Featured Discussions - 12160 Social Network2024-03-28T10:15:47Zhttps://12160.info/group/vonmisesinstituteandaustrianeconomics/forum/topic/list?feed=yes&xn_auth=no&featured=1The Ethics of Freedom and Climate Changetag:12160.info,2009-11-25:2649739:Topic:1293232009-11-25T07:56:15.185ZLocaltarianhttps://12160.info/profile/Awho
<a href="http://mises.org/daily/3829">http://mises.org/daily/3829</a><br />
by Francisco Capella<br />
<br />
The freedom of a person to act according to his will in his property implies by symmetry that aggressions against others are ethically unacceptable. An illegitimate aggression is any sufficiently intense adverse physical interference caused by a person on another's property.<br />
<br />
A problematic and possibly important case is the alteration of environmental conditions as in a hypothetical climate change, which…
<a href="http://mises.org/daily/3829">http://mises.org/daily/3829</a><br />
by Francisco Capella<br />
<br />
The freedom of a person to act according to his will in his property implies by symmetry that aggressions against others are ethically unacceptable. An illegitimate aggression is any sufficiently intense adverse physical interference caused by a person on another's property.<br />
<br />
A problematic and possibly important case is the alteration of environmental conditions as in a hypothetical climate change, which could have both positive and negative effects depending on the subjective valuations and particular circumstances of human beings. If climate change is considered a problem, it does not follow automatically that it has to be stopped or minimized at whatever cost it takes: humans are especially good at adaptation, and government does usually more harm than good.<br />
Freedom, Property, and Aggression<br />
<br />
A normative ethics with universal, symmetric, and functional rules is based upon the fundamental principle of property rights. The ethics of freedom and property rights is the natural law, the system of norms adequate to human nature that permits harmonious and peaceful social coexistence and development by avoiding, minimizing, or solving conflicts as much as humanly possible.<br />
<br />
Property is the domain of legitimate decision by the owner, the space in which each person is free to act according to his preferences without violent interference from others, whose valuations in this regard are ethically irrelevant. All peaceful actions by the owner in his property are permitted, and no actions are obligatory (there are no natural positive duties).<br />
<br />
The right to property is a negative right of noninterference. Humans do not have natural positive rights that imply that others must do something for them, and there are no natural duties towards others (present or future). Positive rights and duties arise by means of contracts.<br />
<br />
Freedom does not mean absolute absence of restrictions: my freedom ends where the freedom of others begins; my property is finite and limited by other people's properties. Freedom and property rights are equivalent to the nonaggression axiom: the initiation of force is not legitimate; force may be used only for defense and justice. Aggression, the invasion of the property of others without their consent, is forbidden. The aggressor must repair the damages and compensate the victim.<br />
<br />
Aggression is not only the narrow-sense notion of criminal violence performed by a person against another one and his possessions (murder, assault, injuries, rape, kidnapping, theft). Aggression in an abstract sense is any sufficiently intense adverse or noxious physical interference caused by a person or his possessions on another person's property.<br />
"The more actions are considered illegitimate aggressions, the more use of force is justified."<br />
<br />
Being the owner of something is not always good: property does not only imply the right to enjoy and use means of action. Property can be bad: the owner is responsible for the damages that his actions and his possessions could cause on others (intended or unintended, known or unknown, foreseen or unforeseen). All actions imply the production of undesired residuals or waste that must be taken care of by the owner so that they do not damage others.<br />
<br />
All real things are directly or indirectly interconnected by fundamental forces, so that a change in one entity causes some effect, small or big, on other entities. But ethical rules refer only to changes and effects caused by human action that can damage others and create conflicts.<br />
<br />
These interactions can involve matter (solid, liquid, gas; macroscopic or microscopic particles), energy (heat, electromagnetic waves, pressure waves) or alterations of natural environmental conditions (luminosity, pressure, temperature, winds, humidity). Effects can be strong or weak, concentrated or diffuse, direct or indirect, local or global, frequent or infrequent, cumulative or noncumulative, instantaneous or delayed, temporary or permanent.<br />
<br />
Due to the limitations of the human mind, reality is often studied in a simplified way as if it were linear and simple; but nature is in fact a complex network of entities and relationships. A cause can have multiple effects over different persons, some positive and some negative.<br />
<br />
An effect can have multiple causes, natural or artificial, from one person or from many people doing the same thing (like breathing) or complementary things (like making and driving cars, or like producing and consuming energy). In chaotic nonlinear systems, small causes can have big effects (due to amplifiers, destabilizers, or positive feedback loops), but also big causes can have small effects (due to dampers, stabilizers, or negative feedback loops).<br />
<br />
In order to be qualified as aggressions, real events must at least be physically detectable, psychologically perceptible, and relevant for human preferences. Objective real conditions do not automatically constitute problems. It is human valuations which perceive situations as opportunities or threats, benefits or damages, goods or bads. And it is the possible incompatibility of subjective human preferences that originates conflicts: what one likes another may dislike.<br />
<br />
The specific contents of the notion of aggression are open and debatable; it is not a concept with sharp boundaries, it is partially fuzzy and arbitrary. It cannot be fully determined by deduction using pure reason, it depends on customs, traditions, conventions (blocking sunlight, high-intensity lights, high-volume sounds, pollutants). Some objective criteria can be used to determine whether an event is more adequately considered an aggression or not: intensity, directness, extension, duration, accumulation.<br />
"There is no natural duty to preserve the environment, which has no intrinsic value because valuations are products of mental activity."<br />
<br />
A functional ethics of freedom needs to include responsibility principles and rules for legitimate defense. The traditional and sensible principles of justice place the burden of proof of aggression on the accuser, who must prove beyond reasonable doubt the guilt of the accused. It is not the accused who must prove his innocence (if it were so, every person should have proof of innocence for every action and moment in his life, because he could always be accused of something).<br />
<br />
Legitimate defense may be invoked by the actual or possible receiver of the effects of an action if there is clear, present and provable danger, and not just if someone cannot fully assure that there is not. Defense becomes illegitimate (it becomes aggression) if it cannot be proved that there is a danger of real damage.<br />
<br />
The precautionary principle proposed by many environmentalists demands that the initiator of an activity proves its complete harmlessness and that the government does not need to prove probable harm in order to stop it. Proving that something is absolutely innocuous is impracticable in new domains, where learning is performed by trial and error, and therefore this principle would paralyze innovation. Knowledge acquisition is costly, and full knowledge is impossible.<br />
<br />
The notion of aggression is based on the consequences or results of actions (the real effects in the world), and not on the knowledge or intentions of the agents. Instinctive moral feelings tend to excuse or diminish responsibility if there is no intentionality or if the damages are unforeseen, secondary effects: this is so partly because moral feelings evolved as genetic instincts in past times when our human ancestors had little capabilities of action.<br />
<br />
But with capital and technological accumulation, it is necessary to demand responsible use of powerful tools, and warn persons that their ignorance or lack of foresight will not excuse them for the damages they might cause. This kind of rule provides incentives for agents to fully consider all possible consequences of their actions, and not only the ones they intend to achieve, because they will be judged according to the real effects of their actions.<br />
<br />
Property rights work very well when reality is easily separable, and when the effects of actions are direct, local, concentrated, and falling mainly on the owner and nearby others easy to identify. But elements of reality are often intertwined in messy ways. Solid macroscopic objects tend to stay in their stable positions; but fluids (liquids and especially gases) tend to move, and photons and thermal energy tend to flow; these factors spread and cross legal boundaries unless stopped by some physical barrier.<br />
<br />
Externalities are effects of actions of an agent on the property of others; they can be positive (like gifts, not forbidden and not obligatory) or negative. An aggression is a negative externality. Diffuse negative externalities are problematic and difficult to regulate. Many victims could suffer a very small nuisance or loss from the actions of one agent: it might seem ridiculous to consider illegitimate actions that produce such small effects and it would be very costly for each of the victims to demand the agent to stop or to compensate them.<br />
<br />
Externalities can become important due to the cumulative and persistent effects of small actions of many agents. In a clear aggression it is possible and relatively easy to determine who is doing what to whom, who must be stopped or who must compensate whom for what. In diffuse externalities it can be very difficult to determine and connect agents, actions, effects and receivers of effects.<br />
<br />
Since aggressions imply damage, it might be naively considered that it is better to make it a very inclusive notion, so that many losses are avoided. But accepting that something is an aggression and forbidding it has consequences that might be worse than simply tolerating it. The more actions are considered illegitimate aggressions, the more use of force is justified.<br />
<br />
Costs of the system necessary to detect and punish the aggressors and compensate the victims could exceed its benefits (always bearing in mind that it is extremely problematic to perform interpersonal comparisons and additions or subtractions of utility or social cost-benefit analysis). It might be better to learn to live with some changing realities — to adapt to them — than to try to avoid them. Especially because humans are good at adaptation, by means of which they have colonized most of the planet, in very different environmental conditions.<br />
<br />
Automatically giving the State the responsibility to deal with diffuse negative externalities can be a huge mistake. The State is the monopoly of jurisdiction and violence, and it is often illegitimate (dictators, or even democratic leaders according to anarchists), very inefficient and possibly corrupt (lack of motivation or incentives and lack of knowledge or impossibility of socialism, public choice theory).<br />
<br />
What is often called market failure is often just the result of inadequate determination of property rights. Markets are never perfect because human beings are limited in their abilities; proposing that the State fixes alleged problems that individuals cannot solve freely seems to forget that the State is also made up of humans, and perhaps not the best ones (bureaucrats are not disinterested angels, and the worst might get to the top).<br />
Climate Change<br />
<br />
Ethics concerns only human beings: there is no natural duty to preserve the environment, which has no intrinsic value because valuations are products of the mental activity of cognitive emotional agents.<br />
<br />
Contamination above certain levels is usually considered an illegitimate aggression because pollutants directly damage human beings and have no beneficial effects. Climate change is related to the environment but it is very different from contamination.<br />
<br />
Anthropogenic climate change might occur due to changes in land use and emission of greenhouse gases. Changes in land use can alter the reflectivity or albedo of the surface of the planet, and it seems hard to consider them an illegitimate action.<br />
<br />
Carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas that results from respiration and from burning fossil fuels; labeling it as a contaminant is an abuse of language, since it is necessary for photosynthesis and it is not toxic. Some human activities, like growing trees, take carbon dioxide off the atmosphere. It is extremely difficult to prove specific relationships between human carbon dioxide emissions, local climate changes, and their particular effects.<br />
<br />
Climate change, be it global warming or cooling, has multiple possible causes and effects, and the valuation of the effects can be different in different parts of the planet. Cold regions may welcome warming and lament cooling, warm regions may welcome cooling and lament warming. Climate-change alarmists seem to be climate reactionaries accepting no change.<br />
<br />
There is no optimal climate, and conflicts for the climate's determination may arise if humans achieve partial control over it. Even if humans are adapted to the present climate, this does not imply that it would be difficult to adapt to different climates if the changes are not excessive.<br />
"There is no optimal climate, and conflicts for the climate's determination may arise if humans achieve partial control over it."<br />
<br />
Climate change could happen quickly on a geological scale, but it is slow on a human scale, permitting informed adaptation and planning for the future. Climate change mitigation policies have certain, huge costs in the present and would provide uncertain, small benefits in the future. The relatively poor of today would sacrifice to help the relatively rich of tomorrow.<br />
<br />
Temperature is not the only phenomenon associated with climate change and it is possibly not the most relevant for human welfare, since humans live in wide ranges of temperature. Sea level, precipitations, and extreme weather events can be much more important.<br />
<br />
Sea level can slowly increase due to global warming, but the process is very slow, so that protections can be prepared and capital amortized if necessary; freedom of migration can help relocate people whose lands become inhabitable. Precipitation should in general increase with global warming, although its distribution might change. And the dependence of extreme weather events on temperature is complex and little known.<br />
<br />
For almost all human problems associated with global warming, the influence of climate on them is usually small if compared with other more important factors that can be more easily and efficiently dealt with. Climate change alarmists seem to ignore relatively simple solutions for the problems they raise. Humans are proactive, they do not passively submit to natural influences, and the avoidance of climate change is not necessarily the best option.<br />
<br />
Fresh water is a problem where there are no property rights, markets and prices for water. Tropical diseases depend strongly on socioeconomic conditions. Undeveloped nations are poor mostly due to inadequate social institutions, not because of environmental conditions.<br />
<br />
Heat waves can be dealt with by means of proper air conditioning (and global warming would reduce cold waves and their associated deaths). The extinction of species is mostly due to habitat destruction or invasion by humans (or direct killing, hunting or fishing).<br />
<br />
Global warming catastrophists seem to forget other more important and urgent issues which compete for the allocation of the scarce resources demanded for climate-change mitigation. It is preposterous to declare global warming the worst problem for mankind when there is war, hunger, sickness, and poverty.<br />
<br />
For some radical environmentalists and many politicians, climate change is the most important problem for human civilization, and they pretend to speak in the name of all mankind. But all problems seem to be extreme for them, because they have no notion of relative opportunity costs. Their moral language imposes duties on citizens who seem to be receiving orders about what they must do and what they must avoid no matter what.<br />
<br />
Governments are supposed to be necessary to protect their citizens against aggressions, but they are very incompetent at this task, they often perform their own institutional aggressions by prohibiting perfectly peaceful and voluntary activities; and now with climate change they seem to consider anthropogenic global warming an illegitimate undesirable action.<br />
<br />
<br />
Some radicals even try to censor and criminalize dissent from skeptics, deniers, or minimizers. But thought and speech, even if wrong or false, are never real crimes. There may be special-interest groups on both sides of the debate fighting for their favorite public policies: not only oil, coal, and nuclear companies, but also heavily subsidized renewables.<br />
<br />
While the official mainstream climate science may well be correct, its ignorance regarding economics, political philosophy, and law is huge. The most important entities for a human being are other human beings (for the good and for the bad), and not the environment. Humans can be especially damaging when organized politically and inspired by collectivism.<br />
<br />
The possible damages of climate change should be compared to the possible damages of governmental bureaucratic intervention and political oppression. Maybe the whole global-warming scare is an excuse to increase the extension of political power or a distraction from other serious problems. Social institutions matter most, and they are very wrong now: a huge improvement is possible, and freedom is the answer. Capitalism versus Statismtag:12160.info,2009-10-01:2649739:Topic:1084292009-10-01T05:21:00.713ZLocaltarianhttps://12160.info/profile/Awho
<b>Capitalism versus Statism</b><br />
<a href="http://mises.org/story/3735">http://mises.org/story/3735</a><br />
by Murray N. Rothbard<br />
<br />
<p style="text-align:left"><img src="http://mises.org/images/AnnuitCoeptis.jpg"></img></p>
<br />
From the very first we run into grave problems with the term "capitalism." When we realize that the word was coined by capitalism's most famous enemy, Karl Marx, it is not surprising that a neutral or a pro-"capitalist" analyst might find the term lacking in precision. For capitalism tends to be a catchall, a portmanteau concept…
<b>Capitalism versus Statism</b><br />
<a href="http://mises.org/story/3735">http://mises.org/story/3735</a><br />
by Murray N. Rothbard<br />
<br />
<p style="text-align:left"><img src="http://mises.org/images/AnnuitCoeptis.jpg"/></p>
<br />
From the very first we run into grave problems with the term "capitalism." When we realize that the word was coined by capitalism's most famous enemy, Karl Marx, it is not surprising that a neutral or a pro-"capitalist" analyst might find the term lacking in precision. For capitalism tends to be a catchall, a portmanteau concept that Marxists apply to virtually every society on the face of the globe, with the exception of a few possible "feudalist" countries and the Communist nations (although, of course, the Chinese consider Yugoslavia and Russia "capitalist," while many Trotskyites would include China as well). Marxists, for example, consider India as a "capitalist" country, but India, hagridden by a vast and monstrous network of restrictions, castes, state regulations, and monopoly privileges is about as far from free-market capitalism as can be imagined.[1]<br />
<br />
If we are to keep the term "capitalism" at all, then, we must distinguish between "free-market capitalism" on the one hand, and "state capitalism" on the other. The two are as different as day and night in their nature and consequences. Free-market capitalism is a network of free and voluntary exchanges in which producers work, produce, and exchange their products for the products of others through prices voluntarily arrived at. State capitalism consists of one or more groups making use of the coercive apparatus of the government — the State — to accumulate capital for themselves by expropriating the production of others by force and violence.<br />
<br />
Throughout history, states have existed as instruments for organized predation and exploitation. It doesn't much matter which group of people happen to gain control of the State at any given time, whether it be oriental despots, kings, landlords, privileged merchants, army officers, or Communist parties. The result is everywhere and always the coercive mulcting of the mass of the producers — in most centuries, of course, largely the peasantry — by a ruling class of dominant rulers and their hired professional bureaucracy. Generally, the State has its inception in naked banditry and conquest, after which the conquerors settle down among the subject population to exact permanent and continuing tribute in the form of "taxation" and to parcel out the land of the peasants in huge tracts to the conquering warlords, who then proceed to extract "rent." A modern paradigm is the Spanish conquest of Latin America, when the military conquest of the native Indian peasantry led to the parceling out of Indian lands to the Spanish families, and the settling down of the Spaniards as a permanent ruling class over the native peasantry.<br />
"In a profound sense, the free market is the method and society 'natural' to man; it can and does therefore arise 'naturally' without an elaborate intellectual system to explain and defend it."<br />
<br />
To make their rule permanent, the State rulers need to induce their subject masses to acquiesce in at least the legitimacy of their rule. For this purpose the State has always taken a corps of intellectuals to spin apologia for the wisdom and the necessity of the existing system. The apologia differ over the centuries; sometimes it is the priestcraft using mystery and ritual to tell the subjects that the king is divine and must be obeyed; sometimes it is Keynesian liberals using their own form of mystery to tell the public that government spending, however seemingly unproductive, helps everyone by raising the GNP and energizing the Keynesian "multiplier." But everywhere the purpose is the same — to justify the existing system of rule and exploitation to the subject population; and everywhere the means are the same — the State rulers sharing their rule and a portion of their booty with their intellectuals. In the nineteenth century the intellectuals, the "monarchical socialists" of the University of Berlin, proudly declared that their chief task was to serve as "the intellectual bodyguard of the House of Hohenzollern." This has always been the function of the court intellectuals, past and present — to serve as the intellectual bodyguard of their particular ruling class.<br />
<br />
In a profound sense, the free market is the method and society "natural" to man; it can and does therefore arise "naturally" without an elaborate intellectual system to explain and defend it. The unlettered peasant knows in his heart the difference between hard work and production on the one hand, and predation and expropriation on the other. Unmolested then, there tends to grow up a society of agriculture and commerce where each man works at the task at which he is best suited in the conditions of the time, and then trades his product for the products of others. The peasant grows wheat and exchanges it for the salt of other producers or for the shoes of the local craftsman. If disputes arise over property or over contracts, the peasants and villagers take their problem to the wise men of the area, sometimes the elders of the tribe, to arbitrate their dispute.<br />
<br />
There are numerous historical examples of the growth and development of such a purely free-market society. Two may be mentioned here. One is the fair at Champagne, that for hundreds of years in the Middle Ages was the major center of international trade in Europe. Seeing the importance of the fairs, the kings and barons left them unmolested, untaxed, and unregulated, and any disputes that arose at the fairs were settled in one of many competing, voluntary courts, maintained by church, nobles, and the merchants themselves. A more sweeping and lesser-known example is Celtic Ireland, which for a thousand years maintained a flourishing free-market society without a State. Ireland was finally conquered by the English State in the seventeenth century, but the statelessness of Ireland, the lack of a governmental channel to transmit and enforce the orders and dictates of the conquerors, delayed the conquest for centuries.[2]<br />
<br />
The American colonies were blessed with a strain of individualist libertarian thought that managed to supersede Calvinist authoritarianism, a stream of thought inherited from the libertarian and anti-statist radicals of the English revolution of the seventeenth century. These libertarian ideas were able to take firmer hold in the United States than in the mother country owing to the fact that the American colonies were largely free from the feudal land monopoly that ruled Britain.[3] But in addition to this ideology, the absence of effective central government in many of the colonies allowed the springing up of a "natural" and unselfconscious free-market society, devoid of any political government whatever. This was particularly true of three colonies. One was Albemarle, in what later became northeastern North Carolina, where no government existed for decades until the English Crown bestowed the mammoth Carolina land grant in 1663. Another, and more prominent example was Rhode Island, originally a series of anarchistic settlements founded by groups of refugees from the autocracy of Massachusetts Bay. Finally, a peculiar set of circumstances brought effective individualistic anarchism to Pennsylvania for about a decade in the 1680s and 1690s.[4]<br />
<br />
While the purely free and laissez-faire society arises unselfconsciously where people are given free rein to exert their creative energies, statism has been the dominant principle throughout history. Where State despotism already exists, then liberty can only arise from a self-conscious ideological movement that wages a protracted struggle against statism, and reveals to the mass of the public the grave flaw in its acceptance of the propaganda of the ruling classes. The role of this "revolutionary" movement is to mobilize the various ranks of the oppressed masses, and to desanctify and delegitimize the rule of the State in their eyes.<br />
<br />
It is the glory of Western civilization that it was in Western Europe, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, where, for the first time in history, a large-scale, determined, and at least partially successful self-conscious movement arose to liberate men from the restrictive shackles of statism. As Western Europe became progressively enmeshed in a coercive web of feudal and guild restrictions, and of state monopolies and privileges with the king functioning as the feudal overlord, the liberating movement arose with the conscious aim of freeing the creative energies of the individual, of enabling a society of free men to replace the frozen repression of the old order. The Levellers and the Commonwealthmen and John Locke in England, the philosophes and the Physiocrats in France, inaugurated the Modern Revolution in thought and action that finally culminated in the American and the French Revolutions of the late eighteenth century.<br />
"The famous cry to power was laissez faire: let us be, let us work, produce, trade, move from one jurisdiction or country to another. Let us live and work and produce unhampered by taxes, control, regulations, or monopoly privileges."<br />
<br />
This Revolution was a movement on behalf of individual liberty, and all of its facets were essentially derivations from this fundamental axiom. In religion, the movement stressed separation of Church and State, in other words the end of theocratic tyranny and the advent of religious liberty. In foreign affairs, this was a revolution on behalf of international peace and the end to ceaseless wars on behalf of State conquest and glory to the ruling elite. Politically, it was a movement to divest the ruling class of its absolute power, to reduce the scope of government altogether and to put whatever government remained under the checks of democratic choice and frequent elections. Economically, the movement stressed the freeing of man's productive energies from governmental shackles, so that men could be allowed to work, invest, produce, and exchange where they wished. The famous cry to power was laissez faire: let us be, let us work, produce, trade, move from one jurisdiction or country to another. Let us live and work and produce unhampered by taxes, control, regulations, or monopoly privileges. Adam Smith and the classical economists were only the most economically specialized group of this broad liberating movement.<br />
<br />
It was the partial success of this movement that freed the market economy and thereby gave rise to the Industrial Revolution, probably the most decisive and most liberating event of modern times. It was no accident that the Industrial Revolution in England emerged, not in guild-ridden and State-controlled London, but in the new industrial towns and areas that arose in the previously rural and therefore unregulated north of England. The Industrial Revolution could not come to France until the French Revolution freed the economy from the fetters of feudal landlordism and innumerable local restrictions on trade and production. The Industrial Revolution freed the masses of men from their abject poverty and hopelessness — a poverty aggravated by a growing population that could find no employment in the frozen economy of pre-industrial Europe. The Industrial Revolution, the achievement of free-market capitalism, meant a steady and rapid improvement in the living conditions and the quality of life for the broad masses of people, for workers and consumers alike, wherever the impact of the market was felt.<br />
<br />
An undeveloped and sparsely populated area originally, America did not begin as the leading capitalist country. But after a century of independence it achieved this eminence, and why? Not, as the common myth has it, because of superior natural resources. The resources of Brazil, of Africa, of Asia, are at least as great. The difference came because of the relative freedom in the United States, because it was here that the free-market economy more than in any other country was allowed its head. We began free of a feudal or monopolizing landlord class, and we began with a strongly individualist ideology that permeated much of the population. Obviously, the market in the United States was never completely free or unhampered; but its relatively greater freedom (relative to other countries or centuries) resulted in the enormous release of productive energies, the massive capital equipment, and the unprecedentedly high standard of living that the mass of Americans not only enjoy but take blithely for granted. Living in the lap of a luxury that could not have been dreamed of by the wealthiest emperor of the past, we are all increasingly acting like the man who murdered the goose that laid the golden egg.<br />
<br />
And so we have a mass of intellectuals who habitually sneer at "materialism" and "material values," who proclaim absurdly that we are living in a "post-scarcity age" that permits an unlimited cornucopia of production without requiring anyone to work or produce, who attack our undue affluence as somehow sinful in a perverse recreation of a new form of Puritanism. The idea that our capital machine is automatic and self-perpetuating, that whatever is done to it or not done for it does not matter because it will go on perpetually — this is the farmer blindly destroying the golden goose. Already we are beginning to suffer from the decay of capital equipment, from the restrictions and taxes and special privileges that have increasingly been imposed on the industrial machine in recent decades.<br />
<br />
We are unfortunately making ever more relevant the dire warning of the Spanish philosopher Ortega y Gasset, who analyzed modern man as<br />
<br />
finding himself in a world so excellent, technically and socially, [he] believes that it has been produced by nature, and never thinks of the personal efforts of highly-endowed individuals which the creation of this new world presupposed. Still less will he admit the notion that all these facilities still require the support of certain difficult human virtues, the least failure of which would cause the rapid disappearance of the whole magnificent edifice.<br />
<br />
Ortega held the "mass man" to have one fundamental trait: "his radical ingratitude towards all that has made possible the ease of his existence." This ingratitude is the basic ingredient in the "psychology of the spoiled child." As Ortega declares:<br />
<br />
Heir to an ample and generous past … the new commonality has been spoiled by the world around it … the new masses find themselves in the presence of a prospect full of possibilities, and furthermore, quite secure, with everything ready to their hands, independent of any previous efforts on their part, just as we find the sun in the heavens…. And these spoiled masses are unintelligent enough to believe that the material and social organization, placed at their disposition like the air, is of the same origin, since apparently it never fails them, and is almost as perfect as the natural scheme of things….<br />
<br />
As they do not see, behind the benefits of civilization, marvels of invention and construction that can only be maintained by great effort and foresight, they imagine that their role is limited to demanding these benefits peremptorily, as if they were natural rights. In the disturbances caused by scarcity of food, the mob goes in search of bread, and the means it employs is generally to wreck the bakeries. This may serve as a symbol of the attitude adopted, on a greater and more complicated scale, by the masses of today towards the civilization by which they are supported.[5]<br />
<br />
In an era when countless numbers of irresponsible intellectuals call for the destruction of technology and the return to a primitive "nature" that could only result in the death by starvation of the overwhelmingly greatest part of the world's population, it is instructive to recall Ortega's conclusion:<br />
<br />
Civilization is not "just there," it is not self-supporting. It is artificial and requires the artist or the artisan. If you want to make use of the advantages of civilization, but are not prepared to concern yourself with the upholding of civilization — you are done. In a trice you find yourself left without civilization…. The primitive forest appears in its native state, just as if curtains covering pure Nature had been drawn back.[6]<br />
"In England, the laissez-faire capitalism… was replaced by a Tory statism driving toward aggressive Empire and war against other imperial powers. In the United States the story was the same, as businessmen increasingly turned to the government to impose cartels, monopolies, subsidies, and special privileges."<br />
<br />
The steady decline in the underpinnings of our civilization began in the late nineteenth century, and accelerated during the World Wars I and II and the 1930s. The decline consisted of an accelerating retreat back from the Revolution, and of a shift back to the old order of mercantilism, statism, and international war. In England, the laissez-faire capitalism of Price and Priestly, of the Radicals and of Cobden and Bright and the Manchester school, was replaced by a Tory statism driving toward aggressive Empire and war against other imperial powers. In the United States the story was the same, as businessmen increasingly turned to the government to impose cartels, monopolies, subsidies, and special privileges. Here as in Western Europe, the advent of World War I was the great turning point — in aggravating the imposition of militarism and government-business economic planning at home, and imperial expansion and intervention overseas. The medieval guilds have been re-established in a new form — that of labor unions with their network of restrictions and their role as junior partners of government and industry in the new mercantilism. All the despotic trappings of the old order have returned in a new form. Instead of the absolute monarch, we have the President of the United States, wielding far more power than any monarch of the past. Instead of a constituted nobility, we have an Establishment of wealth and power that continues to rule us regardless of which political party is technically in power. The growth of a bipartisan civil service, of a bipartisan domestic and foreign policy, the advent of cool technicians of power who seem to sit in positions of command regardless of how we vote (the Achesons, the Bundys, the Baruchs, the McCloys, the J. Edgar Hoovers), all underscore our increasing domination by an elite that grows ever fatter and more privileged on the taxes that they are able to extract from the public hide.<br />
<br />
The result of the aggravated network of mercantilist burdens and restrictions has been to place our economy under greater and greater strain. High taxes burden us all, and the military-industrial complex means an enormous diversion of resources, of capital, technology, and of scientists and engineers, from productive uses to the overkill waste of the military machine. Industry after industry has been regulated and cartelized into decline: the railroads, electric power, natural gas, and telephone industries being the most obvious examples. Housing and construction have been saddled with the blight of high property taxes, zoning restrictions, building codes, rent controls, and union featherbedding. As free-market capitalism has been replaced by state capitalism, more and more of our economy has begun to decay and our liberties to erode.<br />
<br />
In fact, it is instructive to make a list of the universally acknowledged problem areas of our economy and our society, and we will find running through that list a common glaring leitmotif: government. In all the high problem areas, government operation or control has been especially conspicuous.<br />
<br />
Let us consider:<br />
<br />
* Foreign policy and war: Exclusively governmental.<br />
* Conscription: Exclusively governmental.<br />
* Crime in the streets: The police and the judges are a monopoly of government, and so are the streets.<br />
* Welfare system: The problem is in government welfare; there is no special problem in the private welfare agencies.<br />
* Water pollution: Municipally owned garbage is dumped in government owned rivers and oceans.<br />
* Postal service: The failings are in the government owned Post Office, not, for example, among such highly successful private competitors as bus-delivered packages and the Independent Postal System of America, for third-class mail.<br />
* The military-industrial complex: Rests entirely on government contracts.<br />
* Railroads: Subsidized and regulated heavily by government for a century.<br />
* Telephone: A government-privileged monopoly.<br />
* Gas and electric: A government-privileged monopoly.<br />
* Housing: Bedeviled by rent controls, property taxes, zoning laws, and urban renewal programs (all government).<br />
* Excess highways: All built and owned by government.<br />
* Union restrictions and strikes: The result of government privilege, notably in the Wagner Act of 1935.<br />
* High taxation: Exclusively governmental.<br />
* The schools: Almost all governmental, or if not directly so, heavily government subsidized and regulated.<br />
* Wiretapping and invasion of civil liberties: Almost all done by government.<br />
* Money and inflation: The money and banking system is totally under the control and manipulation of government.<br />
<br />
Examine the problem areas, and everywhere, like a red thread, there lies the overweening stain of government. In contrast, consider the frisbee industry. Frisbees are produced, sold, and purchased without headaches, without upheavals, without mass breakdowns or protests. As a relatively free industry, the peaceful and productive frisbee business is a model of what the American economy once was and can be again — if it is freed of the repressive shackles of big government.<br />
"[I]f the glorious public sector, if expanded government, has brought us to this pretty pass, perhaps the answer is to roll government back, to return to the truly revolutionary path of dismantling the Big State."<br />
<br />
In The Affluent Society, written in the late 1950s, John Kenneth Galbraith pinpointed the fact that the governmental areas are our problem areas. But his explanation was that we have "starved" the public sector and that therefore we should be taxed more heavily in order to enlarge the public sector still further at the expense of the private. But Galbraith overlooked the glaring fact that the proportion of national income and resources devoted to government has been expanding enormously since the turn of the century. If the problems did not appear before, and have appeared increasingly in precisely the expanded governmental sector, the judicious might well conclude that perhaps the problem lies in the public sector itself. And that is precisely the contention of the free-market libertarian. Problems and breakdowns are inherent in the operations of the public sector and of government generally. Deprived of a profit-and-loss test to gauge productivity and efficiency, the sphere of government shifts decision-making power from the hands of every individual and cooperating group, and places that power in the hands of an overall governmental machine. Not only is that machine coercive and inefficient; it is necessarily dictatorial because whichever decision it may make, there are always minorities or majorities whose desires and choices have been overridden. A public school must make one decision in each area: it must decide whether to be disciplined or progressive or some blend of the two; whether to be pro-capitalist or pro-socialist or neutral; whether to be integrated or segregated, elitist or egalitarian, and so on. Whatever it decides, there are citizens who are permanently deprived. But in the free market, parents are free to patronize whatever private or voluntary schools they wish, and different groups of parents will then be able to exercise their choice unhampered. The free market enables every individual and group to maximize its range of choice, to make its own decisions and choices and to put them into effect.<br />
<br />
It is ironic that Professor Galbraith does not seem to be very happy about the public sector as it has lately been manifesting itself: in the military-industrial complex, in the war in Vietnam, in what Galbraith has himself properly derided as President Nixon's "Big Business Socialism." But if the glorious public sector, if expanded government, has brought us to this pretty pass, perhaps the answer is to roll government back, to return to the truly revolutionary path of dismantling the Big State.<br />
<br />
Indeed, American liberals — who for decades have been the main heralds and apologists for big government and the welfare state — have increasingly become unhappy at the results of their own efforts. For just as in the days of oriental despotism, state rule cannot endure for long without a corps of intellectuals to spin the arguments and the rationale to gain the support and the sense of legitimacy among the public, and the liberals (the overwhelming majority of American intellectuals) have served since the New Deal as the celebrants of big government and the welfare state. But many liberals are coming to realize that they have been in power, have fashioned American society, for four decades now, and it is clear to them that something has gone radically wrong. After four decades of the welfare state at home and "collective security" abroad, the consequences of New Deal liberalism have clearly seen aggravated breakdowns and conflicts at home and perpetual war and intervention abroad. Lyndon Johnson, with whom liberals became extremely unhappy, correctly referred to Franklin Roosevelt as his "Big Daddy" — and the parentage on all foreign and domestic fronts was quite clear. Richard Nixon is scarcely distinguishable from his predecessor. If many liberals have become strangers and afraid in a world they have made, then perhaps the fault lies precisely in liberalism itself.<br />
<br />
If, then, there is to be a rollback of statism, there will have to be another ideological revolution to match the rise of the classical radicals of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Intellectuals will have to shift, in large part, back from their role as apologists for the State to resume their function as upholders of the standards of truth and reason as against the status quo. In the last several years, there have been signs of disenchantment by the intellectuals, but the shift has been largely a wrongheaded one. As a result, in the current split between liberals and radicals among the intelligentsia, neither side provides us with the requisites of civilization, with the requisites for maintaining a prosperous and free industrial order. The liberals have offered us the spurious rationality of technocratic service to the Leviathan State of fitting in as manipulated cogs in the bureaucratic government-industrial machinery. Liberalism's solution to every domestic problem is to tax and inflate more and to allocate more federal funds; its solution for foreign crises is to "send the Marines" (accompanied, of course, by politico-economic planners to alleviate the destruction that the Marines cause). Surely we cannot continue to accept the proffered solutions of a liberalism that has manifestly failed. But the tragedy is that the radicals have taken the liberals at their face value: identifying reason, technology, and industry with the current liberal-mercantilist order, the radicals, in order to reject the current system, have turned their backs on the former necessary virtues as well.<br />
"[T]he radicals, feeling themselves forced into a visceral rejection of the world of liberalism, of Vietnam and the public-school system, have adopted the liberals' own identification of their own system with reason, industry, and technology."<br />
<br />
In short, the radicals, feeling themselves forced into a visceral rejection of the world of liberalism, of Vietnam and the public-school system, have adopted the liberals' own identification of their own system with reason, industry, and technology. Hence the radicals raise the cry for the rejection of reason on behalf of emotions and vague mysticism, of rationality for inchoate and capricious spontaneity, of work and foresight for hedonism and dropping out, of technology and industry for the return to "nature" and the primitive tribe. In doing so, in adopting this pervasive nihilism, the radicals are offering us even less of a viable solution than their liberal enemies. For the murder of millions in Vietnam they would, in effect, substitute the death by starvation of the vast bulk of the world's population. The radicals' vision cannot be accepted by sane people, and the bulk of Americans, their ignorance or errors otherwise, are astute enough to recognize this fact and to make loud, clear, and sometimes brutal their rejection of the radicals and their alternative ethic, society, and life-style.<br />
<br />
The point of this essay is that the public need not be forced to choose between the alternative of repressive and stifling welfare-warfare state monopoly liberalism on the one hand, or the irrational and nihilistic return to tribal primitivism on the other. The radical alternative is evidently not compatible with a prosperous life and industrial civilization; this much is crystal clear. But less clear is the fact that corporate state liberalism is in the long run also not compatible with an industrial civilization. The one route offers our society a quick suicide; the other a slow and lingering murder.<br />
<br />
There is, then, a third alternative — one that has still gone unheeded amid the great debate between liberals and radicals. That alternative is to return to the ideals and to the structure that generated our industrial order and that is needed for that order's long-run survival — to return to the system that will bring us industry, technology, and rapidly advancing prosperity without war, militarism, or stifling governmental bureaucracy. That system is laissez-faire capitalism, what Adam Smith called "the natural system of liberty," a system that rests on an ethic that encourages individual reason, purpose, and achievement. The nineteenth-century libertarian theorists — men like the Frenchmen of the Restoration era, Charles Comte and Charles Dunoyer, and the Englishman Herbert Spencer — saw clearly that militarism and statism are relics and throwbacks of the past, that they are incompatible with the functioning of an industrial civilization. That is why Spencer and the others contrasted the "military" with the "industrial" principle, and judged that one or the other would have to prevail.<br />
<br />
What I am suggesting, in short, in the oversimplified categories made popular by Charles Reich, is a return to "Consciousness I" — a Consciousness that is brusquely dismissed by Reich and his readers as they proceed to take sides in the great debate between Consciousness II and III. To Reich, Consciousness I was made obsolete by the growth of modern technology and mass production, which made the turn to the corporate state inevitable. But here Reich is not being radical enough; he is simply adopting the conventional liberal historiography that big government was made necessary by the growth of large-scale industry. If he were familiar with economics, Reich would realize that it is precisely advanced industrial economies that require a free market to survive and flourish; on the contrary, an agricultural society can plod along indefinitely under despotism provided that the peasants are left enough of their produce to survive. The Communist countries of Eastern Europe have discovered this fact in recent years; hence, the more they industrialize the greater and more inexorable their movement away from socialism and central planning and toward a free-market economy. The rapid shift of the East European countries toward the free market is one of the most heartening and dramatic developments in the last two decades; yet the trend has gone almost unnoticed, for the left finds the shift away from statism and egalitarianism in Yugoslavia and the other East European countries extremely embarrassing, while the conservatives are reluctant to concede that there may be anything hopeful about the Communist nations.<br />
<br />
Furthermore, Reich is clearly unaware of the finds of Gabriel Kolko and other recent historians that completely revise our picture of the origins of the current welfare-warfare state. Far from large-scale industry forcing the knowledge that regulation and big government were inevitable, it was precisely the effectiveness of free-market competition that led big businessmen seeking monopoly to turn to the government to provide such privileges. There was nothing in the economy that objectively required a shift from Consciousness I to Consciousness II: only the age-old desire of men for subsidy and special privilege created the "counter revolution" of statism. In fact, as we have seen, this development only cripples and hampers the workings of modern industry; objective reality would require a return to Consciousness I. In this world of remarkably swift changes in values and ideologies, such a change in consciousness cannot be ruled out as impossible; far stranger things have been happening.<br />
<br />
<br />
"In one sense, the adoption of libertarian values and institutions would be a return; in another, it would be a profound and radical advance."<br />
<br />
In one sense, the adoption of libertarian values and institutions would be a return; in another, it would be a profound and radical advance. For while the older libertarians were essentially revolutionary, they allowed partial successes to turn themselves strategically and tactically into seeming defenders of the status quo, mere resisters of change. In taking this stance, the earlier libertarians lost their radical perspective; for libertarianism has never come fully into being. What they must do is become "radicals" once again, as Jefferson and Price and Cobden and Thoreau were before them. To do this they must hold aloft the banner of their ultimate goal, the ultimate triumph of the age-old logic of the concepts of free market, liberty, and private property rights. That ultimate goal is the dissolution of the State into the social organism, the privatizing of the public sector.<br />
<br />
In contrast to the dysfunctional vision of the New Left, this is a goal wholly compatible with the functioning of an industrial society — and with peace and freedom as well. All too many of the older libertarians lacked the intellectual courage to press on — to call for total victory rather than settle for partial triumph — to apply their principles to the fields of money, police, the courts, the State itself. They failed to heed the injunction of William Lloyd Garrison that "gradualism in theory is perpetuity in practice." For if the pure theory is never held aloft, how can it ever be achieved? The Inorganic Recoverytag:12160.info,2009-09-10:2649739:Topic:986242009-09-10T03:55:24.832ZLocaltarianhttps://12160.info/profile/Awho
<b>The Inorganic Recovery</b><br />
by Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.<br />
<a href="http://mises.org/story/3700">http://mises.org/story/3700</a><br />
<br />
<p style="text-align:left"><img src="http://mises.org/images/FinancialFingersCrossed.jpg"></img></p>
<br />
There is something affected, something not believable, something agitpropish, about all the cheers for the glorious economic recovery we are supposed to be experiencing. Even some of the recovery's biggest boosters don't quite believe it.<br />
<br />
I'm thinking of the reporter on National Public Radio a few days ago who, at the end…
<b>The Inorganic Recovery</b><br />
by Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.<br />
<a href="http://mises.org/story/3700">http://mises.org/story/3700</a><br />
<br />
<p style="text-align:left"><img src="http://mises.org/images/FinancialFingersCrossed.jpg"/></p>
<br />
There is something affected, something not believable, something agitpropish, about all the cheers for the glorious economic recovery we are supposed to be experiencing. Even some of the recovery's biggest boosters don't quite believe it.<br />
<br />
I'm thinking of the reporter on National Public Radio a few days ago who, at the end of a segment, offered a passing warning that the bust did not come to an "organic" end, but rather was artificially stopped by government intervention.<br />
<br />
That's an intriguing admission, suggesting that not even this reporter really believes the hype. I certainly don't believe it. In fact, I seriously doubt that even the champions of this great fakeroo believe it.<br />
<br />
What that reporter hinted at is the crucial difference between a recovery that comes from within the structure of the market economy and one that is imposed from without. The former is sustainable, a basis for growth in the future. The latter is not sustainable. It lasts only so long as the stimulus lasts.<br />
<br />
The most conspicuous problem remains unemployment, which is nearing double digits in the official data, while unofficial data, even from Fed economists, hint that the reality is closer to 16 percent. Among the youth, the rate is 25 percent and growing.<br />
<br />
Month after month, the press announces the "good news" that unemployment is not as high as expected. And yet if you look at the trend line, we are in an uninterrupted climb in job losses of a scale we have not seen in our lifetimes.<br />
<br />
To be sure, this is only a symptom. When an economy goes from boom to bust, a bout of job losses is inevitable. The losses can even suggest a good trend, as people leave jobs in failing sectors to enter jobs in the healthy sectors. Policy should not attempt to stop this trend.<br />
<br />
What is of concern here is the timing. The problem keeps getting worse, which suggests that in fact the bust has not played itself out entirely. And this is backed by other trends.<br />
<br />
Let's first talk about housing statistics, which are off the cliff. Consider housing starts. Over a year, they have crashed from a height of 1.8 million per month to 390 thousand per month. The latest rebound looks like a blip on the radar screen.<br />
<br />
The July numbers on foreclosures are the worst we've seen, and the third new record in five months. Already 2.9 million homes have been foreclosed on, and there are probably at least that many still on the chopping block. Banks are reluctant to do the deed because foreclosures devastate their books, so they delay as long as possible.<br />
<br />
There is also the sleeping giant of commercial real estate, which rose as much as residential housing, tripling loaned dollars in the course of a mere 10 years. But there has not yet been a crash here. Looking at the numbers, one gets the impression of a high-flying jet about to run out of gas.<br />
<br />
And when you broaden the perspective past housing, to the whole of domestic investment, it looks like an Olympic high dive with no end in sight. In fact, ten years of investment has been effectively reverted. We stand today where we stood in 1999.<br />
<br />
Investment is a very important piece of data for assessing our future, because it is always forward looking. In this case, there doesn't seem to be progress in the future at all. Even from the point at which this figure turns, we have another few years before real economic growth returns.<br />
<br />
Why do matters in the financial sector look better? This is wholly a consequence of trillions in artificial stimulus, a market rejiggered and falsified through money creation, partial nationalization, and bailouts. These do not last.<br />
<br />
A few months ago, many people were worrying about the inflationary future that is suggested by the astonishing increase in phony bank reserves over the last year. Today, however, the tune has changed. Bernanke is now being heralded as the great genius of our times.<br />
<br />
What this suggests is that no efforts are going to be undertaken to suck the phoniness out of the system. The new reserves are going to stay in the system, and every effort will be taken to convert the reserves into real money supply increases. And if that actually happens, you had better hold on for a wild, inflationary ride.<br />
<br />
Do I even need to mention the federal budget problems? Revenues continue to collapse as government spending soars, creating a gigantic hole in the budget at a time when the pressure for more spending is cranked up by the recession. There is no talk of budget cuts. We are entering uncharted territory.<br />
<br />
A year ago this month, the whole country was in agreement that we had been living an illusion for the previous ten years and that the prosperity we thought we were enjoying was not sustainable. There was no dissent on this point. Even Obama admitted it. Today, the illusion is even more egregious than it was, and yet people are once again embracing it as if it will not end.<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
The policy response to the downturn has been one of the most shortsighted and economically irrational in the entire history of mankind. Why did they do it? It's all for the politics of the short term.<br />
<br />
The entire economic structure has been phonied up in order to make a success of the Obama cult. This is the driving motivation, alongside the obvious desire on the part of financial and banking big shots for a bailout.<br />
<br />
Please clip and save this column; reread it 18 months from now. In the meantime, don't be among those who believe that the government has discovered the secret of prosperity in the offices of the Bureau of Engraving and Printing. Literature from the Von Mises Institutetag:12160.info,2009-08-24:2649739:Topic:938382009-08-24T00:45:08.585ZLocaltarianhttps://12160.info/profile/Awho
The Logic of Law<br />
<a href="http://libertarianpapers.org/articles/2009/lp-1-36.pdf">http://libertarianpapers.org/articles/2009/lp-1-36.pdf</a><br />
<br />
Gold, the Golden Rule, and Government: Civil Society and the End of the State<br />
<a href="http://libertarianpapers.org/articles/2009/lp-1-32.pdf">http://libertarianpapers.org/articles/2009/lp-1-32.pdf</a><br />
<br />
Property, Freedom, and Society (Full 426 page book)…
The Logic of Law<br />
<a href="http://libertarianpapers.org/articles/2009/lp-1-36.pdf">http://libertarianpapers.org/articles/2009/lp-1-36.pdf</a><br />
<br />
Gold, the Golden Rule, and Government: Civil Society and the End of the State<br />
<a href="http://libertarianpapers.org/articles/2009/lp-1-32.pdf">http://libertarianpapers.org/articles/2009/lp-1-32.pdf</a><br />
<br />
Property, Freedom, and Society (Full 426 page book)<br />
<a href="http://mises.org/books/property_freedom_society_kinsella.pdf">http://mises.org/books/property_freedom_society_kinsella.pdf</a><br />
<br />
Too Much Government, Too Much Taxation (Full 439 page book)<br />
<a href="http://mises.org/books/Too_Much_Government_Too_Much_Taxation_Fay.pdf">http://mises.org/books/Too_Much_Government_Too_Much_Taxation_Fay.pdf</a><br />
<br />
<br />
The History of Banks<br />
<a href="http://mises.org/books/History_of_Banks_Hildreth.pdf">http://mises.org/books/History_of_Banks_Hildreth.pdf</a><br />
<br />
<br />
Our Enemy, The State<br />
<a href="http://mises.org/books/Our_Enemy_The_State_Nock.pdf">http://mises.org/books/Our_Enemy_The_State_Nock.pdf</a><br />
<br />
<br />
The Challenge of Liberty<br />
<a href="http://mises.org/books/challenge_of_liberty_Jones.pdf">http://mises.org/books/challenge_of_liberty_Jones.pdf</a><br />
<br />
<br />
How to Keep Our Liberty<br />
<a href="http://mises.org/books/How_to_keep_our_Liberty_Moley.pdf">http://mises.org/books/How_to_keep_our_Liberty_Moley.pdf</a><br />
<br />
The Ethics of the U.S. Monetary Policy In Response to the Financial Crisis of 2007-2009<br />
<a href="http://libertarianpapers.org/articles/2009/lp-1-31.pdf">http://libertarianpapers.org/articles/2009/lp-1-31.pdf</a><br />
<br />
<br />
Freedom and the Law<br />
<a href="http://mises.org/books/Freedom_and_the_Law_Leoni.pdf">http://mises.org/books/Freedom_and_the_Law_Leoni.pdf</a><br />
<br />
<br />
Gold is Money<br />
<a href="http://mises.org/books/Gold_is_Money_Sennholz.pdf">http://mises.org/books/Gold_is_Money_Sennholz.pdf</a> What Soviet Medicine Teaches Ustag:12160.info,2009-08-21:2649739:Topic:932232009-08-21T19:58:51.663ZLocaltarianhttps://12160.info/profile/Awho
<b>What Soviet Medicine Teaches Us</b><br />
Yuri N. Maltsev<br />
<a href="http://mises.org/story/3650">http://mises.org/story/3650</a><br />
<br />
<p style="text-align:left"><img src="http://mises.org/images/ObamaCareSymbol.jpg"></img></p>
<br />
In 1918, the Soviet Union became the first country to promise universal "cradle-to-grave" healthcare coverage, to be accomplished through the complete socialization of medicine. The "right to health" became a "constitutional right" of Soviet citizens.<br />
<br />
The proclaimed advantages of this system were that it would "reduce costs"…
<b>What Soviet Medicine Teaches Us</b><br />
Yuri N. Maltsev<br />
<a href="http://mises.org/story/3650">http://mises.org/story/3650</a><br />
<br />
<p style="text-align:left"><img src="http://mises.org/images/ObamaCareSymbol.jpg"/></p>
<br />
In 1918, the Soviet Union became the first country to promise universal "cradle-to-grave" healthcare coverage, to be accomplished through the complete socialization of medicine. The "right to health" became a "constitutional right" of Soviet citizens.<br />
<br />
The proclaimed advantages of this system were that it would "reduce costs" and eliminate the "waste" that stemmed from "unnecessary duplication and parallelism" — i.e., competition.<br />
<br />
These goals were similar to the ones declared by Mr. Obama and Ms. Pelosi — attractive and humane goals of universal coverage and low costs. What's not to like?<br />
<br />
The system had many decades to work, but widespread apathy and low quality of work paralyzed the healthcare system. In the depths of the socialist experiment, healthcare institutions in Russia were at least a hundred years behind the average US level. Moreover, the filth, odors, cats roaming the halls, drunken medical personnel, and absence of soap and cleaning supplies added to an overall impression of hopelessness and frustration that paralyzed the system. According to official Russian estimates, 78 percent of all AIDS victims in Russia contracted the virus through dirty needles or HIV-tainted blood in the state-run hospitals.<br />
<br />
Irresponsibility, expressed by the popular Russian saying "They pretend they are paying us and we pretend we are working," resulted in appalling quality of service, widespread corruption, and extensive loss of life. My friend, a famous neurosurgeon in today's Russia, received a monthly salary of 150 rubles — one third of the average bus driver's salary.<br />
<br />
In order to receive minimal attention by doctors and nursing personnel, patients had to pay bribes. I even witnessed a case of a "nonpaying" patient who died trying to reach a lavatory at the end of the long corridor after brain surgery. Anesthesia was usually "not available" for abortions or minor ear, nose, throat, and skin surgeries. This was used as a means of extortion by unscrupulous medical bureaucrats.<br />
"Slavery certainly 'reduced costs' of labor, 'eliminated the waste' of bargaining for wages, and avoided 'unnecessary duplication and parallelism'."<br />
<br />
To improve the statistics concerning the numbers of people dying within the system, patients were routinely shoved out the door before taking their last breath.<br />
<br />
Being a People's Deputy in the Moscow region from 1987 to 1989, I received many complaints about criminal negligence, bribes taken by medical apparatchiks, drunken ambulance crews, and food poisoning in hospitals and child-care facilities. I recall the case of a fourteen-year-old girl from my district who died of acute nephritis in a Moscow hospital. She died because a doctor decided that it was better to save "precious" X-ray film (imported by the Soviets for hard currency) instead of double-checking his diagnosis. These X-rays would have disproven his diagnosis of neuropathic pain.<br />
<br />
Instead, the doctor treated the teenager with a heat compress, which killed her almost instantly. There was no legal remedy for the girl's parents and grandparents. By definition, a single-payer system cannot allow any such remedy. The girl's grandparents could not cope with this loss and they both died within six months. The doctor received no official reprimand.<br />
<br />
Not surprisingly, government bureaucrats and Communist Party officials, as early as 1921 (three years after Lenin's socialization of medicine), realized that the egalitarian system of healthcare was good only for their personal interest as providers, managers, and rationers — but not as private users of the system.<br />
<br />
So, as in all countries with socialized medicine, a two-tier system was created: one for the "gray masses" and the other, with a completely different level of service, for the bureaucrats and their intellectual servants. In the USSR, it was often the case that while workers and peasants were dying in the state hospitals, the medicine and equipment that could save their lives was sitting unused in the nomenklatura system.<br />
<br />
At the end of the socialist experiment, the official infant-mortality rate in Russia was more than 2.5 times as high as in the United States and more than five times that of Japan. The rate of 24.5 deaths per 1,000 live births was questioned recently by several deputies to the Russian Parliament, who claim that it is seven times higher than in the United States. This would make the Russian death rate 55 compared to the US rate of 8.1 per 1,000 live births.<br />
<br />
Having said that, I should make it clear that the United States has one of the highest rates of the industrialized world only because it counts all dead infants, including premature babies, which is where most of the fatalities occur.<br />
<br />
Most countries do not count premature-infant deaths. Some don't count any deaths that occur in the first 72 hours. Some countries don't even count any deaths from the first two weeks of life. In Cuba, which boasts a very low infant-mortality rate, infants are only registered when they are several months old, thereby leaving out of the official statistics all infant deaths that take place within the first several months of life.<br />
<br />
In the rural regions of Karakalpakia, Sakha, Chechnya, Kalmykia, and Ingushetia, the infant mortality rate is close to 100 per 1,000 births, putting these regions in the same category as Angola, Chad, and Bangladesh. Tens of thousands of infants fall victim to influenza every year, and the proportion of children dying from pneumonia and tuberculosis is on the increase. Rickets, caused by a lack of vitamin D, and unknown in the rest of the modern world, is killing many young people.<br />
<br />
Uterine damage is widespread, thanks to the 7.3 abortions the average Russian woman undergoes during childbearing years. Keeping in mind that many women avoid abortions altogether, the 7.3 average means that many women have a dozen or more abortions in their lifetime.<br />
<br />
Even today, according to the State Statistics Committee, the average life expectancy for Russian men is less than 59 years — 58 years and 11 months — while that for Russian women is 72 years. The combined figure is 65 years and three months.[1] By comparison, the average life span for men in the United States is 73 years and for women 79 years. In the United States, life expectancy at birth for the total population has reached an all-time American high of 77.5 years, up from 49.2 years just a century ago. The Russian life expectancy at birth is 12 years lower.[2]<br />
<br />
After seventy years of socialism, 57 percent of all Russian hospitals did not have running hot water, and 36 percent of hospitals located in rural areas of Russia did not have water or sewage at all. Isn't it amazing that socialist government, while developing space exploration and sophisticated weapons, would completely ignore the basic human needs of its citizens?<br />
"The filth, odors, cats roaming the halls, drunken medical personnel, and absence of soap and cleaning supplies added to an overall impression of hopelessness and frustration that paralyzed the system."<br />
<br />
The appalling quality of service is not simply characteristic of "barbarous" Russia and other Eastern European nations: it is a direct result of the government monopoly on healthcare and it can happen in any country. In "civilized" England, for example, the waiting list for surgeries is nearly 800,000 out of a population of 55 million. State-of-the-art equipment is nonexistent in most British hospitals. In England, only 10 percent of the healthcare spending is derived from private sources.<br />
<br />
Britain pioneered in developing kidney-dialysis technology, and yet the country has one of the lowest dialysis rates in the world. The Brookings Institution (hardly a supporter of free markets) found that every year 7,000 Britons in need of hip replacements, between 4,000 and 20,000 in need of coronary bypass surgery, and some 10,000 to 15,000 in need of cancer chemotherapy are denied medical attention in Britain.<br />
<br />
Age discrimination is particularly apparent in all government-run or heavily regulated systems of healthcare. In Russia, patients over 60 are considered worthless parasites and those over 70 are often denied even elementary forms of healthcare.<br />
<br />
In the United Kingdom, in the treatment of chronic kidney failure, those who are 55 years old are refused treatment at 35 percent of dialysis centers. Forty-five percent of 65-year-old patients at the centers are denied treatment, while patients 75 or older rarely receive any medical attention at these centers.<br />
<br />
In Canada, the population is divided into three age groups in terms of their access to healthcare: those below 45, those 45–65, and those over 65. Needless to say, the first group, who could be called the "active taxpayers," enjoys priority treatment.<br />
<br />
Advocates of socialized medicine in the United States use Soviet propaganda tactics to achieve their goals. Michael Moore is one of the most prominent and effective socialist propagandists in America. In his movie, Sicko, he unfairly and unfavorably compares health care for older patients in the United States with complex and incurable diseases to healthcare in France and Canada for young women having routine babies. Had he done the reverse — i.e., compared healthcare for young women in the United States having babies to older patients with complex and incurable diseases in socialized healthcare systems — the movie would have been the same, except that the US healthcare system would look ideal, and the UK, Canada, and France would look barbaric.<br />
<br />
Now we in the United States are being prepared for discrimination in treatment of the elderly when it comes to healthcare. Ezekiel Emanuel is director of the Clinical Bioethics Department at the US National Institutes of Health and an architect of Obama's healthcare-reform plan. He is also the brother of Rahm Emanuel, Obama's White House chief of staff. Foster Friess reports that Ezekiel Emanuel has written that health services should not be guaranteed to<br />
<br />
individuals who are irreversibly prevented from being or becoming participating citizens. An obvious example is not guaranteeing health services to patients with dementia.[3]<br />
<br />
An equally troubling article, coauthored by Emanuel, appeared in the medical journal The Lancet in January 2009. The authors write that<br />
<br />
unlike allocation [of healthcare] by sex or race, allocation by age is not invidious discrimination; every person lives through different life stages rather than being a single age. Even if 25-year-olds receive priority over 65-year-olds, everyone who is 65 years now was previously 25 years. Treating 65-year-olds differently because of stereotypes or falsehoods would be ageist; treating them differently because they have already had more life-years is not.[4]<br />
<br />
Socialized medicine will create massive government bureaucracies — similar to our unified school districts — impose costly job-destroying mandates on employers to provide the coverage, and impose price controls that will inevitably lead to shortages and poor quality of service. It will also lead to nonprice rationing (i.e., rationing based on political considerations, corruption, and nepotism) of healthcare by government bureaucrats.<br />
<br />
Real "savings" in a socialized healthcare system could be achieved only by squeezing providers and denying care — there is no other way to save. The same arguments were used to defend the cotton farming in the South prior to the Civil War. Slavery certainly "reduced costs" of labor, "eliminated the waste" of bargaining for wages, and avoided "unnecessary duplication and parallelism."<br />
<br />
In supporting the call for socialized medicine, American healthcare professionals are like sheep demanding the wolf: they do not understand that the high cost of medical care in the United States is partially based on the fact that American healthcare professionals have the highest level of remuneration in the world. Another source of the high cost of our healthcare is existing government regulations on the industry, regulations that prevent competition from lowering the cost. Existing rules such as "certificates of need," licensing, and other restrictions on the availability of healthcare services prevent competition and, therefore, result in higher prices and fewer services.<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
Socialized medical systems have not served to raise general health or living standards anywhere. In fact, both analytical reasoning and empirical evidence point to the opposite conclusion. But the dismal failure of socialized medicine to raise people's health and longevity has not affected its appeal for politicians, administrators, and their intellectual servants in search of absolute power and total control.<br />
<br />
Most countries enslaved by the Soviet empire moved out of a fully socialized system through privatization and insuring competition in the healthcare system. Others, including many European social democracies, intend to privatize the healthcare system in the long run and decentralize medical control. The private ownership of hospitals and other units is seen as a critical determining factor of the new, more efficient, and humane system. Audio Lectures and Essay's of Members from the Von Mises Institutetag:12160.info,2009-08-16:2649739:Topic:913002009-08-16T02:43:50.435ZLocaltarianhttps://12160.info/profile/Awho
Mark Thornton on "An Introduction to Libertarianism"<br />
<a href="http://mises.org/multimedia/mp3/Thornton-01-19-2006.mp3">http://mises.org/multimedia/mp3/Thornton-01-19-2006.mp3</a><br />
<br />
Lew Rockwell on "What the Government is doing to our money"<br />
<a href="http://mises.org/multimedia/mp3/misescircle-ny06/Rockwell.mp3">http://mises.org/multimedia/mp3/misescircle-ny06/Rockwell.mp3</a><br />
<br />
Thomas E. Woods Jr. on "The Revolutionary War and the Destruction of the Continental…
Mark Thornton on "An Introduction to Libertarianism"<br />
<a href="http://mises.org/multimedia/mp3/Thornton-01-19-2006.mp3">http://mises.org/multimedia/mp3/Thornton-01-19-2006.mp3</a><br />
<br />
Lew Rockwell on "What the Government is doing to our money"<br />
<a href="http://mises.org/multimedia/mp3/misescircle-ny06/Rockwell.mp3">http://mises.org/multimedia/mp3/misescircle-ny06/Rockwell.mp3</a><br />
<br />
Thomas E. Woods Jr. on "The Revolutionary War and the Destruction of the Continental<br />
<a href="http://mises.org/multimedia/mp3/misescircle-ny06/Woods.mp3">http://mises.org/multimedia/mp3/misescircle-ny06/Woods.mp3</a><br />
<br />
Walter Block on "The Origin and Nature of Money"<br />
<a href="http://mises.org/multimedia/mp3/misescircle-ny06/Block.mp3">http://mises.org/multimedia/mp3/misescircle-ny06/Block.mp3</a><br />
<br />
Hans-Hermann Hoppe on "The Free market: A world without Theft"<br />
<a href="http://mises.org/MultiMedia/mp3/misescircle2006b/Hoppe.mp3">http://mises.org/MultiMedia/mp3/misescircle2006b/Hoppe.mp3</a><br />
<br />
Robert P. Murphy on "Anarchy and Economies of Scale"<br />
<a href="http://mises.org/multimedia/mp3/BB05/Murphy-07-13-2005.mp3">http://mises.org/multimedia/mp3/BB05/Murphy-07-13-2005.mp3</a><br />
<br />
Scott Beaulier on "Austrian Economics and the Third World Development"<br />
<a href="http://mises.org/MultiMedia/mp3/bb05/bb-07-06-2005.mp3">http://mises.org/MultiMedia/mp3/bb05/bb-07-06-2005.mp3</a><br />
<br />
Robert E. Perry on "How Small-scale Entrepreneurs can Compete in (Heavy Industries) Markets Dominated by International Giants"<br />
<a href="http://mises.org/MultiMedia/mp3/bb05/Perry.mp3">http://mises.org/MultiMedia/mp3/bb05/Perry.mp3</a><br />
<br />
The Welfare State: Promising Protection in an Age of Anxiety 8/24/2009 by Robert Higgs<br />
<a href="http://mises.org/MultiMedia/mp3/audioarticles/3634_Higgs.mp3">http://mises.org/MultiMedia/mp3/audioarticles/3634_Higgs.mp3</a><br />
<br />
Can We Have a World Without Taxes? 8/21/2009 by Walter Block<br />
<a href="http://mises.org/MultiMedia/block/block_08-21-2009.mp3">http://mises.org/MultiMedia/block/block_08-21-2009.mp3</a> Here you will find Videos of Presentations and Lectures from the Ludwig Von Mises Institutetag:12160.info,2009-08-13:2649739:Topic:891812009-08-13T02:42:35.868ZLocaltarianhttps://12160.info/profile/Awho
Why The Meltdown should have surprised no one<br />
<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EgMclXX5msc">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EgMclXX5msc</a><br />
<br />
80 Years Later: The Parallels Between 1929 and 2009<br />
<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rQILK-m7AVM">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rQILK-m7AVM</a><br />
<br />
Why You've Never Heard of the Great Depression of 1920<br />
<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=czcUmnsprQI">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=czcUmnsprQI</a><br />
<br />
How Abolishing the Fed Would Change…
Why The Meltdown should have surprised no one<br />
<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EgMclXX5msc">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EgMclXX5msc</a><br />
<br />
80 Years Later: The Parallels Between 1929 and 2009<br />
<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rQILK-m7AVM">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rQILK-m7AVM</a><br />
<br />
Why You've Never Heard of the Great Depression of 1920<br />
<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=czcUmnsprQI">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=czcUmnsprQI</a><br />
<br />
How Abolishing the Fed Would Change Everything<br />
<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rm7d2H7ayPU">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rm7d2H7ayPU</a><br />
<br />
Monetary Freedom and It's Opposite<br />
<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B11_BPoEPsQ">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B11_BPoEPsQ</a><br />
<br />
Entrepreneurship Under the Gold Standard<br />
<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Of9j69dJynM">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Of9j69dJynM</a><br />
<br />
Ending the Monetary Fiasco and Returning to Sound Money<br />
<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5w9mqaE10_A">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5w9mqaE10_A</a><br />
<br />
Anti Trust and Monopoly (With Ron Paul)<br />
<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8C4gRRk2i-M">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8C4gRRk2i-M</a><br />
<br />
Libertarianism By Murray N. Rothbard<br />
<a href="http://mises.org/MultiMedia/video/Rothbard_MichiganLP_May1989.wmv">http://mises.org/MultiMedia/video/Rothbard_MichiganLP_May1989.wmv</a><br />
<br />
Dr. Thomas E. Woods Jr. Meltdown. Discusses his Book Meltdown<br />
<a href="http://mises.org/multimedia/video/Woods_04-03-2009.wmv">http://mises.org/multimedia/video/Woods_04-03-2009.wmv</a><br />
<br />
Money, Banking and the Federal Reserve<br />
<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iYZM58dulPE">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iYZM58dulPE</a><br />
<br />
Capital, Interest and the Structure of Production<br />
<a href="http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8333369568899847231&ei=vxOHSuqdKI_0qAO92cnLBg&q=Fundamentals+of+Economic+Analysis%3A+A+Causal-Realist+Approach+&hl=en">http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8333369568899847231&ei=vxOHSuqdKI_0qAO92cnLBg&q=Fundamentals+of+Economic+Analysis%3A+A+Causal-Realist+Approach+&hl=en</a><br />
<br />
Thomas Woods Jr.: Speech on Liberty<br />
<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BkXCXQwqfME">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BkXCXQwqfME</a> Pt.1<br />
<br />
<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HurBvDv0KRE">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HurBvDv0KRE</a> Pt. 2<br />
<br />
<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0uo4sKbFuaI">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0uo4sKbFuaI</a> Pt. 3<br />
<br />
<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XRf6RPxB96A">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XRf6RPxB96A</a> Pt. 4<br />
<br />
Can the Monetary System Regulate Itself? by Lawrence H. White<br />
<a href="http://mises.org/multimedia/video/Carden/White_03-09-2009.wmv">http://mises.org/multimedia/video/Carden/White_03-09-2009.wmv</a><br />
<br />
The Political Chances of Genuine Liberalism by Ludwig Von Mises<br />
<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xAlA1drRlU8">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xAlA1drRlU8</a><br />
<br />
Intellectual Property and Libertarianism<br />
<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GZgLJkj6m0A">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GZgLJkj6m0A</a>