燕子

山上區 變電站

Substrate Penetration

Evanescence

漸入佳境

That's 小白 ("Shao Bai") on my west-side balcony this morning. I took him back home from the vet's yesterday; he's getting better - that's a certainty. He's had fresh chicken, eggs, dog biscuits, milk and refrigerated water on tap since he's been here (and of course his B-complex twice a day). That's my job for the next week: keeping him supplied with the ammunition to finish off his distemper virus. His job? Stay focused...

OH-58D

UH-1

Sustentation

Letter Against Jean-Paul Mouton

Sirs,

Only a barbarically grandiose stupidity could have caused Jean-Paul Mouton to write what he did in Monday's editorial.

To claim that it was the PRC's abandonment of socialist philosophy that caused passers-by to ignore a little girl repeatedly run over in a street in China is such a monstrously absurd claim that it is difficult to imagine him being welcome in polite company again. Allow me, in my slow-motion horror, to count just two of the ways...

First, the claim implies that such contemptible apathy and oblivion to human suffering is a moral failing of the PRC government in Beijing, rather than those individual passers-by themselves. As much as we may detest the PRC government, such a claim is as dishonest as it is absurd. It carries with it a disease - the implication that nobody can act morally without either being possessed of communal-socialist philosophy or of having such a philosophy violently imposed upon them by government.

Second, under the leadership of the CCP under Mao, the Chinese people were regularly plagued with all kinds of atrocities far exceeding this in both scope, destruction of human life, cruelty, and imagination. Far from it being the abandonment of socialist beliefs that causes human suffering - no! - it is their strict application that has over the last century caused still untold suffering.

Enough. A decent person could only regard Mouton's claim as casting him beyond a suitably distanced pale.

Yours freely,
Michael Fagan.

(Sent: Monday 24th October 2011).

Against Jean-Paul Mouton

"While lofty communist ideals might once have echoed in the halls of government, there can be no greater proof of the loss of innocence or the abandonment of the communal philosophy of socialism than the sad story of this poor little girl and the bystanders who did not lift a finger to help her."

The story referred to in that quote can be seen in this video here.

That Mouton can write of "lofty communist ideals" without, apparently, any degree of compunction is something I can only regard with a hatred beyond contempt, given the track record of communist regimes: genocide, famine and totalitarian political persecution being only three of their "greatest hits".

And as for his claim, couched in such barbarically grandiose terms, that it was the abandonment of socialism which lay behind the fact that so many bystanders neglected to help that little girl... that is simply breathtaking: whether it was written in appalling naivity (or worse).

Does he for one moment think that similar such atrocities as the casual killing of children never occurred in China under its previously more "socialist" political leadership? Does he know nothing of the crimes of the PRC against the Chinese people under Mao? Or of the appalling track record of communist regimes whenever and wherever they have arisen in any part of the world, at all times?

The failure of strangers to help that little girl was certainly a moral failing which cannot be explained away by psychobabble such as "diffused responsibility", but it is not a moral failing that can be explained by a (wrongly) supposed absence of socialist philosophy behind PRC government policy. Such an explanation is absurd for it implies that people cannot act morally without either holding such a philosophy themselves or having it violently imposed upon them.

Jean-Paul Mouton is apparently a master's student at National Chiao Tung University. I've said it before: it is abject morons like him that supply ammunition for my argument that State funding of the Universities ought to be abolished.

308

小白 ("Shao Bai")

My girlfriend took this picture earlier tonight. Although it isn't technically very good (out of focus, exposure all wrong etc...), I prefer it to any of the others she took. It's exactly right.

That's my bonny lad - he knows I'm not going to abandon him, and he is going to kick that virus out of his system. He's still only eight months old, and that rotten thing inside him is up against the two of us.

For How Much Longer?

"Mortensen said Taiwan was performing fairly well among the four “Asian Tigers,” with unemployment at 4.4 percent and an inflation rate of 1.8 percent, indicating that the country has successful monetary policies."

Oh for pete's sake. Those policies (continued monetary expansion) will continue to roll along "successfully" right up until they roll off the edge of the cliff. Mortensen is the wrong person giving the wrong advice at the wrong time. Further...

"Governments have long neglected academics’ calls to pay attention to the widening wealth gap, he said, adding that global economic growth has only benefited the richest 10 percent of the population, and even if their wealth is redistributed to the poor, the poor will only become poorer."

For the thousandth and one time, income inequality is not the problem - it isn't even a problem. The actual problem with income levels is the continuing fall in the purchasing power of the currency which effectively taxes savings and pushes down real incomes - especially for the poor. As for "wealth redistribution", that's another fallacy. A government cannot "redistribute" wealth any more than they can redistribute intellect, and that is because "wealth" is not mere cash, it is the collection of human knowledge and skills necessary for producing value. All a government can do in this regard is simply shuffle cash around.

"During a panel discussion with local economists and corporate leaders in the afternoon, Mortensen said Taiwan’s education system could play a role by help students learn abilities wanted by local companies, which in turn would help the firms expand in China."

To readjust the education system to serve the needs of certain companies is a laughable conceit of central planning. Not only would such a move anger the old-skool public education socialists (what about our art teachers?!), but it concedes to the Libertarian the central point that education is not one monolithic public good, but a keenly differentiated spectrum of private goods some of which (or rather, their graduate beneficiaries) are in greater economic demand than others; that being the case, the most efficient way to coordinate the supply of all of these different goods to match variable demand is via the free market, not yet another readjusted central plan and the continuing unadjusted conceit of government.

The global economy is being driven off the edge of a cliff by systemic State intervention, and when the ketchup finall dollops out of the bottle, you can bet it'll be the "free market" that gets the blame.

It makes me sick to watch this happening.

Damn It

This is 小白 ("Shao Bai" ["Little White"]) at the vet's clinic on thursday morning. He has been diagnosed with canine distemper - a disease which is infectious and for which the treatments are generally ineffective (and prohibitively expensive); the vet expects him to die within a month or so.

Needless to say, I am distraught.

First thing tommorow morning I will go and see him and get the other dogs checked out (they aren't showing any symptoms, but I want to be sure). He and each of the other four puppies had all of their injections shortly after they were first abandoned, so I am somewhat shocked (it may be that when they were abandoned they were already slightly too old for the type of vaccine they were given). According to this messily written wikipedia entry there may be some hope in administering high doses of vitamin A - but the papers referenced in that article don't seem to be available online. The thing is as well, he'd pretty much have to stay with me every day for a month or so if he is to have any chance, but he might end up infecting my dog. What I might do is get my dog sorted out with revaccination first thing in the morning (Friday morning), and then think about keeping Shao Bai with me on my west-side balcony. I could put him on high-dose vitamin A supplements along with plenty of chicken and biscuits and he would stay dry and get some sunshine. Naturally, I'd have to keep the balcony doors closed and keep him strictly separated from my dog.

I'm not optimistic, but the little fella has only been alive seven or eight months, and I'll be damned if I don't at least try to do what I can for him.

There are other pictures in these posts here, here and toward the bottom of this post here.

Update: apparently the vet has been giving Shao Bai high doses of vitamin supplements already and he is doing better than expected - I'll go to feed him some fresh chicken tommorow morning and every morning this next week. I want him to know he hasn't been abandoned. If he makes it through this next week, he's coming home to live with me.

Displacement Vectors

Mid-Afternoon

當歸鴨肉麵線

Duck leg, noodles and angelica soup - downtown last weekend. Heavy on the angelica, which is how it should be.

October

Freedom

My comment below, delivered to the appropriate authorities in respect of tommorow's Occupy Taipei protest:

***

I write this in English since, although I know some Chinese, I'm afraid I'm not fluent enough to accurately write what it is I want to say. I hope that those of you who do read this can forgive that shortcoming.

Your protest in Taipei tommorow, if I may presume from association with the Occupy Wall Street protest, will be directed against ideas as much as against particular institutions and the effects variously attributed to them. Among these ideas may be the "free-market". Just today (Friday 14th October) in the Taipei Times for example, a Mr C.J. Wu (of Taiwan ThinkTank) wrote the following:

"...blindly believing in the free market results in a lack of freedom for 99 percent of people."

This, I put it to you, and with no other authority than that which I exercise over my own voice, is the most insidious and pernicious error of our times. It arises from the conflation of two aspects of freedom; "freedom from" and "freedom to" (or if you prefer, the negative and positive aspects of freedom). The realization of negative freedom stipulates the absence of obstacles to action, particularly coercion. Positive freedom necessitates the presence of choices and the power to act - even in the absence of obstacles. In everyday experience, these two aspects of freedom are inseperable. Analytically, however, they are distinct.

The global market economy in which governments, banks and corporations interpenetrate one another is "free" in one aspect only: the positive one; they are free to act in their own interests. In doing so however, these institutions violate the negative freedom of the very people they purport to serve, in that their operation ultimately depends on coercion.

It is right to challenge this nexus of institutions, but it is not right to do so on the wrong philosophical basis. The global market economy is not at all "free" - by any stretch of the imagination and to call it so can only be either an enormous intellectual error, or a deliberately dishonest tactic to attack the principles of free exchange, free association and free speech that are the founding basis of a civil and free society.

I urge those of you who are not already committed to one of the many "alternative" ideologies of State coercion, to conduct your protests in light of what I have written. I do not write to belittle or patronize, but only to oppose those among you who are intractably committed to some variety of State coercion and opposed to the negative aspect of freedom in principle.

Yours freely,

Michael Fagan.

***

I have no idea whether it will be published.

C.J. Wu's Error

Yet another editorial in the Taipei Times today, by C.J. Wu of "Taiwan Thinktank" (of whom I have taken note here on two previous occassions), continues the now time-worn error of misusing the term "free-market". Look at this:

"...blindly believing in the free market results in a lack of freedom for 99 percent of people."

Either this was written under the now rampant intellectual error of conflating Isaiah Berlin's two distinct concepts of liberty, or one was unwittingly substituted for the other, or C.J. Wu is nothing more than a consciously dishonest enemy of freedom - and ought to be regarded and treated as such by anyone for whom intellectual integrity and freedom are cardinal values.

The error, assuming it is indeed error and not deliberate deviousness, is as follows...

• There are two analytically distinct aspects of freedom: negative and positive. Negative freedom is the absence of coercion or other obstacles to action ("freedom from"), whilst positive freedom is the power to act in a given way ("freedom to"). In our everyday experience, they are often almost like two sides of the same coin, such that if I am unencumbered by external constraints (negative freedom), then I may have the power to perform a given action (positive freedom). So in an empirical sense it is easy to see how the two distinct aspects of freedom may be conflated.

• In the context of social organization (today, that would be what we call "politics"), recognizing the analytical distinction between the two is of incalculable importance. The reason for that is this: the preservation of negative freedom in a market order contains no a-priori implication for the status of positive freedom for anybody - i.e. if everybody minds his or her own business and refrains from coercing others, there is no directly following implication for how much positive freedom anyone may have; by stark contrast, the attempt to engineer equality, or at least improvements, in positive freedom (what is often called "equality of opportunity" - another subtle intellectual error) by means of State social policies, logically necessitates the violation of at least some people's negative freedom - this is because all actions of the State involve forcible taxation and restriction of human action via legislation or regulation.

• Consequently, given the diffuse means by which the State and the largest corporations necessarily interpenetrate one another and thereby attempt to govern the labour, capital and commodities markets it makes no sense to refer to this as a "free-market" order. The conflation of the two aspects of freedom - negative and positive - can lead directly to this confusion since the mind will naturally attend to the comparison between the power of politicians, bankers and corporations to act and the power of middle and working class people to act. What will typically be lost is the myriad ways in which this market order is governed by coercion and a pervasive disregard for the preservation of negative freedom in order to engineer the relative balance of positive freedoms.
  

A sharper intellect will recognize the momentous importance of that analytical distinction between negative freedom and positive freedom. For it is unambiguously the case that there can be no sense - none whatsover - in ascribing to the current market order the adjective "free", once it is made clear that it is the primary negative aspect of freedom that is under stipulation.

What is happening today is the result of a mixed (and increasingly politically dominated) market order - not a free market order, and the failure to recognize this by the likes of so-called "intellectuals" like C.J.Wu, who no doubt attended some expensive University, is going to have catastrophic consequences over the long term.

I would write to the Taipei Times on this point, but they now steadfastedly refuse to publish anything by me.

"We Are Standing On The Edge"

It is amazing - to me at least - to be here on the island of Taiwan, one of the four "Asian Tigers", and yet be confronted with the ubiquitous stupidity (see comments) which holds that the free market is the source of the injustices in the world. That I can sit in my little rented apartment here in Tainan, not thirty minutes away from the site of the old Dutch fort at Anping - itself an historical testament to the revolutionary birth of the stock market - and yet be confronted by the growing rejection, the world over, of free exchange...

To see a reporter for the Taipei Times argue against the principle of free exchange, which, though it only ever gained partial traction at most, utterly transformed the material conditions of Taiwanese people's lives in just a few generations... is truly an enormity.

He writes:

"Free markets deliver nothing but inequality and injustice."

That statement is as utterly fatuous as it is ubiquitous. The "free market" of which he speaks does not exist. The market is nothing more than people, and the malignant coercion that some of those people apply to everyone else (via the institutions of the State) is so pervasive and chaotic in its results as to make a nonsense of the idea that people are free.

A free market is one in which coercion is entirely absent: freedom necessarily means freedom from coercion. It is a negative conception, and not to be conflated willy-nilly with the positive conception of freedom as power (for further remarks, see my essay against Ha Joon Chang here). Nowhere in the world today do there exist "free markets", and anybody who says otherwise does so either through intellectual error or insincerity. That is because markets everywhere today are imbued with State coercion, regulations, litigation, punitive taxes, subsidies, inflation, bailouts, systemic corruption and so on under which the people who together comprise the market are pushed and pulled and squeezed in their attempts to freely exchange values. Consider...

• None of the globally-traded currencies are produced freely and subject to market competition in their function as a medium of exchange for everyday commodities. All of them are State-banking monopoly products which make a mockery of the common misconception that central banks are in some sense "private".

• None of the major banks in any country you could care to name operate without the permission, influence and backing of the State. Hence the endemic corruption, fat-cat bonuses, rule-breaking, inflation and endless bailouts.
  

• Nowhere (to my knowledge) is education for the poor not dominated by the State, rather than provided by the market. Even in Santiago, the example he links to here, our intrepid idiot doesn't seem to realize that the school the students have barricaded themselves inside is a government run school.

And it is not merely the case that all the various acts of State coercion operate discretely, with neatly seperable consequences confined to one aspect of society or another. The institutions of the State systematically interact with one another such that nonlinear consequences emerge through institutional margins of error to render structural instability a systemic feature of society. That is what the problem is - not a "free market" which exists nowhere other than the febrile imaginations of the sub-Marxist, anti-semitic, pignorati thronging the financial districts of New York, Taipei and elsewhere.

He also writes (quoting from elsewhere):

"At the heart of the students’ agenda is the demand that education be recognized as a common right for all, not a “consumer good” to be sold on the open market."

If you have a "right" to education (that is what is known as a "positive right"), how are you going to get it unless some other people provide those goods and services to you, which, when taken together, are commonly thought of as "education"? Given the premise of a political "right" to education, there can be only two possibilities: either some other people have a corresponding obligation to give it to you, and can thus be forced against their will to do so, or you simply don't get an education.

The only other way to acquire "education" - to acquire the time and effort of other people to help you learn - is through voluntary exchange, i.e. the market.

Do you realize what I'm saying to you? Is any of this getting through that thick skull of yours, Mr-I'm-a-journalist-at-the-Taipei-Times-anonymous-coward?

The logic is as irrefutable as your ignorance is invincible: you are arguing for slavery.

***

What a perverse privilege it is to take part in this fight. I can only imagine how people on this island in the distant future, long after the fall of the PRC and the ROC, might look back on these early moments in the 21st Century aghast: somewhat in horror, but perhaps with a tinge of envy in that it was the likes of I and other utterly powerless people like me, who were the only ones present to guard the fire as the murderous dusk gathered. I can only hope I get lucky.

Bernard Butler

"It's not what I choose to tell you, it's about what you already know..."

I've mentioned my admiration for him previously, and, having found this upload, I have no hesitation in mentioning it again:

Bernard Butler is my all-time favourite musician, bar none.

I instinctively recognized what this guy was doing when he struck out on his own after leaving Suede. I always knew.

Reflections On The R.O.C. Centennial

Today* is the centennial of the R.O.C State - a hundred years since the New Army rebelled against the Qing government in Hubei province in 1911 following a dispute over the Qing's attempt to steal expropriate privately built railways. Although Sun Yat Sen (孫逸仙) was not present at the time, he had been the leader of previous attempts to oust the Qing government.

Today, every city in Taiwan (to my knowledge) has roads named after Sun Yat Sen's "three principles of the people": minzu (民族), minquan (民權), and minsheng (民生), or in English: nationalism, democracy and socialism. Taken together as meaning a democratically calibrated national-socialism (or "fascism"), the R.O.C. is no different in its' operating principles to any other modern State such as Britain, France or even the U.S.

In the West, the subject of politics is typically taught with a now almost axiomatic distinction between "democracy" on the one hand, and the early twentieth century "extreme" ideologies of socialism, national-socialism, fascism and communism on the other.

Yet the distinction between democracy and these other ideologies is dangerously misleading on two counts, the first of which is that from an individualist pespective (which is the true "human rights" perspective), there are no substantive differences between socialism, national-socialism, fascism and communism because all of them necessarily trample the rights of the individual human being underfoot. The second point is that, rather than being a substantive contrast to these ideologies, democracy is actually nothing more than a procedural method for calibrating their operation.

The common misconception that democracy does represent a substantive alternative occurs because of the tacit association of democracy with both constitutional and cultural restraints on the State - which is a major premise of liberalism, properly understood. To be sure, modern States - including the R.O.C. - do have constitutional limits on government, but these are as honoured in the breach as in their observance. The notion of strictly limited government is often elided today when politicians, academics, editors and other commenters sermonize about "democracy" without prior critical reflection.

What Sun Yat Sen (孫逸仙) did in the years leading up to 1911, was to agitate for a revolution in the institutional form in which political power was to operate. The sad, and worrying fact is that today's China under the PRC is still trying to catch up with him a century later in a world in which the ideas of nationalism, socialism and democratic calibration have been undermined not only by increasing participation in global market exchanges (and a good thing too), but also by the hubris and stupidity of their application, the collapse of constitutional restraints and the ongoing failure of democratic mechanisms to prevent this collapse.

What is necessary for the 21st Century is not a further application of Sun Yat Sen's revolutionary premises such as democratic calibration of the Chinese State, as in accordance with some of Liu Xiaobao's (劉曉波) prescriptions, but the application of devolutionary ideas. Political power ought to be devolved to the level of the individual such that it is extinguished and replaced entirely by the "soft power" of civil society and free, voluntary market exchange.

A century of depoliticized society would be a far superior achievement to that of the R.O.C. or any other modern State.

*I'd have liked to get myself up to Taipei today to take pictures, but without having prepared a couple of months in advance, it's just not practical.

A Cluster Of Errors

"In a country where we enjoy the benefits of a democratic political system and free-market environment, and where people respect a pluralistic culture and technological innovation, Taiwan should encourage more companies to move up the global corporate ladder."

Whoever was responsible for the Steve Jobs editorial in today's Taipei Times must have went to University.

How else to explain his obvious misuse of the term "free market"? Taiwan does not have a free market in anything, and to pretend otherwise is willful self-deception at best.

Some markets here may be comparatively less rigged, distorted, regulated and taxed than others elsewhere but that hardly qualifies them for the superlative "free". What that scribbling editorialist ought to have done was used the simple term "market economy" (although "mixed economy" would have made salient that aspect of State intervention which the use of the term "free market economy" elides). But of course, if you're a journalist at the Taipei Times, getting things right is not really the point is it?

It's quite sufficient to continue blundering about with semi-literate calls for unspecified government intervention, despite everything that stands for having been refuted by the life of the man - the great critic - whose sad death this editor has misappropriated as a mere hook.

I despair at these sub-Marxist clowns, I really do.

***

Another editorial, this one by a union official, calls for the government to enforce adherence to a five-day working week (even though most workers in Taiwan already work to a five-day working week).

"The US data also showed that before Taiwan reduced its working hours, its unit labor cost (ULC) in the manufacturing sector rose 0.2 percent from 1990 to 2000. After the cuts, the ULC dropped 3.8 percent from 2000 to 2007 and another 7.4 percent from 2008 to 2009."

Those figures are meaningless because they are aggregate totals taken out of context. Two questions that need to be asked here are (a) are people working more than the five day week free to negotiate their contracts or not?, and (b) what are the overall costs (not just ULC) and margins like for those companies that require their workers to work over the five day working week? And what about those small business proprietorships - noodle shops, motorcycle repair joints, hairdressers, pharmacists (and of course, not to mention the little nightmarket people) - who regularly work six to seven days a week to keep themselves afloat and employ a very small staff of perhaps two or three workers? Enforcing a five day working week upon these businesses might very well send some of them under.

***

From today's letters:

"What is most urgently needed now is a political union that will form a coalition government for the entire EU."

So wrote Andrew Michael Teo. I agree with much of his analysis, but I disagree with his prescription. I think default is the better, more honest and more realistic option - as I argued in the comments here.

And this in a letter by one Wendy Shin:

"However, why have people in Japan now protested violently against nuclear power? The answer is because if a nuclear crisis is to arise, it would cause the extinction of all creatures."

Where do these abject idiots come from? Oh, of course - the Universities, and the broader ejyukayshion system underpinning them.

Remedial Notes

Earlier today, I was at the library of Tainan Technology University. The name is misleading - it would be more accurate to call it a glorified arts and crafts school for eighteen to twenty year old girls, because that is basically what it is. My girlfriend, although she didn't study there (she did a science degree in Kaohsiung), likes their library building for various reasons to do with convenience and aesthetics. I was there to help her prepare for a higher-level English exam, and as she was going through a mock paper and wanted to concentrate, I went wandering around for a while during which time I came across a prominently displayed textbook on "Corporate Responsibility" on the ground floor. I took it back upstairs with me to relieve the boredom of waiting.


Naturally, I went straight to the name index at the back and looked up "Friedman, M" for which there were only five or six page numbers listed. So I went to the first couple of references in Chapter 1 and came across this:


Upon reading that it should be immediately clear why students who go to University to get a degree in business, leave University not only without a clear understanding of the moral case for free markets, but as more or less committed to a democratically calibrated fascism.

Consider the premises tacitly at work there in rendering the term "social responsibility" as consequences that are "good for everyone". It is simply assumed that "social" must encompass "everyone" (where to draw the limits for that "everyone"?), and then further assumed that a given set of consequences can in some measure be beneficial to "everyone" (despite the fact that people's preferences generally display considerable variety at any given point in time).

The first problem - how to define "everyone" - cannot be easily dismissed. Obviously, a company cannot possibly consider the consequences of its actions for everybody in the whole world as such a proposition is as crass as it is unrealistic. Yet nor is that problem simplified to any significant degree by the limiting factor of the nation-state, as after all, populous nation-states typically comprise millions of people. Working that limiting factor further down in scale to something like State or county level might be more realistic, but then there is the problem of consequences for people outside that jurisdiction.

What is required to solve that problem are principles limiting what kind of responsibility a company has relative to different categories of people (e.g. shareholders vs third-parties with a tort claim).

The second problem - ensuring that "everyone" benefits from the consequences of a decision - is essentially insoluble. This is because the decisions that companies make typically ripple their way through market prices to some degree, and these ripples can have far-reaching effects across both local and world markets. Not only do decisions fail to benefit "everyone" to the same degree, but of course, they also impose costs on "everyone" - but again not to the same degree, nor even do they impose the same kind of cost or the same cost at any given point at time. The market system is essentially chaotic in that respect, i.e. the particular effects of a given company decision cannot be predicted a-priori.

Since that problem is insoluble, there are only two possibilities: either no attempt is made by the company's managers to "benefit everyone", or they make a misguided and doomed attempt to do so. In that case, what will inevitably happen is that they end up benefiting certain people (especially, for instance, people able to dispense advantages to them through the exercise of political power), while dumping costs on others. In this way, a company can easily become a minor tool of political power.

Rather than attempting to solve that problem, a free market approach to social responsibility requires principles describing and limiting the specific kinds of responsibility a company owes to specific kinds of people. Those principles are derived from the negative, liberal rights framework of private property and freedom of speech and association, with those rights themselves having their ethical basis in the sovereignty of the individual.

NB: This post isn't finished yet...

After The Crash

"Don't take your life, 'cos your bicycle won't fly..."

(Another) Two For The Price Of One...

Turton put a piece up yesterday in which he discussed two articles; a piece at Asia Times (behind paywall) by Yvonne Su in Beijing (is this her here?), and a report in yesterday's Taipei Times by Chung Li-hua on the ECFA's effect on farmers in Taiwan. I haven't read the Yvonne Su piece as I don't have a subscription to Asia Times, but from what he quotes of it, I don't think I would disagree with him: the ECFA is similar in some ways to the Single European Act, in that it is intended as an economic precursor in a process toward eventual political union, or annexation.

However, referring to Turton's discussion of the Taipei Times report wherein he refers to "neoliberal fantasies", commenter "Readin" says this...

"The only thing you said that could be construed as "liberal" is your recognition that the government has a role to play in food safety - but even most conservatives recognize that."

Damned fool. "Recognizing" that government has a "role to play" in food safety is not "liberal" but rather, the opposite of liberal - since it presupposes that food safety can only be produced to a given value by coercion, rather than through voluntary cooperation made possible by liberty. Sorting out which sellers are selling "poisonous" goods, whether from China or anywhere else (remember the DEHP scandal in Taiwan earlier this year?), is best achieved by a competitive regulatory market - yes, a market for the provision of independent safety standards and regulations (e.g. see my argument in the comments section here). Not only is there ample historical precedent for such a thing (e.g. UL before its' business was subsumed into a broader governmental regulatory framework), but there are several good reasons to think it would be more successful than handing over the job of regulation to the caprice, corruption and incompetence which typifies government bureaucracies.

Conservatives are so stupid, they fall over themselves conceding everything to the Left without even realizing it - indeed, while believing that they are actually attacking the enemies of liberty! They can't even keep hold of the word "liberal", without validating the Left's disgraceful abuse of the term to refer to their own advocacy of government expansion - that's how goddamn stupid they are. It's like reading Orwell to the tune of "bring on the clowns!"

As for Turton...

"Neoliberals are people like Rosen et al, the 'free traders' who are actually corporate tools."

A person who is a "corporate tool" is not likely to be a "free trader" because a person who is a "corporate tool" is probably therefore also a government tool (assuming the mental lethargy implied by the term "tool"). The doctrine of free trade actually works against the interests of many large corporations* that fear competition and use the State to protect themselves from it in return for favours.

It is not in Turton's interest to have a frank and open discussion about this - which is why I must make my remarks here, rather than in the comments section to his post.

*Many, but by no means all - there are many corporations which would likely perform much better than they currently do in a freely competitive market.

Two For The Price Of One...

Damned fools.

Fool Number One remarks on a Fox interview with Fool Number Two:

"This interview of a member of Occupy Wall Street will never be aired on FOX News."

Well as much as that may be true, what is just as certain is that my rebuttal of Fool Number Two will not appear in the comments to Fool Number One's post, because, as much as he likes Avro Vulcan pictures (he told me so in email), he doesn't like having to put up and defend a rational case for his views. He's not like me you know; apparently I'm "narcissistic" or something.

I make my remarks here instead. From the video:

"After thirty years of having our living standards decrease whilst the wealthiest 1% have had it better than ever, I think it's time for, I dunno, maybe some participation in our democracy - that isn't funded by news cameras and gentlemen such as yourself."

The first mistake he makes there is in his premise - which is to suppose that "living standards" are a thing that goes up or down for 99% of the population, rather than an abstraction from the appraisals of individual people that vary over time and with circumstance. Immediately consequent to that error is his failure to account for the discriminatory force of government against different people's "living standards". Robbing Peter to give to Paul might raise Paul's living standards, but it necessarily detracts from Peter's. Oh, but of course that will be OK so long as Peter doesn't belong to a politically-favoured sub-identity collective.

His second error there is to suppose that living standards are the same as comparative income levels - though perhaps I am being a little too lenient in calling this an "error" rather than a lie. The bringing to market of both new products and better products over the last thirty years has facilitated a vast increase in living standards. For instance, cars produced today are generally faster, safer, more comfortable, more efficient and less polluting than cars produced thirty years ago. That is only an obvious example - much the same is true for many other products and services many of us tend to take for granted in our everyday lives, from food, clothes, houses, environmental conditions, telecommunications, the world wide web... etc. He might dismiss all of that, and I would think he'd be stupid to do so, but he is only entitled to do so with regards to his own values - to presume such a dismissal on behalf of other people would be monstrous.

Third: that "participation-in-democracy" he calls for can only either be participation in the same democracy as is instantiated in the U.S. now, but only with Fox News subsumed by the Left, or a fast-forward to the Left's long-term wet dream of direct democracy and the subjection of corporations and other economic arrangements to more direct, localized forms of democratic control. However, it is not as if prior to 1996, the same mutations at work in the U.S. government today had not already been metastasizing for decades. Had a subprime mortgage crisis appeared in 1996, does anyone seriously doubt that Clinton and Greenspan would have bailed out the banks? Of course they would have.

On localized direct democracy... that's just another variation on communism with its prerequisite abolishment of private property rights.

"I think myself as well as many other people would like to see a little more economic justice or social justice - jesus stuff - as far as feeding the poor, healthcare for the sick. You know I find it really entertaining that people like to hold a bill of rights above their [heads] screaming at gay soldiers, but they just can't wrap their heads around the idea that a for-profit healthcare system doesn't work."

There is no such thing as "social" justice, or "economic" justice as distinct subcategories of justice. There is only the justice which arises from action in respect of the rights of individuals in society and the manner in which they are transgressed. Justice is already "social" by definition, and because it is so, it already has economic implications. Feeding the poor and tending the sick are rightfully to be regarded as acts of charity to be dispensed freely, as it is only when such acts are dispensed freely can any moral approval be attributed to he who dispenses them. A man coerced against his will into giving to the poor does not deserve any moral approval for giving since he only did it to avoid punitive sanction.

As for the outrageous presumption that a for-profit healthcare system "doesn't work"... sure. A free-market in healthcare, one run by entrepreneurs in response to customers wouldn't work. It couldn't work could it? It would afford no means of expanding the collective social-engineering premise into the field of healthcare - this most vital of economic fields for people who suffer from injury, sickness and old-age. As Beth Haynes says in just one of her many, many posts on this topic:

"When allowed to function free from coercive egalitarian standards, the market will raise the prosperity of all. when price, profit and loss signals are manipulated (even if done with the intention of helping the most disadvantaged) everyone suffers."

With that, I close and point the reader in the direction of Beth Haynes' blog as her knowledge of healthcare matters far surpasses my own (what with me being healthy and she being a doctor).

Mutations

Over at Samizdata, occassional commenter Midwesterner has a very good post up which he calls "Institutional Will". The essence of it is that institutions "mutate", with selection pressures acting upon those institutions over time such that those mutations which would help the institution to perpetuate itself (e.g. the expulsion or intimidation of dissidents and whistle-blowers) tend to be selected. Midwesterner's brief essay is basically a limited application of evolutionary theory to the problem of political reform.

An example might be the refusal/failure of any U.S. President from Nixon onwards to achieve "energy independence", despite talking it up to get elected, or the confluence of interests Wall Street banks share with the Fed and the Treasury. Sciabarra uses the term "nexus" in describing the same thing.

Yet as I point out in my comment to Midwesterner's post, there is a prior fault in the common acceptance of subtle misconceptions (e.g. concerning the importance of "the rule of law") which may then support the promulgation of institutional mutations.

The immediate question which Midwesterner's post points to is whether institutions of government have mutated to such an extent that democratic mechanisms no longer have substantial interdictive powers over them.

If the answer to that question is yes, then the obvious conclusion is that electoral politics has become a mechanism of government control, rather than a mechanism for the control of government.

That conclusion would invalidate all contemporary mainstream political thought including the sanctified reverance in which "democracy" has been held by both Left and Right since the end of world war two. It relegates the voting citizen to the status of a looter trying to make off with a couple of F-16s, or a favourable interest rate, or a school or whatever else before the system finally chokes.