Incompressible

Alright, all you blockbuster government socialists who think that oil "speculation" aka futures trading is to blame for high gas prices, I'm going to have to bust out some Sowell on you. From Basic Economics , Chapter 12: A tourist in New York's Greenwich Village decided to have his portrait sketched by a sidewalk artist. He received a very fine sketch, for which he was charged $100. "That's expensive," he said to the artist, "but I'll pay it, because it is a great sketch. But, really, it took you only five minutes." "Twenty years and five minutes," the artist replied. Artistic ability is only one of many things which are accumulated over time for use later on. The Economist magazine defines investment as simply "spending today that yields a stream of income in the future." More broadly, it is not simply the spending of money but, as in the case of the Greenwich Village artist, the investment of time. If the earlier cost...

The idea of voluntary communalism is an attractive ideal - when you see a piece of litter on the ground, you just do your part to pick it up and dispose of it, for example. In doing so, you are doing a public good, you are giving charity to the rest of us by taking on yourself the costs of picking up the litter yourself. Totalitarian communism, by contrast, produces public goods by central control. The litter gets picked up because, ultimately, there is a faceless person in a remote Gulag somewhere who will execute you with a single shot to the back of the head and kick your lifeless corpse into a mass open grave if you disobey the government. And the government tells you when and where to pick up litter. Or make back scratchers. I suspect that when leftists say "socialism has never been done right", they are expressing something akin to the belief that voluntary communalism is possible, it's just never been tried. It is logically possible for there to exist a society whe...

Government-promoted emphasis on the problem of global warming, in my view, is a desperate attempt of power players in industry and government to try to control the global market because they're scared to death of the idea of global competition. To justify global governance, there must be a public goods problem of global proportions which is so dire that nothing short of emergency intervention on the part of a global governing authority will suffice to prevent imminent annihilation. The global warming political narrative fits the bill perfectly. As far as "scientific consensus" goes, it is better termed "academic consensus" since consensus has never been a part of the scientific method (Flood geology was once the consensus of science). That academic consensus aligns with the political ends of big industry and governments who want to control the global market is hardly surprising since Western academia is largely funded by government subsidy. The less control nati...

I think the worldview problem with measuring inflation in terms of CPI (consumer price index) is that it presupposes that inflation is some kind of natural, inevitable aspect of any "normal" economy. If anything, money which is denominated in terms of some sufficiently costly to produce commodity, such as precious metals, should on balance be deflationary. If a quarter piece of gold could buy a week's worth of groceries in 1900, the same amount of gold should be able to purchase much more groceries today because, despite the modest increase in the world's gold supply in the last 100 years, the technological innovations which drive down the cost of producing food have followed an exponential curve that makes the world's gold supply look flat by comparison. I expect that an empirical study could be performed to vindicate this view by estimating the amount of consumer goods which could be purchased with a unit of gold in 1900 versus the same unit of gold today. And t...

Please take a look at this article discussing the fascism of the left . I would extend the argument made in the article further to say that the federal state has become both our parents, both our Mommy and our Daddy. Conservatives (usually Republicans) are fans of Daddy government, comprised of the defense wing of the government. Liberals (usually Democrats) are fans of Mommy government, comprised of the health & human services wing of the government. Take a look at the Budget Graph (you'll need to click on the graph to be able to zoom in and move around to view it). Astoundingly, the fellow that came up with the Budget Graph (Jess Bachman) found a way to place the incomprehensible Federal budget onto one wall chart, but most astounding is the pattern in which he has laid it out: defense-related agencies and expenditures on the left and health & human services agencies and expenditures on the right. The spending is about equal on each side. Daddy government is on the left s...

Here are some of the things (most of which I used to believe to one degree or another) which I have learned to be modern folk wisdom, and myths. Scale is always an advantage How many times have you heard, "Capitalism is unstable towards monopoly"? Implicit in this claim is the belief that scale is always an advantage. So, when Megacorp A merges with Megacorp B, the resulting MegaMegaCorp will be even more powerful and consumers will suffer without government intervention either to prevent the merger in the first place, or regulate the behavior of the resulting MegaMegaCorp once it has formed. While the economy of scale certainly has advantages and has been the foundation of most of our economic growth for the past two centuries, at sufficient scales, the internal efficiency of an organization begins to break down. It is this downward pressure induced by organizational inefficiency which eventually completely swamps the upward pressures of capital investment, replication, auto...

The $290 billion farm subsidy bill has the effect of giving welfare to the wealthy. The biggest beneficiaries of this massive wealth redistribution bill are large farm conglomerates, who were also instrumental in lobbying for the bill in the first place. How is taking $1000 for every man, woman and child in the US and giving it to a very small number of already wealthy farmers an example of helping the poor? And this is clearly not a partisan issue as both Republicans and Democrats got this bill passed. It's a class issue, it's an issue of rich people with lots of lobby dollars using government to take money from the poor and give it to themselves. It's sickening to think there are people that profoundly greedy, but wherever government coercion is, you will always find these bottom dwellers. This is perhaps the most glaring example, but the US Federal budget is chock full of such redistribution. Disaster assistance, for example, is abused by wealthy individuals as a massive...

Most of the subject matter discussed in this blog post is also discussed in an article on the money supply written in 1995 by Murray Rothbard, available here . Please read it. The Federal government in the last two years has embarked on a massive taxation campaign. Because people often make the (false) assumption that money at a grand scale (in the trillions) works substantially different than money at small scales, they shroud governmental monetary policies in an aura of glorious mystery. While the complexity of the economy itself may defy most analyses, the government is just a big organization, and organizational decisions are never so complex as to be utterly inexplicable. So, how has Bush raised your taxes? What about all those kickers and tax cuts for the corporate fat cats? Isn't Bush a tax cutting conservative? Well, the Federal government has been raising your taxes by playing with the discount rate (an interest rate on loans from the Federal Reserve to private banks in th...

While I still have a large anarchist's standard library reading deficit (I have read zero Spooner, Tucker, Thoreau, etc.), I am quite convinced that anarchy is the correct global organizational principle. Let me clear away the stereotypes. I am not an angry teenager, I have a career, I am married and I have children. I do not want chaos, I want my children and grandchildren to live in the best of all realistically possible worlds. I am not emotionally maladjusted, I have a normal relationship with my parents, I don't have a problem with authority, having only been fired once (for love!) and my most serious run-ins with the state have been speeding tickets (none in the last five years). I am not an atheist, I believe in God and I am deeply religious. The 2000 Presidential election was the first time I was old enough to vote and, as a good Republican, I cast my vote for W. I was raised a small-government conservative and I believed that the Republican party genuinely stood for sm...

OK, this is my new blog. I am a horrible blogger, but I might start just publishing some of the old articles and forum posts that I have stashed on my hard drive to fill the gaps between the times when I actually have the wherewithal to write some new content. The name of the blog, to those who are curious, is a reference to randomness as defined in the Kolmogorov-Chaitin sense of an incompressible program. Not that you cared. I plan to blog on whatever strikes my fancy. In the past, this has included topics from theology, philosophy, politics and mathematics. I have been studying economics lately, and I suspect a large portion of my posts will have to do with that.