October 15, 2011 - 6:02 pm
The government consists of a gang of men exactly like you and me. They have, taking one with another, no special talent for the business of government; they have only a talent for getting and holding office. Their principal device to that end is to search out groups who pant and pine for something they can’t get and to promise to give it to them. Nine times out of ten that promise is worth nothing. The tenth time is made good by looting A to satisfy B. In other words, government is a broker in pillage, and every election is sort of an advance auction sale of stolen goods. — H. L. Mencken
That is actually great insight! Troubling that it is so true though…
Charlie, that quote is yet another Mencken’s aphorisms that is foolish, bitter, morally relativistic, and historically dead-wrong on the facts.
In sharp contrast to Mencken, the book-of-the-month in our household is Jonathan Israel’s just-released Democratic Enlightenment.
• I enjoy the scientific integrity of Franklin and Priestley
• My wife enjoys respect for education of Jefferson and Adams
• Our son enjoys the wise leadership of Washington, Madison, and Hamilton
There is in Israel’s sweeping history of democracy’s philosophical foundations precisely none the misanthropy and bitterness of Mencken … who in his entire life, accomplished nothing to match the founders.
Isn’t that right, Charlie? Mencken’s cynicism accomplished … nothing, eh?
Except that Mencken was an Ayn Rand supporter. Hey, maybe that’s why PJM/Tatler loves Mencken so much!
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Democratic Enlightenment: Philosophy, Revolution, and Human Rights, 1750-1790
By Jonathan Israel
URL: http://books.google.com/books?id=6NE8gZ2FIU0C&pg=PA1
Menkcen’s statement is less of an exaggeration than the claim mankind is causing measurable global warming.
After all, if he was right only one time out of ten, government is a net economic loss.
And it is.
It’s what happens when you make economic decisions for political reasons. Net loss.
I dunno, physicist. It seems to me that the first three sentences of Mencken’s quote are right, say, 95% of the time, anyway. On what basis do you object to that much of what he says, at least?
Dean, Mencken takes care to cherry-pick examples that support his uselessly misanthropic world-view.
Mencken’s brand of cherry-picking — if you think about it — is a recipe that turns *any* enterprise into garbage, eh?
That is why the best antidotes — by far — to Mencken’s futile brand of toxic political misanthropy are the visionary writings of America’s Founders: Madison, Hamilton, Paine, Adams, Jefferson.
You really should read up on the political machine of Baltimore in Mencken’s time, and the family that benefited from it. You might even find some current “leaders” in your search that could shed some light as to how their system actually works.
LOL! Melinda, thanks for the laugh!
`Cuz during December 20, 1776 – March 4, 1777, didn’t the Continental Congress meet in … of all places … Mencken’s home town of Baltimore?
And somehow-or-other that “gang of men with no special talent for the business of government” managed to write a little document called … “The Declaration of Independence”, eh? And many of the delegates then went-on to serve with distinction, in the very government that they themselves had created. Talk about yer self-serving pork!
But you’ll sure never learn this Baltimore history by reading Mencken!
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URL: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0d/Congress_voting_independence.jpg
1777. 1947.
Whatever.
Same thing? I see.
And the Declaration wasn’t written there either.
Stop shoveling, wiccan.
physicist-
Have you ever looked at politics as an entropic, energy system, where currency is the transfer mechanism? You might notice some feedback loops within some of the subset fields.
Just an exercise I would recommend.
I use that analogy all the time. Wealth as energy- it’s the clearest way of describing how the government always wastes it in the process of changing it from one form to another. Income to taxes to spending in all its forms- the loss of money is almost inevitable. Lots of heat but no forward motion.
Back in the late sixties, one of my hippie friends posited a financial system in which the basis was kiloWatt-hours. I suspect it was one of those rare cases of “in cannabis veritas”, but this idea actually makes some sense.
Mencken is certainly more accurate, and conveys more insight, than the “physicist” who quibbles and blathers and fills our screen with endless logorrhea. Apologies for feeding the troll, y’all.
John, do you deliberately seek out Charlie Martin’s and Patrick Richardson’s posts for your trolling? It sure seems that way sometimes.
However, I am sure that Charlie, and Roger, and all the rest of the staff appreciate your continued financial support through your page views, and the page views of those who come here to rebut your idiocy on a daily basis. You’ve probably single-handedly contributed to the financial success of PJM, and put lots of dollars in Roger’s pockets!
Now, aren’t you proud of that accomplishment?
Participating in the marketplace of ideas is a good thing, ConservativeWanderer … and so if PJM/Tatler makes money from it, more power to them!
It’s seems to me Charlie and Patrick are charged with defending some of PJM/Tatler‘s more peculiar ideological notions … peculiar in the sense that these notions flat-out contradict well-established history, science, and even mathematics. In consequence, their posts are straightforward to refute.
Like the notion that “free” markets are “fair” markets (where “free” is understood in the mathematical sense, and “fair” is understood in the Jeffersonian sense).
Pretty much *no* mathematician believes *that* any more!
For the simple reason, that it’s just plain not true, eh?
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COMPLEXITY IN FINANCIAL MARKETS
URL: http://www.princeton.edu/~markus/research/papers/Complexity.pdf
Asking a mathematician about economics makes about as much sense as asking a botanist about equine genetics.
You’re just stalking Pat and Charlie.
It’s seems to me Charlie and Patrick are charged with defending some of PJM/Tatler‘s more peculiar ideological notions … peculiar in the sense that these notions flat-out contradict well-established history, science, and even mathematics. In consequence, their posts are straightforward to refute.
Meaning we disagree with him.
And I’m not sure how your constant appeals to authority and logical fallacies refute anything John.
Quite a few folks *are* rebelling against ideology-first ignorance nowadays …
… and perhaps someday you’ll join them, Patrick.
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Rick Perry officials spark revolt after doctoring environment report
Every single scientist associated with Texas’ 200-page report
has demanded their names be struck from the document
URL: http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/oct/14/rick-perry-texas-censorship-environment-report?newsfeed=true
So obviously I’m too stupid to have looked at the facts and come to my own conclusion because it differs from yours John?
I picked the ideology I have because I agree with its basic tenants — the same reason I became a Christian and a Southern Baptist. No one tells me where to stand on an issue, least of all the editors here. I stand where I do because I can do no other.
But typical of liberals, John, those who disagree with you are either stupid or evil.
So here’s where I stand now. It’s become clear, by your own admission that you are personally targeting myself and Charlie. I will no longer respond to any of your infantile provocations.
I will no longer feed the energy creature.
Oh, John, at least read the abstracts of papers you cite. First of all, the paper you’re linking doesn’t actually say anything about the idea of markets as a whole, whether “fair” or “free” — in fact, neither word occurs in the text, which is entirely based on boundedly-rational actors. (Sure enough, it turns out that when none of the actors have full information, there are information asymmetries, just like classical economics already says.) The paper is about the problems inherent in complicated derivative instruments.
Second, while individual CDOs can be excessively complex, the underlying theory is simple, explained easily with basic finance; I wrote a piece on the financial crisis in 2008 that I think stands up quite well, and closely approximates the later explanation of what went wrong from the committee Congress set up to investigate — in which an attempt to regulate a non-market outcome was the cause, not the solution. And all the paper concludes is that it’s possible for CDOs and similar complex instruments to be so complex it becomes very hard to evaluate them — but is also concludes that it’s unclear any regulatory exercise could resolve this.
In other words, the paper you’re citing to say that markets aren’t “free in the mathematical sense, or fair in the Jeffersonian sense” — I’d love to see you posit those definitions, but don’t frankly expect it, since you never say anything testable — doesn’t speak to either “free” markets or “fair” markets, explores a particular area of bounded-rational-choice theory, concludes it’s a hard problem with no obvious solution, and in particular its unclear how regulation could be applied “fairly” since it would inevitably be a subjective decision on the part of regulators.
What’s more, it doesn’t actually apply anything like complex-systems theory — it’s talking about the complexity of legal definitions and the size of disclosures.
So, tell the truth — you actually just googled for an economics paper with the word “complexity” in the title, figuring you’d convince some poor fool who thinks certainly you wouldn’t throw in a meaningless citation to fool people. Didn’t you?
Charlie, these same points, relating to macro-scale instability arising micro-scale rationality, were described in plain language by Hyman Mirsky back in the 1960s-80s. Now advances in complexity theory are providing information-theoretic foundations for Mirsky’s common-sense insights.
Wikipedia Mirsky survey is commended to your attention … it ain’t hard, Charlie!
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Hyman Philip Minsky (September 23, 1919 – October 24, 1996)
URL: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyman_Minsky
Now Dr. Stalker John is using Wikipedia as a primary source!
Hey, Dr. Stalker, what would you do if one of your students did that in a paper?
CW, John isn’t actually that kind of professor. He’s a “research professor”, that is, a lab tech with a PhD.
Good.
I’d hate to see the kinds of students this tool would turn out.
Jesus, John, read the paper you’re citing. Read the abstract of the paper you’re citing. It has nothing to do with what you’re arguing. It’s about descriptive complexity, not Kolmogorov complexity. Yes, yes, there’s a strained and conjectural relationship there, but the Brunnermeier and Oehmke paper is referring to the problems of describing a complicated derivative adequately to inform a buyer. There is no formal description of complexity whatsoever.
Similarly, Minsky, as your Wiki article says, “stated his theories verbally, and did not build mathematical models based on them.” Now, considering how ineffective the post-Keynsian models have been (as demonstrated by the current protracted catastrophe) I’m not sure I’d want to cite this one anyway — but certainly not as someone who made a mathematical argument.
You didn’t actually read this citation either, did you?
Patrick, maybe the problem is that once folks make up their mind about politics, religion, etc., they tend to stop looking at the facts, and especially, stop looking at inconvenient facts.
But the inconvenient facts don’t stop coming, eh?
When we look at the sky, we see plainly that the universe is billions of years old, and its expansion is accelerating.
AGW is real, and serious, and like the universe, AGW too is accelerating.
The Denosivan hominins were real, and their DNA does live on inside of modern humans. It makes yah think, eh?
Unregulated markets are dynamically unstable, and globalized markets do utterly lack a moral compass.
Free market Iraq reconstruction did fail utterly, and President Bush was right to fire the architects of that failed strategy.
NASA’s James Hansen and Texas’ Rick Perry both do support nuclear power, and in this respect … Hansen and Perry very definitely are on the same page!
And yah know, exactly *none* of these “inconvenient facts” get covered in the ideology-first media (IFM).
But that doesn’t alter their truth, eh?
Charlie, did ya notice that he completely skips over your debunking of his articles?
He simply cannot admit that he’s not as smart as he thinks he is.
ConservativeWanderer, when a post supplies mathematical rigor, ideology-first skeptics demand common-sense. And when a post common-sense, ideology-first skeptics demand demand mathematical rigor.
The plain truth is, the world’s globalized/computerized/derivativized “markets” nowadays have zero to do with “markets” as the Founders understood them — in an era before the word “corporation” was even invented — namely, gatherings where independent craftsfolks and freeholders traded their goods face-to-face, within a community that valued honesty, thrift, diligence, skill, foresight, and dignity in the citizenry.
If yah see these moral values appreciated on financial forums like Wilmott, let us know.
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Wilmott Forum: Quantitative Finance FAQs
URL: http://www.wilmott.com/categories.cfm?catid=19
CW, I did. Then some nifty projection, and a veer into a completely irrelevant topic. As I was pointing out to you the other day, that’s a tacit admission that he’s lost the argument on substance and has to hope smoke will let him preserve a little dignity.
Which he then completely loses by another flood of emoji.
If we had a way to dot ‘i’s with little hearts and daisies, he’d use it.
Charlie, you (and other free-market true-believers) might wanna check the (ideology-free) Wilmott forum’s discussion “What are the stupidest things people have said about risk neutrality?”
Ask yourself: does *any* sensible brand of conservatism favor *these* folks running the world’s markets?
By the way, most definitely I *do* use stochastic calculus in my everyday work … so I appreciate (as I think you do too) that the Wilmott discussions are reasonable in a narrowly mathematical sense … but most definitely have failed utterly in creating markets that sustain conservative values.
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What are the stupidest things people have said about risk neutrality?
URL: http://www.wilmott.com/messageview.cfm?catid=19&threadid=62803
Well, at least it’s faintly germane. That’s a start.
It’s a complete straw man, since objecting to excessive regulation doesn’t mean that all regulation is bad, and a “Randian” absolutely unregulated market isn’t a particularly “conservative” notion. (Not to mention that notion of Objectivist theory is also a straw man, since one of the few areas in which Rand thought Government had an appropriate role was in maintaining contracts and protecting counter-parties against fraud, which isn’t a completely unregulated market.)
It also has nothing to do with the Mencken quote, since Mencken is pointing out a flaw with Government, not markets.
Ya know something, Dr. Stalker John?
If the UW gig ever taps out, you could be a fish salesman.
You have the largest stock of red herrings I’ve ever seen.
ConservativeWanderer, since Mother Nature supplies us all with an ocean-full of facts, little credit belongs to me for fishing a few of them out.
Any brand of conservatism that can’t face facts is as ineffectual as … as …
… White House neo-cons clinging to free-market Iraq reconstruction ideology?
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A puzzled neocon
URL: http://punditkitchen.files.wordpress.com/2011/02/political-pictures-john-mccain-scooby-doo-meddling-kids.jpg
Yet another red herring.
Sorry, not in the market for seafood today.
Can you ever stay on topic for more than 3 comments? I don’t think so.
You know, John, one of the most amusing things about you — other than the fact that you continue to write like a teenybopper on her first cell phone — is your complete inability to grasp even the tiniest idea that conflicts with your preconceptions.
…and where is your physics PhD from again?
Given the general level of true intellect he displays here–as opposed to lefty faux-intellectualism–I’d say his PhD came out of a Cracker Jack box.
There’s nothing like going through a PhD program — and I went through two — to show you that the PhD is more of a union card than anything else.
Hah!
Charlie-
I know he was writing about a different time and place, but boy do some things never change.
Did you know drinking western Lake Michigan water causes amnesia? It seems to be brought on by the presence of spiral note books and Klieg lights. Emanuel seems to be the latest casualty.
With all due respect, Mencken seems to understand democrats!
“In other words, government is a broker in pillage, and every election is sort of an advance auction sale of stolen goods”
The Founding Fathers knew this and gave us the only form of government that has even been able to stave off the pillagers. But 230 years later, the pillagers have figured out how to beat even their brilliant scheme. It can be sumarized with one word…progressivism.
The only solution is to reduce the size of the federal government. It won’t totally solve the problem, since Mencken’s observation is true at any level, but at least it will reduce the taxpayers’ money in the hands of the thieves from trillions to billions, and it will take fewer voters to dislodge them from their bunkers.
Proreason, although your post makes some good points, it appears that Missouri farm juries see a larger political and economic picture.
The reasons go all the way back to Adam Smith:
Yep, when it comes seeing clearly what’s wrong with America today …
… as globalized corporate malfeasance wrecks more-and-more families and cherished American institutions …
… those Missouri farmer juries are mighty hard to fool, eh?
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Missouri Farm Juries Know Whom To Blame
URL: http://pajamasmedia.com/comment/1373242/
Oh, God, you are a self-blinded fool. You rant about ideology, and subscribe to the most reality-proof ideology ever! No wonder you worship the AGW cult: it promises to make sycophants like you into something more important than glorified bottle washers.
Rob, in my time I’ve washed plenty of bottles and dug plenty of hog manure pits too (and will do more before my time is done) … that’s why posts that try to associate shame to honest work … instead bring happy memories of it.
Thanks, Rob!