Reason

“The mountains are high and the emperor is far away”

by on November 17, 2011 @ 12:25 am · 0 comments

in (Austrian) Economics, Business

Reason.com has posted an excellent article on Wenzhou, China, a city built almost entirely upon private enterprise:

For the last 30 years, private citizens in this southeastern China metropolis have largely taken over one of the least questioned prerogatives of governments the world over: infrastructure.

Driving down the cluttered and half-constructed streets of this 3-million-strong boomtown requires frequent U-turns and the patience of Buddha, but every road eventually leads back to a factory. Each factory is in turn surrounded by a maze of roads filled with hundreds of small feeder shops selling spare parts, building materials, and scraps. Every haphazard street in this town seems to have an economic purpose….

Wenzhou shopping districtThe official channels of financing and investment are routinely bypassed, replaced by local institutions with their own governance and lending rules.  It all works, if a bit haphazardly:

Gray-market lenders are often established, though technically illegal, financial institutions that lend primarily working-capital loans at rates as high as 10 percent a month. Contacts often modify interest rates based on how well you know them. Forms of repayment enforcement differ. Weng points out that in a community so dependent on guanxi—relationships—defaulting on a contact’s loan could blackball you from future business opportunities….

Lending also takes place through a number of formal lending institutions that have become informal depositing institutions. Pawnshops in Wenzhou are very different from those in the West. The shops can give out loans of millions of dollars backed by property and stocks, and they can pay depositors interest rates three to four percentage points higher than the official lending rate at banks.

It’s a vivid example of what can be achieved when the central planners are too far away to have much influence and local bureaucrats learn to simply get out of the way.  If only U. S. bureaucracy was so ineffective!

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Revisionist Middle Earth History: The Last Ringbearer

by on February 24, 2011 @ 10:33 am · 2 comments

in Pop Culture, War

Over a decade ago, a Russian paleontologist wrote an alternative take on the War of the Ring from J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. Recently translated into English, Kirill Yeskov’s The Last Ringbearer tells the tale from the point of view of Mordor, the bad guys in Tolkien’s epic.

History is usually written by the victors, but now the truth of the War of the Ring has finally come out. Gandalf is a warmonger bent on destroying a bastion of civilization dedicated to reason, science, technology, and industrialization because science “destroys the harmony of the world and dries up the souls of men!” The elves are bent on world domination and Aragorn is a Machiavellian schemer whose strings are pulled by his wife, the elf Arwen.

If you’re intrigued, you can learn more about The Last Ringbearer from the Salon.com article “Middle-Earth according to Mordor” and, also on Salon.com, the author’s own account of why he wrote the novel. You can download The Last Ringbearer for free and give it a read. Here’s to hoping Christopher Tolkien doesn’t aggress against Yeskov by launching a copyright or trademark infringement lawsuit.

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Our Efficient, All-Volunteer Killers

by on October 18, 2010 @ 9:49 am · 4 comments

in Imperialism, War

Steve Chapman extols the benefits of having an all-volunteer military force:

A few decades ago, the draft was a requirement for any major military undertaking. No one would have dreamed of fighting the Germans and Japanese, or the North Koreans and Chinese, without calling up young men for mandatory service. Not until the waning years of the Vietnam War did the nation elect to rely entirely on volunteers.

It was a controversial step, and one whose durability was very much in doubt. But in the intervening decades, the draft has gone from being indispensable to being unthinkable. Even the extraordinary demands of two difficult wars have not induced a reconsideration.

Anti-conscription badge from WWIEven the military’s leadership recognizes now that armies perform better when they’re filled with people who actually want to be there, and as Chapman points out, it’s a more efficient use of training dollars to spend them on Army careerists than on guys who’d rather be smoking pot and watching football.

If this is the extent of Chapman’s argument then I agree, but I’m not any more comforted by the fact that the military’s bombing and killing of poor people overseas are performed by people who actually want to do that sort of thing.  And he ignores the fact that young men must still notify the government of their whereabouts via Selective Service in case the draft is reinstated.  If the military really does not want conscripted men (and possibly women) among its ranks, why does the infrastructure for conscription still exist?

More dubious is Chapman’s concluding paragraph:

It was once a novel experiment: fielding a force to protect freedom without grossly violating freedom by dragooning young men to serve. But it’s worked so well we’ve almost forgotten there’s an alternative.

“Protect freedom” is a canard I expect from National Review, not a supposedly libertarian publication such as Reason.  Few if any all-volunteer forces have ever been used to protect Americans’ freedoms, even during the Revolutionary War (see volume 4 of Murray Rothbard’s Conceived in Liberty); and there isn’t a single military campaign undertaken in the past century that could be called a legitimate defense of freedom.  If one wishes to sing the praises of America’s efficient, all-volunteer killers, at least one shouldn’t pretend they exist for any reason other than to satisfy the imperialist aims of the Washington elite.

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All You Ever Need to Refute a Paul Krugman Column

by on September 13, 2010 @ 11:02 am · 1 comment

in (Austrian) Economics, Anti-Statism

Courtesy of Tim Cavanaugh at Reason, we now have a basic template to refute just about anything Nobel Laureate, neo-Keynesian, and regime apologist Paul Krugman ever publishes:

[destroy whatever economic fallacy Krugman promotes this week]

The rest of his column is political speech and unworthy of note. The above is all the intellectual content, and it is very shabby.

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The terrorizing, and triumph, of Tonya Craft

by on May 16, 2010 @ 1:33 pm · 3 comments

in Legal System, Police Statism

Last Tuesday, Tonya Craft’s horrific ordeal at the hands of a morally bankrupt judicial system came to a merciful end, as a Catoosa County, Georgia, jury found her not guilty of multiple counts of child sexual abuse, including charges that she molested her own daughter.  The case against Craft was a mountain of lies; virtually all of it was constructed from testimony by the alleged victims, all of whom were of preschool age at the time the assaults supposedly took place.  It became clear during the trial that counselors at the Child Advocacy Center had pestered the children with questions until they offered up whatever “evidence” the state needed for its case.  The prosecution’s inability to specify any details of the assaults, combined with ethically dubious behavior by the prosecutors and presiding judge (who did not recuse himself despite having represented the defendant’s ex-husband in their divorce proceedings), eventually led to an acquittal.  Craft is free, although she has much to do to rebuild her life; she lost her job, her house and custody of her daughter following her arrest two years ago, and her family had to raise half a million dollars for her defense.

Now Catoosa County District Attorney Buzz Franklin blames not his spectacularly inept and unethical prosecution team for the case’s failure, but the jury, biased media coverage, and the internet(s):

I was disappointed with the verdict in the Tonya Craft case.  The State presented a strong and compelling case to support a conviction, however, the jury chose to acquit her and we must accept this decision.  Unlike a defendant, the State has no right of appeal.  However, we need not agree with the verdict.

In most cases, the media strives to present their coverage of criminal trials in a fair and even-handed way that serves to inform the public.  In this case, a number of local reporters openly took sides and heavily slanted their coverage in favor of the defense.

Combined with the dynamics of the internet blogosphere, it created an environment hostile to the State’s ability to receive a fair trial and portrayed the victims and their families in a false and negative light.  This was an integral, purposeful and shameless part of the defense strategy.

The “dynamics of the internet blogosphere” appears to be a reference to bloggers who have covered the trial since its beginning, namely Bill Anderson who provided in-depth coverage on his blog, and Jacob Sullum who wrote for Reason‘s Hit & Run.  Franklin’s statements would only make sense if the jurors had been reading media coverage, which of course they had sworn not to do.  If he believes the jury was tainted, he needs to investigate immediately and not just whine about it to the public.

[Keep reading…]

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