Survival is More Than Canned Food and Matches… Click Here!

Category: Economics
A nation of wimps
Written by Rob
Saturday, 11 May 2013 02:57
No Comments

Stress a source of strength:

A Nation of Wimps: Parents are going to ludicrous lengths to take the bumps out of life for their children. However, parental hyperconcern has the net effect of making kids more fragile; that may be why they’re breaking down in record numbers.

Nassim Taleb’s antifragility strikes again:

Fragile things break under stress. But, according to Nassim Nicholas Taleb, there’s an entire class of other things that don’t simply resist stress but actually grow, strengthen, or otherwise gain from unforeseen and otherwise unwelcome stimuli. Taleb sees degrees of antifragility everywhere, from fasting, mythology, and urban planning to economic, technological, cultural, and biological systems.

A 20 min Nassim Nicholas Taleb youtube discussion is worth listening to here

Antifragility highlights yet again how we tend to create that which we most fear. In trying to protect our children from harm now, we cause them harm later. Preventing short term harm can cause long term problems. Unfortunately short run gains are often readily apparent, while the long term harm is hidden. Keynesian economics is the classic example, as is the welfare state.

The purported goal of the welfare state, to help people, is noble. But once a society creates a welfare state its people have different expectations about their possible futures. They therefore make different choices and their behavior changes. This changes people, and the society which they in aggregate form. Over time it changes the values their children grow up with. People and society fundamentally diverge from what would have eventuated absent the welfare state. At the individual level this is epitomized by the saying:

Watch your thoughts; they become words.
Watch your words; they become actions.
Watch your actions; they become habit.
Watch your habits; they become character.
Watch your character; it becomes your destiny

Thus a strong sovereign people and vigorous society can be transformed into something far weaker and more fragile. Truly the road to hell is paved with good intentions.

 
Boston left lies
Written by Rob
Saturday, 20 April 2013 04:45
No Comments

The left have a habit of taking over institutions and perverting them. It’s Orwellian news speak “Cold is warm. Peaceful is violent. We’ve always been at war with Eastasia” applied to institutions:

Legacy media speculation that the Boston bombing was the work of the tea party fits this mold.  The legacy media have long succumbed:

This despite the fact that the Tea Party does not just protest peacefully, but tend to leave the protest areas cleaner than when they arrived:

Tea Party participants are the bedrock of bourgeois society. Inheritors and holders of values which were the core creators of wealth and well-being in the world today. No wonder the the left demonizes them. Until they are undermined the left will not be able to fully impose their violent dis-empowering policies. Something we should all be grateful for:

We will not even go to global warming and the destructive lefty policies applied in that area. Granny killers. Spreaders of misery and impoverishment. Global warming vested interests have got fat on the cold and misery of the poor. They deserve nothing but contempt. And their willing enablers should hang their heads in shame, recant and be less gullible in future. More is at stake than most realize.

As for the banksters. Useful tools? Who cares, the consequences of policies transferring our wealth to them will be dire for almost all:

Lenin is said to have declared that the best way to destroy the Capitalist System was to debauch the currency. By a continuing process of inflation, Governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens. By this method they not only confiscate, but they confiscate arbitrarily; and, while the process impoverishes many, it actually enriches some. The sight of this arbitrary rearrangement of riches strikes not only at security, but at confidence in the equity (or fairness) of the existing distribution of wealth.

As the inflation proceeds and the real value of the currency fluctuates wildly from month to month, all permanent relations between debtors and creditors, which form the ultimate foundation of capitalism, become so utterly disordered as to be almost meaningless; and the process of wealth-getting degenerates into a gamble and a lottery.

Lenin was certainly right. There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis of Society than to debauch the currency. The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and does it in a manner which not one man in a million is able to diagnose.

Click here for a discussion on the source of the quote:

It’s time to see the truth and face the future in freedom and with love. Orwell wrote 1984 as a warning, not a how to manual. We can make use of it for its intended purpose.

 
Life Enhancing Values
Written by Rob
Friday, 15 February 2013 13:38
No Comments

Posted this at Law of Markets – a site to keep an eye on.

The problem is how to embed these in a democratic framework. Politicians have incentives to break these rules in order to buy votes from their vested interests/supporters. They may also tend to have a natural instinct to want to “do something” (or simply think doing something will increase the chance of more votes later).

Capitalism works because it accepts people as they are “warts and all” and creates a system in which people improve their wellbeing through improving that of others, rather than at their expense.

However, modern western democracies seem to be undermining this life enhancing core of capitalism. In a world of government regulations, bailouts and other subsidies the path with the best expected return for individuals and entities is increasingly through the political/regulatory market rather than the commercial one. Thus talent and energy are directed at grabbing more of the existing cake via the political marketplace, rather than creating new cake in the commercial one. Eventually the amount of cake shrinks – someone has to actually produce stuff of “market value”.

I suspect democracies are compatible with capitalism over time, but only if people have appropriate value systems. There are a range of value combinations compatible with the with persistent productivity gains. But the Western educational system and its “cultural leaders” are not disseminating one of them. Our societies will therefore fail to sustain their level of wealth through time. Basically not enough people recoil at measures which will undermine the life enhancing capitalist core of our societies.

We and our children will be the poorer for this failure to sustain life enhancing values. Without broadly held life enhancing values we will lose our wealth, security and liberty. Poverty, despotism and tyranny will reign in the lands of the formally wealthy and free. Can we turn it around? Can we create a culture which will recoil at suggested breaches of your formula?