Category Archives: Capitalism

Pope In An Intellectual Wilderness

Capitalism, Christianity, Communism, Environmentalism & Animal Rights, Intellectualism, The West

I once read a papal encyclical: John Paul’s. With his 1998 encyclical, Pope John Paul sounded a lone voice for both “Faith and Reason” in the postmodern religious wilderness. Who else spoke with unhectoring clarity about the errors of relativism in modern thought? Certainly not Pope Francis. He’s too dumb to consider such abstractions.

That Jorge Bergoglio is shaping up to be a bit of a bumpkin is no surprise. He hails from the Latin American strain of Catholicism. And he, Pope Francis, is threatening to undo what Pope John labored to achieve: “steer liberation theology away from the influence of Marxist social analysis.”

In the 2015 encyclical, the Holy See saddles the richest nations with the blame for the despoliation of the earth, when the truth is that the developed world’s advanced technology has helped clean-up the atmosphere, the oceans and the waterways. It is the developing nations—China, India—that despoil the earth and its creatures most. The earth looks like “an immense pile of filth” not in Canada, Germany, or the US (except for where illegal immigrants tread: see “Illegal Immigration’s Negative Impact on the Environment”).

The love for the earth, its creatures and our pets (parrots, dogs, cats) is a distinctly Western sensibility.

The Catholic Crisis Magazine can’t help but take a swipe at the anti-intellectualism of this pope’s “close advisors”:

… the hortatory Cardinal Maradiaga of Honduras said [this] with ill-tempered diction: “The ideology surrounding environmental issues is too tied to a capitalism that doesn’t want to stop ruining the environment because they don’t want to give up their profits.” From the empirical side, to prevent the disdain of more informed scientists generations from now, papal teaching must be safeguarded from attempts to exploit it as an endorsement of one hypothesis over another concerning anthropogenic causes of climate change. It is not incumbent upon a Catholic to believe, like Rex Mottram in Brideshead Revisited, that a pope can perfectly predict the weather. …

Intellectually, Pope Francis is no match for his predecessors. And that’s putting it kindly.

Recommended reading:

“On The Line: The Impact of Immigration Policy on Wild Life and on the Arizona Borderlands”

“Environmentalism in the Light of Menger and Mises” By George Reisman (The Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics)

The Grotesquely Stalinist FDR

Capitalism, Communism, Crime, Free Markets, libertarianism, Russia

“The Grotesquely Stalinist FDR” is the current column. It questions the current libertarian support (my own included) for Russia, and recounts how ‘grotesquely Stalinist’
Franklin Delano Roosevelt was. An excerpt:

… One can well understand why the medieval blood ties that tethered some Ukrainians to the Russians would have been severed by the criminal communist regime, which targeted the Ukrainian breadbasket with a vengeance. The communists robbed the Ukrainian peasants of their fertile farms, forced them into slave labor by corralling them into state-owned, collective farms, and systematically starved them by requisitioning most of their grain. The peasants had been left with a fraction of the amount of grain required to sustain life.

Yet these heroic, individualistic farmers rose up against the Reds.

The slogans of the Ukrainian peasantry, in 1919, were “Ukraine for the Ukrainians, down with the Bolsheviks and the Jews (whom they associated with the Bolsheviks), free enterprise, free trade.” Besides the standard mass executions, in order to wipe out this class of people, Stalin devised a diabolical man-made famine which killed up to 10 million .

Fast forward to Kiev, circa 2013, where Ukrainians tore down the statue of the founding father of Bolshevism and a mass murderer in his own right. But that man, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, still reposes in a mausoleum in Moscow’s Red Square.

Why, pray tell? …

Read the rest. “The Grotesquely Stalinist FDR” is now on WND.

‘How Economic Inequality Is Essential for Successful Economic Competition by the Less Able’

Capitalism, Economy, Free Markets, Political Economy, Political Philosophy

Republicans, Democrats and conservatives—come to think of it, most people—do not fear flaunting their inveterate ignorance of economics. Thus almost all have railed against economic inequality to boost their empathy credentials and likelihood of being elected or re-elected.

The Capitalist Professor, George Reisman, has the antidote, and has been kind enough to send me a complimentary copy of his essay “Fundamental Insights into the Benevolent Nature of Capitalism.” It is available to the general public for 99¢ as a Kindle Book on Amazon.com.

An excerpt:

How Economic Inequality Is Essential for Successful Economic Competition by the Less Able

By George Reisman, Ph.D.

“As von Mises has … shown, with his development of Ricardo’s law of comparative advantage into the law of association, there is room for all in the competition of capitalism. Even those who are less capable than others in every respect have a place. In fact, in large measure, competition under capitalism, so far from being a matter of conflict among human beings, is a process of organizing that one great system of social cooperation known as the division of labor. It decides at what point in this all-embracing system of social cooperation each individual will make his specific contribution—who, for example, and for how long, will be a captain of industry, and who will be a janitor, and who will fill all the positions in between.

In this competition, each individual, however limited his abilities, is enabled to outcompete all others, however superior to him in their abilities they may be, for his special place. Quite literally, and as an everyday occurrence, those with abilities no greater than required to be a janitor are able to outcompete, hands down, without question, the world’s greatest productive geniuses—for the job of janitor. For example, Bill Gates might be so superior an individual that in addition to being able to revolutionize the software industry, he might be able to clean 5 times as many square feet of office space in the same time as any janitor now living, and do it better. But if Gates can earn $1 million an hour running Microsoft, and janitors can be found willing to work for, say, $10 an hour, their readiness to perform the job at one one-hundred thousandth of the hourly rate Gates would require, so far overcomes their lesser abilities that it is they who are the winners of this competition, without any question. For cleaning the amount of floor space that one of them can clean in an hour costs just $10, if one employs one of them, while having Gates clean that same amount of floor space costs $200,000, since the hour of his labor that would be required to clean 5 times as much floor space costs $1 million. To say the same thing slightly differently, employing 5 of them, who in combination clean as much floor space per hour as Gates, costs only $50, while employing Gates to do the same job costs $1 million.

It should go without saying that the same principle applies to all lesser degrees of productive superiority. Thus, for example, individuals capable of being janitors twice as efficient as the average janitor but also capable of doing work that the average janitor simply cannot do and that pays them more than twice as much per hour as the average janitor earns—these people will be outcompeted by the average janitor for the job of janitor. For it will be less expensive to employ two ordinary janitors than one twice-as-efficient janitor, who must be paid more than the two of them in combination, while their combined performance matches his.

There is an important implication in these examples for the subject of economic inequality. Namely, it is the ability of less capable people to work for wages sufficiently below those of more capable people that enables them to outcompete the more capable people and thereby to secure employment. It follows that all measures, such as minimum wage laws, that seek to force up the wages of less capable people operate to undercut their ability successfully to compete and thus to force them into unemployment, while depriving the rest of society of their services and forcing the movement of more capable workers into jobs that could have been filled by less capable workers.

In addition to the fact that under capitalism, there is room for even minimally capable people to be employed in the economic system, it is also the case that because productive geniuses are free to succeed in revolutionizing products and methods of production, those with minimal abilities are able to enjoy not only food, clothing, and shelter, but even such products as automobiles, television sets, and personal computers, products whose very existence they could probably never have even dreamed of on their own.”

Read the complete essay, “Fundamental Insights into the Benevolent Nature of Capitalism.”

Blessed Are The Burgerflippers

Business, Capitalism, Economy, Labor

By Myron Robert Pauli

So I see that Portland OR has raised the minimum wage to $15/hour and the rest of the state may soon follow.

Years back, I did some minimum wage work at a chemical-spectroscopy lab in New York – not particularly lucrative or enjoyable but it paid money. The company mostly hired college graduates from the Philippines (probably with some H-1 visa) because they were cheap. Not surprisingly, companies pay workers at little as they can get away with. Workers, in turn, are right to grumble and are free to seek out higher paying work (or at least better conditions – that lab was rather unsafe). Most people do not work for some great satisfaction – most jobs range from somewhat stinky to complete stinky. Who the hell wants to pick crops in the hot summer or climb up cleaning gutters in winter? Workers primarily work for one primary motivation – money.

The $15 minimum wage will be a boon to developers of automated burger-flippers. Not only do they not get the $15, the robots don’t need Social Security, W-2 forms, OSHA inspectors, Obomney-Rombama care, paid vacations, sick leave, and those other things that raise “overheads.”

Anyone who has studied the history of labor in the 19th or 20th Century should be aware of the Luddites who went around smashing machinery. I would not be surprised if some restaurants not only take reservations online but orders as well – press the steak icon and it will ask rare through well-done. This should not be too hard to code and people can pick up their orders cafeteria style. Or a robot can probably deliver the gourmet food to the table. The chef can be well paid, but who goes to the restaurant for the waitresses (excepting, perhaps, Hooters)? Four star pre-ordered robot delivered gourmet meals with profits shared between consumer and restauranteur.

However, let me put on my Samuel Gompers hat when it comes to the anti-worker rant of Jennifer Harris. First of all, workers have every right to be greedy and should be free to strike (but not destroy property or resort to violence) – with the flip side that the employer can find replacements. If I choose to “refuse” to be locker-room attendant for the Russian Women’s Volleyball Team for less than $1500 an hour, perhaps the team owner can find someone who will work for less pay!

The second point of Harris’ rant is how the troops are “getting shot at, deploying for months in hostile environments, and putting their collective asses on the line every day protecting your unskilled butt?” The first part about being shot in hostile environments is perfectly true. As to the second part: How are these “troops” protecting the butt of anyone, skilled or unskilled, other than the military brass and politicians who sent them in to be 21st Century IED-fodder? I know what benefits I get from the grocery clerk and the restaurant waiter and the guy who cleans my gutters. (Or from Edward Snowden.) Does the average American get protected when some troops “engage” Sunnis who are shooting at Shiites or Shiites who are shooting at Sunnis? Harris makes fun of “Sally McBurgerflipper” and “Johnny Fry-Boy,” but they enable Mom to save a day of cooking and let the brats play at the McSlides. What great “service” did anyone get out of Petraeus and that neo-con phony “surge,” other than some titillation concerning lover Paula Broadwell? Yet, “conservatives” deify Petraeus and sneer at the gardener.

In that sense, I can neither endorse the leftist desire to ignore the realities of labor markets, nor these rightists who extol senseless, pointless, endless killing over honest backbreaking work. Maybe the poor schlub mowing your lawn will motivate his kids to get a real education (not modern “liberal arts”), and that kid might invent a new “smart lawnmower.” Anyway, the poor shlub is doing honest work.

Blessed are the Burgerflippers – may they profit both themselves, their employers, and their customers for they are the Children of Peace.

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Barely a Blog (BAB) contributor Myron Pauli grew up in Sunnyside Queens, went off to college in Cleveland and then spent time in a mental institution in Cambridge MA (MIT) with Benjamin Netanyahu (did not know him), and others until he was released with the “hostages” and Jimmy Carter on January 20, 1981, having defended his dissertation in nuclear physics. Most of the time since, he has worked on infrared sensors, mainly at Naval Research Laboratory in Washington DC. He was NOT named after Ron Paul but is distantly related to physicist Wolftgang Pauli; unfortunately, only the “good looks” were handed down and not the brains. He writes assorted song lyrics and essays reflecting his cynicism and classical liberalism. Click on the “BAB’s A List” category to access the Pauli archive.