Nuance versus meaning

NUANCE:

• Clemons: Contrary to wide reports, Chuck Hagel actually likes gays.
• Goldberg: Contrary to wide reports, Chuck Hagel actually likes Israel.
• Wright: Never mind what mainstream Democrats and Republicans are widely saying about Chuck  Hagel, neocons run a filthy smear machine.

Why does anyone listen to Robert Wright?

Michigan is waking up from a bad dream

Diocletian used this logic to nail the feet of “those filthy serfs” to the land for a thousand years. I guess some people never got enough of a good thing. Garfinkle may be Jewish; if so, perhaps that is distorting his values. Many people dislike being tied down.

(As a Jewish American, Garfinkle is likely to be Ashkenazi: his cultural memory of Europe does not involve violent capture and punishment as a valuable chattel that fled the master’s estates. As a member of a once-undesirable class, his cultural memory holds the supremely reluctant honor of a torchlit parade to the borders of the kingdom, not being forced to stay.)

Newsflash: China was a massive labor sink isolated from the West because of Chinese racism and xenophobia, then Red Fascist ideology and good old-fashioned Communist self-genocide. My father and grandfathers did not have to compete against Chinese labor because we lost China to Mao; my great-great grandfathers were spared, to a far lesser extent, by the Manchu.

It is the end and deflation of the biggest market distortion in history that has dropped this unprecedented labor force on us: the end of the Chinese nation’s isolationism and its emergence in the global market. The water is leveling in the glass and it is a hell of a ride. As Michael Barone noted about immigration: China’s supercheap labor market is not some malign dragon we must venture forth and slay with trade guilds and protective tariffs, but a particular product of a particular time. It will end. This painful time for American labor will end. As it is, we are under tremendous pressure and we are quickly shedding our bad habits: overpaid, featherbedding unions, the forced socialism of employer-based health care.

This is Bastiat’s simplest lesson: That which is not seen. Why is economics so hard to some?

Eric Cantor: we endowed the POTUS with massive, sweeping powers. Who knew some asshole would try to abuse them??

Or that Agencies that Do Nothing But Regulate Without Check Or Hindrance would grow out of control?

It’s a pity Eric Cantor cannot bring himself to the STUPIDLY OBVIOUS conclusion that allowing the Executive to make regulatory law (from the ICC on) is a MASSIVE MISTAKE.

But then the Republicans would be forced to confront their own Cuntitude. Not. Gonna. Happen.

Ten Things Everyone Should Read About Health Care

FreedomWorks’ Dean Clancy has republished Ben Domenech’s list of articles called “Ten Things Everyone Should Read About Health Care.” Good stuff on what is broken, how it broke, and how to fix it. I will be reading it and commenting on each article, linking back to this blogpost.

Unlimited Quantitative Easing

Market monetarism is Keynesianism in Monetarist drag. It is based on inflating the currency, on Quantitative Easing. And the Federal Reserve is hoping you won't notice.

Ben Bernanke just held a press conference and declared a market monetarist stance, namely growth and inflation targets. Economist Tyler Cowen called today Scott Sumner Day. Sumner is the blogger at The Money Illusion. Basically, this is Sumner's idea. (Paul Krugman is also a fan.)

So what is his idea? Nothing but endless Quantitative Easing:

Today the Fed adopted one of those three recommendations; open ended QE.

Whats changed since June? That’s pretty easy to answer; Woodford’s paper was obviously very influential, and that changed the politics on level targeting. So Woodford also deserves a lot of credit. It’s not as specific as Woodford or I would like, but it’s something. More specifically it’s a dog whistle that Bernanke hopes the markets will hear, but which he also hopes will be missed by the Tea Party.

Sumner spells it out some more:

Bernanke emphasized that monetary stimulus is not like fiscal stimulus, it actually reduces the budget deficit. That’s right.

Remember: the problem is not inflating or deflating the money supply. The dreaded Keynesian bugaboo is the awful, nasty rabbit from Monty Python's Holy Grail: the "Liquidity Trap." This is the idea that money earning no interest and being slowly eaten by inflation will never be pulled out and invested. This is, of course, completely ridiculous.

The real problem is public confidence in economic growth. As Ludwig von Mises noted in The Theory of Money and Credit, this is a monetary solution to fiscal and policy problems. Quit telling investors you hate them, quit confiscating their money, and wealth, real wealth goods and services will flow. Till then, Bernanke is not only whistling past the graveyard, he's decked out in garlic and wolfsbane.

p.s. Market monetarism from Wikipedia: "In contrast to traditional monetarists, market monetarists do not believe monetary aggregates or commodity prices such as gold are the optimal guide to intervention. Market monetarists also reject the New Keynesian focus on interest rates as the primary instrument of monetary policy."

Harry “Goodlife” Harrison dies

Well, I mean, doesn’t it sound that way? And how does the Guardian boast about legalistic tax immunity? Are they that cynical and duplicitous, or do they just not care?

Gore Vidal, 1925-2012

I prefer Mr Vidal’s fiction and essays (most of them) to Mr Buckley’s (particularly his later, more orotund style). Politically, of course, it is the opposite. I don’t trust artists’ political opinions: they don’t really study these things.

Creation is a good novel, once one gets past the few Vidal-isms therein. (Martin Amis noted that one must write “disinterestedly” to make good art, which is why self-inserting authors, or their opinions, go down so poorly so often, and why Vidal’s political novels and later work suffer.) You may be offended by Myra Breckinridge; certainly, if homosexuality squicks you, I don’t recommend you read it, any more than I would advise someone who faints at the sight of blood to watch a Hammer Studios Dracula film. Christopher Isherwood, Vidal’s close friend, wrote to Vidal that he thought MB was a kind of self-portrait: when I compare Myra Breckinridge with the sequel, Myron, I can see the change in Vidal’s outlook: Myron is an angry, negative polemic.

Kalki was a great, downer-ending science-fiction story: the only proper SF Vidal ever wrote. Messiah was also very good, as were The Judgment of Paris, Julian and 1876, especially since there were fewer real figures in the last (historical) novel, so less temptation. (Vidal’s crush on James A. Garfield is rather amusing.)

Palimpsest was a good memoir, though it cribbed much of his own previous writing on himself and his acquaintances, but it cribbed well.

For the essays: basically, anything Vidal wrote on Art is worth reading. His prose could achieve a kind of water-clear transparency at those times, something he never, ever could do with politics.

p.s. One normally calls this clarity “limpid” or “pellucid,” sadly, those words are so abused I leave them out here.

p.p.s. Hillsdale College has Buckley's papers, including his excellent
“On Experiencing Gore Vidal”. Sadly, no direct URL exists: type “gore vidal” in the search bar and click to page two.

McCartney’s personal sexuality

ETA: I used to wonder if Paul McCartney was bisexual. Actually, now I don't, partly on the strength of this interview. If Paul has a trope that led him to write these lyrics, I would say he likes making fun of his own homebody-ness. Anyway, back to my half-baked theory, now discredited, I think.

There’s not much evidence, but I think it could be true. Consider that in Prick Up Your Ears, the Beatle picking up gay playwright Joe Orton to discuss another Beatle movie screenplay is McCartney.

Consider also the lyrics:

“Jet”: “And Jet, I thought the major was a lady suffragette.”

“Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da”:

Happy ever after in the market place
Molly lets the children lend a hand
Desmond stays at home and does his pretty face
And in the evening she's a singer with the band

Or “Get Back”:

Sweet Loretta Martin thought she was a woman
But she was another man.
All the girls around her say she's got it coming
But she gets it while she can.

They keep explaining these as mistakes. Well, Mr McCartney sings this soi disant mistake over two lines; more than a mere substitution. Also note the matching of the pronoun: Desmond does his pretty face.

Perhaps Mr McCartney simply enjoys sexual confusion as a comedic gambit: he’d be hardly alone. People like casting Lennon as the adventurous one but there are good reasons against that. Lennon grew up without a father or other male role model. McCartney grew up with a musician dad and apparently learned a lot from him. The latter type tends to be more secure and more willing to experiment (or be seen as such). Lennon’s childhood would create a personality more likely to be hostile to bi- or homosexuality.

Again, no proof. And yes, I am open to charges of projection, I know. But I do wonder.

Edmund Burke on American Colonial History

All this was done by England whilst England pursued trade and forgot revenue. You not only acquired commerce, but you actually created the very objects of trade in America; and by that creation you raised the trade of this kingdom at least fourfold. America had the compensation of your capital, which made her bear her servitude. She had another compensation, which you are now going to take away from her. She had, except the commercial restraint, every characteristic mark of a free people in all her internal concerns. She had the image of the British Constitution. She had the substance. She was taxed by her own representatives. She chose most of her own magistrates. She paid them all. She had in effect the sole disposal of her own internal government. This whole state of commercial servitude and civil liberty, taken together, is certainly not perfect freedom; but comparing it with the ordinary circumstances of human nature, it was an happy and a liberal condition.

— Edmund Burke, “Speech on American Taxation,” 19 April 1774.

A great speech. I am not a Burke partisan, but I admire his strategies. Burke is the great Humanist who formed the gentler side of Thomas Hobbes’ absolutism, noting in Reflections on the Revolution in France that Englishmen would rather die than exercise the right to hire and replace public officials.

This prediction was not quite… fulfilled, as you may have noted. From the same speech, he discusses George Grenville and the habits of office:

He was bred to the law, which is, in my opinion, one of the first and noblest of human sciences,—a science which does more to quicken and invigorate the understanding than all the other kinds of learning put together; but it is not apt, except in persons very happily born, to open and to liberalize the mind exactly in the same proportion. Passing from that study, he did not go very largely into the world, but plunged into business,—I mean into the business of office, and the limited and fixed methods and forms established there. Much knowledge is to be had, undoubtedly, in that line; and there is no knowledge which is not valuable. But it may be truly said, that men too much conversant in office are rarely minds of remarkable enlargement. Their habits of office are apt to give them a turn to think the substance of business not to be much more important than the forms in which it is conducted. These forms are adapted to ordinary occasions; and therefore persons who are nurtured in office do admirably well as long as things go on in their common order; but when the high-roads are broken up, and the waters out, when a new and troubled scene is opened, and the file affords no precedent, then it is that a greater knowledge of mankind, and a far more extensive comprehension of things is requisite, than ever office gave, or than office can ever give. Mr. Grenville thought better of the wisdom and power of human legislation than in truth it deserves. He conceived, and many conceived along with him, that the flourishing trade of this country was greatly owing to law and institution, and not quite so much to liberty; for but too many are apt to believe regulation to be commerce, and taxes to be revenue. Among regulations, that which stood first in reputation was his idol: I mean the Act of Navigation. He has often professed it to be so. The policy of that act is, I readily admit, in many respects well understood. But I do say, that, if the act be suffered to run the full length of its principle, and is not changed and modified according to the change of times and the fluctuation of circumstances, it must do great mischief, and frequently even defeat its own purpose.