"Prayer For You"

This is Sharleen Spiteri and Ally McErlaine of the Scottish band Texas - this is a session from their early days and the Southside album back in 1989. I loved this record, but haven't got it anymore. Their later stuff was patchy I thought.

My defense essay has been through some initial re-writes and won't be ready for a while.

"For A Piece Of The Non-Action"

"...too many of us seem to regard an advanced Western society as the geopolitical version of a lavishly endowed charitable foundation that funds somnolent programming on NPR. I was talking to a trustiefundie Vermont student the other day who informed me her ambition is to “work for a non-profit.”

“What kind of ambition is that?” I said, a little bewildered. But she meant it, and so do most of her friends. Doesn’t care particularly what kind of “non-profit” it is: as long as no profits are involved, she’s eager to run up a six-figure college debt for a piece of the non-action. The entire state of Vermont is becoming a non-profit. And so in a certain sense is an America that’s 15 trillion dollars in the hole, and still cheerfully spending away."

Mark Steyn. He is, in the way he phrases his points, genuinely funny and one of the very few people at NR I can read without a mental playback of "Moonlight Sonata".

But even Steyn's article didn't make me laugh as much as Ozsoapbox's inadvertent slip of a comment here:

"By discriminating against ABC’s, Africans or anyone else who isn’t white the employment sector is being intolerant of all other races and ethnicities."

You see that? "The employment sector"... It dovetails quite well with Steyn's remark about seeing Western civilization as little more but a lavishly-endowed charitable foundation. For a piece of the non-action, follow the link to the thread at Oz's place.

Annabell

That's her English name. This is a better picture of the girl I mentioned in my last Sunday post when I'd forgotten her name.

Anyway, there's a typhoon raging outside, I've come down with a cold and a splitting headache and I'm a bit worried about the dogs at the park. I feel miserable today. Still, I'm soldiering on with my defense essay between naps.

Later... at about 10.30pm I went out to the park with a bag full of hot chicken legs for the dogs and did some tidying up of fallen branches and such. Last year's typhoon (Fanapi) was worse.

On "Accumulation By Dispossession"

This is my email response to someone who asked me whether I had heard of the Marxist term "accumulation by dispossession". The question was put with a link to the wikipedia entry here. Readers can judge for themselves...

* * *

Briefly...

Privatization - one thing the wikipedia page neglects to mention is how these "public" assets came to be so in the first place. For instance, the construction of railways in England was initially carried out by private enterprise and only later captured by the State. The concept of "public assets" is presented as if it is a default setting. More importantly, the concept's political legitimacy depends on the public's acceptance of the terms under which the "asset" will be managed - that being the case, this legitimacy is always suspect simply because the public are not usually asked for their opinion as to whether the State should manage a given "asset", except indirectly through the election cycle or a rare referendum. The "default" assumption that a given thing is or ought to be a "public asset" unless privatized by the State is, I think, invalid on Lockean grounds (i.e. the rightful acquistion of property by individuals through labour or voluntary trade). In addition, I would add that calling anything run by the State an "asset" seems to me a corruption of the concept via its' application to the opposite kinds of things. If a State-owned company that turns a profit on the market is to be considered an "asset", then what is a State-owned company that does not turn a profit to be considered - a liability? OK, then why isn't it ever admitted that Britain's NHS is a "liability"? (That isn't the term I would use mind - I'd say "fucking monstrosity" or something). If it is to be argued that a "public asset" is an "asset" by some measure other than monetary calculation (e.g. "service"), then this can be dismissed on the grounds that economic value is subjective. Changing the example from "service" to something quantifiable like "number of lives saved per month" doesn't help either because saving another person's life is still something which you must decide to spend money on or not. If one stranger's life is worth your money over and above your other values - then why not any other stranger's? You'd bankrupt yourself that way and thus not be able to save anybody's life.

"Financialization" - this section conspicuously fails to mention that the "deregulation" of the 80s was followed by what might be termed "re-regulation" in the 90s and 2000s, e.g. the Community Reinvestment Act passed by the Clinton administration and the Sarbanes-Oxley Act passed by the Bush administration. I agree that inflation is a terrible thing - especially for the poor - and may in some sense be thought of as an "asset stripper", but the use of this term implies control, which inflation does not really confer. I would tend to be suspicious of some mergers, but not opposed in principle. On asset stripping per se, I have no objection in principle - if a firm cannot compete in the market and declares bankruptcy, then asset-stripping may be exactly the right thing to do - though how it is done is a seperate question.

The management and manipulation of crises - this would not occur under a system of competing currencies operating in a free market. The damage to small countries occurs because (a) their governments operate a central-bank supplied fiat currency, and (b) so does the U.S., and (c) governments, including the U.S. government, are typically the largest purchasers of commodities. When a large government makes bad decisions on the market, these decisions have enormous consequences for other people in smaller countries on the other side of the world. For instance, one aspect of the recent "Arab Spring" revolts was unrest at the rise in prices for grains which was caused partly by local inflation, but also by the U.S. government's demented subsidization of ethanol production as a "green" substitute for gasoline.

State redistributions - well, I'm against State redistributions! And that begins with taxation itself, never mind fiddling about with the tax code.

***

Criticisms are welcome, as that answer was fired off quickly and isn't worked out in any great detail. On the point about the "management and manipulation" of crises, the wikipedia entry isn't especially detailed (though I would guess it's the same sort of "shock doctrine" crap that Naomi Klein pushes). I say that these so-called "crises of capitalism" occur due to the price distortions and thus mis-incentives that loose monetary policy instantiates for the systemic malinvestment of capital. They are so bad primarily because the government operates a monopoly over the medium of exchange. Without that monopoly, these "crises" (i.e. the "bust" periods of the business cycle) would likely be mild since price corrections would be far easier for the market to make in the absence of systemic mis-incentives.

Response To Anonymous Question On Defence & Expropriation

In a (trashed) comment to my post below on the amendments to the land expropriation act, an anonymous commenter (I have a suspicion as to who it was) asked me a not entirely unreasonable question amid a barrage of vile and gratuitous insults. I will answer it here in a short seperate post for several reasons: first, I want to keep it seperate from the rest of the defence essay I'm writing; second, as I write it's nearly 3am on Friday night and I've been busy all day - I'm too tired to do much more than a short post; third, I don't back down from a challenge like that, even if I do trash the rest of the comment (unlike Turton, I will not ban people for arguing with me, nor even for bad language or strongly expressed disagreement - but I probably will ban you for gratuitous, extreme incivility). The question was this:

"So let's say mainland China will imminentaly attack Taiwan, should the government go into lengthy protracted discussions with land owners to be able to use their land for defense installations?"

First of all, there is an obvious problem with the way this question is put - which is that, if an attack from the PRC was "immanent" (i.e. already underway or very soon to be so), then not only would "protracted discussions" be a waste of valuable time, but possibly the actual construction of any "defence installations" would be too; not only that, but the siting of "defense installations" could hardly be rearranged in such circumstances unless they were highly mobile units such as PAC-3 missile launchers (and even then, were an attack "immanent", mobile units almost certainly could not be redeployed to new, unprepared locations quickly enough).

That problem aside however, there is still the substantive matter of whether land expropriation by the State is justified if it is done for the purpose of national defense. So you might easily imagine the government preparing a new site well in advance of any potential attack, and in doing so, considering whether to buy land voluntarily or simply expropriate it. Alternatively, you might consider whether existing sites used by the MND today were at some point acquired through use of legalized theft. Either scenario would bring you to the same substantive ethical point of question.

I think there are two questions to answer here. The first is how likely a property owner is to refuse to sell up, and the second is whether the State is justified in forcing him to do so or not.

On the first question, I would guess that most property owners would be more likely to sell their land for use in collective defense against the declared threat of an external State than for its' use by a large corporation. The distribution of benefits seems to be wider and more generalized across the population in the case of national defense than in the case of a single manufacturer establishing a plant requiring a few thousand employees. Those assumptions are arguable however, since not only do the benefits of "defense installations" depend on success, but whether any given manufacturer can continue to work depends on broader conditions of security, i.e. you probably can't do your normal job if you're factory is being bombed. Whatever the unconsidered uncertainty of the assumptions through which the "defense installation" project might be perceived, it nonetheless remains likely that, at least for reasons of social pressure, most property owners would sell-up their land for the cause (assuming they perceived the MND as competent at installing and running the thing).

However, it is still possible to imagine, on several grounds, scenarios in which property owners refuse to sell. Would the State then be justified in seizing their land? No - unless perhaps it could be conclusively demonstrated that the non-sale of the land would result in disaster for other people with whom the property owner is in society with and that the State's proposed seizure were the only means of preventing this. Those conditions however, are extremely stringent and therefore unlikely to apply. First, the mere possession or "installation" of defensive weapons cannot by itself guarantee that a disastrous attack by an enemy State will not succeed; perhaps nuclear weapons are the closest thing to any such guarantee, although some of the problems with that should be obvious. Second, since the State exercizes an effective monopoly on the production of security, it is susceptible, like all other economic cartels, to being perverted by the economic incentives for high prices and poor quality that monopoly and cartel structures tend to inculcate (i.e. basically, there is always a good chance they are likely to make a f*cking mess of whatever it is they are supposed to be doing). Third, and in dovetail with that last point, it may be that a property owner (or group of such property owners) have a viable alternative means of either dissuading or repelling aggression which requires that they access to their land (e.g. militia groups which, whilst they might do nothing to raise the cost of invading, could be significant in raising the costs of staying put).

More generally, I stick to the principle that the State may not expropriate land under any circumstances, even war (there ought to be no need for this anyway, even in war time). Dogmatic? Yes, but not stupid.

There are other arguments to be made in response to the question, but pursuing them here would not only take me too far into subjects I'm already writing about for my defense essay, but tapping them out on the keyboard would likely retard my rise tommrow morning by another hour or two.

* * *

Incidentally, a correction... I noted in an earlier post that the Nankunshan temple was in the Beidou district of Chiayi county... well not according to this map of Tainan I snapped in the 7-11 the other night (zoom in on the far left, upper-corner):

The Theft Act Must Be Repealed, Not Amended

"President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) yesterday announced that his administration would push for legislation and revision of laws on land expropriation...

...Under the proposals, local governments will evaluate land transaction prices of expropriated lands every six months, and compensation for landowners will be calculated according to market value rather than the published value of the land, which is often much lower than the market value."

The lefties would settle for that, but to hell with them. Legalized theft of private property is still an enormously consequential injustice - irrespective of how much compensation money the State pays out. If a large corporation wants to acquire somebody's land, then - as with any other form of property - they ought to inquire as to a purely voluntary deal with the property owner and they should receive absolutely no help whatsoever from the State in doing this.

The expropriation act ought to be repealed outright, not simply amended to provide a few extra dollars of lubrication.

Ko-suen Moo (慕可舜)

J.Michael Cole laments the disinterest shown by Taiwanese journalists in the Bill Moo (慕可舜) story he broke last weekend.

It's got to be either some manner of incompetence, or perhaps more likely (since he refers to "reporters" in the plural), the realization that this Bill Moo (慕可舜) specimen has connections high enough to easily turn over a journalist's career. You don't get to "disappear" yourself at a major international airport without the help of very serious people.

I must remember this story - i.e. the lack of interest in Bill Moo's disappearance - the next time I hear talk of the "professional virtues" of Taiwanese journalists.

Update: I see the story has been belatedly covered by the Liberty Times now - over a week after the story broke.

Nankunshan Temple Gate

This is the gate for the Nankunshan temple which, if I recall correctly, is in the south-eastern Beidou district of Chiayi County. That contrast of red and blue is the sort of thing you see in guidebook photography, though this image would never qualify for a guidebook. Had I spent more time (which I didn't because Sunday was scorching hot) I probably could have worked on the perspective a bit more to eliminate background cars and other clutter. I should also have either switched lenses for this shot (I was using the 18mm) or took up a closer position.

Anyway, this red-blue colour contrast is compelling - of attention, but not interest. In other words the form is attention grabbing, but the subject being a temple gate, it doesn't by itself interest me very much, which is another reason why I didn't bother to hang about. However, the fact that temples don't interest me much makes me somewhat uneasy, as I can't rid myself of this back-of-the-mind suspicion that I should be very interested in temples...

Three Provocative Pieces: Cole, Bandow & Skidelsky

A more interesting than usual edition of the Taipei Times this morning...

First, there is the story of Taiwanese PRC agent Ko-suen "Bill" Moo (慕可舜) in J.Michael Cole's headliner. The man was jailed in the U.S. for attempting to illegally transfer high-end technology from Lockmart to the PRC whilst employed as a defense procurement agent for the Taiwanese Air Force. Upon his release from prison in the U.S. he was deported to Taiwan, arriving at Taoyuan airport last Wednesday, whereupon he somehow gave officers of the NIA's Border Affairs Corps the slip. My comment at Cole's place on the first break of the story:

"A specimen like him has to have expensive handlers."

What does he know, and what use might he be to whom now? This is a very interesting story, which could be the making of an enterprising young journalist's career.

Second, there was a featured editorial from a Cato guy, Doug Bandow, with which I largely agree. What I would add to Bandow's prescription that the U.S. government not interfere with the sale of advanced weapons systems to Taiwan is that the leadership in the Taiwanese government ought to be brave and intelligent enough to consider implementing a strategy of social depoliticization as a domestic complement to external defense systems, with both aspects of this broader defense policy aimed at raising the costs of annexation as much as possible. The most important aim within this strategy would be monetary reform, with the abolition, not necessarily of the central bank, but of the laws which prevent private competition in the issue of currency. Perhaps the first aim of such a strategy however (given the likely difficulties with even getting monetary reform discused - though, having said that, see below...), should be the decentralization and even outright removal of State control over education - that would be one of the most valuable State assets that the PRC would attempt to control in any annexation. Put that "asset" out of their reach as far as this is possible to do.

Third, Skidelsky was back (responding to his recent participation in the LSE debate) but this time in more sober appearance than his usual clownish regalia. His argument is not that Hayek's analysis of the business cycle is incorrect per se, but that Hayek "deserved" to lose the debate in the '30s and again today because he does not offer Statists the solutions they would like. He is effectively saying that even if Hayek's explanation is correct, "we" cannot afford the recommendations that follow from his explanation. Yet that claim is itself made on flawed grounds. Here is what he thinks is Keynes' knock-down argument to Hayek:

"As Keynes pointed out, if everyone — households, firms and governments — all started trying to increase their saving simultaneously, there would be no way to stop the economy from running down until people became too poor to save."

The problem with that is twofold.

First, it contains the assumption that, were "everyone" to begin saving simultaneously, the economy would collapse - but this assumption is invalid because saving is a response to incentives which are themselves dynamic. As more people begin to save, so the relative costs of saving rise and the relative benefits fall - consumption then becomes more attractive. Of course, a deflationary contraction and liquidation of malinvestments would be extremely painful, but it would be better in the long term than an inflationary collapse - which now seems inevitable.

The second problem with that argument is that it simply assumes the truth of its' own premise, i.e. that government intervention is necessary to manage the market. Yet it is precisely government intervention which distorts the price mechanism and retards the market from functioning with the efficiency with which it would otherwise work.

I say Skidelsky is wrong about the business-cycle, and that his longed for "national investment bank" would be a long-term disaster.

Meanwhile, I hope to have my defense essay finished by next weekend - now that I've said that, it ups the ante on me to actually get it done.

Sunday

I'm having some trouble with the Blogger template*. Upon swapping my header image of Tainan city for a new image I took earlier today, the bloody thing has inexplicably decided to reduce the width of the header image so that it no longer "heads" the entire blog. The header width specified for the "shrink to fit" option is 728px. I don't remember what it was previously, and there isn't any option to adjust it manually without going into the template coding itself - which I've looked at and it doesn't seem to contain an equivalent item specifying the header width. I might think about redesigning the whole thing again even if it means altering the template coding itself, though that might be somewhat time consuming.

Anyway, since a certain "significant other" of mine was off with her diving team in Kenting today (having forgotten our date last night), I was out driving up route 17 through the north-eastern districts of Tainan County (Cigu, Jiangjun and Beimen) and the south-eastern districts of Chiayi County (Budai, Dongshih and Puzih). The weather being fantastic today (i.e. extremely hot, with blue skies only punctuated by white clouds), I had a good time with the camera.


I much prefer this shot of the Tainan City skyline to the one I most recently used for my header image. The problem was that the position from which I had taken the previous images did not afford the necessary elevation. Without that, the perspective was limited. So today, having plenty of time, I drove further north and realized that the slightly upward curvature of the road itself, when added to the increased distance from the previous point would in fact allow a significantly better perspective - one marred only by the interference of the road lamps. The sky over the city was also a bit too hazy with it being the early afternoon - yet that's just whinging, I think the new picture is grand. You can clearly see the Shangri La hotel tower to the left of the image. I'll start heading out there now at different times of day to see what sort of skies I can get.

I also took a little eastward detour off route 17 to have a look at this temple, and to see if they would let me use it to get a higher elevation to take some pictures.


Actually, the place was empty except for a few old women fast asleep - it being the middle of the day. So I quitely crept up the stairs to the top of the left-hand building (because it had a south-facing balcony - the one to the right didn't which was a dissapointment because it would have afforded superlative perspective) and took a few shots with both the 18-55 and 55-250 lenses.


In this image, the Shangri La hotel tower isn't visible - it's off to the left just out of shot. The interlocking pools with water pumps in the foreground are fish farms.


The red-haired top of the Dutch fort at Anping was visible in the distance out to the west. Here is another long-lens shot of that tower which I took on Tuesday, but this time from just across the Anping river...


Since it was so hot, I decided to stop in Beimen to let the dog cool off in the river, so whilst we were there I naturally got the camera out again and started snapping away...


... until Tinkerbell interrupted me.


What was she looking for? River crabs...


Female.


Male.

After that break in Beimen, it was a long drive up into Chiayi. I stopped for lunch in Beidou fishing port, and then drove on until I reached the Puzih river - that's the point at which I turned due east toward Chiayi City, and then, since I was knackered, back home southwards through the central districts of Tainan County (that drive, assuming no stops, is approximately an hour north, an hour east and an hour south). On the way south, between Lioujia and Sanhua, I came upon this...


Reality check: that's a car lying upside down in the middle of a road at sometime after 4pm on a Sunday afternoon - and it probably won't even make the local news here. This is why I am very reluctant to get into any sort of vehicle (car, taxi, bus etc) driven by a Taiwanese person whom I don't know well. You simply cannot assume competence. Here is a close-up...


Sadly, this sort of thing is all too believable to me. As I stood there taking pictures, a Taiwanese guy on a sports bike drove past and slowed down to exchange eyebrows and shrugs with me. He knew.

"That's f*cking atrocious and we're not all like that!"

Whatever, dude.

Not to finish on a low, here is my favourite of all the pictures I took at the bar last night...


This girl only started recently (criminally I forget her name!). She's not as sharply focused in that image as I should have had her - which says I have to work on double-checking the focus. Look at her eyes though - isn't she cute? She reminds me somewhat of the Sanhua brewery girl, but with shorter hair (I love it when Taiwanese girls have their hair cut short like that)...


And here is a self-portrait I took yesterday, since nobody seems capable of getting me in focus...


*Update: fixed now: 908px is the necessary width. Posted here for future reference.

Response To Harry Adamopoulos

Sirs,

After referring to the discovery of Lin Keh-hsiao's (林克孝) body by search and rescue teams as an example of how the "rich get special perks", Harry Adamopoulos goes on to write:

"If you are wondering why London is burning up and revolutions are taking place in the Arab world, look no further than these types of injustices. While the weak suffer, the rich bask in their little world of grandeur."

That is extremely myopic.

The various acts of assault, theft and arson committed during the riots in London and elsewhere in England were not motivated by the (as yet still unestablished) injustice of the Mark Duggan shooting. They were the opportunistic expression of nihilistic fun by a growing culture of petty criminality and unwarranted sense of entitlement - one which has been operantly conditioned by welfare-state policies for decades.

The revolutions in Egypt and Tunisia were motivated by the broader injustices of a dictatorial political economy exacerbated by monetary mismanagement and the rise in worldwide grain prices caused by the U.S. infatuation with ethanol subsidies - motivated, in part, by the environmental movement.

The general injustice of the rich getting better treatment than the poor which Harry Adamopoulos refers to is a result of the existence of State monopolies on such treatment. Police search and rescue teams are monopolized by the government. Access to education, employment, housing and services are increasingly monopolized by government-imposed conditions in the UK. Price distortion, monetary mismanagement and political persecution are all the products of government monopolies. The answer is to abolish these monopolies to release people from the burdens they impose and to enable free competition in the provision of critical services.

Blaming the rich for the injustices of the State is as myopic and thoughtless as Robespierre's "la Terreur" pogroms carried out in the aftermath of the French Revolution.

Yours freely,
Michael Fagan.

(Sent: Saturday 20th August 2011. Unpublished by the Taipei Times.)

Urrghh... Brain-fart: That conclusion to that penultimate paragraph originally read: "The answer is to abolish these monopolies to release free competition in all of these areas." On re-reading that, I realized it looks like I am arguing for free competition in "price distortion, monetary mismanagement and political persecution"! I've corrected it, and resent the letter with this correction.

Harry Adamopoulos

"I find it remarkable that it took the government less than 24 hours to find the body of Taishin Financial Holdings president Lin Keh-hsiao (林克孝). If it were any average person, it would take weeks — as has been proven with the death of other hikers. If you are wondering why London is burning up and revolutions are taking place in the Arab world, look no further than these types of injustices."

So people in London smashed shops, stole televisions and burned cars because of the type of "injustice" whereby the body of a rich hiker is found more quickly than a poor one? And the people in Cairo protested against the social and economic conditions imposed on them by a dictatorial government for the same reason?

That's some fearsome stupid you've got there Mr Harry Adamopolous in Taipei. You'd be f*cking invincible in a debate.

IDF Shots

Just less than an hour ago, I was pottering about washing dishes and going through some pictures I took on Tuesday and Wednesday when I was interrupted by a flight of four IDFs passing fairly low (four or five hundred feet perhaps) over Tainan City. I fumbled the camera back out of its bag and rushed to the balcony but could only get a few faint snaps of them in the distance. Then they made a second pass about five minutes later and I managed a few half-decent shots. After that I stayed on the balcony waiting for the third pass, but it never came - instead they came in to land (the airforce base is just down the road, and I often drive by it on my way south to Kaohsiung).


This shot and the one at the top are from the second pass. In the shots I took from the first pass, the planes were already so far away in the distance as to be mere specks against the clouds.


The somewhat blurred buildings to the immediate right and left of that plane are dormitories on the NCKU campus behind the train station. If you zoom in you can see the pilot has already got his landing gear out.


The landing gear is even more clearly visible in this shot of the next plane coming in to land. The tower to the immediate left is the Shangri La hotel tower behind the train station. Here is a recent non-skewed shot I took of that building:


One of my side projects is compiling a series of photographs of Tainan and Kaohsiung cities for a friend in China who gave me a compilation of fantastic photos of her city Qingdao. It will take me a while to finish, but that shot is going on the list.

And no, not everybody in China is an enemy.

Two Bad Editorials

In a Taipei Times editorial, James Wang declares the U.S. Vice President's visit to Beijing today as a "double slap in the face" for President Ma - as he puts it "one slap from Washington and another from Beijing."

What Wang is trying to do is to use the idiot Biden's visit to Beijing to discredit Ma. Yet what Biden chooses to do can hardly be the fault of Ma. Ma has no say over what Biden does or does not do, and that being the case, the only person who is discredited by Wang's article must be... Wang himself.

President Ma's foreign and defense policy can only be discredited in respect of the institutions over which he can conceivably wield power. Since coming to power in 2008, Ma has presided over outrageous violations of the rights of individual Taiwanese and an insidious expansion of State power into and over the media. Moreover, he has done nothing to even reduce or decentralize the political power of the central government; were the PRC to eventually annex Taiwan, a strongly centralized State apparatus based in Taipei is precisely what they would find... most convenient.

There are legitimate grounds on which President Ma can be criticized, but he cannot be held responsible for the actions of the U.S. Vice President and to insinuate otherwise, however indirectly, is ridiculous.

In another Taipei Times editorial today, Danielle Nierenberg and Graham Salinger, who are apparently connected to some "Nourishing the Planet" organization, write:

"...as food prices fall as a result of farmers producing more food than can be bought, merchants and farmers are struggling."

So they have at least heard of the law of supply and demand: prices fall when supply outstrips demand. It becomes apparent on reading the rest of their editorial however, they are too stupid to understand the implication, which is that in the absence of a complementary increase in demand, supply must be reduced - for they go on to cite the irrelevancies of organic farming and water conservation methods as possible solutions:

"...such economic pressures have prompted continued efforts by the government to help farmers produce profitable harvests. Efforts emphasize educating a new generation of farmers about organic farming, addressing water shortages that threaten crop yields and introducing programs to conserve energy during the farming process."

The problem of farmers not being able to sell enough produce is not an environmental problem, it is a problem of economic calculation. In order to regain profitability, farmers need to think about either reducing the quantity of their supply (which can only be done efficiently through a cartel - which requires government intervention), or getting out of the farming business and into something else. Using less water to produce the same crop yield does not help because the imperative is to reduce crop yield.

The stupidity on display in Nierenberg and Salinger's article is just facepalm stuff.

A Reminder

At the end of a short paragraph (headed "way cool") to his August 15th "daily links" post, Michael Turton writes this:

"Asia-Pacific Journal piece argues that the reactor at Fukushima was knocked out and melting down before the tsunami hit, with clear political implications. The claims of scientifically incompetent climate denialists that volcanoes pump more Co2 into the atmosphere than humans are utterly refuted by scientific reality. Not that the lying will stop, of course."

I may look into the Fukushima claim and the volcano stuff at another point, but all I want to note here is that when Michael Turton accuses other people of lying, he should be made to stand in front of this particular mirror...

"There are two banned individuals, FOARP and Fagan, both for personal insults."

FOARP has since returned*. I, on the other hand, was not banned for personal insults.

"Stay off my blog. I don't have time to waste on flat-earthers, creationists, and agw denialists."

I was banned because Turton, like the religious eco-fanatic he is, does not have time to waste debating "denialists".

Read the posts at both of those links. Michael Turton, along with numerous other lesser Taiwan bloggers, is someone who will ban you for arguing with him and then muddy the waters later with spurious remarks about "personal insults". When he says something about other people, or makes a bold factual claim, you should never credit it as being infused with the virtues of truthfulness, but rather, with those of pragmatism, i.e. of saying whatever may have practical value in attaining "just" ends irrespective of truthfulness.

This is a man who, despite having lived in Taiwan for many years with all which that implies, has said that the annexation of Taiwan to the PRC "might be permissible", if it would solve the problem of PRC expansionism.

I spit upon him.

*Whether invited to do so or not, I have no idea.

To Start The Week...

"Limit all US politicians to two terms..
One in office
One in prison…..."

Spotted that at John Venlet's blog.

Night Owl

The blog has been stagnating recently with my posting becoming more infrequent and sporadic. I have three essays I want to write: one on defence, one on a comparative analysis of theories of the business cycle and one on aesthetics. I'll get around to each of them eventually. My enthusiasm occassionally has rotten periods, which, though I can drag myself out of them of course, they do mean I spend more time on other things which I might otherwise have neglected, such as taking the dog out on long drives into the countryside.

I stayed out all night Friday (Tainan) and Saturday (Kaohsiung) this weekend, which is unusual for me. Nothing better to post at the moment than some recent pictures and this studio vid - someone mentioned not being a "night owl" like me and this was immediately what I thought of. Somebody else, who shall go unnamed, plays far too much Hank Williams than can possibly be healthy - in my opinion! Gerry Rafferty and his band were very good and they don't get played often enough for my liking.


This is the Tainan City skyline as seen from the north side of the Anping River (westward, i.e. the river is flowing from left to right and the picture was taken with my right side facing toward the river delta).


The same shot using the long lens to bring into focus three particular buildings: to the left is the Shangri La hotel tower behind the train station; to the right is the red-roofed watch-tower adorning the remains of the Dutch Fort (I believe the tower was built by the Tainan City government with much of the rest of the site being the "reconstruction" of the Japanese colonial administration - only a few wall fragments and so on remain of the original construction). In the middle of the image is a cluster of three buildings in the city's financial district.


This is another shot from my west-side balcony just before dusk. To the far left you can see the Shangri La hotel tower; I live about ten minutes from the train station.


Last wednesday, I drove out to Tseng-wen reservoir as I had the day off. This is the waterfall just off the main approach road to the damn where me and the dog stop to cool off (Tseng-wen reservoir is over an hour's drive away in the blistering heat). It's quite small and doesn't have a pool deep enough for swimming, which is something I'm on the lookout for (I know one or two spots in Kaohsiung county for this, but that's an even longer drive out).




I can't decide which of these two shots I like best. The first one captures the profile of the bird better since the shape of the tail is obvious, whereas it isn't in the second image. However, the tributary inlet in the background to the second image helps to make a better overall composition by framing the bird in the centre.


Dog pictures. I should create a seperate page for these since I have so many. This one shows Black & White yawning earlier this afternoon.


This is a good one, showing the two white pups with one in focus and the other blurred. I still haven't given them names yet, and actually just earlier tonight when I was out feeding them chicken, I found someone had dropped another puppy off at the park - tiny little thing, whereas these fellas are starting to get big enough to play with the adult dogs. I've got to find someone to adopt them or consider it myself - there's been a few times already when I've had to stop the locals from beating them, but I can't be there all the time.


Here's all four of the puppies together - two brown, two white - with a black dog in the background (he and his brother get brought here occassionally by their owner who then comes round a few hours later to pick them up, which is just irresponsible - even though the two of them generally behave themselves).


This is my mate's Vespa sitting outside the pub. Great colour, shame about the rusty wheels - he wants to switch them to "moon caps". I think he should get rid of the spare wheel at the front too and mount a pair of mirrors on the handlebars - driving without mirrors is anathema to me.

I got plenty of people shots as well, but naturally I'm reticent about putting up pictures of other people without their permission. Somebody did take a picture of me on Friday night smoking a cigar... compositionally it was almost quite good, but technically it was retarded - he was drunk and managed to focus on the wall behind me. Come to think of it actually, I haven't got any good pictures of myself. Aside from passport pics, and the Kenting one I use for my avatar, all the pictures of me are blurred (taken by other people) or out of focus. I'd prefer a shot of me drinking a whiskey or actually doing something rather than just a blank mug shot.

Oh, and if anybody would like to referee the debate in this thread, feel free. I may be guilty of getting a bit too rough at times.

On The London Riots

"When naked apes revert to jungle rules, a body is prey, predator or able to dissuade predators who think you're prey. A firearm, most particularly a handgun, is the most effective means to this last end. You are the first line of your own self-defense..."

That's commenter Harry Schell on this thread at Samizdata on the disgraceful riots in London.

If the good people of Clapham and other London districts were in practiced possession of firearms, they would not need to depend on the police. A cricket bat wielded by an old man is not going to be of much use against a mob. Handguns, shotguns and, especially, assault rifles on the other hand, could be of inestimable defensive value.

Later... so what seems to have happened is roughly this: a man gets shot and killed by the police, after which the "underclass" of London (wearing expensive trainers and wielding blackberries and iphones) subsequently decide to start rioting, looting, burning etc just because they can.

Later still... more rioting and murders in Birmingham, Manchester and Liverpool. The Guardian seems to be outdoing the other papers in its coverage, as with this item in which they use online maps to plot the rioting and allow commenters to point to inaccuracies and even better maps. On that video showing the police beating up rioters on bicycles in Manchester... so long as those kids had been rioting, looting, burning etc then fuck 'em. A good kicking is the least they deserve and is exactly what I and probably most other right minded people would have given them.

... Plently of compelling video at the Guardian here too. In all of this it is crucial for the police to be able to tell rioters from people who are just out on the streets to defend their shops and businesses. That it isn't easy for the police to do this is a criticism to be made of a State-run police force, not a criticism of people rightfully defending their property. Samizdata has been very good with a series of posts on the rioting since it started. Here's Perry de Havilland's latest post in that series.

Finally: Theft Is Theft

When I first started this blog three years ago, my very first post outlined my purposes, the first of which was to undermine the existing editorial bias in the Taipei Times - i.e. to try to challenge the collectivist premise underneath that bias. Today, almost three years to the day that I started and during a period in which they haven't published anything by me for months... today the Taipei Times published an editorial which referred to the land expropriation cases as "theft" and as "violence against the individual". Those are precisely the sort of terms I would have used had I been the one tasked with writing either editorials or reports that touched on the land expropriation cases. The article contained none of the usual whimpering bullshit over "procedural irregularities", "insufficient regulatory oversight" or "environmental concerns".

Of course, I have entirely predictable disagreements with certain arguments in this editorial piece (a "pitiful salary" for instance, does not qualify as "violence"). It is however, the first time I believe I've seen anybody else (other than myself) in the Taipei Times refer to the land expropriation cases as theft of private property:

"As for the Democratic Progressive Party, it will have to go beyond the usual vapid slogans and clearly articulate an alternative policy for national development that is just and avoids government-sanctioned theft of private property."

Finally. I've been arguing for the Taipei Times to start calling it what it is for over a year now, and it's about time somebody caught up.

As to that "alternative policy", I'll sum up what it ought to be in one word:

Depoliticization.

Such a program would focus on the decentralization and rational repudiation of government powers and responsibilities. That is the direction which genuinely Liberal, radical and responsible criticism of Taiwan's political system ought to take.

Aviation Aesthetics

The XB70 prototype: effectively obsolete by the time it was ready and little more than a political tool, but unlike the debtocratic-socialist policies of the U.S., it was at least sensible in one respect: its' aesthetic appeal (especially in anti-flash white).

Meanwhile, this weekend's "news" was that, S&P were the first to finally downgrade their rating of U.S. debt to AA.

Robert Widmer

That's Jimmy Stewart in the cockpit.

Monetary Policy Debate @ LSE

Check it out: the debate at the London School of Economics published by the BBC. For Keynes, the clown Skidelsky and former Labour Party adviser Duncan Weldon. For Hayek, free-banking academic George Selgin and philosopher Jamie Whyte.

Follow up remarks from Selgin and others at the Free Banking joint here, and in the enemy camp here. I may post my own reflections on the debtate and the follow ups if and when I get time.

Income Inequality Is Not A "Social Issue"

"Chairperson Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) said social issues, in particular income inequality, would be the central pitch of her presidential campaign..."

That the leadership of Taiwan's main opposition party seems to regard income inequality as a "social issue" indicates two points of systemic philosophical weakness: the corruption of their concept of property (income) with ethical collectivism (inequality) and their lack of any clear distinction between "the social" and "the political".

Let's specify each of those points.

(1) Property is necessarily exclusive. The concept of property, especially when used in its proper context of a property right, designates the exclusive control over resources in connection with a specific individual or group. The income I receive in exchange for my labour is my property, since my labour is naturally my own and I have simply exchanged it for the means to make further exchanges on the market.

Yet since labour is properly under the exclusive control of the individual citizen (and therefore the income exchanged for that labour is property), the notion that the income exchanged for this labour can be legitimately redistributed by the State severs the control which a citizen exercizes over his own labour, and therefore over his own life. His "right" to his own property (income being one such property) is therefore corrupted and would be more accurately referred to as a privilege.

(2) Just as the terms "proper" and "property" are naturally related, so are the terms "society" and "social". A "social issue" is therefore a problem which several people in society with one another have in common (drought or flooding, for example). The term "politics" refers to the rules of conduct by which people interact with one another (to respect the boundaries of other people's property, for example).

To conflate the social with the political is to consider all common problems under the question of rules of conduct. Since politics in Taiwan, like everywhere else, occurs under a territorial monopolist (a democratic State) it therefore follows that there is no common problem, no social issue, from which the State is barred from acting on. In the absence of a clear demarcation between the social and the political, the government of Taiwan under either administration already has a totalitarian reach in principle, even if it does not yet choose to effect the realization of this reach in a way that bears sensible comparison to the atrocities of earlier totalitarian governments.

* * *

Given those two points - the corruption of the concept of property held by the political leadership of the DPP, and the absence of any clear demarcation between the social and the political - then it follows that under a DPP administration, there would be no social issue from which the government is, in principle, restricted from acting on and nor could there be any property rights that could not be usurped by the government - a government which effectively regards all people within its territorial scope as its own property.

I despise the DPP and its political leadership because they do not offer a principled alternative either to the KMT or, indeed, to the CCP they claim to oppose.

They are merely three varieties of "diet"-totalitarianism.

Note: I've just edited this somewhat because I thought paragraph three in particular (together with its link to paragraph four) was over-written and thus poorly written.

2nd Note: I made some further stylistic changes today (Friday), including the asterisk paragraph break and the addition of the words "effectively" and "own" in paragraph six.

U.S. "Spending Cuts"

"The problem is "baseline budgeting", which is a fraud. It starts with a "baseline" prepared by the Office of Management and Budget... which assumes a certain level of future spending growth. Anything less than that "baseline" amount is considered a "cut", even if more actual dollars are spent than in the previous year..."

That's commenter Laird on accounting detail. The "spending cuts" contained in the budget deal in Washington and trumpted by the usual retards are lies.

All that has been cut are the rates at which spending on various programs is set to grow; the budget deal contains no actual spending cuts in the usual sense of absolute reductions in spending. Michael Tanner has more detail at National Review.

Addendum: here is a list of how the Senate and House members voted for future reference. It passed 74-26 in the Senate, and 269-161 in the House.

Liberalism, Not Multiculturalism

Sirs,

In last Friday's editorial, it was implied that the prescence of "hundreds of thousands" of foreigners in Taiwan was sufficient to refute Anders Breivik's claim that Taiwan, along with South Korea and Japan, were relatively "monoculturalist" societies.

Aside from its conflation of culture with nationality, I think your editor's claim is problematic because it seems to share Breivik's dubious premise. What matters is not the number of foreigners, or whether the society is "monocultural" or "multicultural". What matters is fidelity to the Liberal principle of tolerance for others who may sometimes think and act in reference to somewhat different cultural standards. I think this principle is fairly strong among ordinary people in Taiwan. Whether that makes Taiwan "monocultural" or "multicultural" is of no ethical importance whatsoever, unless one chooses to evaluate according to nationalist, ethnic, racial or other equally shallow and collectivist criteria.

The principle of extending tolerance is limited only to those who are themselves prepared to do the same. What is indefensible is to tolerate those people who are themselves intolerant - which means those people who are prepared to violate the lives and property of others in pursuit or maintenance of their own values.

Assuming that this principle is sound, then just as it is indefensible to tolerate Muslim protestors who publicly called for the actual beheading of "those who insult Islam" (such as those who merely drew a cartoon of Mohammed), it is likewise indefensible to tolerate a government which insists on "expropriating" the private property of farmers who merely happen to stand in the way of the expansion of a science park. Both cases are instances of intolerance, and though the former may appear more obviously barbaric than the latter, they are yet identical in principle as they both pertain to the violation of the freedom of the individual.

Yours freely,
Michael Fagan.

(Sent: Tuesday 2nd August 2011. Unpublished by the Taipei Times: I guess I'm banned now.)

Note: It did cross my mind to tone down the final paragraph as the equation of government expropriation to Islamic militancy does cut across several other significant differences and as such will likely (but incorrectly) be regarded as a category error by the TT editors. It isn't a category error because the comparison is held in place by stipulation to a particular context: the violation of those rights of the individual necessary for freedom. Yet the reason I haven't toned it down is because, on the weight of recent experience, I suspect the TT eds are just as likely to refuse to publish a principled criticism of government expropriation powers with or without a comparison to Islamic militancy.