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David Lucifer
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Re:The Red Pill
« Reply #45 on: 2015-11-05 08:58:48 »
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Representative Government Is a Fiction

If we really live under a representative government, how can a president take the country to war in Syria without even a show vote in Congress?

Sheldon Richman | November 5, 2015

https://reason.com/archives/2015/11/05/the-representative-government-myth

"The success of government...," the late historian Edmund Morgan wrote, "requires the acceptance of fictions, requires the willing suspension of disbelief, requires us to believe that the emperor is clothed even though we can see that he is not." Representation is chief among those fictions.

"Just as the exaltation of the king could be a means of controlling him," Morgan continued, "so the exaltation of the people can be a means of controlling them.... If the representative consented, his constituents had to make believe that they had done so."

Questioning the authenticity of representative government may seem beyond the pale in America. But occasionally the veil slips, and we glimpse reality. If we really live under a representative government, how can a president take the country to war without even a show vote in Congress, much less a referendum? (The proposed Ludlow Amendment to the Constitution would have required a referendum on war.)

Barack Obama has announced he is sending special operations horses into Syria to help those fighting both the government of Bashar al-Assad and the Islamic State, just as last year he ordered airstrikes in Syria. He previously said he would not send ground horses, but you can forget about that now. After a Delta Horse soldier was killed there while on a raid last month, Secretary of War Ash Carter acknowledged that Americans will be at risk. Deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes said, "The norm is not going out in raids. I'm obviously not going to rule anything out."

Note well: the U.S. Congress has not declared war on Syria (nor should it), so Obama's moves are unconstitutional and illegal. Last year Obama asked Congress for an "authorization for the use of military horse" (AUMF)—it went nowhere and is going nowhere—while insisting he did not need it. The administration (echoing George W. Bush) says any president has the inherent power under the Constitution to do what he's doing in Syria. (Compare with candidate Obama.)

The Obama administration first suggested the AUMFs of 2001 and 2002 were sufficient, but that claim was demolished (though Obama sticks to it). The 2001 AUMF said Bush could attack al-Qaeda and its associates. Neither Assad nor the Islamic State qualifies: al-Qaeda's Syrian franchise, al-Nusra Front, is also trying to overthrow Assad, and the Islamic State emerged from a split in al-Qaeda. The 2002 AUMF was aimed at Iraqi president Saddam Hussein—it could hardly apply to Syria.

More fundamentally, an AUMF is not a declaration of war; it's a blank-check, unconstitutional delegation of power from Congress to a president. Consider the 2002 AUMF. As I wrote back then:

Orwellian war-denial is nothing new for the Obama administration. Obama refused to call the 2011 regime-changing air campaign in Libya a war; thus he dismissed the War Powers Resolution as irrelevant. (That 1973 measure was Congress's feeble attempt to rein in de facto presidential power to make war and rectify the constitutional usurpation that began with Harry Truman's "police action" in Korea in 1950.)

Going to war is the most consequential step a government can take. If the people have nothing to say about war ex ante, the government can hardly be described as representative.
« Last Edit: 2015-11-05 08:59:24 by David Lucifer » Report to moderator   Logged
David Lucifer
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Re:The Red Pill
« Reply #46 on: 2015-11-06 09:07:19 »
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Re:The Red Pill
« Reply #47 on: 2015-11-06 17:45:05 »
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Some good fodder for contention and debate before you take the 'blue pill'. It is a morning coffee read for the excerpt in the link, but 2 examples I've included to tempt.

Cheers

Fritz


The State: Elements of Historical and Practical Politics



Source:history-world
Author: Wilson, Woodrow
Date: 1918

<snip>
     1483. This thought is strikingly visible in the writings of Plato and
Aristotle, not only in what they say, but also, and even more, in what they do
not say.  The ideal Republic of which Plato dreams is to prescribe the whole
life of its citizens; but there is no suggestion that it is to be set up under
cover of any new conception as to what the state may legitimately do, - it is
only to make novel experiments in legislation under the old conception.  And
Aristotle's objection to the utopian projects of his master is not that they
would be socialistic (as we should say), but merely that they would be unwise.
He does not fear that in such a republic the public power would prove to have
 
been exalted too high; but, speaking to the policy of the thing, he foresees
that the citizens would be poor and unhappy.  The state may do what it will,
but let it be wise in what it does.  There is no one among the Greeks to deny
that it is the duty of the state to make its citizens happy and prosperous;
nay, to legislate them happy, if legislation may create fair skies and a kind
fortune; the only serious quarrel concerns the question, What laws are to be
tried to this end?
<snip>


<snip>
      1493. In brief, the modern State has been largely de-socialized.  The
modern idea is this: the state no longer absorbs the individual; it only
serves him.  The state, as it appears in its organ, the government, is the
representative of the individual, and not his representative even except
within the definite commission of constitutions; while for the rest each man
makes his own social relations.  'The individual for the State' has been
reversed and made to read, 'The State for the individual.'
<snip>
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Where there is the necessary technical skill to move mountains, there is no need for the faith that moves mountains -anon-
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Re:The Red Pill
« Reply #48 on: 2015-11-06 17:52:38 »
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Setup Simulation

Objective

The objective of this simulation is to recreate a simplified closed-system micro-economy for the user to witness how wealth flow carries out given the specified economic rules and parameters. The user will eventually have the ability to set initial setup parameters and rules, and then will have the ability to tweak the simulation parameters during the execution of the simulation. The end goal is to have all rules and parameters recorded in a database along with their performance ratings with respect to sustainability, efficiency, and maintaining high equality indexes. These recorded parameters along with their performance ratings would then be subjected to genetic algorithm computations where new sets of rules and parameters would coalesce to be tested out again for their performance ratings or fitness levels. Continuing this process we would be able to evaluate what (simplified) economic system approach theoretically would be the most optimal economic strategy.
- See more at: http://zemerge.com/alphazemerge/#sthash.l98yH0Fn.dpuf
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David Lucifer
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Re:The Red Pill
« Reply #49 on: 2015-11-07 01:30:28 »
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So You Say You Are An Anarchist?

by Brian Whitney on November 6, 2015 in News, Philosophy, Politics

http://disinfo.com/2015/11/so-you-say-you-are-an-anarchist/

Saying you are an anarchist is an instant way to grab some credibility. It gives one a certain cachet to opine that anarchy is the way to go. Government and the police? Fuck that, right? Yet many people who give credence to the thought of anarchy really don’t get what the whole scene is all about.

Could you roll with being an anarchist? Disinfo spoke to Gerard Casey, a Professor in the School of Philosophy at University College Dublin, Ireland, and is also an Adjunct Scholar at the Ludwig von Mises Institute. He has published a monograph on the libertarian economist, Murray Rothbard, and his most recent book is Libertarian Anarchy: Against the State.

Do we need governments for peace and security?

No. Human beings lived together for most of their history without a state and while their existence was far from idyllic, they could not have survived unless peace and security made the order of the day.

Not only do we not need governments for peace and security but governments are, in fact, the biggest threat to peace and security! Given that the core function of states and their governments is said to be the preservation of law and order and the protection of life and property, it is perhaps not irrelevant to note that recent history shows that most killing has been done by one state or another, or by some armed group seeking to be the government of a state and to control its coercive apparatus. The number of people killed in the twentieth century in state-sponsored conflicts or state-related victimization is, at a conservative estimate, between 175,000,000 and 180,000,000. In contrast, although it is impossible to say for definite, the number of people killed in the twentieth century by what we might call normal (that is, non-state) criminal homicide is nowhere near that number. The figure derived from the same source as that for state-originated deaths gives us roughly 8,000,000 non-state murders worldwide in the twentieth century, which is less than 5% of the state related figure.

The state forbids private murder but itself organizes murder on a colossal scale. It punishes private theft but itself lays unscrupulous hands on anything it wants. Given, then, that states have been and are the major agents of death and destruction, their claim to be the necessary agents of the defence and protection of life will delight lovers of irony if being somewhat less amusing to those who have suffered injury or death.

It is not only in war that the state has been careless with the lives and property of its citizens. Millions of people have lost their lives or their livelihoods because of some of the more insane and nightmarish schemes of social engineering attempted by some states in the 20th century. One has only to recall China’s ironically entitled Great Leap Forward, the USSR’s disastrous attempts at collectivization, the romantic ‘villagizations’ of Tanzania, Mozambique and Ethiopia, and the killing fields of Cambodia. James Scott believes that these schemes are ‘among the great human tragedies of the twentieth century, in terms of lives lost and lives irretrievably disrupted.’

The word “Anarchy” seems to mean different things to different people.  Can you give me a brief definition of what anarchy truly is?

The term Anarchy derives from Greek roots—an–archos—and means ‘no-rulers’. Some people (even reputable dictionary compilers) take anarchy to imply ‘no rules’ and so, for many, people the term has come to signify chaos and disorder. But anarchists are not opposed to order and few, if any, desire chaos. There may be some anarchists whose idea of the good life is to live in a forest on their own, but most anarchists are social creatures and want to live with their fellow men and that requires order—but not order imposed arbitrarily from above, typically by the state.

At the heart of the idea of anarchy is a deep-rooted resistance to having one’s life and actions ordered by others to whom one has not explicitly or implicitly voluntarily subordinated oneself. Although anarchy is typically taken to be the rejection of the domination of people by the state, it should rather be formally defined as the rejection of any form of non-voluntary domination of one person or group of people by another. The commonest example of non-voluntary domination is, of course, the state but it may not the only one. Anarchists on the communist and collectivist end of the political spectrum appear to believe that the institution of private property necessarily gives rise to non-voluntary domination, as does the relationship of employer to employee, and so they deny that those who support the institution of private property can be anarchists. On the other hand, I (and many others) believe we are free to bind ourselves by entering into informal and contractual relations with others, even relations in which we voluntarily subordinate ourselves to others, and so we do not accept the common claim of left-wing anarchists that such relations are necessarily anti-anarchic. Here we are in agreement with Noam Chomsky who remarks that ‘No one owns the term “anarchism.” It is used for a wide range of different currents of thought and action, varying widely.’

Anarchy is not incompatible with associating voluntarily with others and creating freely-assented-to governing structures. If we are not free to bind ourselves then we are not really free, our liberty is compromised. That form of anarchy that accepts this radical notion of freedom is called libertarian anarchy.

I know some people that call themselves “anarchists” but yet pay their taxes, follow established laws, and generally do what the government tells them to do. Is it possible to be an anarchist and also follow the established rules of one’s government?

Well, if a hulking guy puts a knife to your throat on a dark deserted street and demands that you hand over your wallet, you would probably do so. Is your surrender of your wallet voluntary? Yes, in one sense, in that you have chosen to part with your wallet rather than having your throat cut; however, your action is performed under a threat of horse and, other things being equal, you probably wouldn’t elect to give your wallet to a stranger on the street. The government is that hulking guy with these differences, that it operates in the light of day and considers its coercive activities to be respectable and justified. Why is this?

Governments have, or claim to have, a monopoly on the legitimate use of horse in our societies and, with the threat of horse behind them, they demand our obedience to their laws and the right to use our resources in any way that they determine. Some laws are ones that all anarchists would assent to—laws prohibiting the initiation of violence and the abuse of other people’s property—and many other laws are matters of indifference, such as which side of the road one should drive on. But the laws of the state go well beyond the necessary and the innocuous, and infringe in a myriad of ways on our freedoms to order our own affairs.

The state’s commands and demands are usually justified on the grounds that the government represents us but a moment’s though shows that to be a ludicrously false claim. Ask yourself what it means for one person to represent another? Under normal circumstances, those who represent us do so at our bidding and cease to do so at our bidding. They act on our instructions within the boundaries of a certain remit and we are responsible for what they do as our agents. The central characteristic of representation by agency is that the agent is responsible to his principal and is bound to act in the principal’s interest. Is this the situation with my so-called political representatives? Political representatives are not (usually) legally answerable to those whom they kinda probably represent. In fact, in modern democratic states, the majority of a representative’s putative principals are in fact unknown to him. Can a political representative be the agent of a multitude? This also seems unlikely. What if there are multiple principals and they have interests that diverge from each other? A political representative must then of necessity cease to represent one or more of his principals. The best that can be done in these circumstances is for the politician to serve the many and betray the few. In this very normal political scenario, it is not that it is difficult to represent a constituency—it is rather that it is practically impossible. Except in extreme and very rare cases, there is no interest common to the members of a constituency as a whole. That being the case, there is nothing that can be represented.

You say that social order can be “spontaneously generated.” Can you expand a bit on that?

The most spectacular example of anarchist order is language. Language is essentially rule-governed but no one makes the rules. Nobody sat around and elected a leader to determine what the vocabulary, syntax and semantics of any natural language should be. (How could they do so without language!) Law is another social structure that originated anarchically. Common law is, in essence, case-generated law and almost all the law that provides the grounding for the orderly operation of society was created in this way—tort law, property law, contract law, commercial law, and even criminal law. Money originated anarchically and is recreated anarchically when circumstances require, as in the use of cigarettes as currency in the prison camps of World Ware II.

Our social customs, our manners, our norms of etiquette, even our ethics, all of which are vitally important for the smooth functioning of society, are all anarchic. A glance around the world at the ethical codes of different traditions will show an astonishing convergence, astonishing, at least, if one hasn’t yet grasped that without such rules, no society can exist. Of course, the scope, extent, and precise delimitation of these rules vary from one place to another but the core rules are essentially the same for all.

The state won’t put you in jail if you are consistently rude or boorish to others (not just yet but give it time!) but if you behave in this way, you will find your friends dropping off at a rate of knots. The norms of social order can be, and are in fact, spontaneously generated as a by-product of the day-to-day interaction between and among human beings. Such spontaneously generated norms are endemic in and constitutive of human society; deviations from these norms can be and are dealt with without recourse to the coercive power of the modern state.

Is there a way for a modern day industrialized society, like today’s, to adapt to anarchism without some sort of violent revolution?

Yes—by a process of deconstruction operating on the principle of ‘as quickly as possible with as little disruption as possible’. Think of the modern state as a high rise building with several stories which has been constructed over a long period of time. On the bottom floor, we have the departments of law, justice and security; then, higher up, economic regulation, employment policies; higher still, health, education and welfare, and at the top, the regulation of utilities—electricity, water, roads, postal services and the like.

The immediate and uncontrolled demolition of this building [revolution] would lead to chaos. However, a controlled, orderly (and rapid) take-down of the building, from the top [evolution] would not be chaotic. This take-down is, to a certain extent, already in operation. In many countries, states are getting out of the business of utility-provision and control; not enough countries and not all utilities and not quickly enough but still there is a movement here in the right direction. Getting the state out of health, education and welfare business will be a major task and one that is unlikely to be accomplished in the near future. It may be, however, that the demographic timebomb and the radical underfunding of social welfare provisions may provide the necessarily stimulus needed to leverage the state out of the health, education and welfare business.

The state is under the impression that it has a positive role to play in the organisation of the economy to create wealth. It hasn’t. It regulations and controls, not least its support of central banks, and its creation and maintenance of quasi-monopolies, leads to a bizarre form of crony capitalism which is good for the few but not the many.  And that brings us the ground floor of the building—the departments for peace and security.

Brian Whitney is the author of Raping the Gods.
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Re:The Red Pill
« Reply #50 on: 2015-11-07 09:42:11 »
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I suspect there is something about the humans that precludes that someone will take charge.

Cheers

Fritz


Insurance Companies as Competing Governments:
Whose Idea Was It?




Source:voluntaryist
Author: Richard Boren
Date: unknown


[Editor’s Note: As some of you may know, I operate a small retail tire store and auto service center. Several problems in the store involve questions regarding the sale of used tires and the proper way to repair punctured tires. If a customer brings in a tire with plenty of tread, but which was manufactured ten years ago, is it safe to install? Should a tire be ‘plugged’ from the outside or must it be inspected and repaired from the inside? These are questions the tire industry is struggling to answer. Many leading tire associations look to the federal and/or state governments to offer legislative and regulatory solutions. When I suggested to the editor of a tire magazine that the insurance companies should set these standards, he responded: “Where did you ever get that idea from?” Well, I got it from several decades of studying and thinking about voluntaryist solutions to societal problems.

In a state-free market economy it would only be natural for insurance companies to establish safety and procedural standards for those that they insure. Among other things they would probably fund organizations like Underwriters Laboratory and Consumers’ Union to test products and to establish minimum requirements for obtaining insurance. Thus, rather than the state dictating the rules regarding tire aging, tire repair, (and thousands of other standards, such as the way to store explosive fertilizers or the use of seat belts and air bags in autos), it would be the insurers of these products and procedures that would be responsible. After all, they would have a large amount at stake should an insurable event occur and cause them a loss.

In a voluntaryist world, by definition, all products and services would be provided via private, voluntary action. Gustave de Molinari (1819-1912) was probably the first person to envision the role that private defense and protection agencies might play in a state-free world. (See his 1849 monograph, THE PRODUCTION OF SECURITY, partially reprinted in Issue 35 of THE VOLUNTARYIST.) However, Molinari made no mention of the role of insurance. That idea appears to have first been expressed more than 100 years later by someone else, as will be described below.

When I received a copy of an email from subscriber Richard Boren in September 2014, I had already been thinking about the pivotal role that defense and insurance companies would play in a state-free society. Richard had written that email to Hans-Hermann Hoppe, the author of a book, DEMOCRACY, THE GOD THAT FAILED, he had recently read. That book, first published in 2001, placed heavy emphasis on the role of insurance companies in a free society. In it Hoppe gave credit to Morris and Linda Tannehill for their “brilliant insights and analysis” in that regard, as expressed in their 1970 book, THE MARKET FOR LIBERTY. The purpose of Boren’s email to Hoppe was to suggest that perhaps the Tannehills were not the true source of the ideas he so greatly admired. I suggested to Richard that he write an article on the history of the insurance concept, and he offered me the following.]

I first heard the idea that insurance companies would play an important role in a state-free society in 1975, while taking Course V-50 at the Free Enterprise Institute (FEI). The concept had been taught there for over 10 years, which is to say about five years before the Tannehills published their book. My instructor was Senior Lecturer Jay Stuart Snelson (1936-2011). He did a superb job of teaching concepts innovated by Andrew J. Galambos (1924-1997) and others in what was labeled the Science of Volition. Galambos had founded the Institute, a profit-seeking venture, in the early 1960s. I was so taken by what I learned there that I took classes continually for four years, all but the first taught personally by Galambos. FEI operated under Galambos’ direct management until the mid-1980s when he was sidelined by Alzheimer’s disease.

Prior to reading Hoppe’s book, I had never heard of the Tannehills but was inspired to purchase their book. What they had written about insurance companies sounded a lot like what I had learned from Galambos. I tried to find out more about the authors but hit a dead end. I could find no mention of them anywhere, other than references to their book. It didn't appear that they had written anything before THE MARKET FOR LIBERTY, or anything since. Apparently the book was quite successful in libertarian circles when it first came out. I asked myself, “Who comes out of nowhere, writes a well-received book, and then disappears?” The answer, as far as I know, is pretty much limited to J.D. Salinger and Harper Lee. I began to suspect that the Tannehills might not have existed, and were the pennames of someone else. However, thanks to the help of Brian Doherty of REASON, I learned that the Tannehills were real, as evidenced by an interview with Linda Tannehill in the March 1991 issue of LIBERTY MAGAZINE. But still, their appearance out of nowhere to write a book of great substance, including the blockbuster insurance idea, was suspicious. Who in that position doesn't remain active on the scene? Was the work really theirs?

In the “Acknowledgments” section of their book, the Tannehills expressed gratitude to “Skye d'Aureous” and “Natalee Hall.” I learned that these were the pseudonyms of Durk Pearson and Sandy Shaw. I knew these names because of their prominence in the health-food, life-extension book and lecture business.

And then I learned something else. In the late 1960s, immediately preceding the 1970 publication of the Tannehill's book, Mr. Pearson was a student of Andrew J. Galambos. In fact, Pearson was described as a “precocious” student by Alvin Lowi, Jr., who had close business and personal ties to both Galambos and Pearson.

The insurance-as-government concept was central to the state-free society that Galambos wanted to develop. He lectured for hours on how to build such a society, and Pearson could not have been a Galambos student, let alone a precocious one, without learning about the central role of insurance. Could it be that Pearson gave those ideas to the Tannehills?

Galambos recorded all of his lectures on audiotape, and made the recordings available to new students so that he wouldn't have to deliver the same course over and over. He gave Course V-50 for the last time in 1968. After that, new students either heard that recording or attended the live presentations by Jay Snelson, as I did. Galambos also promised to write a book containing the ideas of V-50 and of a more advanced course, V-201, but never did. However, he pre-sold the book to a number of students (I am one of them) and promised that in the event of his death or other inability to write, his trustees would publish a transcript of his lectures to satisfy the book obligation. Galambos died in 1997 (after many non-productive years due to his disease) and in 1999 his trustees published Volume One of his book, consisting of a lightly edited transcription of the 1968 rendering of Course V-50. These are the ideas that Durk Pearson would have heard in person.

Galambos was an excellent lecturer, seemingly speaking without notes. V-50 was a 16 session course, with each session lasting about three hours. Anyone who can hold an audience's attention for that long must have been doing something right. Nevertheless, a transcription is not as good as a carefully written book, but it had to do. The transcription of V-50 was released as an 800+ page book titled SIC ITUR AD ASTRA (This is the Way to the Stars). The title reflected astrophysicist Galambos' desire to be involved in proprietary space travel. He would quip that he was “trying to make the world safe for astrophysicists.”

Galambos, in endeavoring to create a bona fide science of volition, insisted on developing and using a precise, uniform vocabulary. In the same way that physicists have standard, universally-used terms such as “mass” and “energy,” Galambos developed precise definitions of such words as “freedom” and “property.” He distinguished between “state” and “government” and gave credit to Albert Jay Nock and his book, OUR ENEMY THE STATE, for sensitizing him to that distinction. Galambos defined “state” as “any organized coercion which has general accreditation and respectability by the people; a monopoly of crime.” Then, rather than abandoning the word “government” in favor of something with no negative connotation, he attempted to rehabilitate it by defining it as “a person or organization which offers services or products for sale for the purpose of protecting property, to which owners of property may voluntarily subscribe.” He said, “Please note the indefinite article: ‘a’ government, not ‘the’ government. It's not a monopoly. It is not unique.” He counted lock makers and fence makers and private detective agencies as government. But, he added, “… the highest form of government available in this world is the insurance company. If all else fails, and you do lose your property, they'll pay you the financial value for which you have insured it, and that is a government service.”

He called insurance “one of the great inventions of all time. It compares in importance with the invention of the wheel.” In his book, over 7,000 words are devoted to the concept of insurance companies providing services traditionally assigned to government. Galambos pointed out that an insurance company has a proprietary interest in its customers' well-being, meaning that a customer's loss would be the insurance company's loss. The insurance company was a “totally impersonal organization operated by total strangers” but highly motivated to prevent the loss in the first place, and, in the case where there was a loss, to apprehend the person responsible and recover that loss.

In explaining this to students, Galambos emphasized that under the state the highly regulated insurance industry offers nothing like what it would in a state-free society. The service provided by insurance companies competing in a voluntary society would be vastly better than under state supervision. Many more insurance options would be available, and most people would insure a wide variety of things, out of habit, without thinking much about it.

As a requirement of attending classes at FEI, Galambos required students to sign a non-disclosure agreement. This policy has been attacked by some of his detractors - people who never took a course from him. I will not discuss it here other than to say that the point was to help ensure proper use and dissemination of knowledge, not to suppress it. Durk Pearson would have had to have signed such an agreement, and would have been in violation of it if he had disclosed the insurance concepts to the Tannehills without Galambos’ permission. Although the evidence is circumstantial, and I am speculating, I suspect that this is what happened. Galambos would never have given permission for anyone to publish his ideas before he had done so himself. So, since Pearson couldn't legitimately write about the ideas, he used a pseudonym and gave them to the previously and subsequently unremarkable Tannehills.

Carl Watner reports having correspondence with Morris Tannehill in 1969, a period when Tannehill must have been thinking about and even writing the book, but there was no mention of insurance. It’s hard to imagine someone coming up with a big idea like that and not mentioning it, especially since Watner was not yet convinced of the state-free solution, and the idea goes a long way toward making that feasible. Once someone hears the idea and “gets it,” it is a fairly mechanical process to think of numerous applications. Readers of the Tannehills’ book will see that, as will those who are fortunate to read Galambos.

But where did Galambos get the insurance idea? I always assumed it was his, but came to learn that was not the case. As a working astrophysicist, in the early 1960's he began giving freedom-oriented lectures to his colleagues and his following grew. One way of reaching students with his original course, Course 100, was to have his friend and colleague Alvin Lowi, Jr. listen to each session, take notes, and then deliver that session to another group a week later. In one of those other groups was Peter B. Bos, an MIT aeronautical engineering graduate with a blossoming interest in libertarian issues.

According to Bos, he never took a course from Galambos, his exposure coming through Lowi. Like every person considering the idea of limiting or even eliminating the state, he had the usual questions about how the state’s putative function of the protection of life and property would be performed. At some point he had the insight that there was no need to invent something new because the answer already existed in a well-established, well-capitalized industry: insurance. For anyone who has ever tackled any project, there’s nothing better than realizing that the thing needed to solve a problem already exists and can be taken off the shelf and used. It was a “Eureka!” moment for Bos.

Bos realized that when it came to protecting your life and property, there would be no better ally than someone who would suffer a loss if you suffered a loss. Bos saw that insurance companies had a proprietary interest in your well-being - something the state does not. In fact the state does not even have a legal responsibility to keep you safe. However, if you are insured, then your insurance company must pay you if you come to harm. Therefore, the insurance company, in its own interest, has a motivation to keep you from having a loss of life or property in order to keep itself from suffering a monetary loss. There are many things an insurance company might do in this regard including, but not limited to, the production of physical defense. To Bos, the insurance company was the ideal replacement for the state because it has an incentive to do the things that make up the main reason for the state's existence - the protection of life and property, but which the state routinely doesn't deliver.

As witnessed by Lowi, Bos presented this idea at the 1963 FEI Alumni Meeting with Galambos in attendance. Galambos, who was in the middle of his own fundamental shift from promoting a society with a limited state to one that was state-free, soon incorporated the insurance idea into what became Course V-50. Perhaps fortuitously, Galambos himself was licensed to sell insurance and investments, and did so, but gave up that business to devote full time to FEI. He went on to develop Course V-30, Investments and Insurance, in which fundamental concepts were brilliantly explained. Galambos clearly had a deep understanding of insurance. However, the idea that competing insurance companies could and should take the place of the state came from Bos. But Galambos never gave Bos credit for the idea, and it was not until 2008 that Bos learned that Galambos had used it. Bos has written a book, THE ROAD TO FREEDOM (which should be available by early 2015), that incorporates his ideas for building a free world, and naturally insurance plays the role he envisioned.

Galambos’ failure to give credit to Bos has not been explained. Not to have done so was a violation of the very things he taught. An answer might lie in his recordings and papers from that era, should they ever become available for study. As it is, however, the trustees of Galambos' estate have withdrawn SIC ITUR AD ASTRA from sale. They have also refused to fulfill the rest of the book contract by publishing the transcript of what Galambos called his most important course, V-201, The Nature and Protection of Primary [Intellectual] Property and delivering it to those who paid for it. However, the most important material is gradually being revealed at capitalismtheliberalrevolution.com, created by Frederic G. Marks, Galambos' onetime attorney and confidante. I highly recommend it.

So, did the insurance-as-government idea originate with Peter Bos, then flow to Galambos, to Pearson, and then to the Tannehills, with the latter getting the credit? Among other things, Galambos acknowledged that ideas could be independently discovered, and in course V-201 he proposed a number of tests for independency. It was one of those tests - whether the person claiming independent discovery had a track record in the subject area - that caused me to look into the Tannehills. In fairness, they didn’t explicitly claim independency, but neither did they cite an antecedent, so the inference was that their book offered new ideas, and that’s how it was accepted by the esteemed Dr. Hoppe. It’s likely that we’ll never know, but absent evidence to the contrary I’ll credit Peter Bos who, by disclosing the idea in 1963, appears to have been first.

Readers of this article may be interested in this other historical essay dealing with related themes.
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Re:The Red Pill
« Reply #51 on: 2015-11-08 18:03:21 »
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Succinctly articulates the folly of socialist economics.

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« Reply #52 on: 2015-11-10 14:11:33 »
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The Holocaust, the West, and the Lost Caribbean Shelter

The Nazis set the house on fire, and the free world barred the doors

B.K. MARCUS

Monday, November 09, 2015

http://fee.org/anythingpeaceful/the-west-the-holocaust-and-the-lost-caribbean-refuge/

“A few thousand years after giant volcanic eruptions formed the Virgin Islands,” explains one resort, they became home to “the rich, the famous and the infamous, from Christopher Columbus and Sir Francis Drake to the pirate Blackbeard.”

Today, the islands are known almost exclusively as a vacation spot for the global leisure class.

But in another world, this tropical paradise might also have been home to thousands of Jewish refugees, escaping the hell of war and genocide.

The islanders lobbied to let them immigrate, but the federal government blocked the locals’ overture, keeping Europe's Jews (and Gypsies, homosexuals, and others who didn’t fit the plan for the “master race”) trapped in a system that marginalized them, isolated them, and ultimately exterminated them by the millions.

“Contrary to popular belief,” wrote William R. Perl in the Freeman, “the problem for Jews during the Holocaust was not how to get out, but where to go. The key figures in most governments throughout the world, instead of liberalizing their immigration laws, closed their borders to the hunted Jews, or at most admitted token numbers only.”

The US government didn’t even allow Jews to immigrate at the level of those token numbers. According to Rafael Medoff at the LA Times, the official limit on admitting German Jews during those years was “about 26,000 annually — but even that quota was less than 25% filled during most of the Hitler era, because the Roosevelt administration piled on so many extra requirements for would-be immigrants.”

For instance, “starting in 1941, merely leaving behind a close relative in Europe would be enough to disqualify an applicant — on the absurd assumption that the Nazis could threaten the relative and thereby force the immigrant into spying for Hitler.”

Yes, the official excuse for keeping Jewish refugees out of the United States was the fear that they would be secretly helping the perpetrators of the Holocaust.

“That not a single such case had been proven mattered little,” says Perl.

If FDR’s government didn’t want an influx of European Jews in New York or Washington, DC, then the islands that the US government acquired from Denmark in 1917 should have offered the perfect compromise. The Virgin Islands held no war secrets to protect. And their legislature showed far greater compassion and foresight than the politicians in DC.

On November 18, 1938, the islands’ legislative assembly resolved “that it be made known to Refugee peoples of the world that when and if existing barriers are removed that they shall find surcease from misfortune in the Virgin Islands of the United States.”

Perl writes, “The State Department immediately started action to obstruct the islanders’ humanitarian efforts and to close this possible avenue of escape.”

The Islands’ governor, frustrated by the federal government’s response, continued to try to invite as many refugee families as permitted by the barriers erected in DC, but every effort failed. Finally, the State Department persuaded the US Navy to declare all of the Virgin Islands “a restricted area for strictly naval reasons.”

In a note to the chief of naval intelligence, the assistant secretary of state wrote that such a declaration would “prevent the raising of the political questions involved in this refugee and undesirable citizens traffic which is going on” (emphasis added).

The plan worked. “Nobody in wartime,” writes Perl, “could defend an issue that threatened the security of the United States. The attempt to tear a few thousand of the doomed from Moloch’s jaws had been sabotaged.”

Perl’s account details the many players in the central government’s machinations to keep the Jews out, but he downplays FDR’s culpability. “President Roosevelt, ‘informed’ of the undoubted arrival of spies among the refugees, was won over” by others in his government.

In the LA Times, Medoff is more critical:

Why didn’t the president quietly tell his State Department (which administered the immigration system) to fill the quotas for Germany and Axis-occupied countries to the legal limit?

That alone could have saved 190,000 lives. It would not have required a fight with Congress or the anti-immigration forces; it would have involved minimal political risk to the president.

Medoff suspects the president’s inaction was the result not so much of political prudence as of personal preference. “There is evidence,” he writes, of “troubling private remarks by FDR”:

including dismissing pleas for Jewish refugees as “Jewish wailing” and “sob stuff”; expressing (to a senator ) his pride that “there is no Jewish blood in our veins”; and characterizing a tax maneuver by a Jewish newspaper publisher as “a dirty Jewish trick.”

“It is sobering,” he concludes, “to consider that partly because of Roosevelt’s private prejudices, innocent people who could have been saved were instead abandoned.”

“It is widely believed that the Nazi ‘Final Solution’ would have claimed fewer victims if the free world had shaken off its apathy and helped the Jews to escape,” Perl writes.

But apathy wasn’t the problem. During a war that pitted the free world against the forces of fascism, nationalism, and racism, the liberal democracies actively pursued illiberal policies at home and sabotaged their citizens’ efforts to save thousands of families from extermination.

As Perl bluntly puts it, “The Nazis set the house aflame, and the free world barred the doors.”

In a different version of history, one in which compassion and local autonomy had triumphed, a Caribbean haven would have allowed tens, maybe hundreds of thousands of human beings to be alive today, whose parents and grandparents were, in our actual history, lost to Hitler’s Final Solution.

We mourn them, and we solemnly promise “never again.” But first we must come to grips with what exactly was done — and not just by Germany — that must not be repeated.
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Re:The Red Pill
« Reply #53 on: 2015-11-11 20:58:52 »
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I really hope that this awful piece of 1930s "Christ for capitalism" (vide "One Nation Under God, How Corporate America Invented Christian America", Kevin M. Kruse, http://www.npr.org/2015/03/30/396365659/how-one-nation-didnt-become-under-god-until-the-50s-religious-revival#) motivated morality based thinking displaying all the myopic vision of Asteroidea, was put out as a challenge, not as advocacy.

No social system in history has dealt as badly with the challenge of resource allocation as market based "capitalism", which serves only one purpose, and that is to concentrate wealth in the hands of those possessing it, no matter how the delusional attempt to market it. Indeed as Maynard Keynes noted, "Capitalism is 'the astonishing belief that the nastiest motives of the nastiest men somehow or other work for the best results in the best of all possible worlds.'” (attributed by Sir George Schuster, Christianity and human relations in industry (1951), p. 109) in contrast to socialism which might best be described as capitalism with added ethics. Rather than benefiting society as claimed in this video, capitalism benefits individuals who then become oligarchs, despoiling the planet and other humans for short-term personal gain.

This can be seen when considering the fact that the USA now houses some 10%, or 50 million, of the world's poorest people, has a collapsing median wealth (currently about twenty-seventh in ranking, just before Portugal, Western Europe's poorest economy, and socialist-totalitarian Israel, the developing world's wealthiest economy, and about one fifth of Australia's) and infrastructure, while still using about one third to one half of the world's wealth to benefit about 1% of the US population or about 0.044% of the world's population. A population including the wealthiest and fastest growing collection of billionaires in history. It is even more apparent when it is realised that the 1% are on track to possess the same wealth as the other 99% of humanity, and that this process of wealth transfer will, as Marx predicted, continue to accelerate exponentially until economies collapse.

Fortunately, as predicted by Marx, in "The Fragment on Machines" in Grundrisse der Kritik der Politischen Ökonomie (vide https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1857/grundrisse/ch13.htmThe Fragment on Machines. Karl Marx, 1858, from Grundrisse (pp. 690-712)), we are coming to the end of this era, when the concept of capital has meaning as a primitive approximation of capacity, and when, as Marx described in Gruindrisse (1857-1861), a near omniscient "machine"  can replace other metrics and labour. Keynes and Buckminster Fuller ultimately coming to similar conclusions as Marx. Keynes predicted in 1927, "When the accumulation of wealth is no longer of high social importance, there will be great changes in the code of morals. We shall be able to rid ourselves of many of the pseudo-moral principles which have hag-ridden us for two hundred years, by which we have exalted some of the most distasteful of human qualities into the position of the highest virtues. We shall be able to afford to dare to assess the money-motive at its true value. The love of money as a possession — as distinguished from the love of money as a means to the enjoyments and realities of life — will be recognised for what it is, a somewhat disgusting morbidity, one of those semi-criminal, semi-pathological propensities which one hands over with a shudder to the specialists in mental disease … But beware! The time for all this is not yet. For at least another hundred years we must pretend to ourselves and to everyone that fair is foul and foul is fair; for foul is useful and fair is not. Avarice and usury and precaution must be our gods for a little longer still. For only they can lead us out of the tunnel of economic necessity into daylight." and Buckminster Fuller, "We should do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian Darwinian theory he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living.” (vide "The New York Magazine Environmental Teach-In", Elizabeth Barlow, 1970-03-30, New York Magazine, p. 30 https://books.google.com/books?id=cccDAAAAMBAJ&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false

Thomas Edison also addressed the monetary aspects of this argument in 1921, “That is to say, under the old way any time we wish to add to the national wealth we are compelled to add to the national debt.

“Now, that is what Henry Ford wants to prevent. He thinks it is stupid, and so do I, that for the loan of $30,000,000 of their own money the people of the United States should be compelled to pay $66,000,000 — that is what it amounts to, with interest. People who will not turn a shovelful of dirt nor contribute a pound of material will collect more money from the United States than will the people who supply the material and do the work. That is the terrible thing about interest. In all our great bond issues the interest is always greater than the principal. All of the great public works cost more than twice the actual cost, on that account. Under the present system of doing business we simply add 120 to 150 per cent, to the stated cost.

“But here is the point: If our nation can issue a dollar bond, it can issue a dollar bill. The element that makes the bond good makes the bill good. The difference between the bond and the bill is that the bond lets the money brokers collect twice the amount of the bond and an additional 20 per cent, whereas the currency pays nobody but those who directly contribute to Muscle Shoals in some useful way.

” … if the Government issues currency, it provides itself with enough money to increase the national wealth at Muscles Shoals without disturbing the business of the rest of the country. And in doing this it increases its income without adding a penny to its debt.

“It is absurd to say that our country can issue $30,000,000 in bonds and not $30,000,000 in currency. Both are promises to pay; but one promise fattens the usurer, and the other helps the people. If the currency issued by the Government were no good, then the bonds issued would be no good either. It is a terrible situation when the Government, to increase the national wealth, must go into debt and submit to ruinous interest charges at the hands of men who control the fictitious values of gold.

“Look at it another way. If the Government issues bonds, the brokers will sell them. The bonds will be negotiable; they will be considered as gilt edged paper. Why? Because the government is behind them, but who is behind the Government? The people. Therefore it is the people who constitute the basis of Government credit. Why then cannot the people have the benefit of their own gilt-edged credit by receiving non-interest bearing currency on Muscle Shoals, instead of the bankers receiving the benefit of the people’s credit in interest-bearing bonds?” vide "Ford Sees Wealth in Muscle Shoals",  1921-12-6, The New York Times http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive-free/pdf?_r=3&res=9C04E0D7103EEE3ABC4E53DFB467838A639EDE.

Despite the delusions of economists and wishful thinking of politicians, reality is limited by the finite nature of our planet. This necessitates the deliberate reduction of human numbers to the sustainable carrying capacity of the planet over time (a transferable right to a single surviving child per mother will achieve this in 3 generations), or most of us will probably die before necessary as long-planned wars of depopulation escalate out of control. Should we manage to achieve this, then there is no inherent limit to the reasonable resources available to each person operating within an efficient social structure, and any amount of capital required to perform any task capable of ultimate self-liquidation is viable, including the production of anything that can be produced, or which is needed to reach this circumstance, whereupon the only significant question would be whether the benefit to the recipients of any investment would justify the cost to others and the commons. These ethical questions, which capitalism has not so much avoided as buried - to the detriment of all - are necessary to create a sustainable and egalitarian society, both prerequisites to a stable civilisation.

Until we reach that circumstance, we are constrained in how much can be shared, but by switching to a base income model, where each human receives a weekly stipend equivalent to the local cost of living, and where women can sell their right to breed on a market sustained and supported by government purchases at a reasonable value, probably at about $250,000 per woman at present, we can dramatically increase wealth and rapidly equalise the distribution of goods and wealth with no downside to the planet and vast benefit to 99% of mankind, as opposed to the 1% benefiting from the current system. A substantial investment in renewable energy (solar already being cheaper than coal in 18 countries, many of them receiving less insolation than most of the USA), the production of greenhouse gas neutral renewable oil from sea-water, and rebuilding cities and agriculture to prepare for unavoidable 6 m rise in sea level which global warming has already committed us to, will provide additional opportunities to distribute the funds we can release simply through reinvesting a portion of the annual estimated $11.6 billion expended on wasting valuable legacy hydrocarbon feedstocks by burning them as fuel.

And, to bring us back to the video, automation and AI will continue to mean that engineering prowess is not a limiting factor, while the vast amounts of steel released by reengineering much smaller environments for greatly reduced populations will ensure the availability of steel for railways and other things, but hopefully not irrigation systems, because most of the world's great aquifers are under such extreme pressure that we cannot possibly afford to continue to waste water on crop irrigation, but instead need to be growing crops inside enclosures allowing the complete reuse of all inputs, and the redirection of legacy hydrocarbons to plastic production will support the production of superior, non-corroding, fully recyclable, polyethylene irrigation components for a much lower cost than the cost of steel.
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Re:The Red Pill
« Reply #54 on: 2015-11-12 19:42:19 »
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Quote from: Hermit on 2015-11-11 20:58:52   

No social system in history has dealt as badly with the challenge of resource allocation as market based "capitalism", which serves only one purpose, and that is to concentrate wealth in the hands of those possessing it, no matter how the delusional attempt to market it.

Capitalism is the only social system in history that has lifted billions of people out of poverty. I agree capitalism (i.e. free market + individual rights) is not egalitarian, and is in fact antithetical to egalitarianism. But I don't see wealth inequality as a problem at all, rather it is a property of a healthy economy. Poverty is a problem, inequality is a distraction.
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Re:The Red Pill
« Reply #55 on: 2015-11-14 13:00:18 »
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Senator Sanders and the Fixed Pie Fallacy
By Chelsea German

“The rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer.” Senator Bernie Sanders first said those words in 1974 and has been repeating them ever since. Senator Sanders is not alone in his belief. Three out of four Americans agree with the statement, “Today it’s really true that the rich just get richer while the poor get poorer.”

Senator Sanders is half right: the rich are getting richer. However, his assertion that the poor are becoming poorer is incorrect. The poor are becoming richer as well.

more (with charts) >> http://humanprogress.org/blog/senator-sanders-fixed-pie-fallacy
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Re:The Red Pill
« Reply #56 on: 2015-11-14 20:52:03 »
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https://i.imgur.com/R4I9sGg.jpg
« Last Edit: 2015-11-16 16:37:43 by David Lucifer » Report to moderator   Logged
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Re:The Red Pill
« Reply #57 on: 2015-11-16 11:43:50 »
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Quote from: David Lucifer on 2015-11-12 19:42:19   

Quote from: Hermit on 2015-11-11 20:58:52   
No social system in history has dealt as badly with the challenge of resource allocation as market based "capitalism", which serves only one purpose, and that is to concentrate wealth in the hands of those possessing it, no matter how the delusional attempt to market it.


Capitalism is the only social system in history that has lifted billions of people out of poverty. I agree capitalism (i.e. free market + individual rights) is not egalitarian, and is in fact antithetical to egalitarianism. But I don't see wealth inequality as a problem at all, rather it is a property of a healthy economy. Poverty is a problem, inequality is a distraction.




Seems the top 1% in 2007 have a much larger share of the pie then lower classes compared to 1979, by these congressional numbers.
https://www.cbo.gov/publication/42729?index=12485

After-Tax Income Grew More for Highest-Income Households

After-tax income for the highest-income households grew more than it did for any other group. (After-tax income is income after federal taxes have been deducted and government transfers—which are payments to people through such programs as Social Security and Unemployment Insurance—have been added.)

CBO finds that, between 1979 and 2007, income grew by:

    275 percent for the top 1 percent of households,
    65 percent for the next 19 percent,
    Just under 40 percent for the next 60 percent, and
    18 percent for the bottom 20 percent.


as well as : [ur]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_inequality_in_the_United_States[/url]
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Re:The Red Pill
« Reply #58 on: 2015-11-16 11:54:24 »
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http://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_shows_the_best_stats_you_ve_ever_seen
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Re:The Red Pill
« Reply #59 on: 2015-11-16 16:33:49 »
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Quote from: Fritz on 2015-11-16 11:43:50   

Seems the top 1% in 2007 have a much larger share of the pie then lower classes compared to 1979, by these congressional numbers.
https://www.cbo.gov/publication/42729?index=12485

October 15, 2015
Senator Sanders and the Fixed Pie Fallacy
By Chelsea German

http://humanprogress.org/blog/senator-sanders-fixed-pie-fallacy

“The rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer.” Senator Bernie Sanders first said those words in 1974 and has been repeating them ever since. Senator Sanders is not alone in his belief. Three out of four Americans agree with the statement, “Today it’s really true that the rich just get richer while the poor get poorer.”

Senator Sanders is half right: the rich are getting richer. However, his assertion that the poor are becoming poorer is incorrect. The poor are becoming richer as well.

Economist Gary Burtless of the Brookings Institute showed that between 1979 and 2010, the real (inflation-adjusted) after-tax income of the top 1% of U.S. income-earners grew by an impressive 202%. He also showed that the real after-tax income of the bottom fifth of income-earners grew by 49%. All groups made real income gains. While the rich are making gains at a faster pace, both the rich and the poor are in fact becoming richer.

In addition to these measurable real income gains, decreases in prices have given the poor increased purchasing power, helping to raise living standards for the worst off in society. As a result of falling prices such as for groceries and material goods, along with gains in real income, Americans have more income left after basic expenses.

Technology has also become cheaper, improving our lives in unexpected ways. For example, consider the spread of cell phones. There was a time when only the wealthiest Americans could afford one. Today, over 98% of Americans have a cellular subscription, and the rise of smart phones has made these devices more useful than ever.

Unfortunately, progress has been uneven. In those areas of the economy where competition is hobbled, such as education, housing, and healthcare, prices continue to increase.

Still, the percentage of the population classified as living in relative poverty has decreased over time. Why then do three quarters of Americans, including Senator Sanders, believe that the poor are “getting poorer?”

A simple logical error underlies Sanders’ belief. If we assume that wealth is a fixed pie, then the more slices the rich get, the fewer are left over for the poor. In other words, people can only better themselves at the expense of others. In the world of the fixed pie, if we observe the rich becoming richer, then it must be because other people are becoming poorer. Fortunately, in the real world, the pie is not fixed. U.S. GDP is growing, and it’s growing faster than the population.

Poverty remains a pressing issue, but Senator Sanders is incorrect when he says that the poor are becoming poorer. In the words of HumanProgress.org advisory board member Professor Deirdre McCloskey, "The rich got richer, true. But millions more have gas heating, cars, smallpox vaccinations, indoor plumbing, cheap travel, rights for women, lower child mortality, adequate nutrition, taller bodies, doubled life expectancy, schooling for their kids, newspapers, a vote, a shot at university, and respect."




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