Flip-flop, Hip-hop - Ron Paul & Rational Expectations

Copyright © 2011 by (Jeremy Lawson)

I want to pose a hypothetical question.  Suppose it is near to Christmas, and you decide make a roast beef.  So, you choose a butcher several weeks before the holiday.  You examine the various butchers’ reviews on Yelp, and look at their websites in order to ascertain which one would best fit your needs.  You ultimately go to Johnson’s Butchery, and order the roast several weeks in advance.

Along comes Christmastime.  You go to Johnson’s to pick up your roast, and when you get home you discover that he has actually given you a section of ham.  Your meal is ruined.  You write a scathing review on Yelp, and promise yourself that you will never go back.



Next year, during the holidays, you once again survey Yelp.  Despite your previous bad experience, there is still a temptation to order from Johnson’s butchery.  After all, even though your order was filled incorrectly, they have a snazzy new website, and legions of positive customer reviews on Yelp, and the butcher was extremely consoling and apologetic when you didn’t get what you wanted last year.  So this year, you decide to try Johnson’s again, ordering well in advance.



Once again, when Christmastime rolls around, you bring the package home, and find that you’ve been had.  Your roast beef has turned into ham once again.



This may seem ridiculous, but this example serves a distinct purpose;  it is analogous to the experience of the American voter.  Politicians run on one platform, promising one thing, and then deliver something completely different once in power.



Take Newt Gingrich.  Gingrich was part of the House Republican coalition that attempted to impeach Bill Clinton for hiding his affair with a government aid.  At the same time, he was having an affair with a government aid.  Gingrich flip-flopped on Libya, climate-change, healthcare, and Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.  (How strange that, at the same time Newt was excoriating these government-sponsored enterprises, he was under contract with Freddie, being paid $1.6 million to $1.8 million to help the company “strategize”.)



Or take Mitt Romney.  He was for amnesty, before he was against it.  He was for abortion rights, before he was against them.  He was for gay marriage, before he was against it.  The list goes on:  stimulus, healthcare, immigration, the auto-bailout, gun-control...  With this record, the promises he is making on the campaign trail are worth less than a Zimbabwean dollar.



Whether the hypocrisy is to be found in the candidate’s personal conduct, or in his waffling on policy decisions, it is still hypocrisy.



Flip-flop, hip-hop.  In financial economics, real present value of an asset decreases as
expectations about its future performance become less certain.  What is the current valuation of a Gingrich presidency, or a Romney presidency?  Are we willing to vote for an unknown quantity over Obama?  While it is true that Obama has enacted many policies with which I disagree, he is a known quantity.  I’m familiar with the mix of progressive and Neoconservative interest groups for which Obama pulls, and can tolerate it.  I cannot say the same of any of the Republican presidential candidates, save one.



Ron Paul is a known quantity.  True, he does not have a fancy page on Yelp;  he does not have at his disposal a plethora of soundbites for media consumption.  He occasionally stumbles over words, because the ideas to which his muse speaks are complex.  He is honest.  He has been voting based upon philosophical underpinnings that have changed little over the course of his career.  When he has changed a position, he has made clear the reasons underlying his ideological shift.  Though I do not agree with Paul on all the issues, I know where he stands.  And perhaps most importantly, I know what I am voting for, not what I am voting against.

Why A Liberal Became a Libertarian: The Empathy Stance: Part I

[Note: This post is intended for a liberal audience, of the variety that are inclined to ask DagnyTateleh to explain her recent conversion to conservative sensibilities after a long young adulthood of liberal stances. Conservatism versus liberalism is often seen as a battle between the heart and the mind, or the feeling versus the thinking. Liberalism or, more accurately, progressivism, says that to base one’s adopted philosophies primarily upon logic is to dismiss the heart. The thought is understandable, given the unfortunate tendency of several thoughtful conservatives to frame their arguments in toxic and callous tones, complete with name-calling and condescending dismissal of those who challenge them. I have found that the heart and mind may be reconciled, and to embrace perceived “anti-social” statutes is not to turn one’s back on humanity.]

My liberal tendencies as a younger woman stemmed from real concern for others, empathy for the grimacing beggar and the little black child whose face fell when the white ones called him “nigger.”

What is better - condescension or respect? In truth, “tolerance doctrines” are as degrading to perceived minorities/disenfranchised groups as they are to the perceived powerhouses (snidely referred to as WASPs or Dead-White-European-Males). Even in my most liberal state, working alongside a person of African ancestry found me with nagging queries that I wouldn’t dare voice – “are you here because you’re truly competent, or because you’re moderately competent and black?” Many of these coworkers were graduates of a tier-4 school known for its stringent affirmative action policies and “party” reputation – the white coworkers consisted both of graduates from the same college as well as more prestigious schools, but in any case it was a certainty that affirmative action had gotten them neither college acceptances nor jobs. I have no comment on the work ethic of black people as a whole when compared to white people; within this group there were ultimately some black workers who easily were among the best of our employees and some who were not fit to sweep the floor. In knowing that they were all subject to the same quota policies, every tactical or grammatical error on the part of any of black worker, competent or not, sparked a scrutiny that was not always warranted. I realized that a mandatory government “equalizer” of this sort serves to exacerbate issues of tension and distrust between races. In an economically and socially free market, the only question of who to hire is to staff any enterprise with the best people possible (as it is in the economic interest of a capitalist to do so) – this may result in less racial diversity in any given workplace, but the minorities who find such positions are free of the assumption that they are where they are as token position fillers and nothing more.

The temptation to act as an advocate for minority groups of which one is not a member sometimes stems from a “hero” complex – in this situation, the advocate acts on the presumption that said minority group needs to be “parented”, as if it were an inept child who could not be trusted to speak for himself – while publicly proclaiming its equality and ability to groups who do not require such a defender. The recent phenomenon of coddled children whose parents don’t trust them to sit through a job interview by themselves comes to mind -(http://www.usatoday.com/money/economy/employment/2007-04-23-helicopter-parents-usat_N.htm).

This endeavor and its intention are ignoble.

Alternately, only in a society where every person is expected to make full use of their mental gifts and resources, can a person’s achievements be lauded fully and truly as just that: theirs.

The PC Bible

Discrimination.  We all discriminate, whether consciously or not, regardless of whether we admit it.  By choosing where to live or work or go to school, or the people with whom we associate in our leisure time, or the clothes we wear, or the cars we drive, we discriminate explicitly.  We declare a preference for Condition A over Condition B, and realize that preference by our choices in the real world. 

Walter Block has an article at Mises.org that illustrates the absurdity of attempting to distinguish between commercial and personal discrimination.  Commerce, in the aggregate sense, is merely the sum of infinite personal decisions, many of which involve discrimination.  What Block fails to address is the intersection of anti-discrimination and culture.

It is a fallacy to claim that "tolerance," "acceptance," "individuality," etc., are not pushed on the population by those in a position of power.  This (among other things) has led to a precipitous decline of American cultural standards over the past half-century.  Disintegration of the nuclear family?  Check.  Normalization of fringe culture?  Yup.  Destruction of previously-accepted social norms?  Oh yes.

In a truly free society, the population would naturally choose which ideas worked best, free of the coercion of government.  Peer pressure is a powerful agent, and social standards follow.  Activities that a society of free agents determine to be detrimental to the society as a whole are discouraged in a spontaneous, decentralized manner.  The threat of being shunned by one's peers is a powerful agent for the normalization of the population's behaviors.


Enter government.  "Authority" now dictates that certain previously-taboo behaviors must now be accepted socially.  When the population continues its market-based discrimination, anti-discrimination laws are passed.  Persons engaging in these taboo behaviors now turn to government for protection against discrimination, because, after all, the behavior is officially A-OK.  Government anti-discrimination laws now override the private "peer pressure" system.


The change in authority brought about by this government thought-coercion brings about subtle shifts in attitude.  People begin to discriminate against each other, not because their community has agreed that the behavior in question is socially harmful, but because the government has arbitrarily decreed that certain behaviors are sacrosanct.  Over time, this causes the population to lose sight of the very reasons behind its original discrimination.  "We discriminate against activity x because activity x harms the society at large" is replaced with "We discriminate against all those who contravene the wisdom of the government."  The necessary act of discrimination has been transformed;  previously, discrimination served to better the society in the eyes of its participants.  People knew why they discriminated against certain behaviors and for others.  Now, the motivation behind discrimination is a desire to follow government orders, and the end result is necessarily the weakening of the previously-accepted social customs.

From a distance

I remember when I was in elementary school, the music teacher decided we were to sing a song for the parents.  The teacher decided it would be fun to sing a rendition of From A Distance, and she decided that our rendition would be based a recording of the same, performed by an African choir.  A good exercise in cultural exchange, perhaps?  We listened to the recording of their performance over and over again in class (I remember thinking how funny their accents were).


Pretty simple, right?  Well, we got into practicing, and at some point I remember the teacher saying we were to replace certain words in the song.  All the lines that read “God is watching us” were to be replaced with “Love is watching us”.  I didn’t really think it was that big a deal at the time, but I remember my parents were quite upset.  I remember wishing they would calm down, thinking that it wasn’t that big a deal…


Fast forward a decade or so, and I can’t believe they even let me perform in front of an audience.  This is the end result of following Political Correctness…  absurdity.  To sum up:


A good song is butchered into incomprehensibility:  ”Love is watching us” does not make one lick of sense.
Cross-cultural dialogue is rendered moot:  cultural exchange can ostensibly be a good thing.  By changing the entire meaning of the song, much of the potential association with the (largely religious) African continent was lost.


Students are deprived:  whether or not you believe in Him, there is much reasoning that has concluded that God exists.  By replacing the word “God,” the teacher deprived us of exposure to a mainstream way to view reality (isn’t that the mantra of PC-ideologues?), and exposed us to…  well, nothing.


This kind of absurdity is what I hope to expose on this blog…

Ignore Everything Below This Post

A lot can change over two years.  The abandonment of whatever Republican political leanings I may have had.  Embracing a new way to view the world.  Or rather, a couple new ways.


The first is libertarianism.  Or agorism, minarchism, anarcho-capitalism...  You can call it what you will, but I am convinced that virtually everything the state touches is eventually defiled.  Much more on this later.


The second is an anti-PC bias.  I have always harbored this, but it has crystallized in my mind.  If all views are to be respected equally, so must the view be respected that negates my own viewpoint.  Political-correctness is inherently contradictory against its own axiom.  It unravels itself.


The third is fear.  I fear that everything good about the Western-European world is drowning in a sea of otherness.  Multiculturalism says we must esteem all cultures equally, yet we are surprised that the Caucasian bedrocks of our society (marriage, family, the Protestant work-ethic) are vanishing before our eyes.


I think that my writings will focus mainly on these three ideas.  I'll also throw in random links and video posting that I think further the discussion.