Month: January 2013

A Lynching in Wyoming

by

I’ve said it over and over again, that what really happened in history is very often even more bizarre and dramatic than any fictional account of events, either written or cinematic. A book or a movie has to make sense, after all and have some kind of logic and believability about it, whereas in reality chance and coincidence do not have to make logical sense in the real world. To put it in short; reality frequently trumps imagination. Going back to contemporary accounts, records and memoirs often turn up all kinds of interesting nuggets, which very often contradict conventional wisdom.

This is what late amateur historian George W. Hufsmith did with a very readable account of a lynching in the Sweetwater River Valley of Wyoming over a hundred and twenty years ago. Hufsmith originally came to the project as a composer, commissioned to write an opera about it all. But what he found in various dusty public records was sufficient to overturn what had been put out as the conventional wisdom in the wider world beyond Wyoming … and demonstrates very well what happens when an overwhelming interest in a particular subject takes hold of a person. Just so, the topic of the only woman ever lynched in Wyoming gripped Hufsmith, and he was determined to get to the bottom of it or as close as one could, given the decades that had passed.

Read more

ΜΟΛΩΝ ΛΑΒΕ

by

And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family?
 
Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?
 
After all, you knew ahead of time that those bluecaps were out at night for no good purpose. And you could be sure ahead of time that you’d be cracking the skull of a cutthroat. Or what about the Black Maria [Government limo] sitting out there on the street with one lonely chauffeur — what if it had been driven off or its tires spiked.
 
The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin’s thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt!

Alexander Solzhenitsyn, The GULAG Archipelago

The Bitter Wastes of Politicized America

by

The expansion of government replaces competition with coercion.  Free people lack coercive power, so they must compete with each other for business opportunities.  Customers must be persuaded.  Employees must be attracted.  It’s messy sometimes, and the process must be policed for theft and fraud, but it’s generally constructive.

Government power replaces all that with a simple, brutal, zero-sum equation: what you are given must be taken from someone else.  The regulatory process is corrupted by both ideology and special interests.  Even when it avoids outright corruption, the process is expensive, because it’s not constructive the way private competition is.  Wealth and value are lost through forced redistribution.  It’s a smaller, poorer world, in which political influence becomes valuable currency.  Your fellow citizens are not your competitors they are your enemies.    They become selfish plutocrats or lazy parasites.   Their defeat becomes an occasion for riotous celebration.

And effective political power requires solidarity sizable groups of voters acting in concert, to press their common interests upon the State, whose officials in turn benefit from packaged electoral support.  The best way to hold a large group of people together is to make them feel as if everyone else is out to get them.  The most effective political adhesives are distilled from hatred and distrust.  People who disagree with your agenda are “attacking” you or “robbing” you.  How commonly do you hear dissent described in precisely those terms nowadays?

When the government controls everything, there is no constructive relief valve for all this pent-up tension.  It all boils down to a “historic” election once every couple of years, upon whose outcome everything depends.  They’re all going to be “historic” elections from now on.  That’s not a good thing.

Read the whole thing.

America 3.0, The Future of Manufacturing and Employment

by

In our upcoming book, America 3.0: Rebooting American Prosperity in the 21st Century – Why America’s Greatest Days Are Yet to Come (available for pre-order here), Jim Bennett and Mike Lotus paint a word-picture of America in 2040, which is less a prediction and more an exercise in hopeful and forward-looking thinking for conservatives and libertarians. We include predictions regarding the impact of distributed manufacturing.

The recent article in Wired by Kevin Kelly entitled Better Than Human: Why Robots Will — And Must — Take Our Jobs makes similar points. Here are two good quotes from Kelly:

Right now we think of manufacturing as happening in China. But as manufacturing costs sink because of robots, the costs of transportation become a far greater factor than the cost of production. Nearby will be cheap. So we’ll get this network of locally franchised factories, where most things will be made within 5 miles of where they are needed.
***
It is a safe bet that the highest-earning professions in the year 2050 will depend on automations and machines that have not been invented yet. That is, we can’t see these jobs from here, because we can’t yet see the machines and technologies that will make them possible. Robots create jobs that we did not even know we wanted done.

It is important to remember that technological change destroys categories of jobs, and creates new ones that literally cannot be imagined yet.

We are going to be facing a tidal wave of creative destruction in the years immediately ahead.

Our book offers some ideas about why we are well suited to benefit from these changes, and how to navigate the rapids to get from here to there.

Stand by for very interesting times.

He’s Just Not That Into You!

by

Or as Glenn Reynolds might say, another rube self-identifies.

Some people catch on slower than others. In this case one of our foremost legal minds has just figured out that, by golly, maybe Barack Obama isn’t quite the great friend of the Jewish people his Jewish supporters insisted he was.

Oh, well.

But let’s not be too hard on Dersh. Anyone can make a mistake. And it’s not like Obama’s animus towards Israel was obvious or anything.