Wot Empire?

DOUBTLESS I am wasting what remains of my precious life by reading the mass-circulation media, but I constantly come across the suggestion that there is today a United States empire comparable to those of the United Kingdom and the United Provinces (the Netherlands.) However, this is true neither de jure nor de facto.

It is false de jure, because the U. S.A. rejected dominion when it could easily have seized it, and freely accepted equality with the U.K., U.S.S.R., France and China in the United Nations.

What do we know about de facto empires? We all – or, rather, we Jews and Christians – know something about the Roman empire. Jesus of Nazareth challenged the Pharisees, the collaborators, “Show me the tax money.” The Romans demanded that taxes be paid in their own coins; because those coins were regularly being shipped back to Rome, they were valued at least 20% higher than the Greek currency. (TO "show" the coin was a challenge to the Pharisees, because the coins bore the image of Caesar, and to a Jew, any image of a living thing, created by God, was anathema.)

And we know something about the British empire; the early settlers in America objected to paying taxes to the king, because they had no representation in Parliament. (The Americans who are forced to pay the Alternative Minimum Tax today need to bear this in mind . . . equal representation, equal taxation!)

And it is fairly widely known what the Spanish empire in America was about; the Spaniards shipped great loads of gold home from South America – but, because Spain was on a gold standard, the result was that coins suddenly became more plentiful, a phenomenon for which we today have a word; INFLATION. Debtors were relieved, creditors were ruined, the social order collapsed – and Spain has never again been a world power.

But, in acute contrast, the U. S. A. taxes its own creators and then – if what we are told by the media is true – lavishes “foreign aid” upon Israel, Egypt, North Korea and countless other nations which declare their independence by both word and deed.

In addition, the U. S. A. perfects automobiles and moving pictures and mass production and sky-scrapers and aircraft and computers and semi-conductors and telecommunications and space exploration and the global positioning system and all the symbols of modern times, thus saving the other nations the cost and delay involved in developing these things for themselves. (It is amusing to notice how often the others do not dare even to tread in our footsteps; the Chinese boosters still do not use liquid hydrogen, which is incomparably the most efficient, but dangerous and intractable, of fuels.)

The role of the U. S. A. is not that of Zeus, the angry and self-centered dominator, but that of Atlas, carrying the world on his shoulders. The nations of the world should be asking themselves, what would befall if ever Atlas …?

ELECTION YEARS are notorious for giving rise to nonsense, and nonsense seems to have emerged early this time. One of the most respected minds in the country, Warren Buffet, is reported to have said – in open session of the House of Representatives – that he is not opposed to taxes on the rich (among whom he is, of course, conspicuous) being higher than on other people.

Once upon a time, it is said, there was a principle: “No taxation without representation.” Nowadays, the States make a fetish of equalizing representation: in State elections, members of Congress and other tax-spenders are allowed to vote. Why is there not just as much emphasis on equalizing taxation? If Buffett has only as many votes as the bag ladies and welfare mothers, and the people who can’t find their way across a butterfly ballot, why should he be more highly taxed? Ordinary citizens, in contrast to Buffett, dislike high tax rates; notice how much more income the elite have declared since the Republican administration reduced the rates they experience.

If Buffett wants to repay the great masses of consumers who have – willingly – endowed him with immense riches, he might very well remind the Congress that the Constitution is not only democratic – in the proper sense, that the many [State] officers have always the first and, in many cases, also the last words – but also politically correct: the privileges authorized, bankruptcy and patents and copyright, are all in favor of minorities (the U.S. is allowed to err neither to the Right, by oppressing minorities, nor to the Left, by favoring majorities.) Better still, he and his friends Bill Gates and Charles Munger and other notables might run for election as electors in their respective States: nowadays, candidates vying to be electors are all too often persons of little standing outside their respective parties.

I manage to have something that I deem worth saying about once a week. There are, of course, columnists who do it once a day, and one of them, Bill Bonner, has also co-authored at least two books, Empire of Debt and Mobs, Messiahs, and Markets. Bonner – in common with Buffett – exemplifies the “modern” (as opposed to classical) mind that reasons from data to theories. (Once upon another time – I remember it well – there was a saying, “Every educated man is a liberal:” believe it or not! What the words meant was, that the only way to reach agreement with other people is to reason deductively, from first principles down to particular cases.)

At the moment, Bonner is telling us that the all-too-familiar phenomenon of warfare is attributable to evolution; we are descended from males who were ready to fight to prevent strangers from carrying off their females. There is no way to test this theory, because we cannot alter the past. However, we can point out that it is flatly false to suppose (as Bonner seemingly does) that war is a fact of life that we must accept. If “war” means conflict between states, then it arises only if there is not free trade and free travel across borders. (The Iraqi invasion of Kuwait was an exception; the pretext was a reservoir of “public” oil extending across their common border.)

But war is not necessarily frequent and widespread. The safeguard against it is called by the French fraternité, by the workers solidarity, by the Christians righteousness, by the States common defense, by the nations collective security: if any one is wronged, all hir equals join in hir defense. The sophisticated and cosmopolitan Bonner must have observed that, even in this republic (meaning, that every officer can be removed with ballots, rather than bullets,) there is a Confederation Of Public Servants that practices collective security and enjoys a remarkable measure of liberty.

RECENTLY, I read an article by a black author, Idang Alibi of Nigeria, discussing the remark of James Watson, of “Double Helix” renown, that black people are measurably less intelligent than others. Alibi agreed that the facts are so, but asked why the Blacks continue to allow their societies to be so dramatically, emphatically inferior.

Alibi is flattering, particularly, the Whites, it seems to me. Think back a century to, perhaps, the greatest of all Whites, Henry Ford I. He employed anyone who wanted to trade a hard day’s work for five dollars (except members of his own family.) In fact, the Ford foundry was run almost, if not entirely, by Blacks, whose melamine could withstand the heat and glare of molten iron. If Blacks could satisfy Henry Ford, the most successful industrialist in the United States, then they can satisfy any employer competing on a free market! Anyway, the Ford workers did not need exceptional intelligence: Ford succeeded because he left it to very many minds to find the best solutions to problems (in contrast to the “Scientific Management” preached by F. W. Taylor.

If Blacks cannot compete today, it is not because the Blacks have changed, it is because the market is no longer free. The notion is abroad today that "democracy" means, not liberty and justice for all, but government for the greatest good of the greatest number; thus there are seen minimum wage laws and compulsory health insurance and other measures that shut out the black minority. Black-majority nations have adopted bad government too, with the result that Whites with experience and judgment have been discouraged, if not indeed expelled: as Alibi remarks, the most successful nation in Africa is South Africa, where there are both Whites and Blacks in the same market.

The heuristic Gillaspy, in "The Drive to the North," remarked upon the historical trend for civilization to move from the most favorable places, such as the Golden Crescent in the Near East, to colder and colder climates, up to Scandinavia, Canada, even Alaska. His thesis was that as some country becomes more populous, the society becomes more conventional, less tolerant of non-conformity – and so the brightest and best men move out, to test their powers in a more difficult environment. This theory might very well explain Alibi’s lament that the black countries are falling behind, or even deteriorating: it is not because they are black, but because they cling to familiar failure.

If we have understood the phenomenon, can we make practical recommendations? We can indeed: ask yourself, “Is this an open society? If I invent a better mousetrap, am I free to make them and market them – or do I need permissions, permits, protection? Can I say, with the Lord Jesus, ‘Is it not lawful for me to do what I wish with my own?’ (Matt. 20:1-15.)”

RECENTLY, I read an article by a black author, Idang Alibi of Nigeria, discussing the remark of James Watson, of “Double Helix” renown, that black people are measurably less intelligent than others. Alibi agreed that the facts are so, but asked why the Blacks continue to allow their societies to be so dramatically, emphatically inferior.

Alibi is flattering, particularly, the Whites, it seems to me. Think back a century to, perhaps, the greatest of all Whites, Henry Ford I. He employed anyone who wanted to trade a hard day's work for five dollars (except members of his own family.) In fact, the Ford foundry was run almost, if not entirely, by Blacks, whose melamine could withstand the heat and glare of molten iron. If Blacks could satisfy Henry Ford, the most successful industrialist in the United States, then they can satisfy any employer competing on a free market. Anyway, the Ford workers did not need exceptional intelligence: Ford succeeded because he left it to very many minds to find the best solutions to problems (in contrast to the “Scientific Management” preached by F. W. Taylor.)

If Blacks cannot compete today, it is not because the Blacks have changed, it is because the market is no longer free. The notion is abroad today that democracy means, not liberty and justice for all, but government for the greatest good of the greatest number; thus there are seen minimum wage laws and compulsory health insurance and other measures that shut out the black minority. Black-majority nations have adopted bad government too, with the result that Whites with experience and judgment have been discouraged, if not indeed expelled: as Alibi remarks, the most successful nation in Africa is South Africa, where there are both Whites and Blacks in the same market. The more the individuals differ, the more easily each one can specialize on what he, or she, does best.

The heuristic Gillaspy, in The Drive to the North, remarked upon the historical trend for civilization to move from the most favorable places, such as the Golden Crescent in the Near East, to colder and colder climates, up to Scandinavia, Canada, even Alaska. His thesis was that as some country becomes more populous, the society becomes more conventional, less tolerant of non-conformity - and so the brightest and best men move out, to test their powers in a more difficult environment. This theory might very well explain Alibi's lament that the black countries are falling behind, or even deteriorating: it is not because they are black, but because they cling to familiar failure.

If we have understood the phenomenon, can we make practical recommendations? We can indeed: ask yourself, “Is this an open society? If I invent a better mousetrap, am I free to make them and market them - or do I need permissions, permits, protection? Can I say, with the Lord Jesus, ' Is it not lawful for me to do what I wish with my own?' (Matt. 20:1-16.)”

Public Medicine
TWELVE MONTHS before the next election, the media is already saturated with political commentary. The polls show, we see, that a majority of the people would like to have health care nationalized, and even to pay as much as $150 a month to enjoy it.

One has to wonder what they have in mind. Presumably, they do not imagine that every doctor would cost the same amount; the ones who have been lucky recently, and had very few patients expire, would have long lines of would-be patients waiting to be seen.

If good doctors charge more than poor ones, then all doctors will be more or less equally busy, but some people will be spending much more than others: one would suppose that women of child-bearing age will be far more concerned to keep healthy than would grandmothers.

One solution to this variation in demand is familiar; it is the catastrophic medical insurance policy, which covers the expense of treatments that only a small proportion of the population will ever require.

However, the medical profession perceive that this is a misconceived solution. The best strategy is to spend money on prevention, rather than treatment; almost, if not quite, everyone would benefit by having advice and, perhaps, certain procedures before they ever suffer any symptoms.

Once we think in terms of health, rather than sickness, the problem becomes soluble. What we ought to do is to pay, not for the expense of treatment, but for the benefit of being well. Thus one should join a genuine health maintenance organization - one in which you paid a fee every day you were well, and stopped paying when you were sick. The organization would have a strong incentive to get you better quickly; its treatments would have a kill-or-cure character. Young wives and athletes would join expensive HMOs, retired persons would gravitate to cheaper ones - there might even be some, run by teaching hospitals, which charged only a token fee (and gave only token treatments.)

This is, obviously, an example of paying for results, not for expenses - something which is all too scarce in these United States. Masses of workers are paid for the time they put in, not the product they put out: one of the few exceptions is that drivers are paid so much for every sixty seconds' worth of distance run. But it should not be new and strange -- we remember the “Apollo” astronaut who was asked what he thought about when he was in orbit, and replied, “I reflect that to get down again I rely upon a thousand systems, and every one was made by the lowest bidder.” (Or perhaps not all of us do remember that thought: I just looked in Wikipedia for “Apollo,” and this anecdote was not included.)