Cash for Clunkers Contributes to the Crash

The Cash for Clunkers program demonstrated definitively that the Congress and the President don't have the foggiest idea how the economy works, including how wealth is created.

Suppose you have two countries, Country A and Country B, and both countries make Product X at the rate of one unit per year. (We're making it a really simple economy.) That means that both countries have a GNP of 1 unit of X per year. However, let us next suppose that Country A destroys every unit of X it produces when it produces a new unit of X, while Country B keeps all theirs. At the end of four years, Country B will be 4 times wealthier than Country A, even though both show the same GNP each year. (Which also shows that GNP is not the best gauge of a country's wealth.) This is how wealth is created.

With the Cash for Clunkers program, people were encouraged to bring in their old cars for a discount on a new car. This discount was made available by the government, meaning by tax money. Thus, money that could have been used elsewhere in the economy was used for this program. This is aside from all those whose salaries were paid to run the program (such a program that redistributes money does not create anything new, and therefore does not contribute to the creation of wealth in the economy -- those people's salaries are also a redistribution of money). Next, the cars that were traded in were destroyed. Thus, we acted like Country A, destroying wealth -- thus, keeping even -- rather than creating wealth. Most of the cars purchased would have been purchased anyway, either during the time of the program, or shortly thereafter, so no real effect was made on the economy. In fact, to the extent that it just moved up purchases a few months, it took away from future sales. Further, it sent false signals to the car companies that sales were up. Thus, more cars will be produced for upcoming months when people won't be buying cars, creating a surplus that will put downward pressure on prices and idle workers. Deflationary signals and the inevitable layoffs from having idle workers will send yet more signals to the economy that the recession is worsening.

Cash for Clunkers would seem like a great plan only to someone completely ignorant of how the economy works. Which of course is why Congress created it.

Fix Health Insurance by Abiding by the Constitution

In the current health insurance debate, I have heard repeatedly that we need to allow people to buy insurance in other states. However, the prevention of such interstate commerce is itself unconstitutional. States should have never been allowed to prevent anyone from buying anything from other states in the first place. That is a violation of the interstate commerce clause. Not surprisingly, the biggest problem, it seems, comes about from a violation of the Constitution. It seems to me that the way to solve it is by fixing that violation, not by coming up with a plan that is a complete violation of the Constitution.

On the Richardson Christmas Village

(With Apologies to Johnny Mathis)

It's beginning to look like postmodern Christmas
Ev'rywhere you go;
You've got Existential angst and Derrida to thank'st
For the ironic references to snow.
It's beginning to look like postmodern Christmas
Putting off all fun
As we stand in line to see the nose that's artificially
Slapped on with paint -- you're done.

Psychological Inquiry

For those of us interested in evolutionary psychology, I present Psychological Inquiry.

Socialism Is Intelligent Design Theory

In the same way that evolution is a well-established fact, so is the economy as a free market (without the free market, there would be no economy per se). There are of course theories of evolution, just as there are theories of the market economy, but the fact that there are theories doesn't mean that we can deny reality without consequence. Those who support socialism of any sort are the same as those who support creationism or intelligent design -- and Marxism is a theory of socialism in the same way as there are theories of intelligent design. In fact, Marxism and other theories of socialism are precisely theories of intelligent design applied to the economy. People should be honest about what they are. Any sort of support for any kind of intelligent design rather than recognizing that complex entities such as living things or economies are self-organizing comes from a denial of facts and of reality. It is time we were honest about what is really going on here.

Quatrain 4

Two Scotsmen and a saint provide the light
And tension needed for the growth of man --
Behold their paradoxical delight,
The source of growth from when it all began.

Quatrain 3

The island nation lights the lamp of liberty
As it goes out in the devalued, dying west
As they embrace lies' leaders and frivolity,
The promise they can all suck from the common breast.

Quatrain 2

The fire shall sweep the countryside to ash
And singe the eagle's feathers, threaten her
Young eaglets in the nest. The nest will crash
Into the flames and crush the moral cur.

Quatrain 1

The fiat virus grows relentlessly
To sicken, poison almost all the herd
Until the herd itself is blamed -- the three
Shall kill the herd, supporting the absurd.

Job Search

If anyone out there knows of a job that would be appropriate for me, please let me know. Surely someone out there needs a Ph.D. in the humanities to do or teach something.

New Book Critical of Heidegger Coming

It appears new book on Heidegger is coming, and it argues that you cannot separate Heidegger's philosophy from his Nazi politics. I hope it has profound effect, considering how deeply the postmodern Left has been influenced by him. I don't think we can dismiss him -- he did create the waste land that is 20th Century philosophy, art, literature, and art and literary criticism, after all. But the more throughly he and his work is discredited, the sooner these fields can heal. His fascist influence permeates our culture and politics far too much.

On Tony Hoagland’s Poems

Shall I compare them to good poetry?
The lines are most atrocious, bordering
On adolescent ravings. Gallantry
Is pissed upon by a limp phallic spring.
They bravely condemn racism in the
United States in all their college lines
Ink-jetted in the racist century
Obama was elected, hate declines.
But surely, despite this, they have a point?
But, no – their mindless Marxism is flat,
Pathetic, most embarrassing. Anoint
Yourselves, you silly lines, with flames grown fat.
Such self-important poetry’s not art –
It's nothing but a psychopathic fart.

Literature and Evolutionary Psychology - An Objection

I had a recent email discussion with a fellow scholar who argued against using evolutionary psychology to understand the actions of Shakespeare's characters on the grounds that Shakespeare couldn't have put in something he didn't know about. The problem with this is that if evolutionary psychology accurately describes human behavior, then Shakespeare doesn't have to have known anything about it to nonetheless use it. I think this may be one of the main errors theorists make in their objection to using things like evolutionary theory and psychology.

Oddly. that never stopped many scholars from using Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis, though.

Beauty and Paradox

Beauty is what emerges out of the interaction of paradoxical elements. The more paradoxical elements, the more beautiful the object.

I am pretty certain the above is true. Some examples:

Woody Brock's concept of relative complexity of theme versus complexity of transformation of theme
beauty balances symmetry and asymmetry (the golden mean ratio being an example)
beauty contains both unity and variety

Beauty is emergent from the conflict between paradoxical opposites.

More, the universe seems to also be emergent from the conflict between paradoxical opposites. Self-organizing systems, too, emerge when there are paradoxical opposites (I just finished reading Paul Krugman's "The Self-Organizing Economy," in which he observes that cities self-organize into complex patterns due to the simultaneous presence of centripetal and centrifugal forces among businesses, for example). Indeed, the strange attractors of chaotic, biotic, and self-organizing systems are paradoxical in nature, simultaneously attracting and repulsing. If all of this is true, then Frederick Turner is correct when he says that our recognition of beauty is the recognition of the deep tendencies of the universe itself. Since these deep tendencies keep arising -- and keep arising in more and more complex forms -- then it makes evolutionary sense for us to appreciate beauty.

Paradox is a pair that seem self-contradictory, but in fact arise out of reflexivity. How can something be both symmetrical and asymmetrical at the same time? Or both complex and simple simultaneously? These are paradoxical relations. The golden mean ratio is an irrational ratio (and ratios are rational), meaning it is a paradox.

An example:

Something cannot be both black and non-black at the same time and in the same sense, as that would be a contradiction. However, something can be a mixture of black and white. One kind of mixture -- a linear mixture -- gives us gray, of course -- but another kind of mixture, a nonlinear mixture where the object simultaneously becomes more black and more white at the same time will give us something with black and white texture, with large splotches and areas of black and white. For for something to become more black and more white at the same time is a paradox. It also gives one more order as well.

The strange attractor is strange precisely because it attracts and repels simultaneously.

The Nobel Peace Prize? Really?

Although I'm not the biggest Obama fan when it comes to economic policy, and though I question his tendency to refuse to meet with friends and to show support for some pretty despicable leaders, I'm not exactly a knee-jerk anti-Obama guy. I hope he's successful on many of his professed social positions, and I hope that he is successful on the international stage. If you don't know anything at all about economics, it's too early to judge Obama about much of anything, considering he hasn't even been President for a year.

And considering that last fact, how on earth can the Nobel Peace Prize have been awarded to Obama? The Nobel Committee argues that it's for his "efforts" and because he gives "people hope." So he got it not because he has actually accomplished anything, but for what are at the present moment nothing more than symbolic actions and rhetoric?

Let's be honest here. Al Gore won the Prize because he was anti-Bush. This is the Committee's last middle finger to the Bush administration. Not that the Bush administration doesn't deserve such a gesture for much of its international efforts -- but that shouldn't be what the Prize is for.

Obama hasn't done a single thing to deserve the Nobel Peace Prize. I hope he earns it, but I suspect he won't.

Nobel Prize in Chemistry

The Nobel Prize in Chemistry goes to Venkatraman Ramakrishnan, MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, Cambridge, United Kingdom; Thomas A. Steitz, Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA; and Ada E. Yonath, Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot, Israel, "for studies of the structure and function of the ribosome". SPecifically, they each mapped out the location of each and every atom in the ribosome, helping us to understand better their function. And this is quite literally no small thing. Ribosomes are made up of several molecules of RNA and several proteins, so they are huge complexes. An impressive feat, to say the least.

Nobel Prize in Medicine and Physiology

This year's Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine is awarded to three scientists, Jack Szostak, Elizabeth Blackburn, and Carol Greider, for their discoveries of telomeres and telomerase. Telomeres, discovered by Szostak and Blabuburn, are found at the ends of eukaryotic chromosomes, and prevent the chromosomes from being degraded with copying. Telomerase, discovered by Blackburn and Greider, is an RNA-protein enzyme that acts as a kind of reverse transcriptase that copies telomeres and adds them to the ends of chromosomes. Telomeres are particularly interesting because their lengths are associated with longevity. The fact that older couples' children tend to live longer than do children of younger couples implies something about the activity of telomerase, implying an environmental elements to inheritance of life span.

How to Get to Socialized Medicine

Here is the evil genius of the socialists . . . er, Democrats. To pay for the government health insurance plan, they plan to tax medical devices and replacement parts. This, in addition to taxing private health insurance. This will of course drive up costs, making it more difficult for people to afford medical care, and driving up insurance costs, which will of course be passed on to consumers if possible. The higher insurance premiums, etc. will create pressure for a government option -- which will be "cheaper" because it will be subsidized. Of course, since it will be subsidized, people will pick up the government option. Also, as insurance companies cut prices to try to compete, they will become less and less profitable, until they one by one go bankrupt. This will, in the end, leave people with only the government "option" -- meaning, we will have a single-payer, meaning we will have full-blown socialized medicine. And Baucus still wants to put me in prison if I don't buy insurance, no matter if I can afford it or not, or if I want it or not. So I will in the end be forced -- under threat of imprisonment, which is always a threat of violence, to buy government insurance, no matter if I want it or not. And this is supposed to be a better, more ethical system. A system based on threats and fear? WHen the mafia does this, it's called a protection racket. Why is this illegal for a gang of private citizens, but legal for this gang just because they call themselves our government?

Previously Published in Sojourn (out of UT-Dallas)

False Memories

Why have gaslight in an electric age?
Why feel the need to be transported
Back to a time none of us remembers,
So far removed it has turned cliché,
A time rustic and quaint, time
Flattening difference into utopia?
A Parisian café longed for
By a man who never left the States.
Narrow streets, full cafes, buildings
Centuries old. Or,
So he’s heard. A romantic place
Of Hemingways and Fitzgeralds, everything
An off-focus impression.
At night, lamplight, neon
Goes unseen. A myth
To be sure – uncommon, but
Not unseen. Waiters seat
Single customers with others –
Discussions, wine, and bread until
Gas-lit flame replaces day,
Flickering faces orange, the deep
Shadows drawing wisdom out
Of every café face.
A woman, in short shirt –
A navel, orange in the lamplight –
Draws the eye to new shadows unseen
In a clean electric-light place.

Darwinian Political Science

An interesting posting on the idea of biopolitics.