Surprise! War is Hell

The horror of war has always made good and wise men seek to avoid war at all costs. Whether the Iraqi prisoners were "tortured" or not does not matter.

OK. This is the stupidest thing I have ever heard. That people are tortured does not matter???!!!! Well, I suppose it will not matter if we torture you neocon scum! Does it also not matter that 90% of the incarcerated were innocent??

War is the RAF dropping incendiary bombs night after summer night on Hamburg while the American Eighth Air Force dropped explosive bombs day after summer day, until the second largest city in Germany becomes a vast molten firestorm filled with immolated babies and grandmothers.

Perhaps I should state the obvious since you are obviously an idiot: War is bad and should be avoided. Do not take as given that our fighting WWII was good or necessary. If we stayed out and Germany won, the world would be much the same, but we would not have sacrificed any American lives and would have better moral authority in the world. Stalin's power would have been checked by Germany.

War is the systematic sinking of all sinking in the archipelago Empire of Japan, until the millions of innocent Japanese doomed to starvation and the horrific living suns of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are tortures, but relatively merciful tortures, of countless children and other non-combatants.

Most critcal-thinking individuals have concluded that it was a moral outrage that we dropped atomic bombs on Japan, especially given that the war was essentially over by that time. Nuclear weapons are not exactly precision-guided weapons.

But war is not war simply because nations choose to fight or governments choose to fight.

What??? War can only occur when both sides choose to fight. It takes two to tango and two to fight. As if Bush did not choose to fight Iraq, which posed no real threat to the US.

War is the infliction of pain upon those whose pain will ultimately bring a surrender.

Who are we trying to get to surrender by torturing innocent Iraqis?

The idea of war as a legal concept is pure fiction. War is violence inflicted upon enemies or those treasured by enemies. This violence is not kind.

There are provoked, unkind, and de-escalating responses and then there are cruel, unprovoked, and escalating acts of violence. These are not subtle distinctions.

Coventry, Dresden and Tokyo were filled with children tortured to death from miles above. Was this unspeakable torture of innocents, per se, any better than the butchery of Japanese soldiers in Nanking in 1938 or the Red Army cramming millions of Polish Christians into cattle cars in 1939 and 1940 or the Schultzstaffel gassing Jewish mothers and children in death camps?

No.

Well, yes, it was better. Americans tried to use "pinpoint" bombing, which meant smart weapons.

Nuclear weapons are not pinpoint weapons and the conventional weapons used in WWII were horribly inaccurate.

The British had also tried that early in the Second World War, but abandoned that when it proved woefully ineffectively and prohibitively costly. The Japanese merchant ships sunk by American submarines had oil and raw materials essential for war as their priority cargo. If they had only carried food, American military power would have been redirected to other targets.

But there is a deeper difference that the reluctance of democracies to use terror and the eagerness of totalitarians to use terror than just the intention behind the means.

You have not demonstrated this at all. British treatment of Germans after the war was vicious.

It mattered not only to Brits, but to Frenchmen and to Dutchmen and to Czechs whether Britain or Germany prevailed in the Second World War.

Obviously, they were on our side.

There was a strategic morality to the democratic allies in the Second World War and in the Cold War. Indeed, not only was it better for Belgians and Danes that the Allies win, but it was better to the children and grandchildren of those horribly burned victims in Hamburg, Dresden and Berlin that their side lose and the other side win.

So that they could be slaughtered by the Russians.

So it matters to the Iraqi people that America prevail in Iraq, because America will create a better land for the Iraqi people than they have been able to create for themselves.

Is that why Iraqi makes comments such as "Saddam was bad, but life under the American occupation is worse."

Those relatives of the humiliated prisoners mistreated by Americans are better off if the Americans win than if Americans lose.

So that they can have the priviledge of being assaulted by American soldiers.

Acknowledging that fact, of course, is the great torture of all peoples who hold their own destiny in their hands and yet have failed to turn opportunity into hope.

Let's not give them what they want (freedom). Let's give them what we know is good for them. This hurts us more than it hurts you.

The torture that is violence and the violence that is war also has another moral dimension.

It is great fun to conflate: Torture is violence. Violence is War. War is a lesson. Lessons are acts of love.

Wars are not waged by men who know that they will unquestionably lose not only their life but the cause for which they are willing to die and to kill. Perhaps we should think less of Iraq today, less even of Operation Iraqi Freedom, less of Operation Desert Storm, and more of Operation Enduring Freedom - the liberation of Afghanistan from the Taliban.

Yes, let us not think of these previous fiascos.

America did not begin a war with Afghanistan.

Oh really, what would you call it? A "dance"?

The Taliban had been waging a war for years against the essentially helpless women and children of Afghanistan.

Funny, history says that the Taliban rose to power because of their defense of women against local warlords.

The incredible technological superiority of American power, combined with the exceptional training of American fighting forces, meant that the Taliban, who had with some good reason assumed that their landlocked stronghold in some of the wildest and most inaccessible terrain on the planet made them safe.

Seems they are doing just fine, especially Bin Laden. I suspect they will make a comeback after the Americans go away.

They guessed wrongly. America could have liberated Afghanistan with huge armies of troops rooting out Taliban and suspected sympathizers with savage fighting.

America, instead, used absolutely overwhelming and precise firepower with no regard to any political flak from any corner.

Without "political flak" we undoubtedly would have committed worse attrocities.

The torturing of the Taliban, the Nazis of Central Asia, ended quickly and with few casualties.

So you call 3000+ civilian casualties "few".

The money America spent on gold plated weaponry and an elite volunteer military cost us huge treasure, but the crime of the Clinton Presidency was not spending much, much, much, much, much more on weapons and training and bribery of foreign agents.

Do you just make up your "facts" as convenient; our weapons spending is at an all time high.

The pathetic excuse of spending money on "food programs" in a nation filled with fat, poor people; the lame argument that children and parents glued to inane television programs need more money for "public education" to learn; the nanny notion that better health care is needed for adults who take destructive drugs and indulge in dangerous pleasures - all this fraudulent "compassion" meant only more torture and fear to the women and children of Afghanistan.

You're right. I don't need my money. The goverment will make much better use of it by torturing innocent Iraqis, so that we can have more terrorists in the Arab world.

These torture victims, of course, could not vote for Clinton or Gore.

And they sure as hell would not vote for Bush.

That is what really matters to those who yelp today about the mistreatment of Iraqis who until recently had meted out incomparably more sadistic torments upon the women, children and other innocents of Iraq.

I repeat the Red Cross concluded that 90% were innocent. Picked up for yelling at a neighbor or because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time.

War is Hell - what a surprise!

So you support us torturing foreigners even though it has no strategic purpose? By the same token, Saddam could just say that he was in a civil war.

- and war is not a formal, legal or political process, but it is rather the infliction of violence and of tortures by one group on others. The way to minimize this is for those who hate war to be vastly strongly than those who love war.

The way to minimize this is to fire and prosecute Rumsfeld, suspend the budget of our war-waging machine, and punish the soldiers who perpetrate this.

This the sort of genuine government "investment" - the investment of oceans of tax dollars to prevent the torture, the destruction and the danger to freedom which war produces.

Let me see: The production of torture, destruction, and suspension of freedom is needed to end torture, destruction and promote freedom. Following your logic, the more that our military tortures and sodomizes, the more money that we should give them.

But preventing the Hell of War, with all its attendant tortures on all the innocent and guilty touched by war, requires those men who hate war to so arm, so train, and to so unite themselves that no evildoers consider, except in their grisly dreams, anything violent at all against the rest of the human race.

Black is white. Up is down. War is peace.

If we want to end war, mayhem, torture and destruction, then make certain that those who wish the human race torment, slavery and fear correctly perceive themselves as overwhelmingly weaker than those who wish peace, freedom and hope. There is no greater "investment" we can make. Any politician who pretends otherwise also believes the odious myth that Nazi Germany, one of the best educated, healthiest, wealthiest and most confident nations in history, would not have committed its unimaginable savageries if the Germans had only been a little more learned, a little more physically fit, a little more prosperous or had a bit more self-esteem.

Excuse me!! Germany was desperately poor and had constant class warfare when the Nazis took over. If they had been more learned about economics, they would not have embraced either nationalism or socialism.

Any politician who pretends that the good having overwhelmingly greater physical power and moral will than the evil is the only sure guard against war, genocide and torture is himself an unwitting Nazi and an unknowing Chekist.

Black is white. Up is down. War is peace. Peace lovers are Nazis.

The author may be right about one thing. On net, democracies may be less cruel than totalitarian regimes, but I will only believe it if we do the right thing and eject the current administration, prosecute the war criminals in the current administration, and slash our war machine budget.

Don't fear those rate increases

Knut Wicksell dialed in late last night to tell me not to panic over the imminent change in Federal Reserve rate-hiking policies signaled by Alan Greenspan's congressional testimony last week.

Wicksell was the brilliant Swedish classical economic philosopher who understood money and central banks as well as anyone in the profession. He died in 1926, but I am grateful for his communions across time and space.

Wicksell's monetary model is a simple one. When the central bank's policy rate is placed above the economy's so-called natural rate, then money is tight. When the rate is set below the economy's potential to grow and invest, then money is easy.

Define "tight" and "easy". Any time the money supply grows, the feds rate is above that of the "natural rate". This follows from the definition of "natural rate", i.e., the rate that one person or bank will lend real money to another, not money counterfeited from the Fed. The money market rate is a good measure of the "natural rate of interest".

Confirming this, commodity prices will rise or fall depending on central bank policy. Over the past year, the rise in commodity prices and the fall in the dollar have been signaling that excess money from the Fed has created a mild inflationary potential. That Alan Greenspan has apparently decided to remove some of this liquidity excess is a prudent decision. Expecting Fed restraint, gold plunged and the dollar surged in recent days, signs that virulent inflation is not in the cards.

We can easily tell the so-called natural rate today by observing the yield of the inflation-protected Treasury bond, which trades daily in the open market. The yield is currently just under 2 percent. Now, the central bank policy rate is the 1 percent federal funds rate.

This is low because of Asian buying of treasury bonds to bolster exports, but it approximately agrees with the money market rate.

Therefore, Greenspan & Co. can adjust their policy from one of substantial ease to something close to neutral with just three or four quarter-point rate increases in the remaining months of the year. They could begin at the open-market meeting next Tuesday.

It could well be that the economy's natural rate, which reflects the longer-run productivity of both workers and investments, might rise above 2 percent. In that case, a neutral Fed policy in pursuit of domestic price stability would have to take short interest rates higher. Traders in the widely followed Eurodollar futures curve have priced in a 3 percent fed funds rate by the end of next year.

But Wicksell urged caution about predictions for 2005. Lower tax rates on investment will make scarce capital much more plentiful than in the past. This, in turn, could hold real rates lower than might otherwise be the case.

Schumpeter created an economic growth model that relies on rapid technological advances. These technological outbursts drive economic prosperity to unimaginably higher levels.

Undoubtedly, Schumpeter will tell me that unprecedented new capital formation — unlocked by the significant decline in high marginal tax rates on investment put in place a year ago — will generate more technological advances, higher productivity, big gains in profits and wages, and ever-greater economic growth.

All this growth will absorb excess money and hold back inflationary pressures. Growth is inherently counterinflationary. Indeed, rapid advances in biotech, nanotech and wireless-communication networking equipment are poised to unleash phenomenal economic opportunities.

True, natural deflation checks monetary inflation, but deflation is great for savers and wage earners. Savers should not be continually be robbed by the Fed. A likely rise in petroleum prices would cause natural inflation, which would reinforce the absurd amounts of monetary inflation.

So put your interest-rate panic to rest. Disregard the Cassandras and the pessimists. They've always been wrong for this great country. Good times are coming. That's what free economic opportunity brings.

He can't be serious! Depleted commodity inflation (petroleum, natural gas), government debt induced inflation and housing inflation may well outstrip productivity, and technological deflation in all but electronics, and sensors. We have been setup for a recession and that is exactly what we will get.

Instant Runoff Voting

Ever wonder why we have a two party system? It is because of the way we choose our leaders: If you vote for who you really think is best, you may be throwing your vote away. Instant Runoff Voting is a good way of having the winner at least be the most representative of the views that the citizens hold.

The Value of Fiat Currency

It is widely believed that fiat currencies derive their value from their legal status and that if their legal status were removed they would cease to have value.

"Of course, people value the dollar; however, that is only because of The State's backing and mandate that the dollars be used as currency...If we went to free-market banking, dollars would quickly lose all value as currency. People do not place much subjective value on a cheap piece of paper with a dead man's face on it. Not everyone places subjective value on gold; however, there are so many people who do place high subjective value on it that it is useful as a medium of indirect exchange (currency)." -David Heinrich

I will argue that this is not the case; people would continue to value the
dollar without State backing because it is entrenched as a medium of
exchange. Established (widely accepted) currencies, such as the US dollar, take on a life of their own, and maintain their indirect value, with or without government fiat guaranteeing
their value, unless severely devalued by overproduction.

To argue this, I first need to define a couple of terms:

• Direct value is the highest price that I would pay for something that I expect to retain.
  
• Indirect (tradeable) value is the highest price that I would pay for something that I expect to trade. If I have done my homework correctly, indirect value is also equal to the maximum price that I can obtain for the object through exchange.


• Gift value is a special case of indirect value in which the value is equal to the highest price that I would pay for something that I expect to give away. The direct value that I receive from giving would be the gratitude that I expect to receive in return for the gift.


• An end user or consumer of an item is someone who directly
  values an object.

Because I have little interest in trading cards, women's shoes, and 'precious' metals, they have higher indirect values than direct values . If I owned these items, I would try to sell them to someone who values them more, or possibly to a reseller, consigner, or broker who could find someone who valued it directly (a "consumer"). Objects will tend to be produced, marketed, distributed, and sold to those for whom the direct value exceeds the indirect value and get stuck there until the direct value of possessing the item is less than the direct value of not possessing the item.

Established unconvertible currency has an indirect value based on an indirect value. When I work for dollars it is only because of what they can buy, not because of what others do.

In other words, even though no one values established currencies for their paper or artwork, they value them indirectly because others value them (indirectly). Yes, the logic of the fiat currency exchange is circular, but exchange is simplified and the currency will remain a currency until it is abused by a rapid increase in its supply. Once an indirect value exchange loop is entered, it will persist until the indirect value of the currency is diminished by rapid generation of new currency.

Commodity-backed currencies also make exchange easier, but why demand de jure convertibility with any particular commodity or small set of commodities?
No real advantage is gained by commodity-backing an established currency because
it is unrealistic to expect exchangers to faithfully visit currency clearing houses to verify the claimed de jure interconvertability. De facto convertibility with other directly-valued objects is all that is required of a currency and is pragmatically equivalent.

Commodity-backing of a currency is no longer even necessary to get a currency started: Both the Euro and the Iraqi Dinar were born not out of direct convertibility to any commodity or finite set of commodities, but by de jure convertibility to previous currencies via de jure exchange rates.

I predict that if the Fed would stop printing dollars tomorrow and eliminate all legal backing for the dollar, people would continue to use them and that their buying power would remain approximately constant because they would retain their indirect value.

Moral Inventory of the Iraq War

Libertarians believe that governments should be judged by the same principles as individuals. So armed with libertarian law, we can evaluated whether the Iraq action was just. The first thing to establish is who was the aggressor. This was obviously the U.S.A., since Iraq neither desired war, nor had the ability to wage a successful war against the U. S.A. To many, that would be the end of the case: BUSH is GUILTY; however, we may consider the remote possibility that this was a sort of offensive defense. This is shaky legal territory and can only be allowed if there is overwhelming evidence that an attack is imminent. Bush argued this to be the case, however, we have since found out that he employed others (Chalabi, Cheney) to fabricate and exaggerate the evidence. This is pure sign of guilt and would lead to the immediate verdict of guilty for any common criminal.

Crime

Aggression against a disarmed and defenseless nation that was not planning to attack.

Motive

Chalabi obviously had motive to lie about Saddam's weapons of mass destruction, because he believed that he would be rewarded by being appointed as head of Iraq. Cheney obviously had a financial motive via Haliburton. Bush had a power motive: to place a permanent military base in the middle east and expand his empire of puppet regimes into the region.


While any action will have consequences that may be generally agreed to be both good and bad, what defines the morality of a war is the true reason for its occurring, which rarely coincides with the stated reasons of the aggressor. (Many would say that the aggressor is always at fault, but I will be open to the possibility that if one truly believed that such aggression would result in consequences that are overwhelmingly morally positive, then perhaps such aggression could be justified. This is a broader brush of acceptability than that imposed by international law (as defined by the United Nations), which holds that the only legitimate reason for aggression is because of an imminent and serious threat to one's national security: preemptive defense. )

Whenever a crime is committed, one must look at the intentions of the criminal to see whether the crime was intended or whether there was a perceived mitigating circumstance. In the Iraq war, it is true that many Iraqis from a corrupt Shiite-Christian regime that we had helped to put in power. It is also true that many rejoiced their liberation shortly afterward. However, to determine whether this was a just war, we must ask whether these results were in fact the motives of the Bush administration or whether they were politically-convenient collateral goodness.

Intention

Short of being able to analyze the neurons in George Bush II's brain, we can never be 100% sure of his real or major reason for war, but we can look at actions to help us to discern what was the probable reason.

Multiple Choice. Which of these is the most credible reason for George Bush to attack Iraq:

1. W wanted to help the poor Iraqi's to be free from Saddam Hussein and build a free and democratic nation.
2. W was helping his fellow Israelis, against whom Saddam indirectly funded terrorism by funding Palestinian "charities".
3. Naiive little W actually believed (despite any credible evidence) that Saddam Hussein posed a threat to the United States security, despite no one outside of his hand-picked informants having advised him of that and several intelligence experts insisting that the evidence was false.
4. W wanted to gain control of the flow of oil in the region and award contracts to his oil buddies, including Dick Cheney.
5. W was using the military to settle a personal score with Saddam for sending an assassin to kill his father.

(While a majority may have welcomed freedom from Saddam immediately following the war, a majority of Iraqis do not welcome either the United States or the UN as foreign occupiers nor are they ignorant about the oil and "reconstruction" contracts that the Bush administration has rewarded his buddies. Of course, shortly after the U.S. leaves, the lackey regime that we instate will be assassinated and another regime" will come into power that will make Saddam, who being a rational secular dictator, never dreamed of attacking the US, despite our having bombed him into submission during the first Gulf War, look like a saint.)

The Austrian School

The web is replete with sites arguing for laissez-faire (Austrian) economics. The Austrian philosophy is simple: Government should not interfere with markets. Here are the major tenets of the Austrian School:

1. The Austrian school correctly points out that currency should be stable. This seems to contradict the first point because the raison d'etre of the Federal Reserve is to manage the money supply. If the money supply ceases to be managed, won't the currency become unstable? The Austrians point out that the dollar actually appreciated in value when it was pegged to gold, but afterwards began a sustained inflationary slide of 97% of its value. If the dollar is truly "monetized", then, theoretically, even if the currency were to deflate to a hundreth of its value overnight, there would be no adverse consequences to the economy. In reality, people would defect to other currencies and lose confidence in the dollar, making it worthless. Also, in reality, inflation is never the result of a even distribution of money in the society. Newly minted money starts at the Fed and is then loaned to the government and banks, which in turn, lend it to people. Obviously, if the Federal Reserve were a truly private agency, it would be quite skeptical of lending money to the government, which has horrible record keeping, is highly indebted to foreign creditors, and is extremely inefficient and unproductive.
   
   Furthermore, it should be obvious that the sort of hyper-liquidity necessary for a currency to survive hyper-inflation is far from realized even today: Every store would need to have electronic billboards connected to high-bandwidth networks, just to give the current price. All paper and coin money would lose or gain value so quickly as to be worthless as money (i.e., a medium of exchange). No doubt paper and coin currency would become a speculative investment, which would be even more detrimental to its intended purpose as a medium of exchange. Fixed-rate mortgages would have much higher rates and savings accounts would have much lower rates as a way of buffering against the higher risk of lenders and savers (investors). Indeed, if the value of the state fiat currency changed so quickly, society would almost certainly come up with an alternate currency, which would be exchangable for the fiat state currency at the instant of transaction. This solution to having to update prices constantly would breed a different set of problems: Hucksters would make great fortunes, by delaying transactions by seconds, rounding off conversion factors favorably, or by giving transaction rates above the true market value. So one can see that if money is not stable (i.e., has very high inflation or deflation).
   
   So they correctly point out that currency should be neither highly deflationary or inflationary and we can see that a lot of a labor (bankers, investors, financial advisors, brokers, and economists) that could be doing more productive work exists solely because of currency inflation/deflation risk. In fact, the worry about the hugely irresponsible credit bubble and "high" inflation rate of several percent (that most economists, including the Federal Reserve Board ("Fed") would consider "low" or even necessary to avoid the "specter" of deflation) is so large among the Austrians that there is also an implicit "bring back the gold standard" undercurrent or alternatively allowing alternative forms of currency, such as the Euro, to compete for credibility as a medium of exchange. The "Austrian School" notes that when the dollar was completely "monetized" (i.e., decoupled from any particular exchangable product) the inflation rate greatly increased.


2. Periods of deflation/recession are cathartic. This also seems to contradict Point #1; in a truly monetized, economy neither inflation nor deflation should matter. Remember: money is just a medium of exchange. The problem is of course that since fiat money can just be created via a printing press, those who are authorized to do that creation and spend their newly-minted money have essentially devalued "real" (read: deserved) savings and boosted the economy inequitably. It sure would be nice for me if the Fed would just print up some money and give it to me, but of course this is not fair to anyone else. I can purchase their goods/services despite having produced goods/services in return, whether directly or indirectly.
   
   Never has there been an equitable growth in the money supply, which would require giving everyone an amount of money proportional to the amount that they already have. Instead the Fed grows the money supply by "lending" money to banks at a rate below the natural rate (which may be assumed to be the rate at which banks lend money to each other on the money market); therefore, unfairly bolstering the banking sector. The Fed perceives this as being fair because virtually everyone uses banks in a modern economy, but since their rates to the banks are lower than the banks give to individuals, it really constitutes a banking industry subsidy.
   
   The Austrians correctly point out that during a growing economy, banks that lend money irresponsibly (There has been a surge in both the number of credit card offers and the number of personal bankruptcies.), investors that bought poorly-performing stocks, and financial analysts that recommend that everyone should invest in the "bullish" market need to lose their inflated money, so that capital can be properly allocated, according to value and not hyped value. In other words, certain sectors profit from inflating financial bubbles that are not justified by profits and these bubbles lead to overinvestment, which leads to overproduction that cannot be consumed, which leads to a crash in the market.
   
   The "Austrians" are one of the few groups to point this out. In fact, they claim that stagnant economies are the result of bolstering of sick banks that overlent by the Fed via its subnatural rates to "bolster the economy". In reality, of course what they are really bolstering are
   
   
   
   1. People who borrow money on weak credit. (Usually, to purchase a house.)
   
   
   2. Banks that have over-lent and will probably continue to overlend.
   
   
   This comes at the expense of devaluing real capital, by devaluing the currency.



3. Government interference with free markets impoverishes the economy. This is the only major point of the Austrian school with which I disagree. In fact it is quite rare for economists to rail against a totally free market despite the absurdity of the concept that if the government would just get out of the way, there would be a societal Eden. The "free market" is a sort of game that is produced by laws of governments that guarantee property rights and works in a macroscopic way only to the extent that the laws governing it are well constructed, not non-existant. This notion may not be obvious since no governments specifically write laws to the effect of
   
   
   
   1. You will maximize your profit by producing item x as efficiently as possible.
   2. You will sell things at the lowest possible price.
   
   
   Rather strong central government enables "free markets" through the following
   
   
   
   1. Laws the protect the "civil rights" of individuals and allows them to own property. Preventing competitors/individuals from literally killing each other.
   2. Definition and protection of property laws. (How can you maximize wealth if ownership is not defined???)
   3. Definition and enforcement of standarized weights and measures. (How can you trade with out standardized quantities?)
   4. Intellectual property laws in the form of patents, and trademarks.
   5. Environmental protection laws protecting people from having toxic waste disposed of in the homes.
   6. Consumer protection laws in the form of honest labeling or contents, and quantities.