SamIam writes in, After noticing that some of the numbers in the interest rate comparison grid I furnished [in the post "Interest, Coming and Going...You are Scewed"], which are supposed to represent week-on-week changes, seemed too stable, I did vet the numbers, at least to the extent of going to the sources (bankrate.com and creditcards.com) claimed by Yahoo. Typical of Yahoo's apparently pervasive incompetence, they aren't updating their numbers to reflect changes in those sources. However, the gist of my rant regarding the delta between interest charged and paid remains valid: the actual current "low interest" credit card rate according to creditcards.com is 12.41%, not 12.23%; the US national average interest rate on all categories of credit cards is a whopping 14.56%!
I also found the following informative article about the myth of a middle-class recovery sourced from Baron's this morning. The most startling revelation is the sheer magnitude of the destruction of wealth instigated by our public serpents on behalf of their banksta masters. The net asset value of real estate held by US households has declined from its peak at the end of 2006 by 53.3%!!!
"Even more stunningly, households' net worth in real estate was down by more than half -- 53.3%, to be exact -- from the end of 2006" (Source, click here.)
Here is yet another interesting article found on kitco.com, the precious metals trading site. Now, there are always a few gold bugs featured there who try to use hyperbole to promote sales. However, Roger Wiegand is usually one of the more level-headed columnists. When a financial nerd whose usual territory is advising clients on what financial instrument to buy or sell, and when, turns to publishing missives on the practical aspects of surviving the crash of an entire civilization, perhaps it is time for all of us to pay heed. The article: "This is a new era as we have been irrevocably destroyed."
If it has seemed quiet here for the last few days, well, there's a story.
It began Wednesday evening when the ifeminists site got hacked. It happened as I was on the road to a meeting; I had to turn around and come back, and spend an hour and a half repairing and hardening the site.
Then, Thursday afternoon, our Internet service failed. Completely. Our wireless ISP scheduled a service appointment for Friday afternoon. Meanwhile, we had to switch to Plan B -- dial-up -- which we keep ready for such contingencies.
Except, last fall the phone company performed a few splices and laid a new phone line, which I presume to be the reason we could only get 14 Kbps of dial up speed. That's barely fast enough to collect email, and Wendy struggled to put up some news items on ifeminists.
Late Friday afternoon the service tech arrived, and after many tests concluded that our 3.5 GHz wireless module was defunct. Fortunately he had a spare 900 MHz module in the truck. (Why he didn't travel with a spare 3.5 GHz module is a mystery to me; we were his last service call of the day, and it's possible he'd used his spares earlier.) At 5:30 he had installed and commissioned the new unit, and decamped quickly for his weekend off, leaving me to reconfigure our router.
Except, the new unit refused to work with our router. And refused to work with my laptop. We still had no Internet service.
So it was time for Plan C: when we got wireless Internet, I left our old satellite dish installed and kept the equipment, just in case. (There was no cost to keep it.) A short call to the satellite ISP and I was able to get the service reactivated, and, mirabile dictu, it powered right up and began working after nine months' inactivity.
So I collected my waiting email, checked that our web sites were still active, and enjoyed a late dinner. Then a visit to the loo. And just as I had seated myself on the toilet...the entire house blacked out. 850 homes, including ours, had just lost power.
We're back now, while our luck holds out. "What a week I'm having!"
Yikes! Those who checked in on the ifeminists site last night may have noticed something a tad different. Namely, a notice announcing it had been hacked and, then, a quick redirect to a Turkish site condemning the Armenians. It seems to have been a password hack by which the fellow gave himself admin power, taking it away from us, and inserted a script to commandeer the site. Never fear! -- ifeminists has been cleaned up and nothing of consequence on the site was damaged or lost. A few news items were deleted (I guess he was testing the admin power) but that was the extent of mischief. Other than the redirect, of course. I never thought I would be typing the following sentence but, here goes...."ifeminists apologizes to the Armenians of the world."
A hat tip and a deep curtsy to SkippyBob for sending along the following 'toons from Sinfest -- what a guy, let's clone him! The first two are in response to an earlier blog post by SamIam that was entitled "Interest, Coming and Going...You are Screwed." The cartoons are Banksta One and Banksta Two.
And, more generally reflecting the state of the States...
In an email exchange, a friend expressed his belief that America would soon have a second revolution that was brought about by political and economic instability. My immediate thought was "if that happens, I expect it will more closely resemble the French Revolution than the one in 1776." Then I sat back and tried to figure out why I had arrived at that instant conclusion, and whether it had any merit. As a proximate cause, I think the conclusion popped up as a result of some reading I did last night and from listening to CNN this morning as I did the ifeminists newsfeeds. CNN had two stories that clashed together in my mind: 1) there had been a sharp increase in the number of millionaires in the U.S.; and, 2) unemployment benefits now run for 99 weeks in order to alleviate the severe and widespread suffering of the jobless. To me that means the gulf between the haves and have-nots is widening and quickly so.
America has become a society of elites. Specifically, those in the political class who enjoy an endless economic bounty that comes from the sweat and blood of taxpayers. At the pinnacle are politicians with rich salaries, plush expense accounts (not counting bribes), platinum pensions and health insurance, etc. Then there are the millions of civil servants who are paid considerably more than their private-sector counterparts, who have greater job security due to unions, and who enjoy a pension plan that others can only dream about. The devouring appetite of these elites is fed by the ever-increasing taxes, fees and other money-grabs from the private, productive sector of society. As the level of theft increases, more productive people are being driven in poverty, homelessness and a despair that could easily turn into rage.
Last night I was reading about the conditions in 18th century, pre-Revolutionary France. (Specifically, I was reading about the Physiocrats who were precursors to libertarianism.) The parallels to the U.S. did not escape my notice.
Under Louis XV (and Louis XIV for that matter) France was plagued by fairly constant and ruinously expensive warfare along with economic instability. There was a huge schism between the haves and the have-nots. The haves basically consisted of the nobility and the clergy, both of whom were exempt from taxes; they lived off the sweat and blood of average people (mostly peasants) in the private sector. The foundation of the private sector was agriculture, even though very few citizens owned land. The nobility and clergy (some 600,000 in a population of roughly 25 million) held most property. For example, the church owed about 1/5th of the total land; in some provinces, it owed up to 2/3rds. Moreover, the Church had feudal privileges that continued from the Middle Ages and bound something like one million people to the land as serfs.
Even though France was a comparatively wealthy nation, the peasants existed at near-starvation level because they were so burdened with taxation in myriad forms. A direct tax ate as much as 50% of the earnings of the non-exempt. The collection process was particularly brutal because tax collector were 'entrepreneurs' who paid the king a flat amount for the privilege of collecting taxes; anything over that amount became profit.
There were a slew of other taxes as well, some of them quite creative. For example, there was a salt monopoly tax by which everyone over the age of 7 (as I remember) was required to purchase several lbs of highly-inferior government salt each and every year. The law also proscribed how the salt could be used and imposed heavy fines for misuse, such as in preservation of meat. Many other commodities had their own separate taxes. Fees were levied at every stage of manufacture, upon transportation, at time of sale to retailers and, then, to customers. It has been estimated that these taxes literally doubled the cost of goods. The list scrolls on and on, including many customs duties that were not merely imposed on goods passing into and out of France but often on goods traveling between different provinces within the nation.
And, of course, there was the constant bribery, unofficial theft by authorities, etc. for which France was notorious and which ran rampant through all levels of government. Unfortunately, it is impossible to even estimate how much corruption cost the average person. Even without this factor, however, it has been estimated that the nobility (including the king) and the church probably took about 75% of the wealth produced by peasants -- many of whom lived on the margin to begin with. Over taxed, often homeless, unemployed, hungry and with no hope of justice from the 'system', the vast majority of French citizens were nevertheless not blind. They saw the starvation of their own children and the riches lavished on the velvet-clad children of the elite -- riches that had been stolen from them and from the mouths of their own families. When the desperation of peasants erupted abruptly into unbridled rage, the French Revolution had arrived. And, at least in the beginning, it was a grassroots revolution around which the disenfranchised rallied for justice. They soon demanded revenge.
These are the some of the thoughts I had upon listening to the two CNN stories this morning. I'm sure it is at least part of the reason the French Revolution came to mind immediately upon reading my friend's email. By contrast, the American Revolution was not rooted in a long-standing class structure that split people into widely disparate, permanent and unjust economic sectors.
In the end, Young noted, by the time you reach 61 tests, there's a 95 percent chance that you'll get a significant result at random. And, let's face it--researchers want to see a significant result, so there's a strong, unintentional bias towards trying different tests until something pops out.
Young went on to describe a study, published in JAMA, that was a multiple testing train wreck: exposures to 275 chemicals were considered, 32 health outcomes were tracked, and 10 demographic variables were used as controls. That was about 8,800 different tests, and as many as 9 million ways of looking at the data once the demographics were considered.
Which is why repeatability, and access to the computer models, is important:
In a survey of the recent literature, he found that 95 percent of the results of observational studies on human health had failed replication when tested using a rigorous, double blind trial.
And my favorite news item, from two weeks ago: researchers at the University of Texas at Arlington claim to have a commercially-viable process for making oil from low-grade lignite coal, for just under $30 a barrel. (See here and here.) Bravo for human ingenuity!
It is not a theoretical objection -- that is, a fundamental objection -- but an aspect of the libertarianism focus on electoral politics that I find disturbing is its obsession with numbers. How many candidates are running in how many districts with what total votes as compared to whose other numbers... All the movement becomes a numbers game that is stripped of non-arithmetical substance. Even if a vote total turns out to be 'good', is it really a victory? Campaigners will shout "look how many libertarians we now have!" but you never know why people voted for the somewhat libertarian candidate -- in protest against the other parties, out of movement 'purity', a preference for his non-libertarian positions, the candidate's personal charm, the lack of alternatives, or...? If the last few years have taught anything, it is that voters are incredibly fickle.
And what if a libertarian were to win the numbers game; by which I mean, what if he (or she) were elected to a high public office? What if he were able to grab the Holy Grail of libertarian goals and have a bad law repealed? I'm all for repealing anything but I don't put any stock in that strategy. What is enacted today can be repealed tomorrow and re-enacted the next week thereafter. My time frame is inaccurate but my point is that repealing laws is a poor strategy because it plays the legislative game, which is heavily rigged against libertarianism and freedom. It is just another numbers game.
In final analysis, it does not matter how many laws are on the books or how many are repealed. What matters is whether the authorities are able to enforce the laws, however many there are. When a law becomes unpopular enough, the authorities cannot enforce it; it becomes a dead law...one that has been de facto repealed by the withdrawal of public consent to it. History is replete with such vox populi repeals.
In fact, America was founded on the vox populi repeal of law. The 13 colonies had stacks of laws, regulations, and policies; there were British soldiers in the street along with Loyalists to enforce them. Yet every single one of those government measures, including governmental institutions like the courts, became irrelevant once a sufficient number of ordinary people said "no." The government itself became irrelevant because its will was unenforceable. What happened and what mattered was a change in the hearts and souls of the people -- a change that was brought about largely through the ceaseless, stellar efforts of writers like Thomas Paine who infused classical liberalism into the political psyche of the colonies. They did not produce a fickle change but one that inspired loyalty...not to men necessarily but to ideas -- especially the ideas of freedom and independence.
What would have happened, do you think, if the likes of Paine and Jefferson had "gone through channels"? If they had petitioned the king, run for the local school board or a higher position, if they had tried to repeal the Stamp Act and other laws one-by-one. I suspect there would have been no America because there would have been no revolution, no vox populi repeal of government itself. Instead, the American revolutionaries went to the source of all real social change -- the hearts and souls of men. They did the hard work and they showed how quickly a society could be turned around; it took something akin to 15 or 20 years for their ideas to create an expanse of freedom in the world.
I understand the appeal of the numbers game. Cultural change is difficult to impossible to quantify and this introduces frustration into the life of anyone attempting to accomplish change. It would be amazingly helpful to log onto a website every morning and get a graph of feedback, even if the feedback were negative. Alas, it is not possible. Nor is real change possible without doing the hard and frustrating work. There is no quick fix that cannot be as quickly undone.
All the recent brouhaha about global warming science was started by the leak of some archived emails (and code) from the University of East Anglia...a scandal now known as "Climategate." Some prominent warmists are now discussing how they can mount a P.R. campaign to recover some credibility. Being widely dispersed, they're discussing by email.
The Washington Times broke the story. The warmists' favorite idea so far is to raise $50,000 to take out a full-page ad in the New York Times. Because they see this as a matter of spin, not of science:
"Most of our colleagues don't seem to grasp that we're not in a gentlepersons' debate, we're in a street fight against well-funded, merciless enemies who play by entirely different rules," Paul R. Ehrlich, a Stanford University researcher, said in one of the e-mails.
Yes, that's Paul "Population Bomb" Ehrlich. It's a bit rich for the recipients of hundreds of millionsbillions of dollars of government grants to call a bunch of amateur bloggers "well-funded," but this isn't about truth; this is about creating a narrative.
If they really want to restore credibility, here's a modest suggestion: go ahead and get 50 well-paid climate researchers to donate $1,000 each. Then use that money to buy some decent data and code archiving for the UEA's Climatic Research Unit. Because "we lost the data" really doesn't help your image.
The Most Harmful Error Most Honest People Make by R.C. Hoiles original source: The Register, December 17, 1956
For a couple of days I have been attempting to give evidence that most of our trouble comes from honest persons.
As Isabel Paterson pointed out, a species could hardly exist if any large member of that species were bent on destroying the other members of the species.
What too many people fail to realize is that a person who is honest can be in error. he can be mistaken. And the results can be just as harmful as it would be if he commits an erronious [sic] act intentionally. In fact, I think it can do a great deal more harm if an act is done by an honest person that if it is done by a dishonest person. We are imitative animals and if we think another person is honest and doing right, we are inclined to imitate that person.
Now what is it that honest people do that causes most of our trouble? In plain language and disregarding religion, it is the belief that a group or a government can do things that would be harmful and wicked if done by an individual and produce results that are not harmful, unjust and wicked. It is the belief that a number of people doing a thing, that is wrong for an individual to do, can make it right and just.
From a religious standpoint, it is attempting to serve two masters. It is a violation of the First Commandment, 'Thou shall have no other Gods but me.' The most common method is worshiping the divinity of the State, representing the majority. This attempt to serve two masters or have two standards of right and wrong -- one for the individual and one for the group -- is undoubtedly a result of individuals using as a guide what their contemporary environment regards as right, just and proper. They use this as a guide rather than eternal principles, eternal moral law that never changes with time or place to determine right from wrong. So the individual who intends to be guided by what is currently regarded as right by the majority has, in reality, no guide at all. The individual who is guided by moral law that never changes has a guide. He does not get into moral trouble. He does not injure his fellow-man. He was goodwill in his heart. He does not enter into any collusion to promote his own interest at the expense of another. he does not try to benefit one by injuring another.
And these are the acts that are bound to follow when a man comes to believe that the government or the majority or the labor union or the church or the business organizations can do things and have them right when they are wrong for an individual to do.
Most Common Example
Probably the most harmful practice of giving an agent of the majority the right to force a man to pay for something he does not want to use is the practice of forcing a man to pay for schooling called "education" that he believes violates God's law and moral law. [Ed: Hoiles was referring not merely to the content of the education but to its compulsory nature and tax funding.] When people come to believe that there is a standard for the majority different than a standard for the individual, there is no limit to what the belief will lead to. It leads to protective tariffs, immigration quotas, drafting soldiers, taxation of all kinds, subsidies, planning and zoning, government parks, government hospitals, government libraries, government parking lots, government post offices. In short, it is a form of Communism, Collectivism or Socialism where some men have the right to rule other men or interfere with another man's right to serve God as his conscience directs....
Until such time as we get more and more people to believe in a single standard and to know that it is wrong for the government to do things that it is wrong for an individual to do, we'll continue to lose more and more of our liberty and have a more and more oppressive government.
Yes, the belief of most honest people that causes more harm than anything else is the belief that the government has a right to do things that would be immoral and unjust if done by any individual.
SamIam emails in to share some investigative economic browsing. He writes...
In much browsing of pages critical of da gooberment, including many with an economic bent, I do not recall spotting much (if anything) on the relationship between interest charged and paid. To my mind, in a free society, banks would be compelled to compete for customers largely on the basis of these attributes. As a result, in such a society I would expect that interest charged would for the most part equate to interest paid, plus operating costs, plus a reasonable profit margin. I'm not certain how the presence of a central bank as an alternative (to directly lending depositor dollars) fund source would affect this expectation, but all else equal, I see no compelling reason for that to drastically change those incentives. For several months I have been frequently but irregularly browsing through the interest rate section of the front Yahoo Finance page (http://finance.yahoo.com). One thing that I have noticed is that the rates on "low interest" credit cards has been skyrocketing ever since the "credit card reform" legislation was passed. It is currently at 12.23% (in the recent past we have typically easily been able to obtain credit cards at a max rate of 9.6%, I currently have one obtained 2 years ago fixed at 7.25%) The apparent difference between various categories of interest charged and paid has also been nagging at me for some time. This morning I did a few calculations and put a crude worksheet together (based on the Yahoo Finance figures, which I have *not* vetted). The factor (not spread!) between the credit paid on a 6 month CD and the interest charged on one of those "low interest" credit cards is nearly 15! I find that astounding. After our public serpents directly forked over billions upon billions of stolen taxpayer dollars to them, the bankstas have taken advantage of their mercantilist monopoly to gouge the eyes out of their clientèle. Again, the comparison is not rate spread, it is factors.
At last, the scientists are standing up for the scientific method. In statements to a U.K. parliamentary inquiry, three respected organizations have come out for openness:
The CRU e-mails as published on the internet provide prima facie evidence of determined and co-ordinated refusals to comply with honourable scientific traditions and freedom of information law. The principle that scientists should be willing to expose their ideas and results to independent testing and replication by others, which requires the open exchange of data, procedures and materials, is vital.
It is also imperative that scientific information is made available to the wider community for scrutiny: the validity and essence of research relies upon its ability to stand up to review. In fact, advances in science frequently occur when the prevailing view is challenged by informed scepticism, this is fundamental to the scientific method and should be encouraged, even if controversial.
The RSS believes that the debate on global warming is best served by having the models used and the data on which they are based in the public domain.
...More widely, the basic case for publication of data includes that science progresses as an ongoing debate and not by a series of authoritative and oracular pronouncements and that the quality of that debate is best served by ensuring that all parties have access to the facts. It is well understood, for example, that peer review cannot guarantee that what is published is 'correct'.
Bottom line: publish your data and code, or stop calling it "science."
A reader writes in, The picture attached above is a new notice from the City of Omaha Parks and Recreation that was posted on the front door of the Florence Library/Community Center. In the event you have difficulty reading same it says, "For your safety, Persons and Property are Subject to Search" and purports to come from the Parks and Rec dept of Omaha. Below I have posted the 4th Amendment to the Bill of Rights of the U.S. Constitution. I CANNOT see ANY way a search such as that envisioned by the notice is constitutional.
Amendment IV. The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
All politicians and candidates threaten my freedom
Show your support:
I start with the definition of political office as "a position of power over the lives of others which is usually attained through the electoral process; sometimes the position is appointed by another politician who was elected." So far, it is not clear if the position described is one of just power or not. That evaluation rests on questions such as "over whom is the power wielded?" and "how is it maintained?" If the politician claims jurisdiction only over the lives of those who voted for him or who agreed to abide by the outcome and if his office is financed only by voluntary payments, then there is no libertarian objection to the politician's power. It would be akin to a power-of-attorney through which you transfer some control over your life to someone else. Of course, like a power-of-attorney, you would have the right to cancel the arrangement. The ability to rescind consent is part-and-parcel of what it means to have inalienable rights: the rights belong to the individual, to exercise or not, to assign or to reclaim. The 19th century American anarchist Lysander Spooner explained this limitation: “No man can delegate, or give away his own natural right to liberty . . . or to give to another, any right of arbitrary dominion over himself; for that would be giving himself away as a slave. And this no one can do. Any contract to do so is necessarily an absurd one and has no validity.”
The foregoing description of a "just" politician doesn't describe any currently existing one. All politicians today assume office with the claim of having jurisdiction over the lives of people who did not vote for them, of people who opposed them or did not vote at all. The question for libertarians is: how can one human being properly assume immense power over the freedom and person of unconsenting others. If rights, like freedom of speech and association, are inalienable and equal-to-all, then how can you cast a vote that transfers control over my rights to another person? Especially, how can you do this against my will and over my protest? For a libertarian, the answer is clear. You cannot transfer or nullify another person's rights by making an X on a ballot. All you can do is enable a power-seeker to assume a patina of legitimacy when he claims jurisdiction over and uses force on the unconsenting.
That patina is the consent of the majority, or democracy, which is the sworn enemy of individual rights. In his treatise No Treason, Spooner explained, A man’s natural rights are his own, against the whole world; and any infringement of them is equally a crime, whether committed by one man, or by millions; whether committed by one man, calling himself a robber, ... or by millions, calling themselves a government. The “principle that the majority have a right to rule” merely divides society into “two bodies of men” – masters and slaves – and, so, both negates individual rights and cements conflict into society.
Every person who is a politician or who seeks political office is a threat to my freedom and safety. It does not matter whether the power-seeker is a Republican or a libertarian, a Democrat or a tea-bagger. It does not matter whether he whispers reassurances of "good intentions" or crosses his fingers while taking a public oath of office to uphold laws that violate my rights. (With the exception of the Bill of Rights, the Constitution that politicians vow to enforce authorizes extensive governmental powers like taxation.) All that the whispers and insincere public oaths prove is that the politician is a bald-faced hypocritical liar and, so, even less worthy of being trusted with power. The libertarian truth is that no one has a right to assume power over my peaceful actions; such positions of unjust power must be eliminated, not reformed, because they are inherently and systemically wrong.
At this point, an objection often returns -- "but the power-seeker's intentions are good!" Putting aside the bald-faced liar problem, I put no trust in those intentions. A power-seeker's intentions are invisible (I have no window into the hypocrite's soul to verify their presence) while his actions of seeking power over me are on public display. Moreover, the power-seeker is reaching out for a plush tax-paid job with huge tax-paid benefits as well as the elevated status of being a "master." The very fact that he wants to enrich himself by swilling at the public trough should raise alarm bells. Further, power corrupts even well-meaning people. The corruption is an inevitable consequence of holding a position of unjust power: accommodation with injustice changes people for the worse.
Pulling a lever or marking an X may seem to be a relatively benign act but libertarians must ask themselves how a small group of people -- politicians, the political elite -- are able to control and oppress hundreds of millions. The use of force is part of the answer. But, overwhelmingly, their control depends upon the legitimacy that is provided by people who vote and, so, who give the masters "a mandate."
The libertarian solution to government oppression is to NOT to give your consent but to withdraw it, NOT to participate in your own oppression but to withdraw co-operation. In his classic work "Discourse on Voluntary Servitude" Etienne La Boétie advised the average man, "I do not ask that you place hands upon the tyrant to topple him over, but simply that you support him no longer; then you will behold him, like a great Colossus whose pedestal has been pulled away, fall of his own weight and break into pieces." (For my analysis of La Boétie 's Discourse, click here.)
