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.

This one earns its ‘moron’ status strictly at the point of consumption. At the point of delivery it is by no means unintelligent, and is in fact strategically adept (if crude). Its cynicism approaches the sublime. (By “they” is meant the “us” of NRx.)

@DurrutiOvercloc @YakovPettersson Yeah, they seem to have been the most successful at rebranding fascism for libertarians.

— William Gillies (@williamrgillies) December 31, 2014

The only way this doesn’t consolidate massively in 2015 is for NRx to fall off a cliff.

Hoppe (from 2005) stirs it up:

… one of the most fundamental laws of economics … says that all compulsory wealth or income redistribution, regardless of the criteria on which it is based, involves taking from some — the havers of something — and giving it to others — the non-havers of something. Accordingly, the incentive to be a haver is reduced, and the incentive to be a non-haver increased. What the haver has is characteristically something considered “good,” and what the non-haver does not have is something “bad” or a deficiency. Indeed, this is the very idea underlying any redistribution: some have too much good stuff and others not enough. The result of every redistribution is that one will thereby produce less good and increasingly more bad, less perfection and more deficiencies. By subsidizing with tax funds (with funds taken from others) people who are poor, more poverty (bad) will be created. By subsidizing people because they are unemployed, more unemployment (bad) will be created. By subsidizing unwed mothers, there will be more unwed mothers and more illegitimate births (bad), etc. […] Obviously, this basic insight applies to the entire system of so-called social security that has been implemented in Western Europe (from the 1880s onward) and the U.S. (since the 1930s): of compulsory government “insurance” against old age, illness, occupational injury, unemployment, indigence, etc. In conjunction with the even older compulsory system of public education, these institutions and practices amount to a massive attack on the institution of the family and personal responsibility.

With the conclusion:

Most contemporary conservatives, then, especially among the media darlings, are not conservatives but socialists — either of the internationalist sort (the new and neoconservative welfare-warfare statists and global social democrats) or of the nationalist variety (the Buchananite populists). Genuine conservatives must be opposed to both. In order to restore social and cultural norms, true conservatives can only be radical libertarians, and they must demand the demolition — as a moral and economic distortion — of the entire structure of the interventionist state.

(Everything works for me except the senseless ‘demand’ rhetoric, which is residual Jacobinism.)

HT Hurlock.

Mark Lutter advances the following thought experiment:

Earth is dying, unable to further sustain human life. Mankind has thrown their last resources into creating a space ship that can reach a habitable planet. However, the space ship can only carry 10,000 people and little is known about the planet beyond gravity and oxygen levels. With the literal fate of humanity lying before us, who do we send and why?

After that, it gets WEIRD (+ ++). In a nutshell, Lutter’s ‘we’, while — apparently in absolute innocence — employed to represent the voice of humanity as a whole, is self-evidently processing the problem in a way that would make no sense beyond its own peculiar thede. ‘We’ could probably all come to the reasonable conclusion that only the Swiss get to survive. (Right?)

In passing, he notes that ‘we’ all agree multiculturalism is a dysfunctional mess: “For all the praise of multiculturalism, no one would seriously bet a diverse group of cultures would give the greatest chance for success. …” (The whole paragraph is a jaw-dropper.)

The main point, however: “Picking a cultural group to colonize a new planet and save humanity forces the mind to focus on positive and negative attributes of the cultural group.” This perfectly exemplifies the weirded out intelligence of libertarians, expressed as a detached universalism wholly incognisant of its own deracination. The obvious rejoinder: No one thinks like that (except you guys). It might be over-compensation to suggest that two-thirds of the world’s population would respond to the total extermination of the Swiss with vague amusement, but it’s at least as plausible as Lutter’s assumption that the good people of Helvetia would be neutrally evaluated, selected, and then cheered on as the sole remnant of ‘humanity’, to such an extent that not being Swiss would be cheerfully accepted as an ethnic death sentence.

This isn’t meant to be any kind of denuciation — it’s very possible Lutter is playing his (weird) audience hard, and doing something subversively dark around the back. As barb-hooked bait for libertarian nuttiness, his post is really something. I can’t wait to see what his comment thread looks like.

ADDED: “I do not believe anything I wrote was terribly controversial …” (At least one of us has to be psychotically dissociated — not that there’s anything wrong with that.)

The Umlaut has long been doing an embarrassing amount of our thinking for us, and perhaps even more of our controversy. The latest installment, by Dalibor Rohac, is here. The connections it makes are frankly disturbing to this blog, whose pro-capitalist, post-libertarian, and general Atlantean sympathies have been pushed as hard as realistically possible, along with an explicit attempt at differentiation from those tendencies with an opposite — I would argue self-evidently anti-Moldbuggian — valency. It is going to be difficult to condemn conflations of NRx with the ENR for so long as the ‘voice’ of Neoreaction includes remarks of this kind:

.@DaliborRohac is scared by nationalist stirrings. https://t.co/OhzEVKTBsR

— Michael Anissimov (@MikeAnissimov) August 6, 2014

NRx, across its whole spectrum, is neither libertarian nor fascist. There is, however, a remarkable polarity — our axis of fission — which is based upon which of these associations is found most disreputable. From my perspective, this distinction lines up extremely neatly with Alexander Dugin’s Hyperborean / Atlantean continental forever war. It seems to me beyond any serious question that the inheritance from Mencius Moldbug lies unproblematically on the Atlantean side of this divide. The standing Outside in prophecy is that, by the end of this year, a definitive break along these lines will have taken place. There’s no reason I can see to back-track on that expectation.

ADDED: “One could see a situation in which libertarian inattentiveness to political concerns, in the face of masses of people that are growing frustrated with democracy, abets extremism. If freedom and democracy are incompatible, like Peter Thiel thinks, it is important to articulate ways to preserve freedom.”

As argued here before, Outside in firmly maintains that the distinctive structural feature of NRx analysis is escalation by a logical level. It could be described as ‘meta-politics’ if that term had not already been adopted, by thinkers in the ENR tradition, to mean something quite different (i.e. the ascent from politics to culture). There’s an alternative definition at Wikipedia that also seems quite different. This congested linguistic territory drives NRx to talk about Neocameralism, or Meta-Neocameralism — the analysis of Patchwork regimes.

From this perspective, all discussion of concrete social ideals and first-order political preferences, while often entertaining, locally clarifying, and practical for purposes of group construction, is ultimately trivial and distracting. The fundamental question does not concern the kind of society we might like, but rather the differentiation of societies, such that distinctive social models are able — in the first place — to be possible. The rigorous NRx position is lodged at the level of disintegration as such, rather than within a specific disintegrated fragment. This is because, first of all, there will not be agreement about social ideals. To be stuck in an argument about them is, finally, a trap.

Is this not simply Dynamic Geography, of the Patri Friedman type? As a parallel post-libertarian ‘meta-political’ framework, it is indeed close. The thing still missing from Dynamic Geography (as currently intellectually instantiated), however, is Real Politik (or Machiavellianism). It assumes an environment of goodwill, in which rational experimentation in government will be permitted. The Startup Cities model, as well as its close relative Charter Cities, have similar problems. These are all post-libertarian analyses of governance, at a high logical level, but — unlike NRx — they are not rooted in a social conflict theory. They expect to formulate themselves to the point of execution without the necessity of a theoretical and practical encounter with an implacable enemy. ‘Irrational’ obstruction tends to confuse them. By talking about the Cathedral, from the beginning, NRx spares itself from such naivety. (Sophisticated conflict theory within the libertarian tradition has to be sought elsewhere.)

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From the perspective of an intrigued (and thoughtfully critical) libertarian, Andrea Castillo offers an initial appraisal of Neoreaction. It’s definitely the most dispassionate yet, and in various ways the most perceptive (which isn’t to forget how admirable Adam Gurri’s more obviously polemical engagement was).

The greatest structural merit of the piece is the firm positioning of Mencius Moldbug at the foundations of the phenomenon. Unlike most of the critical NRx commentary so far, Castillo has clearly read Moldbug with some care. This is basically enough in itself to ensure that something real is being seen.

Steve Sailer, who served Castillo unwittingly as a gateway into the darkness, receives disproportionate attention given his manifest lack of affiliation with NRx. Of course, he’s hugely-respected throughout the reactosphere due to his rare refusal to stop ‘noticing‘ upon firm request. Beyond the fact he hasn’t let the Cathedral put his eyes out, however, there’s nothing very much to differentiate him from mainstream American conservatism. Still, Sailer’s presence in the piece does much useful work. In particular, it helps to mark out the boundary controversies defining contemporary libertarianism (the immigration topic prominent among them).

Since she’s already got herself into trouble, it can’t make much more to add that @anjiecast was already one of my favorite people in the world (remember this for instance?). A little bit more now.

Bryan Caplan seizes upon a two-sentence Steve Sailer comment to fly into theatrical conniptions in public:

Does Steve genuinely favor denying half of Americans the right to reproduce? It’s hard to know. It is the uncertainty that he carefully cultivated that makes Sailer’s thought so scary to so many — including me. We shouldn’t have to wonder if a thinker approves of denying half the population the right to have children.

This really is Caplan at his most despicable. First, set up a bizarre counter-factual to support a quite different moral argument by analogy. The crudely-telegraphed argumentative strategy is to shift the burden of fanaticism from proponents to opponents (“hey, can’t you see that restricting immigration is just like sterilizing half the population”). Secondly, when a commentator corrects your counter-factual in the direction of historical reality — i.e. something that actually happened — deflect attention by cranking up the moral hysteria, while retreating into what seems increasingly to be Caplan’s favorite territory — unhinged deontological purism. Finally, suggest that the commentator is only mentioning historical reality in order to surreptitiously endorse your own preposterous thought-experiment as a practical program, thus exposing himself as “scary”.

Why doesn’t he just say that hyper-Nazi eugenics is wrong?  (Of course, he has, many times.) He probably wants to throw your granny into the biodiesel tanks too. Let’s talk about that rather than my project to engineer a national immigration apocalypse.

Anyone who seriously “wonders” whether Steve Sailer secretly advocates sterilizing half of the American population has released their grip on the last frayed threads of civilized conversation. Caplan is deteriorating from a nut into something far more repulsive.

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If you’d asked me what I think about The Prussian yesterday, I’d probably have assumed you were talking about Frederick the Great. Today I’m seeing his stuff mentioned all over the place (at least, by Bryce on Twitter, and Scott Alexander at his place). The two pieces being especially recommended share a tack (interesting) and a tone (impressive). The Outside in response to both is unsettled, but already uneven. At the very least, they initiate a conversation in a way that is unexpected and worthy of respect.

The highlight for me was this (to repeat the second link):

… when differences in African and Caucasian distributions of the ASPM gene that is involved in brain development, racialists jumped to argue that this was the long looked for basis for white cognitive supremacy (Derbyshire’s line). Unfortunately for them, it turned out that the variation does not affect IQ, but does affect the ability to hear tones, and is associated with a lack of tonal languages.

To be honest, this is a lot more interesting than any IQ mumbo-jumbo; that Indo-European languages (‘Aryan’ languages to use the term correctly, and not in the disgraceful way it was used) are non-tonal is one of the big puzzles, and may be a reason why civilization got started in these regions. This is a variant of Joseph Needham’s hypothesis of why China ‘got stuck’ at a certain level of technology. Needham argued that the Chinese failed to make the break to the conceptual level of science that the ancient Greeks did, and part of this is to do with the concrete-level of Chinese vocabulary. By contrast, the reduced sound range and hence, reduced word range available to Indo-European languages may have played a crucial role in making that initial great breakthrough.

Has the case just been made for a clearly identifiable genetic predisposition to digitization? It sounds that way to me.

ADDED: Theden gets serious on the genetics of tonal language.

ADDED: A critique of the Anti-Racialist Q&A at The Right Stuff.

By coincidence I was recalling this Cato-hosted essay by Peter Thiel, in which he states: “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.” It isn’t a message the Cato Institute is able to digest.

Consider this article by Juan Carlos Hidalgo (from the Cato Institute’s Center for Global Liberty and Prosperity). Headlined ‘How socialism has destroyed Venezuela’ it tracks the descent of what “was once South America’s richest country” into a hellish, crime-wracked, economic ruin. Socialist insanity is, of course, the immediate cause. How, though, did socialism become Venezuelan public policy? This is a question Hidalgo seems unable to imagine, let alone answer.

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