Browsed by
Month: November 2013

Baroque Piece for Piano, Op. 33 (2004) – Video by G. Stolyarov II

Baroque Piece for Piano, Op. 33 (2004) – Video by G. Stolyarov II

Comments 0 Comment

A piano composition by Mr. Stolyarov from 2004, employing baroque harmonies but somewhat streamlined and modernized to fit an instrument not yet existing in the Baroque era.

This composition was remastered using the SynthFont2 software, with the Evanescence 2 and GMR Basico 1.1 instrument packs.

Download the MP3 file of this composition here.

See the index of Mr. Stolyarov’s compositions, all available for free download, here.

The artwork is Mr. Stolyarov’s Abstract Orderism Fractal 51, available for download here and here.

Remember to LIKE, FAVORITE, and SHARE this video in order to spread rational high culture to others.

Janet Yellen, the “Pink Dream,” and a Coming Economic Nightmare – Article by Joseph T. Salerno

Janet Yellen, the “Pink Dream,” and a Coming Economic Nightmare – Article by Joseph T. Salerno

Comments 0 Comment
The New Renaissance Hat
Joseph T. Salerno
November 19, 2013
******************************

On Monday, former Fed official Andrew Huszar publicly apologized to the American public for his seminal role in executing the Quantitative Easing (QE) program, a program he characterizes as “the greatest backdoor Wall Street bailout of all time,” and “the largest financial-markets intervention by any government in world history.” While this is a momentous admission from an insider (Mr. Huszar is also a former Wall Street banker), perhaps Mr. Huszar’s most revealing statement concerned the results of QE’s “relentlessly pumping money into the financial markets during the past five years.” He referred to the spectacular rally in financial markets and expressed agreement with the growing belief among expert observers that market conditions had become “bubble-like.”

In a paper just released by the American Enterprise Institute, another former policymaker, resident fellow Desmond Lachman, formerly deputy director of the International Monetary Fund’s Policy Development and Review Department, warns that QE and other “unorthodox monetary policies” are having “unintended consequences.” Among other consequences, Lachman sees signs of incipient bubbles forming throughout the world:

An important aim of the QE policies pursued in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Japan has been to encourage risk taking and to raise asset prices as the means to stimulate aggregate demand. The question that now needs to be asked is whether these policies may have given rise to excessive risk taking, overleveraging, and bubbles in asset and credit markets. In this context, one has to wonder whether historically low yields on junk bonds in the industrialized countries now understate the risk of owning those bonds. . . . One also has to wonder whether yields on sovereign bonds in the European periphery have become disassociated from those countries’ underlying economic fundamentals and whether global equity valuations have not become excessively rich.

The markets for gems and for collectibles have also become very frothy of late. Yesterday, new records were set for a gemstone and for an Andy Warhol piece of art sold at auction. The “Pink Dream,” is a 59.60 carat vivid pink diamond, which is the highest color grade for diamonds, and the purity of its crystals is ranked among the top 2 percent in the world. The record setting price was $83 million. Not coincidentally, the DJIA set an intraday record shortly before the auction. The new record price for the Andy Warhol piece was $105.4 million. The auction’s combined $199.5 million in revenues was also a record for Sotheby’s. During Sotheby’s Geneva fall auction season, records were also set for the prices of an orange diamond and a Rolex Daytona watch.

While the Austrian insight that super-accommodative Fed monetary policy may be causing a recurrence of asset bubbles is making headway in policy circles, it has not yet dawned on Janet Yellen. Nor is such an epiphany likely. Ms. Yellen wears the intellectual blinders of the mainstream macroeconomist which force her to focus narrowly on arbitrary and increasingly irrelevant statistical averages and aggregates like the CPI, the unemployment rate, and GDP and to ignore what is going on around her in real markets.

This was clearly revealed in remarks prepared for her confirmation hearing released yesterday. Ms. Yellen noted that the rate of increase in the CPI index was less than the Fed target of 2.00 percent and that the labor market and the economy were performing far short of their potential (based on the meaningless concept of “potential GDP”). She thus reiterated her commitment to continuing monetary accommodation and “unconventional policy tools such as asset purchases.” It is true that in her testimony before the Senate committee on Thursday she did concede that it is “important for the Fed to attempt to detect asset bubbles when they are forming.” However, she blithely dismissed concerns that recent record highs in asset markets reflected “bubble-like conditions.” With Ms. Yellen’s confirmation highly likely, we can look forward to the Fed blindly fueling asset bubbles to a fare-thee-well. With the financial system still on shaky ground, this will lead to another financial meltdown and a U.S. government takeover of the financial system, the likes of which will make the last Wall Street bailout appear to be a minor intervention.

Joseph Salerno is academic vice president of the Mises Institute, professor of economics at Pace University, and editor of the Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics. He has been interviewed in the Austrian Economics Newsletter and on Mises.org. Send him mail. See Joseph T. Salerno’s article archives.

This article was published on Mises.org and may be freely distributed, subject to a Creative Commons Attribution United States License, which requires that credit be given to the author.

Federal Reserve Steals From the Poor and Gives to the Rich – Article by Ron Paul

Federal Reserve Steals From the Poor and Gives to the Rich – Article by Ron Paul

Comments 0 Comment
The New Renaissance Hat
Ron Paul
November 19, 2013
******************************

Last Thursday the Senate Banking Committee held hearings on Janet Yellen’s nomination as Federal Reserve Board Chairman. As expected, Ms. Yellen indicated that she would continue the Fed’s “quantitative easing” (QE) polices, despite QE’s failure to improve the economy. Coincidentally, two days before the Yellen hearings, Andrew Huszar, an ex-Fed official, publicly apologized to the American people for his role in QE. Mr. Huszar called QE “the greatest backdoor Wall Street bailout of all time.”

As recently as five years ago, it would have been unheard of for a Wall Street insider and former Fed official to speak so bluntly about how the Fed acts as a reverse Robin Hood. But a quick glance at the latest unemployment numbers shows that QE is not benefiting the average American. It is increasingly obvious that the Fed’s post-2008 policies of bailouts, money printing, and bond buying benefited the big banks and the politically-connected investment firms. QE is such a blatant example of crony capitalism that it makes Solyndra look like a shining example of a pure free market!

It would be a mistake to think that QE is the first time the Fed’s policies have benefited the well-to-do at the expense of the average American. The Fed’s polices have always benefited crony capitalists and big spending politicians at the expense of the average American.

By manipulating the money supply and the interest rate, Federal Reserve polices create inflation and thereby erode the value of the currency. Since the Federal Reserve opened its doors one hundred years ago, the dollar has lost over 95 percent of its purchasing power —that’s right, today you need $23.70 to buy what one dollar bought in 1913!

As pointed out by the economists of the Austrian School, the creation of new money does not impact everyone equally. The well-connected benefit from inflation, as they receive the newly-created money first, before general price increases have spread through the economy. It is obvious, then, that middle- and working-class Americans are hardest hit by the rising level of prices.

Congress also benefits from the devaluation of the currency, as it allows them to increase welfare- and warfare-spending without directly taxing the people. Instead, the increase is only felt via the hidden “inflation tax.” I have often said that the inflation tax is one of the worst taxes because it is hidden and because it is regressive. Of course, there is a limit to how long the Fed can facilitate big federal spending without causing an economic crisis.

Far from promoting a sound economy for all, the Federal Reserve is the main cause of the boom-and-bust economy, as well as the leading facilitator of big government and crony capitalism. Fortunately, in recent years more Americans have become aware of how the Fed is impacting their lives. These Americans have joined efforts to educate their fellow citizens on the dangers of the Federal Reserve and have joined efforts to bring transparency to the Federal Reserve by passing the Audit the Fed bill.

Auditing the Fed is an excellent first step toward restoring a monetary policy that works for the benefit of the American people, not the special interests. Another important step is to repeal legal tender laws that restrict the ability of the people to use the currency of their choice. This would allow Americans to protect themselves from the effects of the Fed’s polices. Auditing and ending the Fed, and allowing Americans to use the currency of their choice, must be a priority for anyone serious about restoring peace, prosperity, and liberty.

Ron Paul, MD, is a former three-time Republican candidate for U. S. President and Congressman from Texas.

This article is reprinted with permission from the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity.

SENS or Cryonics?: My Answer to a Hypothetical Choice – Video by G. Stolyarov II

SENS or Cryonics?: My Answer to a Hypothetical Choice – Video by G. Stolyarov II

Comments 0 Comment

If Mr. Stolyarov had $1 billion to donate to life extension, would he donate it to SENS (Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence) or cryonics? Find out his answer.

References:
– “How Can I Live Forever?: What Does and Does Not Preserve the Self” – Essay by G. Stolyarov II
– “How Can I Live Forever?: What Does and Does Not Preserve the Self” – Video by G. Stolyarov II
– SENS Research Foundation Website
– “Kim Suozzi Cryogenically Preserved After Battle With Brain Cancer” – Huffington Post – January 22, 2013

Pursuing the Outcomes of a Free Market – Video by G. Stolyarov II

Pursuing the Outcomes of a Free Market – Video by G. Stolyarov II

Comments 0 Comment

What hope is there to actually achieve the ideals of liberty in our lifetimes? There is a promising approach, encapsulated in the following method. Ask yourself: What results would a fully free market, functioning in accordance with the principles of liberty and individual rights, bring about? Now go pursue those results directly, through your individual actions, without waiting for the system to change.

References:
– The Musical Compositions of G. Stolyarov II
– “Occupy Wall Street activists buy $15m of Americans’ personal debt” – Adam Gabbatt – The Guardian – November 12, 2013

The Boon to Longevity Progress Will Be Increased Activism, Advocacy, and Lobbying – Article by Franco Cortese

The Boon to Longevity Progress Will Be Increased Activism, Advocacy, and Lobbying – Article by Franco Cortese

Comments 0 Comment
The New Renaissance Hat
Franco Cortese
November 17, 2013
******************************
When asked what the biggest bottleneck for progress in life extension is, most thinkers and researchers say funding. Others say the biggest bottleneck is breakthroughs, while still others say it’s our way of approaching the problem (i.e., seeking healthy life extension, a.k.a. “aging gracefully”, instead of more comprehensive methods of radical life extension). But the majority seem to feel that the largest determining factor impacting how long it takes to achieve indefinite lifespans is adequate funding to plug away at developing and experimentally verifying the various alternative technologies and methodologies that have already been proposed (e.g. Robert Freitas’s Nanomedicine [1], Aubrey de Grey’s Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence [2, 3, 4], Michael R. Rose’s Evolutionary Longevity [5, 6]). I claim that Radical Longevity’s biggest bottleneck is not funding, but advocacy, activism and lobbying.
***

This is because the final objective of increased funding for Radical Longevity and Life Extension research can be more effectively and efficiently achieved through public advocacy for Radical Life Extension than it can by direct funding or direct research, per unit of time or effort. Research and development obviously still need to be done, but an increase in researchers needs an increase in funding, and an increase in funding needs an increase in the public perception of indefinite longevity’s feasibility and desirability.

There is no definitive timespan that it will take to achieve radically extended life. How long it takes to achieve Radical Longevity is determined by how hard we work at it and how much effort we put into it. More effort means that it will be achieved sooner. And by and large, an increase in effort can be best achieved by an increase in funding, and an increase in funding can be best achieved by an increase in public advocacy. You will likely accelerate the development of Radically Extended Life, per unit of time or effort, by advocating the desirability, ethicality, and technical feasibility of longer life than you will by doing direct research, or by working towards the objective of directly contributing funds to life-extension projects and research initiatives.

In order to get funding we need to demonstrate with explicit clarity just how much we want it, and that we can do so while minimizing potentially negative societal repercussions like overpopulation. We must do our best to vehemently invalidate the clichés that promulgate the sentiment that life extension is dangerous or unethical. It needn’t be either, and nor is it necessarily likely to be either.

Some think that spending one’s time deliberating the potential issues that could result from greatly increased lifespans and the ways in which we could mitigate or negate them won’t make a difference until greatly increased lifespans are actually achieved. I disagree. While any potentially negative repercussions of life extension (like overpopulation) aren’t going to happen until life extension is achieved, offering solution paradigms and ways in which we could negate or mitigate such negative repercussions decreases the time we have to wait for it by increasing the degree with which the wider public feels it to be desirable, and that it can very well be done safely and ethically. Those who are against radical life extension are against it either because they think it is infeasible (in which case being “against” it may be too strong a descriptor) or because they have qualms relating to its ethicality or its safety. More people openly advocating against it means a higher public perception of its undesirability. Whether indefinite longevity is eventually achieved via private industry or via government-subsidized research initiatives, we need to create the public perception that it is widely desired before either government or industry will take notice.

The sentiment that the best thing we can do is simply live healthily and wait until progress is made seems to be fairly common as well. People have the feeling that researchers are working on it, that it will happen if it can happen, and that waiting until progress is made is the best course to take. Such lethargy will not help Radical Longevity in any way. How long we have to wait for indefinite lifespans is a function of how much effort we put into it. And in this article I argue that how much funding and attention life extension receives is by and large a function of how widespread the public perception of its feasibility and desirability is.

This isn’t simply about our individual desires to live longer. It might be easier to hold the sentiment that we should just wait it out until it happens if we only consider its impact on the scale of our own individual lives. Such a sentiment may also be aided by the view that greatly longer lives would be a mere advantage, nice but unnecessary. I don’t think this is the case. I argue that the technological eradication of involuntary death is a moral imperative if there ever was one. If how long we have to wait until radical longevity is achieved depends on how vehemently we demand it and on how hard we work to create the public perception that longer life is widely longed-for, then to what extent are  100,000 lives lost potentially needlessly every day while we wait on our hands? One million people will die wasteful and involuntary deaths in the next 10 days. 36.5 million people will die this year from age-correlated causes of functional decline. This puts the charges of inethicality in a ghostly new light. If advocating the desirability, feasibility, and blatant ethicality of life extension can hasten its implementation by even a mere 10 days, then one million lives that would have otherwise been lost will have been saved by the efforts of life-extension advocates, researchers, and fiscal supporters. Seen in this way, working toward radical longevity may very well be the most ethical and selfless way you could spend your time, in terms of the number of lives saved and/or the amount of suffering prevented.

One of the most common and easy-to-raise concerns I come across in response to any effort to minimize the suffering of future beings is that there are enough problems to worry about right now. “Shouldn’t we be worrying about lessening starvation in underdeveloped countries first? They’re starving right now. Shouldn’t we be focusing on the problems of today, on things that we can have a direct impact on?” Indeed. 100,000 people will die, potentially needlessly, tomorrow. The massive number of people that suffer involuntary death is a problem of today! Indeed, it may very well be the most pressing problem of today! What other source of contemporary suffering claims so many lives, and occurs on such a massive scale? What other “problem of today” is responsible for the needless and irreversible involuntary death of one hundred thousand lives per day? Certainly not starvation, or war, or cancer, all of which in themselves represent smaller sources of involuntary death. Longevity advocates do what they do for the same reason that people who try to mitigate starvation, war, and cancer do what they do, namely to lessen the amount of involuntary death that occurs.

This is a contemporary problem that we can have a direct impact on. People intuitively assume that we won’t achieve radically extended life until far in the future. This makes them conflate any lives saved by radically extended lifespans with lives yet to come into existence. This makes them see involuntary death as a problem of the future, rather than a problem of today. But more people than I’ve ever known will die tomorrow, from causes that are physically possible to obviate and ameliorate – indeed, from causes that we have potential and conceptual solutions for today.

I have attempted to show in this article that advocating life-extension should be considered as “working toward it” to as great an extent as directly funding it or performing direct research on it is considered as “working toward it”. Advocacy has greater potential to increase life extension’s widespread desirability than direct work or funding does, and increasing both its desirability and the public perception if its desirability has more potential to generate increased funding and research-attention for life-extension than direct funding or research does. Advocacy thus has the potential to contribute to the arrival of life extension and hasten its implementation just as much, if not more so (as I have attempted to argue in this article), than practical research or direct funding does. This should motivate people to help create the momentous momentum we need to really get the ball rolling. To be a longevity advocate is to be a longevity worker! Involuntary death from age-associated, physically-remediable causes is the largest source of death, destruction and suffering today.  Don’t you want to help prevent the most widespread source of death and of suffering in existence today? Don’t you want to help mitigate the most pressing moral concern not only of today, but of the entirety of human history – namely physically remediable involuntary death?

Then advocate the technological eradication of involuntary death. Advocate the technical feasibility, extreme desirability, and blatant ethicality of radically extending life. Death is a cataclysm. We need not sanctify the seemingly inevitable any longer. We need not tell ourselves that death is somehow a good thing, or something we can do nothing about, in order to live with the “fact” of it any longer. Soon it won’t be a fact of life. Soon it will be an artifact of history. Life may not be ipso facto valuable according to all philosophies of value – but life is a necessary precondition for any sort of value whatsoever. Death is dumb, dummy! An incontrovertible waste convertible into nothing! A negative-sum blight! So if you want to contribute to the solution of problems of today, if you want to help your fellow man today, then stand proud and shout loud “Doom to Arbitrary Duty and Death to  Arbitrary Death!” at every crowd cowed by the seeming necessity of death.

***

Franco Cortese is a futurist, author, editor, Affiliate Scholar at the Institute for Ethics & Emerging Technologies, Ambassador at The Seasteading Institute, Affiliate Researcher at ELPIs Foundation for Indefinite Lifespans, Fellow at Brighter Brains Institute, Advisor at the Lifeboat Foundation (Futurists Board Member and Life Extension Scientific Advisory Board Member), Director of the Canadian Longevity Alliance, Activist at the International Longevity Alliance, Canadian Ambassador at Longevity Intelligence Communications, an Administrator at MILE (Movement for Indefinite Life Extension), Columnist at LongeCity, Columnist at H+ Magazine, Executive Director of the Center for Transhumanity, Contributor to the Journal of Geoethical Nanotechnology, India Future Society, Serious Wonder, Immortal Life and The Rational Argumentator. Franco edited Longevitize!: Essays on the Science, Philosophy & Politics of Longevity, a compendium of 150+ essays from over 40 contributing authors.
***
References:
***
[1]. de Grey AD, Ames BN, Andersen JK, Bartke A, Campisi J, HewardCB, McCarter RJ, Stock G (2002). “Time to Talk SENS: Critiquing the Immutability of Human Aging”. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 959: 452–62. PMID 11976218.
***

[2]. de Grey, Aubrey (2003). The Mitochondrial Free Radical Theory of Aging. Austin, Texas: Landes Bioscience. ISBN 1-58706-155-4.

[3]. de Grey, Aubrey and Rae, Michael (2007). Ending Aging: The Rejuvenation Breakthroughs that Could Reverse Human Aging in Our Lifetime. St. Martin’s Press.

[4]. Laurence D. Mueller, Casandra L. Rauser and Michael R. Rose (2011). Does Aging Stop? Oxford University Press.

[5]. Garland, T., Jr., and M. R. Rose, eds. (2009). Experimental Evolution: Concepts, Methods, and Applications of Selection Experiments. University of California Press.

What Does Greenpeace Have Against Golden Rice? – Article by Bradley Doucet

What Does Greenpeace Have Against Golden Rice? – Article by Bradley Doucet

Comments 0 Comment
The New Renaissance Hat
Bradley Doucet
November 17, 2013
******************************
Imagine if you stumbled across a naturally-occurring variety of rice that was rich in beta-carotene, a precursor to vitamin A found in carrots, pumpkins, and sweet potatoes. A lack of vitamin A in the body leads to an increased risk of blindness and increased susceptibility to disease, which can in turn lead to premature death in small children. If you could get people in poor rice-based societies to substitute this newfound variety of rice for the kind of rice they normally eat, then you could help them dramatically improve their health.Well, no such naturally-occurring variety of rice exists on Earth. Fortunately, though, some very intelligent human beings have created such a variety through genetic modification or genetic engineering (GE). It is called “Golden Rice” because of its golden colour. But far from celebrating this life-saving invention, groups like Greenpeace are fighting to stop it from being accepted and implemented. My first reaction to this was that the good people at Greenpeace and similar groups are out of their gourds. But skeptical though I was, I wanted to give them a chance to change my mind, to prove me wrong. What I found was not very impressive. Here are some of the reasons the organization gives [1] for claiming that “Golden Rice is environmentally irresponsible, poses risks to human health, and could compromise food, nutrition and financial security.” 1) “The tens of millions of dollars invested in Golden Rice would have been better spent on VAD [vitamin A deficiency] solutions that are already available and working, such as food supplements, food fortification and home gardening.” Well, maybe yes, maybe no. But who is to decide where money is better spent? I personally would rather have lots of people trying lots of different things. The best solutions will win out in the marketplace if people are free to choose. Oh, and Golden Rice is a form of food fortification. It just takes place at the genetic level.

2) “If cross-pollination or seed mix-up causes Golden Rice contamination, it could prove difficult, if not impossible to eradicate.” The use of words like ‘contamination’ and ‘eradicate’ are clearly meant to poison the debate, to get people to equate Golden Rice with dangerous diseases and harmful radiation. Rhetoric aside, is there any reason to expect more cross-pollination or seed mix-ups with Golden Rice than with other varieties? Are we afraid that basmati might cross-pollinate jasmine rice?

3) “If any hazardous, unexpected effects would develop from Golden Rice, the GE contamination would affect countries where rice is an essential staple and put people and food security at risk.” The reason they have to imagine hypothetical hazardous effects is that as far as anyone can tell, Golden Rice has no actual hazardous effects. It’s safe. It’s been tested. In the absence of any indication that it is harmful, we should go ahead and consume it. Or at least let other people consume it if we ourselves are filled with irrational fear.

4) “It is irresponsible to impose Golden Rice on people if it goes against their religious beliefs, cultural heritage and sense of identity, or simply because they do not want it.” Uh, no argument here. It’s not just irresponsible, it’s completely immoral. But who, exactly, is talking about imposing anything on anyone? Groups like Greenpeace are the ones that want to prevent people from being able to choose Golden Rice. I’m unaware of anyone who wants to force people to eat it, or farmers to grow it.

5) “Golden Rice does not address the underlying causes of VAD, which are mainly poverty and lack of access to a healthy and varied diet.” So what? An artificial knee doesn’t address the underlying causes of bone density loss, but it sure makes life better for people whose natural knees are worn out. Getting at underlying causes is great, and I am certainly all for the economic freedom that will help the poor escape poverty. But in the meantime, treating some of the more dire symptoms of poverty also seems like a good idea.

6) “[T]he single-crop approach of Golden Rice could make malnutrition worse because it encourages a diet based solely on rice, rather than increasing access to a diverse diet of fruits and vegetables, considered crucial to combatting VAD and other nutrient deficiencies.” Golden Rice is a food, not an approach. The sooner the people in poor rice-based societies can get access to a diverse diet with lots of fruits and vegetables, the better, but again, in the meantime, Golden Rice can help. To forbid this option while holding out for a better one is perverse.

7) “Despite all the hype surrounding Golden Rice, it still remains unproven whether daily consumption of Golden Rice would actually improve the vitamin A status of people who are deficient.” This is patently false. Scientific studies have shown that the beta-carotene contained in Golden Rice is “highly available and easily taken up into the bloodstream by the human digestive system.” There is no reason to believe that Golden Rice would not improve the vitamin A status of people who are deficient, and every reason to believe that it would.

Since the reasons Greenpeace gives for opposing Golden Rice are so transparently inadequate, I have to wonder what the real, unstated reasons are. I can’t help but think that the people in charge of this campaign are unscientifically opposed to the transformative technology of genetic engineering itself, despite all of its potential to improve human lives. It really seems to me that they are motivated by an ecological religion whose goal is not to make human life better, but to preserve the non-human natural world for its own sake, and to stop us from altering it in any way unless it is to return it to a previous state before humans started altering it, which was somehow a better state despite being less suited to human survival and flourishing.

I’m all for reducing pollution and dealing with other environmental problems to the extent that doing so actually improves the human condition. Prioritizing the environment to the detriment of human well-being, though, I can’t get behind. And preventing the deployment of beneficial technologies that we have no reason to think would have any harmful effects on people or the environment? That is simply indefensible. Greenpeace should cease its harmful campaign against Golden Rice and get behind this life-saving technology.

1. Greenpeace refers to Golden Rice as “GE ‘Golden’ rice,” which I find clunky. For the sake of readability, I have replaced every instance of “GE ‘Golden’ rice” with “Golden Rice” in quotations from the Greenpeace website.

Bradley Doucet is Le Québécois Libre‘s English Editor and the author of the blog Spark This: Musings on Reason, Liberty, and Joy. A writer living in Montreal, he has studied philosophy and economics, and is currently completing a novel on the pursuit of happiness. He also writes for The New Individualist, an Objectivist magazine published by The Atlas Society, and sings.
Pursuing the Outcomes of a Free Market – Article by G. Stolyarov II

Pursuing the Outcomes of a Free Market – Article by G. Stolyarov II

Comments 0 Comment
The New Renaissance Hat
G. Stolyarov II
November 13, 2013
******************************

            Those of us who love liberty wish to see a free-market society in our lifetimes. But, as a near-term prospect, a society even approximating a thorough respect of individual rights and free exchange is not on the horizon. The best liberty-oriented activism, culminating in the passionate, motivated support for Ron Paul during his 2012 Presidential campaign, has only gained the ideas of liberty the sympathy of perhaps 15% of the United States population, with the ability to attract perhaps a few more percentage points in tactical alliances on specific issues. This is not enough to catalyze system-wide change and turn around the steadily deteriorating political situation. Probably the best near-term hope for the system is some semblance of the 1990s – a glorious time for liberty by comparison to today! This could be achieved if enough people are galvanized to oppose and overturn NSA surveillance, meaningless foreign wars, and the never-ending domestic “wars” on drugs and terror, which have always ultimately turned into wars on innocent, law-abiding Americans. Such an outcome would produce a sigh of relief from the liberty-minded, but it still would not be close to a free market; it would just be somewhat sane and non-totalitarian.

            But if persuasion has not succeeded in convincing even a plurality of the population (at least for now) and if political change in the near term would mostly consist of reversing the most blatant, egregious travesties of justice, then what hope is there to actually achieve the ideals of liberty in our lifetimes? There is a promising approach, encapsulated in the following method. Ask yourself: What results would a fully free market, functioning in accordance with the principles of liberty and individual rights, bring about? Now go pursue those results directly, through your individual actions, without waiting for the system to change.

            Yes, there are limits to this approach. One limit is the law, whose prohibitions and mandates today will certainly constrain certain beneficial courses of action that would have been possible on the free market, while requiring people to spend their time on other courses of action that the free market would have rendered unnecessary. Yet the approach I propose can still do considerable good within the bounds of current laws in any political system less oppressive than that of Oceania in George Orwell’s 1984. Another limit is that the outcomes of a fully free market are not entirely foreseeable. Future discoveries and innovations by free individuals are the currently unseen benefits of voluntary action and exchange, and we cannot always anticipate them in advance. Even with this recognition, though, it is possible to reasonably anticipate that a free market would uplift human beings materially, intellectually, morally, and culturally. People in a free society would be more prosperous, more knowledgeable (and better able to distinguish good ideas from bad), less inclined to aggression against their fellow men, and more inclined to refined tastes (as a result of increased prosperity, leisure time, and sense that life is generally good).

            Direct, peaceful, lawful action by individuals today can bring about many of the results of a free market even without a free market being legally in place or supported by the majority of people. Furthermore, such results can be brought about by actions that are themselves fully consistent with free-market principles, since they would be entirely voluntary and respectful of the rights of others. There is one catch: the activities that would be profitable on a free market would not necessarily be so today. Their cost would need to be absorbed using one’s own resources, and one would need to consider the outcome not a loss, or even a sub-optimal profit, but rather a moral profit that outweighs the material cost, including the opportunity cost, in time and money.

            To give an example, I compose classically inspired music and give recordings away for free online using a Creative Commons license. In a free market, which over time would uplift the tastes of the general public, the production of high music (which would be simultaneously sophisticated and appealing to the human ear) would be much more remunerative than it is today, and the likes of Justin Bieber and Miley Cyrus would be relegated to the ever-thinning ranks of the dregs of society. This hypothesis is supported by history: in prior, far less prosperous but economically freer eras, composers of high music were often seen as celebrities, with Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Felix Mendelssohn, Giuseppe Verdi, and Johann Strauss II being just a few examples. Today, creators of good music have to content themselves with far less remuneration than the dubious pop idols, manufactured by politically connected and protected record labels. However, no one inhibits the freedom to compose, and the available tools for doing so are more impressive than ever before. Voluntary private action can increase the abundance of newly produced high culture in music, art, and literature. Similarly, voluntary private research initiatives, ranging from the humanities to mathematics to DIY biology, can hasten the rate of meaningful discoveries in order to more closely approximate the pace of intellectual and technological progress that would occur in a free market. With the hyper-empowerment made  possible through recent electronic technologies, the opportunities for any individual to make a difference in a field today exceed those available to large laboratories, academic departments, workshops, and orchestras in the mid-20th century. Thus, one person with free-market sympathies, acting on his own time with his own resources, can often achieve more than teams of people working through established institutions using old patterns of production, whose obsolescence is becoming glaringly obvious to anyone who pays attention.

            As an added bonus, creating free-market outcomes in accordance with free-market principles will, in any system, highlight the benefits and possibilities of voluntary, private action to those who might otherwise be unconvinced. It appears to me, from observation and experience, that theoretical and abstract arguments for the benefits of liberty are not sufficient to persuade anyone who is not already extremely theoretically inclined – a tiny minority of the human population. For everyone else, practical demonstrations of how freedom would work are far more powerful than the most finely honed theory of liberty. Probably, the majority of people would only come to support free markets once liberty-minded people have, de facto, built an entire free market around them by informally approximating its outcomes and workings. At that time, achieving a formal free market would just be a matter of “flipping the switch” on the entire system and amending the laws (with popular consent) to recognize the kind of societal order that would have already formed in practice.

            Interestingly enough, Rolling Jubilee, a more recent initiative by the Occupy movement, has valuable lessons to teach free-market advocates regarding the approach of pursuing desired outcomes directly. No, I am not referring to physical occupations of public places, but rather the efforts to purchase consumer debt on the secondary market (at deep discounts) and subsequently to abolish such debt, freeing consumers of its burden.  While the economic ideas of members of the Occupy movement often differ from free-market views, this initiative has achieved an objective that free-market advocates should find salutary: the reduction of the total outstanding amount of consumer debt, much of which was the result of a credit bubble fueled by the reckless inflationary monetary policy of the Federal Reserve. Furthermore, much today’s outstanding consumer debt is an outcome of cultural malaise brought about by generations of unfreedom, as a result of which a condition of financial dependency has come to predominate instead of self-reliance and the robustness to contingencies that can only come about due to a buffer of present owned resources. Freer-market cultures tend to be more contemptuous of reliance on personal debt, and it is thus reasonable to expect the total amount of debt on a free market to be less than exists today. The Occupy movement did not wait for authoritative permission, or for majority agreement, or for system-wide change. Rather, members pooled their resources and, by paying $400,000, managed to annul $14 million of consumer debt. It is a drop in the bucket of the entire problem, to be sure, but it is also an invaluable proof of concept for the project of massive societal transformation through voluntary, private action.

            Direct, peaceful, law-abiding action to bring about the outcomes of a free market would also help in another crucial respect by rehabilitating the image of free markets in the eyes of skeptics. The outcome of the course of action I propose would not be profit maximization in the present day; indeed, it would often require working for free on one’s own time and engaging in acts that would be considered charitable or philanthropic by professed opponents of the market. Even businesses that espouse free-market ideas could join in on this project and pursue practices that, while they may not capture every morsel of profit out there for the taking, are more in accord with how a free market would behave. Such businesses could, for instance, voluntarily renounce lobbying for special privileges and barriers to entry that would keep competitors out of the market.  They could also spend resources to improve workplace conditions and surrounding neighborhoods in order to better approximate how workplaces and neighborhoods would look under a prosperous free market. Furthermore, internal salary schedules in such businesses could be based on an approximation of meritocracy as it would emerge on a free market, which would often mean higher compensation for innovative and talented employees (irrespective of age, origin, past socioeconomic circumstances, or connections), resulting in greater retention, improved morale, better products, and long-term competitive advantages for the business that undertakes such a step. To certain onlookers, these behaviors might seem consistent with what is today called “corporate social responsibility” – and perhaps they would be. But by engaging in these practices in the name of striving toward a free-market ideal, liberty-minded businessmen could perhaps for the first time break through to capture the hearts and minds of many present-day detractors.

            What outcomes do you think would be achieved by a free market but are deficient today? Now go work to make them happen.

Remembrance Day 2038 – Short Story by Bradley Doucet

Remembrance Day 2038 – Short Story by Bradley Doucet

Comments 0 Comment
The New Renaissance Hat
Bradley Doucet
November 11, 2013
******************************

One hundred years ago, humanity was on the verge of global war. Hitler’s Germany had already annexed Austria, and Hirohito’s Japan had invaded China, Mongolia, and the USSR. Tens of millions of people would die in the ensuing Second World War, the deadliest conflict in human history. Today, we remember the fallen, both military and civilian, in this and other wars. We remember, and we give thanks for the current peace, which we have good grounds for believing will be an enduring one.

As recently as 25 years ago, such optimism would have seemed naïve. Though the world was already becoming much less violent in general, the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 were still an open psychic wound for many Americans, and isolated wars raged on in many regions. Fears of nuclear proliferation threatened to spark further conflicts in the already volatile Middle East.

But parallel to these political events and tensions, the global economy kept growing, spreading the benefits of industrialization and trade to more and more people in more and more countries. The more obvious the connection became between basic economic freedom and rising standards of living, the harder it became for even the most authoritarian regimes to resist the push for freer markets. Dire poverty has now been all but eradicated and real economic security is commonplace. And as people have more to live for, they are less willing to die for their countries. Pragmatic negotiations have become more attractive, and violent conflict less so.

The change that humanity has undergone can be summed up by a simple but profound slogan: Make trade, not war. As we have become more accustomed to seeing our neighbours as potential trading partners in positive-sum exchanges, killing them no longer seems to make a lot of sense. We remember today the wars of the past, that we might better appreciate our present peace and extend it indefinitely into the future.

Bradley Doucet is Le Québécois Libre‘s English Editor and the author of the blog Spark This: Musings on Reason, Liberty, and Joy. A writer living in Montreal, he has studied philosophy and economics, and is currently completing a novel on the pursuit of happiness. He also writes for The New Individualist, an Objectivist magazine published by The Atlas Society, and sings.