Bruce Waller has an interesting question about free will and moral responsibility. He asks, why not mix the two concepts instead of treating them as one and the same? Sounds pluralistic to me, and I’m all for the pluralism freedom gives us.
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According to First News from New Zealand, the government has banned dozens of names that parents wanted to give their children, including any name associated with royalty such as ‘King’ or ‘Princess.’ So, why not call the child ‘Rex,’ or just call the child whatever you want while not listing a banned name on the birth certificate?
Better yet, get the government in New Zealand to become familiar with the philosophy of freedom. Perhaps then it will understand why it looks so ridiculous in dictating what names parents cannot give their children.
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According to this 15-year chart of Europe’s economy, Europe has now double-dipped into recession. Leftists blame ‘austerity’ cutbacks on government spending for the recession; conservatives blame rising taxes choking off private investment.
Recessions are caused by a collapse in bank lending. To find the true cause of an economic recession–and how to solve the decline–determine why banks are reluctant to lend. In Europe’s case, the banks are so badly broken that they have to borrow to stay afloat, instead of lending to grow their profits.
Scary whispers from Europe suggest that the banks in France are next to need bailouts. If France fails, the Euro fails. Perhaps the idea of two Euro currencies is best: one for the productive northern nations, and one for the southern insolvent nations. Or even better, one Euro for the thrifty nations with healthy banks, and all of the spendthrift, borrowing nations with broken banks each have their own currency.
More and more, as in Weber’s analysis, it looks like there is something about prosperity in Protestantism which is missing in Catholicism, and it looks like whatever is missing in Catholicism is an economic drag upon all of Europe. France, Spain, Italy, Portugal, and Ireland, by the way, are largely Catholic. Greece is Orthodox, a form of catholic.
So, a philosopher’s question is, How do the different religions affect bank lending?
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From Stanford Professor John Taylor’s blog, Economics One, his chart showing the disparity of income growth between the bottom 90% and the top 10% in the American economy over the past 65 years. Note that the bottom 90% of American workers have stagnant income growth for the past 45 years.
In those 45 years, 1968-2013, 18 years are under Keynesian (Fabian socialism) presidents: five years of Republican Richard Nixon, eight years of Republican George Bush II, and the past five years of Democrat Barack Obama. Now 40% does not mean causation, and the boom of the Great Moderation under Presidents Reagan and Clinton shows that far more is wrong in stagnating incomes for the middle class than simply implementing Keynesian suicidal economics. What is missing is a comparable graph of changes in productivity for the past 45 years, for both the 10% and 90%.
A structural problem is likely the cause of income stagnation in the American middle class (the 10% probably have dramatic improvements in productivity since the end of the 1982 recession, while the 90% likely do not), and the very last institution capable of correcting structural problems is the United States Congress. Perhaps as great as the increase in productivity from personal computers has been for the bottom 90% since 1982 (the year IBM introduced the PC), the increase in productivity from personal computers for the top 10% has been far greater.
If so, the separation of income growth rates between the American prosperous and the American middle class since 1982 is explained, because income follows productivity.
[Email comments welcome: duoism(at)sbcglobal.net]Mr. Obama’s proposed budget calls for tax-deferred retirement accounts to be capped at $3 million in assets, suggesting that accumulated savings in excess of $3 million are not “reasonable.” Much of the political impetus for this plan to limit the amount of savings working people can sock away to become millionaires in their retirement apparently is Mr. Romney’s personal retirement account that holds well in excess of $3 million.
Mr. Romney’s conservative Right decries the proposed limits with an argument that once a person reaches the limit, they’ll stop being thrifty. Hmm. Maybe, but also, maybe not. More likely, someone who has maxed out on tax-deferred savings will concentrate upon savings at reduced capital gains tax rates, meaning that they’ll continue to buy stocks but outside of their retirement accounts.
Actually, the math works in their favor. Distributions from an I.R.A. are taxed at ordinary income tax rates, while capital gains are given preferred lower tax rates. Literally, Mr. Romney’s investments in his I.R.A. will pay more in taxes than he would if he simply made those savings outside of his I.R.A. Why pay 40% tax on distributions from your I.R.A. instead of paying 15% tax on capital gains on stocks sold?
There are so few $3 million I.R.A. accounts in the country that one suspects this idea of Mr. Obama’s is simply vicious partisan politics posing as policy. Mr. Obama simply wants to punish the wealthy, and this anti-Romney policy does nothing to benefit the country. This is nothing more than sociopathic socialism’s hate-filled desire to punish, to dominate, to control individual personal success.
[Email comments welcome: duoism(at)sbcglobal.net]Even as President Putin of Russia signed legislation this week giving him sole power to appoint governors, the ailing and elderly Mikhail Gorbachev gave a speech decrying the reduction of freedom in Russia. But to Mr. Putin, Mr. Gorbachev’s freedom meant the loss of empire and the rise of “gangster capitalism” in Russia, so the two men have very different views on the benefits of freedom.
Both men are steeped in Marxism during their political careers, although Gorbachev is better described today as being ‘communist,’ not Marxist, and Mr. Putin is better described as a ‘religious nationalist,’ also no longer a Marxist. There is no freedom in Marx’s thought, as both Jaspers and Arendt pointed out, so the two men are disputing freedom in the traditional argument as being merely a theme or topic of political discourse.
Gorbachev won the Nobel Prize for Peace but neither man has freedom as a philosophy, and it shows.
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From the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, the relationship in the fifty United States between levels of freedom, both personal and economic, and the two major political parties. A better chart would include corresponding state income growth rates, tax levels, and unemployment relative to the two political parties. By this chart, two of the top three wealthiest States are the least free of all fifty, yielding a narrow conclusion that the least amount of freedom gives the greatest amount of prosperity.
[Email comments welcome: duoism(at)sbcglobal.net]The School of Life in London runs a philosophy blog where a Mr. Stevenson has seven ‘Principles of Optimism.’ His principles of optimism include being busy, have ambition for the future, devote your life to something more important than the self, expose yourself to new ideas, be an empiricist, and suffer criticism gladly. Hmm.
The first five could describe Hitler or Stalin as optimists. Nothing provokes more head-shaking than listening to a philosopher describe how much of an optimist Karl Marx was. Optimism is a psychology, not a set of principles.
It is possible to inject optimism into a pessimistic life, and the mental health improvements are well-studied and documented. But it is how we form our pessimism originally that is just as important as employing ‘principles’ to become more optimistic.
The perceptions of the partially-full/empty glass of water are grounded in how we perceive human nature. If we find humans to be inherently bad, we develop a pessimistic psychology. If we find humans to be inherently good, we develop an optimistic psychology.
The easy test of the divide is to notice how we vote: if we approve of statism, we are pessimists wanting the state to assert control over inherently bad human beings. If we approve of less-regulated humans, we are optimists. ‘Principles’ do not have much to do with it, because the two psychologies are deeply imbeded in everyone. And note, such ‘principles’ can easily be used to describe people who are definitely not optimists.
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Germany’s Der Spiegel has an article today on Kirkuk, the city of 900,000 in northern Iraq rich in underground petroleum and coveted by contesting ethnic groups. The Prime Minister of the country, Maliki, has sent an entire army to the city to let the Kurds and Sunni and Turkmen in the city know that the nation’s rule is sovereign. Unfortunately for the Prime Minister’s argument, his army wears the black of the Shi’a of southern Iraq, not the colors of the nation of Iraq. Immediately as the Shi’a army marched to Kirkuk, the pershmerga of the Kurds dug into the hills overlooking the city and wait for the Shi’a to make any overt move. The Shi’a army, though much better armed, does not want to take on the fabled pershmerga, famous for their ferocity and refusal to give up.
Iraq is not a country that can live with internal pluralism. Iraq is a tripartite ethnic conglomeration imposed as a single nation-state by British imperialists after World War I. It makes no sense to continue to keep it as one country, as dug-in opposing armies makes clear. Iraq should be three states: Kurdistan in the north, Sunni Iraq in the west and middle, and Shi’istan in the south. The middle Sunnis will create an Amman to Baghdad corridor, and the Shi’a will eventually align with Iran. The Kurds? Give them eastern Syria and watch them build the most enlightened democracy in the Middle East, one to rival Israel’s development of a democratic state.
As for Kirkuk: no one wants to take on the pershmerga, so Kirkuk goes to the Kurds.
[Email comments welcome: duoism(at)sbcglobal.net]Economics professor Jeffrey Dorfman of the University of Georgia has an excellent piece today in Real Clear Markets suggesting that the inability of politicians to agree on economic policies is a function of the politicians following one of three philosophers. Dr. Dorfman suggests that free-marketers follow Vifredo Pareto (no harm to anyone, a Libertarian position), free traders follow Nicholas Kadlow (not actually a philosopher), where the harm done is outweighed by the benefit derived (a form of Utilitarianism), and John Rawls, who famously argued that the ‘first position’ is to be given to the least-well off for a society to be just (the welfare state of democratic socialism, Keynesian economics). Rawl’s most famous book is above.
Rawlsian ’first position’ argument is infantalysis. The least-well off are those unwilling or incapable of providing for themselves. They are, especially to the determinist world-view inherent in all socialists, “helpless.” The characteristic of ‘helplessness’ is the fact of the human infant, by far the animal with the longest period of helplessness of any animal on the planet. Rawlsian philosophy/Keynesian economics is motivated by the psychic desire to reward, to care for, to nurture, to provide for human helplessness and in that psychic desire, they propose policies which will reward the infant’s lack of judgment, the infant’s lack of experienced prudence, the infant’s lack of any practical sense of responsibility found only in a mature, grown adult.
Professor Dorfman is correct in his analysis. But he missed the deeper psychological insight: The policies of ‘caring’ economics perpetuates the helplessness it desires to alleviate. Democratic socialism is like all forms of socialism: self-defeating economics, infantalysis philosophy.
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Theofacism:
Relocate Israel?
Due: 3-31-13
Duoism: The Philosophy of Freedom
Due: 12-12-12
Qutb & Rawls:
Two Myths of
Social Justice
Due: 12-13-14
Duoist Diet: The Philosophy of Dieting
Due: 11-12-13
The Craving
(a crime novel)
Due: 1-6-16
Blue!
(sports/crime novel)
Due: 1-5-15
G2
(a stage play)
Due: 1-7-17
David's Lament
(a stage play)
Due: 1-8-18
The Second Texas Secession
(a political novel)
Due: 6-1-16
Sophrosyne:
The Philosophy
of Self-Mastery
Due: 1-9-19
Nietzsche's Herd: Voluntary Totalitarianism
Due: 1-12-21
Objectivity & Its Objections
Due: 2-20-20
Omnivore:
Consciousness &
Self-Destruction
Due: 2-22-22
Amoral
Morality
Due: 12-22-22
