Author Archive

“Bastiat’s Iceberg,” is a fascinating article on economic crisis, recommended by The Cobden Center (”for honest money and social progress”).

Toby Baxendale, at The Cobden Center, on 21 December 2009, writes: “Sean Corrigan of Diapason Commodities Management packs more sound applied economics into this report than ever.” It’s an interesting way to think about the economics of Hayek’s “extended order” and the dangers of commanding it to reorganize itself.

Download the report —this will trigger the download of a 1.6 MB pdf file.

Baxendale’s summary & commentary.

Corrigan, on planners (chateau generals) and entrepreneurs (frontline officers), from the article:

In their Olympian disdain for the little man whose very breath they nonetheless now yearn to regulate, they are congenitally oblivious to the truth that the World can thrive without them: that, absent their heavy-handed interference, its form is highly articulated, intrinsically adaptable and — yes — partly redundant, but therefore gratifyingly robust.
 
These Planners who so plague our modern lives are all, at root, chateau generals, arraying their coloured counters in textbook fashion in the sandbox; serenely isolated from the mud and gore at the front; disastrously behindhand in their decisions; hopelessly divorced from the harsh realities of the fray — all failings which, of course, do not discourage them in the least in their pretence at deciding the destinies of the many.
 
The shrewd commander of the storm-troop, by contrast, is ever alert to the fact that the ‘want of a nail’ is emblematic of military failure and so remains conscious of the importance of logistics — of the necessity for the smooth functioning of that extensive rear-area ‘Tail’ … to the delivery of combat power by the armed ‘Teeth’ in the battlezone. He also lives by the dictum contained in von Moltke”s lapidary phrase that ‘no plan survives first contact with the enemy’ and so knows that there is always a need for hands-on officership, for what we might usefully call an ‘entrepreneurship of war’.
 
If even the starchy Junkers of the Prussian army could learn to delegate as much responsibility as possible right down to men with their noses in the dirt — a doctrine known as ‘Auftragstaktik‘ — why is it that, in civilian life, a drearily intrusive economic prescriptivism has been able to live so far beyond its many failures in the crucible of history?

http://explorersfoundation.org/glyphery/492.html

December 25, 2009

Posted today in Freeorder News

Sharyl Attkisson, CBS, investigates and reports the fraud of swine flu hype and hysteria. This kind of journalism is at the foundation of a free society. When you listen to, or read this, please remember that the President of the United States declared a National Emergency based on things that were not true. Sharyl, thank you. You are a real journalist, and I hope you will inspire others to pick up the old torch. And thank you Dr. Joseph Mercola for your interview with Attkisson and for posting it for our illumination.

This letter is excellent, clear and direct. It needs wide circulation.
A generalized version (fill in the variables) of Babka’s letter for use against future assaults on the market.

efGlyph 478: thought, thinking, idealism, realism, courage . foundations of civilization . individual vs. herd . post-individuation community . no identity taken from accidents of birth . shared identity among all who passionately and courageously seek truth above correctness or triumph . world alliance of sovereign minds and spirits, of all radical explorers

My way of describing Irshad’s project. For more and for links:
http://explorersfoundation.org/glyphery/478.html

I’ve been sending this to friends, many of whom voted for Obama.

If you do a bit of research on what the health legislation actually contains, I think you may decide you don’t want it. This is a good time to pay attention. We are being fooled.

1) We will not be able to keep plans of our own choice;
2) We will pay more;
3) Quality will decrease.

This legislation will end the potential to fix problems through entrepreneur and customer driven market process.

A starting point: http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=10367

I’ve signed this and I hope you will too:
http://www.freeourhealthcarenow.com/

The first requirement of a State that wishes to be defensible is this: It must be a protector of producers, not a despoiler.

A thought provoked by reading John Robb, at:
http://globalguerrillas.typepad.com

He said, “Yes We Can!” meaning, for each us, “Yes You Will!”

We answered, “No We Won’t!” saying, to each us, “Yes You Can!”

This century will reconcile individuality with community. We will find the vision and the means to achieve kinds of community that becomes possible only after complete liberation of the individual from any but self-imposed obligation. Post-individuation communities will be dynamic networks of voyagers bound to one another by sovereign commitment to shared images of good. This will happen most rapidly and beneficially if the ground from which it springs is understood.

James Bennett offers an important contribution to such understanding in an article published in The National Interest, Winter 2004/05, drawing attention to the work of Alan Macfarlane. Bennett writes:

… Over the past thirty years an intellectual revolution has been taking place in historical sociology …
 
[Alan] Macfarlane and his associates have demonstrated very convincingly that English society back to Anglo-Saxon days has been characterized by individual rather than familial landholding; by voluntary contract relationships rather than by inherited status; and by nuclear rather than extended families. Individuals were free of parental authority from age 21 on, and daughters could not be denied their choice of husband (unlike on the Continent). The English nobility, regularly churned by elevation of commoners and marriage of younger sons to non-titled families, tended to mix freely with the rest of society, rather than being a separate caste, again as on the Continent. Rather than the English Reformation being the event that caused this change, it seems to have been (for the majority of the population) the event that brought formal theology and church government more in line with the pre-existing customs of the country. So the English “peasant” the Hollywood is fond of depicting turns out to be the figment of a 19th-century Marxist’s imagination.
 
Macfarlane’s body of work represents a momentous intellectual revolution. The implications of this revolution have not yet been fully realized, or even generally understood. It suggests that modernity and its consequences came particularly easy for the already-individualistic English.

[ef glyph 180] The Making and Riddle of the Modern World & other contents of Alan Macfarlane’s website, including ebooks on Yukichi Fukuzawa, F.W. Maitland, Baron de Montesquieu, Alexis de Tocqueville, and Thomas Malthus  — provided as a gift from Alan Macfarlane. Thanks Alan!

Alan Macfarlane’s website

Tony Ryan, Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, writes: “LEAP’s first ever billboard – now showing at 108th and I street in Omaha, NE. It is up high, where many can see it, and it shows a new website for us which we can use to measure response and effectiveness.”

Cross-posted at the Explorers Foundation blog [link].