Category Archives: Political Economy

Confused About The Subjective Theory Of Value Vs. Objective Standards (+ Some Laughs)

English, libertarianism, Literature, Music, Objectivism, Political Economy, Pop-Culture

At last. Someone with a funny bone (and a healthy IQ). “Best laughs of the month,” writes Jim Ostrowski about “Hollywood: The No-Good, The Bad And The Beastly.” It was also nice to hear from Jim that “CPUKE” made him pack-up laughing—this long time activist, lawyer and author for liberty deserves a good laugh.

On the other hand, on EPJ, “Hollywood: The No-Good, The Bad And The Beastly” has stimulated an interesting, if distressing, thread. Increasingly, I get why my pal Vox Day quit (and he was way more sombre than I; my writing is consistently funny.)

No cause for laughter is this to-and-fro:

Anonymous March 7, 2014 at 12:51 PM:

Sometimes a person can be too critical when giving a negative opinion it comes off as just an irritating screed. A screed that longs for the past that’s not coming back – it’s over, gone, no more – so get over it. Today’s art may not be what it should be, but I bet if and once deflation kicks in art will return to what it ought to be.

The reason why kids now days don’t read certain books but the Hunger Games is because those books (ie. Chekhov) are boring and don’t really line up with today’s issues. Well, they are. And, the author of Hunger Games is a she.

Reply
ILANA MERCER March 7, 2014 at 3:40 PM:

I should have guessed “Hungers Games” was “written” by a girl (although, don’t discriminate, carriers of the Y Chromosome can too be girls if they want to). Could Anon’s impoverished imagination (Chekhov is not for kids and was referenced as “heavy,” not necessarily enjoyable) be a consequence of utter lack of familiarity with the greatest, most exciting books ever? Classics for kids and young adults? Are you kidding me? “Hunger Games” or “Harry Potter” will never match gripping, culturally and historically richly textured, well-written stuff (so good for real boys) like: Ivanhoe, The Count of Monte Cristo, Treasure Island, Arabian Nights, A Tale of Two Cities, Oliver Twist, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Tom’s Midnight Garden, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, Last of the Mohicans, Les Misérables, Around the World in Eighty Days, Black Stallion, Wuthering Heights, Kiss Kiss, and even The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole. Problem is Anon has been brought up to revel in ignorance. You are perfect just they way you are. Kids nowadays don’t read b/c they’ve been told, like Anon, that they don’t need to—nothing much to learn from the great masters.

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Tony March 7, 2014 at 4:56 PM:

What i liked as a child was considered mostly crap by the elderly. And what the youths of today like i consider to be mostly crap. 30 years from now the youths will wonder how anyone other than geriatrics could possibly like Beyonce, Pharrell Williams or Rihanna.
Tastes generally remain stagnant on what we’re used to. Because of this subjective opinion and feelings of nostalgia i don’t really think it is possible to judge which is “better”.

Having said that, i am getting borderline depressed about what goes for “great movies” or “good music” these days. I don’t bother watching the Academy Awards anymore, since it has turned into a liberal self-congratulatory smugfest (with matching “best movie” nominees) so thick it raises ocean levels a yard ever year.

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ILANA MERCER March 7, 2014:

Actually, Tony, the value each consumer places on consumer goods in the marketplace is subjective. But the Subjective Theory of Value should not be confused with objective standards that determine the quality of cultural products. It’s pretty distressing to realize that libertarians confuse the two concepts and that cultural, intellectual and moral equivalence pervades our thinking as much as it does that of mainstream. To wit, applying objective, universal criteria (complexity, skill, mastery, intricacy, etc.), as the column states, it is objectively and immutably true that “B.B. King is no match for Johann Sebastian Bach.” I’m sure you can think of hundreds of similar examples: You might prefer to purchase one of Toni Morrison’s God-awful tomes, but the objective fact is that she’s no match for Shakespeare.

The New York ‘Slimes’ Stops Slumbering. But It’s Too Late.

Healthcare, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Media, Political Economy, Propaganda, Socialism

Before their very eyes, millions of Americans are watching as Obama takes from them and gives to a favored constituency. Now the Johnny-Come-Latelies of the “New York Slimes” (the last is Mark Levin’s moniker) have discovered belatedly that entitlement programs are distribution programs, and that Obama care is a particularity glaring exampled of one:

Hiding in plain sight behind that pledge [“If you like your current insurance, you will keep your current insurance”]— visible to health policy experts but not the general public — was the redistribution required to extend health coverage to those who had been either locked out or priced out of the market.
Now some of that redistribution has come clearly into view.
The law, for example, banned rate discrimination against women, which insurance companies called “gender rating” to account for their higher health costs. But that raised the relative burden borne by men. The law also limited how much more insurers can charge older Americans, who use more health care over all. But that raised the relative burden on younger people.
And the law required insurers to offer coverage to Americans with pre-existing conditions, which eased costs for less healthy people but raised prices for others who had been charged lower rates because of their good health.
“The A.C.A. is very much about redistribution, whether or not its advocates acknowledge that this is the case,” wrote Reihan Salam on the website of the conservative National Review.

Only healthcare experts knew of this? What liars live at the NYT. Mitt Romney repeatedly told the stupid voters that the cost of their healthcare would rise under Obamacare by about $2000 to $3000 annually. (For people in the individual market it’s much more.) There were many like him. The morons refused to heed him. Americans, for the most, were bamboozled by Obama media sycophants like the “Slimes” and were smitten by BHO’s Svengali-style hypnotism.

Libertarians are the Truthers—the good ones cleave to natural justice and to the natural laws of economics. By so doing, we are able to predict what the fools at the New York Times have only just conceded. So it was that “Obama’s Politburo Of Proctologists” (June 26, 2009), one of many such columns, explained to the few who listened that,

The pit of perverse incentives Papa Obama is engineering includes leveling the insurance industry, which by definition must discern and discriminate between applicants based on their health status (largely under individual control). Under his benevolent rule, private insurers will be subjected to a host of new regulations, “including a requirement to insure all applicants and a prohibition on pricing premiums on the basis of risk …”

“Destroying Healthcare For The Few Uninsured” (August 7, 2009) attempted the same:

If the US wasn’t already insolvent, I’d say that Obama was bankrupting the country, and sending the health care we have to hell in a handcart, for the ostensible benefit of less than ten percent of the population. But the US is already in the red, courtesy of the current president and his predecessor.

On an on.

Janet Yellen’s Monetary Mindset

Federal Reserve Bank, Political Economy

The president has appointed Janet Yellen to chair the Federal Reserve. Here is some information about her monetary mindset, by way of a post written on 03.14.10, when Yellen was made vice chair of the Fed:

In an economy of high unemployment and inflation, Barack Obama has gone and appointed as … chair of the Federal Reserve a woman called Janet Yellen, by whose “economic” model inflation is the result of “too many people working and too much economic prosperity.” Or at least, that’s how Larry Kudlow distills the theory.

That such an economic theory exists attests to the degree to which economics and politics have become intertwined. Certainly “Keynes’s political creed guaranteed a hand-in-glove relationship between the state and its stooge economists. Most of what Keynes advocated entails giving the state enormous confiscatory powers.”

Is “the Phillips-curve model,” Yellen’s preferred theory, an extension of Keynesianism, or is it just some form of free floating statism? I have no idea. But since most economists are servants of the state in-waiting, following the Phillips Curve—which posits “a consistent inverse relationship: when unemployment is high, wages increase slowly; when unemployment is low, wages rise rapidly”—has given rise to “a menu of policy options.” Examples, courtesy of the Concise Encyclopedia of Economics, are:

with an unemployment rate of 6 percent, the government might stimulate the economy to lower unemployment to 5 percent. Figure 1 indicates that the cost, in terms of higher inflation, would be a little more than half a percentage point. But if the government initially faced lower rates of unemployment, the costs would be considerably higher: a reduction in unemployment from 5 to 4 percent would imply more than twice as big an increase in the rate of inflation—about one and a quarter percentage points.

OF COURSE, the unquestioned premise of these phillipic prescriptions is that “stimulus” does indeed lower said unemployment rates. Only in The Oink Sectors.

“Super-confused Keynesianism” is Robert Wenzel’s apt description of Yellen’s theories.

Higher Rates And Hussein’s Healthcare Go Hand In Hand

Debt, Healthcare, Political Economy, Reason, The State

“You know what the insurance companies are like,” I was told by a statist neighbor, who adores Obama but concedes her healthcare premiums have gone up. How does the irrational individual solve the cognitive incongruity of rising prices and her undying love of the state?

She blames markets.

But even the stupid statist press can deny no longer that “insurance is at dramatically higher rates,” and some of the reasons are these:

First, the Affordable Care Act (ACA) sets minimum standards for benefits, including mental-health and substance-abuse treatment, maternity care, prescription drugs, and rehabilitative care, which were not included in many of the old plans. Also, insurance companies are now required to take all comers, regardless of their health status, and so rates are rising to cover their costs as well.

MORE.

Here The Heritage Foundation is forced into explaining the economically obvious:

…Contrary to a key intention of the legislation, the combination of mandates and taxes will not help to reduce the deficit. In fact, the PPACA will likely increase the deficit by an average $75 billion per year, and as a result, the nation’s publicly held debt will be $753 billion higher at the end of 2020. Such astronomical debt crowds out other productive investments and will lead to an estimated 670,000 lost job opportunities per year. …
he policy combination of spending and taxes alters the macroeconomic performance of the economy and feeds back onto the budget. A dynamic simulation shows that the higher initial costs are not an investment that pays off with a higher return in later years. Indeed, these front-loaded costs slow economic growth with higher inflation and higher interest rates, which overwhelm the benefits the proposal hoped to gain in later years.
The bill’s taxes, penalties, and fees on investors and businesses will decrease the amount of investment in the economy. This reduced investment will in turn lead to a decline in productivity, causing the economy to produce $706 billion less worth of goods and services. A smaller economic pie means that workers earn lower wages and salaries. Higher taxes on investment also put upward pressure on interest rates as investors seek to achieve their after-tax desired rate of return. …
…Lower wages reduce the amount of taxable income that could otherwise have been achieved. This will both increase the deficit and grow the total debt—which in turn puts upward pressure on interest rates and crowds out some savings that could have gone to new productive business investments.
Higher interest rates mean that more American tax dollars will go toward paying the interest on the federal debt rather than paying down the principal. Simulations using dynamic analysis estimate that the government would spend an average $23 billion more per year on interest rate payments over the 2010–2020 year window than it would without the PPACA.

MORE.

And from “Obama’s Politburo Of Proctologists”:

The pit of perverse incentives Papa Obama is engineering includes leveling the insurance industry, which by definition must discern and discriminate between applicants based on their health status (largely under individual control). Under his benevolent rule, private insurers will be subjected to a host of new regulations, “including a requirement to insure all applicants and a prohibition on pricing premiums on the basis of risk,” in the Cato Institute’s Michael Tanner’s rendering.
This means one thing: moral hazard. Writes libertarian economist Walter Block: “The greater the protection from the random expenses of sickness the greater the potential over-consumption of the item in question.”
We currently labor under “a seeming patchwork of indemnity insurance arrangements, managed care, private payment, and charity.” Yet the fewer the intermediaries interfering with the primary, patient-doctor relationship, the better the patient’s prognosis. The president’s prescription for too little freedom, however, is even less of the same!

MORE.