Hazlitt on Inflation

With his usual clarity, rigor, and razor-sharp language:

“Inflation, to sum up, is the increase in the volume of money and bank credit in relation to the volume of goods. It is harmful because it depreciates the value of the monetary unit, raises everybody’s cost of living, imposes what is in effect a tax on the poorest (without exemptions) at as high a rate as the tax on the richest, wipes out the value of past savings, discourages future savings, redistributes wealth and income wantonly, encourages and rewards speculation and gambling at the expense of thrift and work, undermines confidence in the justice of a free enterprise system, and corrupts public and private morals.

But it is never “inevitable.” We can always stop it overnight, if we have the sincere will to do so.”

From his book What You Should Know About Inflation (pdf file).

The Ultimate Foundations of Economic Science

I’m starting to work through Ludwig von Mises’ book, The Ultimate Foundation of Economic Science, which is — luckily for me! — available on the Mises Institute’s website, along with about 500 other full-text books. (A breath of fresh air: an Institute that talks the talk of education and awareness about its ideals, and then follows through with action. How many conservative think tanks charge high prices for short journals and other publications? How many offer full text books online for free?)

The description of the book in the Mises store reads thus:

“This volume was Mises’ “ultimate” book in more than one sense. Not only did it deal with the most fundamental, elemental, and primary sources of economic science; it is “ultimate” also in being Mises’ own last book. Appearing when Mises was well past his eightieth birthday, this work brought to conclusion a sustained flow of scholarly output that had spanned exactly half a century (since the appearance in 1912 of his first book, the first German edition of the celebrated Theory of Money and Credit).

“It should not, therefore, be a matter for surprise that this is a book that was clearly written with enormous passion. Although many of the themes dealt with were themes on which Mises had dwelt in earlier works, here we find them drawn together in a manifesto passionately proclaiming the true character of economics. He dauntlessly defended its epistemological foundations from the attacks of its detractors, disdainfully dismissing the pretensions of philosophies of science built solidly on abysmal ignorance of the teachings of economics.

“For decades Mises had patiently and tirelessly developed his system of social thought. He did this during an age in which the tide of philosophical fashion was, to say the least, not running in his favor. Despite the ascendancy of epistemological views that rendered Mises’ science of human action grossly unacceptable to the philosophers of his time, despite fashionable methodological innovations in economics that made Mises’own economics appear to his critics as an obscurantist obstacle to scientific advance, despite ideological currents that led to Mises’ policy conclusions being set down as both benighted and reactionary — despite all this discouragement and disparagement, Mises never faltered. The passion that suffuses the present work provides an insight into what it was that kept Mises writing and teaching during those bitter decades of intellectual isolation.”

Mises’ struggle against contemporary philosophy is a fascinating piece of history, especially in light of the world events through which Mises lived. Socialism was in its prime for most of Mises’ life, and upon earning a PhD in the early 20th century he entered an academic world that was exploring and acclaiming the viability of managed economies, eugenics, fascism, socialism, and many other violent ideas. He could not find a job with a university because of his ideas, both in Europe and in America, with anti-semitism putting the nail in the coffin for the already suspicious capitalist. A great article on the intellectual struggles of Ludwig von Mises can be found here, written by his greatest student: Murray Rothbard.

The Ultimate Foundation of Economic Science is a romp through the epistemology of economics (or, as Mises prefered calling it, praxeology). As such, it is a work in philosophy and not of economics itself — it is the justification rather than the explanation, if you will.  Here again Mises stood against the popular general thought of his peers; one such paragraph embodies his philosophical attacks on several schools of thought:

“No thinking and no acting would be possible to man if the universe were chaotic, i.e., if there were no regularity whatever in the succession and concatenation of events. In such a world of unlimited contingency nothing could be perceived but ceaseless kaleidoscopic change. There would be no possibility for man to expect anything. All experience would be merely historical, the record of what has happened in the past. No inference from past events to what might happen in the future would be permissible. Therefore man could not act. He could at best be a passive spectator and would not be able to make any arrangements for the future, be it only for the future of the impending instant. The first and basic achievement of thinking is the awareness of constant relations among the external phenomena that affect our senses. A bundle of events that are regularly related in a definite way to other events is called a specific thing and as such distinguished from other specific things…. Whatever philosophers may say about causality, the fact remains that no action could be performed by men not guided by it. Neither can we imagine a mind not aware of the nexus of cause and effect. In this sense we may speak of causality as a category or an a priori of thinking and acting.”

Makes sense to me. . .

The best website . . . ever?

Or, alternatively titled: The website than which none greater can be conceived.

It started with my last post, when I made a Google search for “Aquinas commentary metaphysics,” with the aim of arriving at the Amazon.com page. What I found in addition to this, however, was something quite unexpected: an online, HTML, English version of the text, available here. Seeing that the url contained a root directory “CDtexts”, and thinking that the plural “texts” sounded promising, I did some manual navigating around the web page, and came across this index.

It looks like we have here about 90% of the known works of Aquinas, translated into English, available for all to read. This includes a full translation of the Summa Contra Gentiles, which up until this point I had only found abridged, even after extensive Google searching!

Notable also are a number of commentaries on scripture, a number of commentaries on Aristotle, and works on prayer, the creeds, and some sermons. You can find passages and complete translations of the Summa Theologiae almost anywhere; it’s Aquinas’ other works that can be murder to find, even in hard copy!

This is the kind of thing that I couldn’t have discovered soon enough. All hail the internet!

The ultimate in organic: Drop City

Through some random series of events on Wikipedia (isn’t that always the way?), I read a short article
on ‘Drop City,’ a 60’s-70’s commune of artists and drug users, which was located on a 7-acre tract of land in Colorado dotted with geodesic domes. Apparently one participant has recently published memoirs from his experiences there. I found online an excerpt of the first chapter of the book, which describes his state of mind shortly before meeting the city’s founders, talking with them about utopia, and leaving for Colorado. I enjoyed his interaction with them — a dialogue that takes place after several rounds of pot:

***

When our stomachs were warmed by the feast and our minds by the marijuana, Curly let out a loud belch.

“Don’t be gross,” Jo said.

He acted shocked. “Oh, excuse me, I forgot I was back in America. In really civilized places a good belch lets your hostess know you appreciated dinner.”

Frinki bared her teeth. “Thank you.”

“That just demonstrates my point.”

“Which point?” Kugo asked.

“This society likes to pretend it’s the apex of civilization, right? They’re so civilized they get grossed out if you belch. And at the same time, everybody acts like a mad dog.”

“Not everybody,” Jo put in.

“Okay, not everybody, at least not all the time. But on the whole this society is based on the principle of the dog fight.”

“We’ve all got the dog in us,” I said. “It’s human nature.”

“Right. You can’t change human nature. But we’re not just dogs. That’s only the lowest side of our nature. We’ve got better stuff in us too. The question is: how much is this society bringing out the dog in people? Is this a plague that has got everybody diseased? Can it be cured? Is it just that the people on top act like mad dogs, so everybody else has to as well? Does that gear this whole society to bringing out the dog in people, so if you don’t act like one, you get pushed to the bottom of the heap, which brings out the dog in you anyway, and you start biting and clawing your way up?”

“Dogs don’t have claws.” Jo corrected.

Curly ignored her. “Or is the dog so ingrained in us that people will always turn the world into a dog fight?”

“I don’t know. What’s your answer?” I said.

He shrugged. “I don’t know either. At least not yet.”

Kugo growled and lit another joint. “All I want is a full belly and some good reefer.”

“Because you’re a highly advanced soul. Not everybody is at your level yet. And won’t be if the people who run this society have their way. They see people like you as a threat.”

“To what?”

“This is the richest country in the world, there’d be plenty for everybody, if only they’d share it. But this society falsifies scarcity to get people like us to clean the toilets of the world for a few dimes. In order to perpetuate the dog fight. It glorifies the dog fight into a universal truth. It claims the best of all things come out of the dog fight. The dog fight is its pride and joy.”

“So what’s the alternative? Nobody’s going to go for socialism in America.” Kugo cut him short.

“I’m not talking about the government running everything. I’m talking about Drop City. That’s the great experiment of Drop City: Is there an alternative? Given decent circumstances, will people act decently? On their own, not if they’re forced to. That’s what we’re trying to do at Drop City. Start all over again from scratch. Everything fair and everybody equal. No rules or expectations. The only thing we have to agree about is that nobody has the right to exploit anybody else. Work when you want to; relax when you want to; find your own balance. Then we let Drop City grow, give it room to take its own shape, like a big extended family, like a living organism.”

Kugo laughed. “And you’re king, right?”

“In a place where everybody can take a good belch, everybody’s king.”

***

The “a belch shows respect in some countries” argument is old-school; I can appreciate that. My mother never seemed to buy it, though.

Drop City’s founders had an intriguing idea in letting their lifestyle spread organically. Test any idea politically, and there’s no way to calculate or register how well it holds up to reality; let an idea run its course with humans free to think and act, and one can tell just how valuable it was in the first place. In the end, of course, ‘Drop City’ suffered from filth, disease outbreaks, and high tensions between occupants. The women ended up doing most of the (thankless) work to keep the community running while it did. When land was eventually sold to a local rancher, the hippies moved on to other things.