Political Philosophy

Nicely Put

by

The current Barrons (12/28) has an interview with fund managers Kevin Duffy and Bill Laggner, two guys who seem to have a gift for expressing themselves well and concisely. A few excerpts:

Barron’s: You’ve said that perhaps the most redeeming feature of capitalism is failure. Please explain.

Duffy: Any healthy system needs a way to correct error and remove waste. Nature has extinction, the economy has loss, bankruptcy, liquidation. Interfering in this process lengthens feedback loops. Error and waste are allowed to accumulate, and you ultimately get a massive collapse.

Capitalism is primarily attacked by two groups: utopians who wish to impose a more “compassionate” system, and political capitalists who want to enjoy the fruits of success without bearing the pain of failure. They use the coercion of the state to gain privileges, at the expense of everyone else.

Read more

Powering Down

by

Here’s the great French scientist Sadi Carnot, writing in 1824:

To take away England’s steam engines to-day would amount to robbing her of her iron and coal, to drying up her sources of wealth, to ruining her means of prosperity and destroying her great power. The destruction of her shipping, commonly regarded as her source of strength, would perhaps be less disastrous for her.

For England in 1824, substitute the United States in 2009. And for “steam engines,” substitute those power sources which use carbon-based fuels: whether generating stations burning natural gas, blast furnaces burning coke, or trucks/trains/planes/automobiles using oil derivatives. With these substitutions, Carnot’s paragraph describes the prospective impact of this administration’s energy policies: conducting a war on fossil fuels, without leveling with people about the true limitations of “alternative” energy technologies and without seriously pursuing civilian nuclear power.

Read more

Innovation and Social Structure

by

Currently reading Turning Points in Western Technology (D S Cardwell, 1972.) The author observes that during the late 1700s and early 1800s, the state of French science and mathematics was very advanced–more so than that in Britain–and asks the question: Why was industrial development in Britain so much more successful than that in France?

Read more

Worthwhile Analogy

by

Imagine that some of our Congresspeople–Barney Frank, Chris Dodd, Dennis Kucinich, and Robert Byrd, for example–formed a professional sports team. Baseball, basketball, football–take your pick.

Would anyone invest money in such a team? Would anyone go to watch it, for any purposes other than mockery? I think the answer is pretty obvious.

Well, the average Congressperson probably knows far more about sports than he knows about business. Almost certainly, he watches sports on TV…he may well have played himself in his younger days…whereas the typical Congressional knowledge of business is comparable to a baseball-watcher who doesn’t understand the difference between balls and strikes. Yet this Congress, with the encouragement of the Administration, is arrogating to itself the power to micromanage every business in the country in excruciating detail.

Read more

Job Killing Regulations

by

The President of the United States presides over a government that employs a huge number of people who write regulations that either slow down job creation or are actual job killers. In these times of high unemployment, the President could, by executive order, instruct these employees to use their existing discretion in favor of the interpretation that would save or create the most jobs.

There would be no need to wait for the Congress. There would be no need to spend the public’s money on this initiative. This executive order would be entirely ‘shovel ready’ and its impact on the deficit is overwhelmingly likely to be positive. So far as I know, President Obama has not signed such an order, nor has he given any evidence that he is even considering it.

Why?