Tim Geithner's Plan to Save the World

A recent headline for a Financial Times story reads: "Geithner Plans to Save the World Economy"*

Uh, I hadn't even read the story and I was already Beelzebub-level scared. Unfortunately, things don't get much better when you read it.

Geithner is credited with pushing the idea to:

broaden the focus from exchange rates. G20 countries, he says, should commit to keep their current accounts – whether deficits or surpluses – within a percentage limit of national output.

Reorienting the discussion towards current accounts makes good sense. They are at the heart of the global imbalances; exchange rates are merely instruments – and far from the only ones – for influencing them. Current account targets would leave open how excessive balances are to be shrunk – through nominal or real exchange rate adjustments or through other policies that affect public or private sector surpluses and deficits.

That's it! Why didn't I think of that? The worlds' economies are going down the tubes because of bad current account targets. We need more central banker intervention! No wonder they call him The Boy Wonder.


*Full disclosure: This was RCP's headline for the story, not the FT's. The former clearly knows a thing or two about generating clicks. The FT has it as: "A walk in the old Bretton Woods"

Radio Interview for The Wells Report Scheduled Oct 28

As promised, the Jon David Wells radio interview has been rescheduled. Same time, new date.

I'm scheduled to be interviewed on The Wells Report at KSKY radio (660 AM), this Thursday, Oct. 28 at 3:20 pm Pacific (6:20 pm ET, 5:20 pm CT, 4:20 pm MT, 11:20 am NZ). The show broadcasts from the Dallas/Ft. Worth area in Texas.

Here's a link to listen in. I hope you will. [Click the red "Listen Live" button near the top of the main text, roughly in the middle of the screen.]

We'll be talking about my recent Pajamas Media article, Beyond Politics: Removing the Progressive Drag On America, and presumably other things.
It promises to be lively, since I'll no doubt be asked my suggestions for how to straighten out the mess the U.S. is in.

Your suggestions are also welcome.

Thanks,
Jeff

Read FDR's Folly by Jim Powell

I've recently finished reading FDR's Folly and I'm here to say it's one of the best books on the subject I've read. It's chock full of fact-filled horror stories with a moral: each one tells you exactly what America's first unopposed dictator was up to and what the results were. That is, he was unopposed by all but the Supreme Court of the day.

It's now all-but forgotten, but the Supreme Court — flawed from day one, admittedly — once stood as a bulwark protecting individual rights. They shut down several of FDR's more egregious rapes of liberty. Even when the vote went the wrong way there were some heroic statements made by justices of the time. (This was before they were castrated by FDR's bluff to pack the Court and his subsequent appointments.)

From Chapter 12 comes this one:

Nebbia v New York, 291 U.S. 502 (1934). A Rochester grocer was convicted of selling two bottles of milk for less than the nine cents per quart ordered by the Milk Control Board.

McReynolds, "The Legislature cannot lawfully destroy guaranteed rights of one man with the prime purpose of enriching another, even if, for the moment, this may seem advantageous to the public...

To him with less than nine cents it says-- You cannot procure a quart of milk from the grocer although he is anxious to accept what you can pay and the demands of your household are urgent."

The odds of even the allegedly conservative members of today's SCOTUS recognizing that principle are less than 1 in 4. I.e., only Thomas would come close, and then not consistently.

Anyway, the point is, if you have time to read only one book about that period, so supremely relevant to events of today, FDR's Folly by Jim Powell should be the one.

ObamaCare and the Election

"The control of the production of wealth is the control of human life itself." Hilaire Belloc

That quote came up in the context of an editorial in the Washington Examiner about Sebelius' bullying of the insurance companies to shut up and get in line, or else.

It's worth a reference here because — with the election only a week away — the repeal of ObamaCare hangs in the balance. If the House and Senate turn Republican in large enough numbers it's possible GOP leaders will grow (at least, temporary) spines and back the effort fully.

Several court cases are winding through the system, but they chiefly involve the individual mandate, which — morally grotesque as it is — really has no teeth. (The IRS is authorized by the bill to deal with refusniks but they have no legal authority in it to exact any punishments.) So, even if when the case(s) finally make it to the Supreme Court and they knock it down, the rest will still stand.

On top of that, even such staunch pro-freedom politicians as Rep. Paul Ryan are not optimistic about any rear-guard effort to defund it. If a guy that committed and knowledgeable says it won't be a slam dunk to starve the beast, I have to give it some weight.

There's another relevant aspect to that Belloc quote: ObamaCare is an attempt to control both wealth and life itself. You don't have to be a paranoid right-winger to believe there will be something like death panels, if ObamaCare stands.

The NHS is Britain already exercises a very similar authority and ObamaCare is much worse than socialized medicine — it's fascist medicine. At least under a socialized system the government is on the hook for providing something. Here, they do nothing but stand on the sidelines and make it near-impossible for health insurers and health care providers to engage in trade.

So, please join the effort this November not only to vote the Democrats out of power, but to prevent Progressive and labor union activists from their usual vote fraud. If any given race is close, they'll stuff ballots like you never saw before, and they have admitted as much openly. (Fronting faux-Tea Party supported candidates to siphon Republican votes is just one of the ways they're doing that, even in advance of the election. Illegally registering thousands of new Democratic voters is another.)

We're in for the fight of the century. It's time to make Progressives around the country even more depressed than they already are.

NPR's Contradictions

NPR's moral failures go far beyond firing Juan Williams for a politically incorrect remark. It's deeper than being irked over his appearances on allegedly right-wing Fox News.

NPR's CEO, like Progressives everywhere, is caught in the contradictions of subjectivism. Faux liberals that they are, they preach tolerance for everything - because according to their ethical philosophy there are no objective principles of morality - then display intolerance for a remark they regard as "inconsistent with our editorial standards and practices.”

There's no way out of this inconsistency for a faux liberal. It's built into the basic fiber from which the Progressive cloth is cut.

Not content with CEO Schiller's getting herself into hot water by publicly remarking that Williams should've "consulted his psychiatrist" before making the statement, NPR's Ombudsman doubled down on the lunacy.

In a story headlined: "NPR's Firing of Juan Williams Was Poorly Handled" the lying fence-sitter said:

Juan Williams once again got himself into trouble with NPR for comments he made at his other job, at Fox News.

Right. His firing was "poorly handled" but he really did bring it on himself.

She tripled the foolish factor by adding:

Instead, this latest incident with Williams centers around a collision of values: NPR's values emphasizing fact-based, objective journalism versus the tendency in some parts of the news media, notably Fox News, to promote only one side of the ideological spectrum.

That's rich. NPR is objective but Fox is biased. Um, NPR proudly upholds Progressive values (a fact favorably noted by over a third of its listeners as one reason they tune in). Those values are entirely the opposite of fact-based and by definition are not objective. Progressivism's core epistemology comes from Pragmatism, whose central premise is there's no such thing as objective anything.

Apart from all that blatant hypocrisy, the firing of Juan Williams shows that contemporary liberals never mean anything they say about black people.

Here, a black liberal gets fired for making a mild comment about Muslims. (One that even moderate Muslims in this country would agree with if they weren't too scared to speak up, and one he even qualified to nullity later in the same program.) But since blacks no longer have it institutionally bad in this country, they've outlived their usefulness to white race hustlers like Vivian Schiller. So, Muslims are now the au courant 'oppressed' group that faux-liberals can drool all over with their faux sympathy.

If it should come to pass someday that this idiotic series of wars finally comes to an end - contrary to Gen. Petraeus' belief — then Muslims will settle into being just another group whose more vocal self-appointed spokespeople yammer about their victimhood. Then there will no doubt be some new convenient 'oppressed' group that so-called liberals can use to undermine individual freedom.

Of course, the real outrage here is not chiefly the depressingly familiar hypocrisy of yet another Progressive, but that NPR - a (partly) taxpayer funded news and editorial radio program - exists in the first place. Let them compete in the open market and they can be as intolerant - and embrace as many contradictions - as they like.

A Blast From the Past: About Vietnam

While organizing some old columns and comments I ran across this Feb, 2007 response to Jack Wakefield on the Forum 4 Ayn Rand Fans, produced during a 'conversation' about the effects of the Vietnam War. It has only slight relevance to things that are going on today — in particular the issues of a military effort 'discrediting' a philosophy, and the weariness of the American public after years of war. I'm reproducing it here mostly because I thought the writing and the ideas were worth sharing.

Note to those (most, I presume) who don't know who Jack Wakefield is. He's a nuclear power plant engineer who lives in Chicago and comments occasionally through and for Robert Tracinski's The Intellectual Activist.

Those facts are all the more remarkable because Jack is not a professional pundit, yet he is one of the finest cultural analysts in America. I don't always agree with him, but he always has something worthwhile reading.

Anyway, without further ado, here's me responding to his claims (I summarize) that the American defeat in Vietnam knocked the wind out of America's sails for a while.


On Discrediting

It's often put about in Objectivist circles (and elsewhere) that President Bush's actions have "discredited the effort" against the jihadists – intellectually and morally.

I'm no fan of George Bush in general, but I think this view is wrong for reasons that go far beyond the current president. No action that the American President, or anyone else, can take can discredit an effort which is appropriate. Even if the view is modified to be 'discredited in the eyes of (some) onlookers', this is incorrect in three ways.

(1) Many are still supporting Bush's efforts – there are die-hard faux-conservatives just as there are die-hard faux-liberals.

Some support Bush because he's not a (so-called) liberal — they use him as a philosophical whip to combat larger causes. The die-hard faux-liberals, interestingly, do the same thing. They are not pro anything; they are simply anti-everything the faux-conservatives are for. Other conservatives genuinely believe in what they think he's trying to do, just as the so-called liberals are genuinely opposed.

(Aside: Large and vocal segments of the two main wings of current political non-thought haven't much in the way of ideas at all, other than 'I hate what you stand for'. In the case of the faux-liberals, they happen to hate what the faux-conservatives partially and inconsistently stand for: everything that makes a human life on Earth possible – reason, individual responsibility and effort, political freedom, etc.)

(2) By and large, people have much the same fundamental view they had three and a half years ago (or three and half decades ago): do it, or get out. They are seeing that the President's team isn't doing it, so they're leaning now toward 'get out'.

Be that as it may, whatever the President does or doesn't do, says or doesn't say, everyone who wants to is capable of thinking for himself. That means he can judge that the right thing was done incorrectly, or for the wrong reasons, or the wrong thing done for the right motives, but incompetently, or any mixture thereof.

George Bush, for example, can — foolishly — say that 'the primary reason we are going to war in Iraq is the threat of WMD which the Iraqis possess or will soon develop'. (This wasn't his initial argument, but it quickly took center stage. Such is the measure of how easily manipulated by the press he is.)

This is the wrong reason to make war on Iraq, or at least far from the best reason. Nevertheless, it isn't too late even now to say 'No, these are the reasons.' and his story has, in fact, evolved over time — especially since the WMD weren't found in abundance sitting on the porch steps of Hussein's palace.

(3) The point is, whether or not he ever states the correct reasons that would objectively justify the effort, the correct reasons still exist and could be identified and voiced now or after the effort by any right thinking person — no matter the actual outcome. The correct moral case doesn't depend on the President carrying out the enterprise correctly, nor what reasons he gives for undertaking it.

That people will, it's true, be affected by what the President says are the reasons, that some will agree others not, doesn't change that. Unless, we have in mind a very different meaning of the word 'discredit'.

If all that is meant by that is that many will disapprove of the past effort and not want to undertake a similar one in the future, then the word is a paltry thing, because it then just refers to a (potentially large) group of individuals subjective whims.

In the latter case, the only proper response is: 'so what?'.

But, I assert that most people at the start, in the middle, and still today are capable of judging well the effort without the President's interpretation of events — nor that of the New York Times.

Thus, the President isn't necessarily discrediting (or crediting) anything by his actions. Failure doesn't necessarily discredit an effort — it depends on how one analyzes the situation after the fact.

Also, importantly, when asserting that the 'effort is discredited', one has to be very careful about exactly what 'the' is — the Iraq War?, battling the jihadists? Most people are perfectly capable of making the distinction, no matter what the majority of newspapers and magazines would have them believe.


On Vietnam and Its Aftereffects

"Military defeat in Vietnam opened up a hole in the American culture and the New Left dove [sic] a wedge deep into that hole. The defeat influenced good people, undermining their self-confidence and moral assertiveness, causing them to grow silent and withdraw...and evil advanced with little obstruction into the political culture." Jack Wakeland

I disagree from many perspectives with these views.

A military defeat of the sort that occurred in Vietnam can make one angry, sad, (temporarily) depressed, or any number of things. It can not cause good persons' self-confidence or moral assertiveness to waver, in general. Some may, but the majority will go on much as they were before. The American people in the 1970s were not similar to Germans between 1918 and 1935 in this respect.

The American people were, rightly, tired of the debacle in Vietnam — an undertaking which should never have been undertaken and (like so many military efforts begun by Democrats) one in which the U.S. had no self-interest to assert.

Thus, they were largely glad to be out of it. That many had a largely negative view of the military afterwards is a different matter. The press certainly had a field day advertising My Lai, the Tet offensive, the withdrawal, and other actions in which the U.S. allegedly didn't look so good. This has been the bread and butter of U.S. journalism since the 1930s and it accelerated in the 1960s, as so-called leftism became more prominent in American culture.

It took another 15-20 years or so for most people to catch on to the fact that, on the whole, journalists are worse liars than the average politician. (One way they're worse is that one expects politicians to lie, journalists are supposed to tell the truth.)

But that doesn't show that the American people lost 'assertiveness'. It means the media were successful, to a degree, in their (still ongoing) campaign to paint the facts a certain way, in order to achieve their cultural agenda: the permanent alteration of American culture to look like Europe.

The result was not a lack of self-confidence, nor moral assertiveness. It was, as it had been for the period of most of the 20th century, a failure of the majority of Americans to hold their government accountable — a trend which has only been slightly reversed in recent years.

What did happen after Vietnam?

Military

With respect to the majority view of the military, the conclusion is simple. During, and therefore afterward, the majority thought (rightly or wrongly) that the military were doing wrong. They thought the military had no business being there and that while there they did many bad things. My Lai was the poster child, but the general view was pretty much the same before and after that.

(Unfortunately for the military, the average soldier who was there also thought much the same thing. Any 'gung-ho' captain was a good candidate for getting his head blown off by his own men. They had no interest in or intention of dying for what they thought was a ridiculous cause. Such is only one result of the draft.)

That view continued largely intact until the Gulf War. (Though Reagan did make some difference in restoring respect for having a strong military.) When the cause was considered just, the American people were behind it. The military gained swift, sure victories and looked like heroes (as they were). The American people were glued to CNN like it was a Tuesday Movie of the Week.

In this sense, a just cause carried out correctly did 'credit the effort'.

Economics

Economically, the period after the Vietnam war was a disaster for about 10-15 years, it's true. But the Vietnam war didn't cause, nor exacerbate, that situation. It wasn't expensive enough to account for such a major effect, and it didn't cause people to suddenly lose their will or ability to produce. The Vietnam War didn't produce bad economic philosophy or policies.

Culturally

The defeat in Vietnam didn't produce hippies, it didn't produce New Ageism, and it certainly didn't create New Left philosophy, nor give it something to feed on that wasn't there already. The roots of that philosophy, as I'm sure you know, go back much further.

Even looking largely at less fundamental causes, New Left influences were not fed by the defeat in Vietnam. After the war, there weren't large groups, nor influential voices saying, "See we lost the war, so we should do X."

The blatant hostility to science, technology, and civilization that gave growth hormones to the environmental movement didn't grow out of the defeat in Vietnam. The amoralism that took hold of American culture for about 20 years didn't grow out of the defeat in Vietnam. The pragmatism that engulfed American culture wasn't given birth nor fed by the defeat in Vietnam. The egalitarianism, multiculturalism, and puritanism of politically correct thought that came along soon after didn't grow out of the defeat in Vietnam. None of the real-world instances of these abstractions was caused by the Vietnam War, nor America's defeat.

All those things have something in common: they are all 'anti' ideas, anti-actions. I.e. they are not positive ideas or actions undertaken for a positive goal; they are rebellions. That rebellion was extant and grew with the Vietnam War, but wasn't caused nor fed by it. Quite the contrary, to a large degree the defeat in Vietnam was the effect of these things, not their cause.

RESCHEDULED: Dallas Radio Interview Oct. 22

UPDATE: As often happens with these things, the radio interview is to be rescheduled. Once the publicist for Pajamas Media lets me know, I'll advertise the new date/time.

Thanks to all those who sent congratulatory emails (and all those who didn't, too; I know you're busy).

I'll update you when I know more.

All the Best,

Jeff

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I'm scheduled to be interviewed by Jon David Wells of KSKY radio 660 AM, this Friday, Oct. 22. It broadcasts from the Dallas/Ft. Worth area in Texas.

Sorry for the last minute notice, but the whole thing was arranged very quickly.

We'll be talking about recent Pajamas Media article, Beyond Politics: Removing the Progressive Drag On America, and presumably other things.

It's scheduled to begin at 6:20 pm ET [5:20 pm CT, [4:20 pm MT, 3:20 pm Pacific].

Here's a link to listen in. I hope you will. [Click the red "Listen Live" button near the top of the main text, roughly in the middle of the screen.]


It promises to be lively, since I'll no doubt be asked my suggestions for how to straighten out the mess the U.S. is in.

Your suggestions welcome.