spaces of psychological and social aberrance, where extravagant delusion finds its precarious refuge.

Yet, precisely through its freedom from plausible representation, horror hoards to itself a potential for the realization of encounters, of a kind that are exceptional to literature, and rare even as a hypothetical topic within philosophy. The intrinsic abstraction of the horrific entity carves out the path to a meeting, native to the intelligible realm, and thus unscreened by the interiority or subjectivity of fiction. What horror explores is the sort of thing that, due to its plasticity and beyondness, could make its way into your thoughts more capably that you do yourself. Whatever the secure mental ‘home’ you imagine yourself to possess, it is an indefensible playground for the things that horror invokes, or responds to.

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ParaPundit captures America’s game of political chicken with exceptional acuity:

The sorts of people who can generate the incomes (and therefore tax revenues) to pay all these [pension] liabilities are becoming rarer. Of course this means the Republicans are road kill. But the demographic ascent of the Democrats into power will give them something like command of the Titanic as it hits an iceberg. In fact, the Democrats decided to head for the iceberg as their sure fire way to get permanent control of the ship.

One dark and fearsome crag, half-lost among the Himalayan mountain range of uncleared obligations stretched out before this blog, is a promise to devote a post (or several) to Mencius Moldbug’s Neocameral regime model. The opportunity to make a small payment against this debt having arisen, I am eagerly seizing it.

A relatively marginal but consistent feature in Moldbug’s model is the tendency of Neocameral tax rates to approximate to the Laffer maximum. Since Moldbug aims to rationalize the theory of government, under the presumption of its ineliminably self-interested nature, this suggestion scarcely requires an argument (and in fact does not receive one). Government will always tend to maximize its resources, and Arthur Laffer’s graph of optimum revenue-raising tax rates seems to show the way this is done. A Neocameral regime tends the economy of a country exactly as a farmer tends a herd of animals — without ever forgetting that ultimate redemption occurs in the abattoir.

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Glenn Reynolds suspects that this story will confirm some PUA stereotypes settled pattern recognition.

I used hang with a guy who would go to Saskatchewan and sell drugs all the time. He was ballin’. He made tons of money. On our first date, he spent well over a G. He was just throwing it out like it was nothing. He was buying me anything I wanted. We rode around in a limo… It was crazy. We would go out to all these fancy-ass restaurants and all the white people would stare at us like, “Who let these hood rats in?” That was fun. He’s never really in town though, so I only get to see him a few times a year. I think if I ever decide to just settle down and be a housewife, I’ll marry him.

There’s not much in the story for religious traditionalists to latch onto with any sense of consolation. Still, as far as genetic selection for entrepreneurial traits is concerned, it has to be possible to do worse.

ADDED: Another sex psychology story (also via). If you think about the archaic genetics of warfare the answer to the question is obvious. For males losing matters absolutely. For females, not so much.

The most direct way to carry this discussion forwards is digression. That’s what the history of capitalism suggests, and much else does, besides.

To begin with uncontroversial basics, in a sophisticated financialized economy, debt and savings are complementary concepts, creditors match debtors, assets match liabilities. At a more basic level of economic activity and analysis, however, this symmetry break down. At the most fundamental level, saving is simply deferred consumption, which — even primordially — divides into two distinct forms.

When production is not immediately consumed, it can be hoarded, which is to say, conserved for future consumption. Stored food is the most obvious example. In principle, an economy of almost open-ended financial sophistication could be built upon this pillar alone. A grain surplus might be lent out for immediate consumption by another party, creating a creditor-debtor relation, and the opportunity for financial instruments to arise. Excess production, at one node in the social network, could be translated into a monetary hoard, or some type of ‘paper’ financial asset (producing a circulating liability). The patent anachronism involved in this abstract economic model, which combines primitive production with ‘advanced’ social relations (of an implicitly liberal type) is reason enough to suspend it at this point.

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Of all the reasons to read Kant, the most important is to understand Mises, and thus the template for a functional world (however unobtainable). Austrian economics, as formulated in Human Action, consists exclusively of systematically assembled synthetic a priori propositions. Insofar as action is in fact directed by practical reason, the conclusions of organized praxeology cannot be wrong.

It is pointless to ask an Austrian Economist whether he ‘believes’ a rise in the minimum wage will increase unemployment (above the level it would otherwise be). The praxeological construction of economic law is indifferent to empirical regularity, as to anything less certain than rational necessity. Does one ‘believe’ that 2 + 2 = 4? No, one knows it, because the irreducible values of the signs compel the conclusion, and are inextricable from it. There could be no value ‘2’ unless its doubling equaled ‘4’, or any meaning to ‘wage’ unless its doubling reduced demand for labor. Empirically sensitive Austrianism isn’t Austrian at all.

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The brilliance released by this economic intelligence collision is almost intolerable.

Power is an Idea. It is exactly what it is thought to be.

Even among pre-civilized social animals, where the temptation to confuse power with force is strongest, the need to demonstrate force is only sporadic, and wherever force is not continuously demonstrated, power has arisen.

That is how dominance distinguishes itself from predation. On occasions, no doubt, a predator dominates its prey, convincing a struggling herbivore that resistance is futile, and its passage into nourishment is already, virtually, over. Even in these cases, however, a predator does not seek to install an enduring dominion. It matters not at all that its command of irresistible force be recognized beyond the moment of destruction. There is no social relationship to establish.

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