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Are We Reliving We The Living?How Many Americans Will the New York Times Kill?

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In 1932, New York Times journalist Walter Duranty won a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting about life in the Soviet Union. His perceived expertise, flowing from his position as the paper’s Moscow Bureau Chief, ended after 14 years in 1936. To explain Duranty’s dishonesty, colleague John Chamberlain wrote in 1991,

The main count against Duranty is he was Stalin’s man. I heard Duranty, on one of his trips to New York, say three million people died in Ukraine in a man-made famine. This seemed to me tremendous news. Duranty, worried about a return visa, denied he had ever said it.

The fix was in for the American communist propaganda machine. Thankfully, and contemporaneous to Duranty, a young female writer named Alisa Rosenbaum had escaped the Soviet occupation of Russia in 1926. Her pretense for a travel visa was to go to America, promote atheism, and return to Russia to write about the evils of capitalism. Instead, to protect her family, she changed her name to Ayn Rand, and while in her mid and late twenties, wrote her first novel – We the Living.

Beginning in 1933 (Duranty was still the Times Moscow Bureau Chief), the manuscript was rejected more than a dozen times in America, over a three year period, and finally published by Macmillan in 1936. Two years prior, Rand wrote a letter to the renowned American individualist H. L. Mencken, that said in part,

I intend to be the first one in a new battle which the world needs as it has never needed before, the first to answer the many advocates of collectivism, and answer them in a manner which will not be forgotten. I have heard so much from that other side, and so little in defense of man against men.

New York Times columnist Paul Krugman has not forgotten. The Nobel Prize winning economist wrote an editorial on October 22, 2020 titled How Many Americans Will Ayn Rand Kill? The article then describes the attributes of personal liberty in terms that no American, especially Ayn Rand or any advocate of rational egoism, would recognize.

While Duranty’s Pulitzer was his reward for protecting Soviet-style economic central planning, Krugman’s Nobel was his reward for protecting Keynesian-style economic protectionism for young industries in developing countries. Of course, his New Trade Theory was supported by complex and technical economic modeling that was easily debunked.

So how do we account for the rise of authoritarianism in 2020 America? The totalitarian regimes of Germany, Italy, and Japan were defeated in World War II. By the 1970’s, John Keynes’ watered-down Marxist economics was exposed as an immoral fantasy by Austrian school economists Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek, and Murray Rothbard. Their bookends were the radical philosophy of Ayn Rand and the journalistic integrity of Henry Hazlitt in the 1960’s, and the political leadership of Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, and Brian Mulroney in the 1980s.

As Richard Salsman, Duke University professor of political economics and philosophy explains, the resurgence of legitimate liberalism described above is despised in today’s university system. But instead of ideological authoritarianism, today’s political gangs are unprincipled and pragmatic. They merely pull Marxism off the shelf because it somehow legitimizes their quest for power over others. Its virulent bigotry is irrelevant.

It was ignorance, incompetence, and pragmatism that ruled Soviet Russia in the 1920’s, and Ayn Rand’s novel, We the Living, dramatized this. Hers is the story of the enslavement of a nation, and more importantly, the spirits crushed by a Marxist criminal gang, except one.

As relevant as ever, philosopher Leonard Peikoff wrote in 2008, “Do we know it yet, even this late? Do we know the nature of a dictatorship as it grows ever more visible in the land of the free? If we do at all, it is thanks in large part to the works of Ayn Rand.”

In 2020 America, we are faced with an important choice. Either the life premise of Ayn Rand and capitalism, or the death premise of the New York Times and socialism. Lives of motion and purpose or lives of stagnation and retribution. As Salsman explains, putting “democratic” in front of it does not make it humane.

To help readers appreciate Ayn Rand’s contribution to the cause of personal liberty, the centerforindividualism.org has launched a project called Reliving We the Living. The characters and circumstances of the novel have been studied and compared to current events, and we hope in a way that gives meaning to Gen Z and Millennial readers who take the time to appreciate this work for themselves.

 

NYT Economist Paul Krugman and Atlas Shrugged Bureaucrat Wesley Mouch Wreak Economic Destruction

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On March 20th, this series explored conformity to popular trends and mediocrity, average ability combined with envy. In the article, Bernie Madoff’s obsession with “beating the market” was compared to Peter Keating’s obsession with socially acceptable architecture in Ayn Rand’s classic novel, The Fountainhead. Madoff was envious of the stock market’s price discovery mechanism, and Keating was envious of Howard Roark’s creative genius, the object of their envy being independence and principles.

In our postmodern and technology-dominated world, the new deity is the administrative state. Their religion is politics, and its catechism is complex computer models for predicting the future and controlling behavior, not quaint moral principles. When a missionary of this dogma wins the Nobel Prize, it is tantamount to being canonized. Among all of the progressive thumbsuckers and professors of economics, Paul Krugman is that mediocrity. Not just any mediocrity, he’s hit the trifecta of academia, journalism, and politics.

As a New York Times columnist, he is the ideal spokesman for their compassionate communism editorial board, or what is known in academic circles as New Keynesian Economics. In summary, it strives to integrate microeconomic conditions with traditional Keynesian macroeconomic effects. For example, when productive output does not equal aggregate demand, it’s because we are poor, dumb slobs. Actually, this “coordination failure” is caused by “monopolists” creating unavoidable “imperfect competition.”

For John M. Keynes, the “imperfect” free exchange among producers and consumers is the result of,

Animal spirits—a spontaneous urge to action rather than inaction, and not the outcome of a weighted average of quantitative benefits multiplied by quantitative probabilities.

Fortunately, you poor, dumb slobs who lack Krugman’s quantitative sensibilities have been blessed! The saviors of fiscal policy in Congress and monetary policy at the Fed will make things right, like always. As Objectivist political economist Richard Salsman explains,

Paul Krugman is a self-described Very Serious Person, which makes him a Superb Economist (albeit a very weak logician), and it helps to be a Keynesian Crank, because if you’re not, you’re just Not Serious!

Seriously, Krugman’s attacks on free market economics are an attack on producers, prices, and profits. He is a relentless advocate for the expansion of government intrusion in economic life. His favorite advice is unlimited money supply growth and federal debt. His rationale is that economic recessions are caused by the “production gluts” of these monopolists exploiting irrational consumer confidence. Salsman continues,

The point of Keynesian policy isn’t to boost demand, stimulate the economy, and save capitalism, but to curb supply, deaden the economy, and sabotage capitalism. To deny the validity of Say’s Law. In short, to be a blithering idiot.

In her epic novel Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand describes Krugman’s pathology:

Every mediocrity with the power to dispose of the property of his betters, by his willingness to devote his life to his inferiors, is the foulest of creatures. The double-parasite who lives on the sores of the poor and blood of the rich, whom men regard as the moral ideal.

In Atlas Shrugged, Krugman’s fellow traveler in mediocrity is Wesley Mouch, the Director of the Bureau of Economic Planning. His character opens the dialogue in Chapter VI, Part II by asking “But can we get away with it?” Very appropriate for unlimited fiat currency. And like Krugman, Mouch had impeccable academic credentials,

Being college-bred and despising men who were in business, the diplomas had always hung on the wall in the manner of reproach to the world. The diplomas had not automatically produced the material equivalents of their attested spiritual value.

People who produce little find it easy to scapegoat producers, markets, and profits. Part of that formula is to denigrate material values, which is also easy when material values have no meaning to those who don’t earn them. To understand Krugman’s depravity, consider his April 13th advice regarding the Wuhan virus lockdown, “The idea that we can reopen in a matter of a few weeks is crazy.” According to Salsman, Krugman must believe “we’re all now ensconced in the Maoist-Keynesian psyche-ward.”

Or governors mansions. “But can we get away with it?” asked Cuomo, Newsome, DeWine, Whitmer, and Mills when deciding which business owners to condemn as non-essential.

Mouch and Company are exposing their intellectual impotence by substituting rational argument with psychological pressure, for the public good. In Atlas, it was the Equalization of Opportunity Act, combined with blackmail, that forced steel magnate Henry Rearden to sign over his patents. James Taggart, CEO of Taggart Transcontinental, had sold information to Mouch about sister Dagny’s (also Taggart COO) relationship with Rearden in exchange for wage and price concessions. Yet in public, Jim Taggart condemned profit.

In Dagny’s case, she refused to be a slave or slave-driver for Mouch’s Directive 10-289. Now non-fiction, the Directive’s Unification Board could have been designed by today’s progressive ideologues: “In the name of the general welfare, to protect the people’s security, to achieve full equality and total stability.”

Krugman’s version is any similar agency, such as the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB). These monstrosities are their own lawmaker, cop, prosecutor, and judge. The CFPB is not even subject to Congressional oversight, yet Krugman defends it,

How to do it – a stand-alone agency with its own funding, protecting consumers against financial fraud and abuse. Republicans are demanding the bureau lose its independence. To take away its guaranteed funding, opening it to interest-group pressure.

In a August 2012 NYT piece, Krugman smeared Atlas Shrugged (“a perennial favorite among adolescent boys”) and Congressman Paul Ryan (“explicitly trying to make life harder for the poor”) for trying to control entitlement spending. Another economic fact that Krugman refuses to acknowledge is that the private sector pays for everything, including government. Yet Krugman seeks to regulate private, voluntary human interaction because Keynesian “animal spirits” are rooted in trust. To destroy trust, destroy money. To destroy money, inflate it. To inflate it, worship mediocrity. To worship mediocrity, invert justice.

Atlas Shrugged proves that earned money is justice. When given a bar of gold, by a pirate, as a refund of taxes looted from him, and as he realizes that justice might exist somewhere in the world, Henry “Rearden burst out laughing.”

 

 

 

Global Warming Is A Non-Problem That Warrants No Action.

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In 2004, TheGuardian.com reported a secret Pentagon warning about global warming: “major European cities will be sunk beneath rising seas as Britain is plunged into a ‘Siberian’ climate by 2020. Nuclear conflict, mega-droughts, famine and widespread rioting will erupt across the world.”

In 2008, Al Gore announced that “the entire North ‘polarized’ cap will disappear in five years.”

In 2009, U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon declared that “[t]he world has less than 10 years to halt the global rise in greenhouse gas emissions if we are to avoid catastrophic consequences for people and the planet.”

All wrong.

Yet the supposedly authoritative statements of global warming doom continue. In a January 3, 2020 column titled “Apocalypse becomes normal”, Paul Krugman in his usual understated way told us that “[o]n our current trajectory, Florida as a whole will eventually be swallowed by the sea” and “[m]uch of India will eventually become uninhabitable.”

Krugman makes the same mistake as other false prophets of global warming doom. His and their predictions are works of science fiction because, contrary to scientific principles, they ignore the facts about global warming’s actual impact.

The facts instead show that global warming is a non-problem that warrants no action.

First, the earth’s temperature has been rising at a microscopically slow pace. NASA’s data set for global temperatures goes back to 1880 and shows that since that year, the earth’s temperature has risen by only 1.14° C. An increase of 1.14° C over 139 years translates to an average increase of only 0.008° C per year.

Second, a warmer earth saves lives. In 2015, the prestigious medical journal The Lancet reported that worldwide, cold kills over 17 times more people than heat. A group of 22 scientists examined over 74 million deaths in the United States, China, Brazil, and ten other countries in 1985-2012. They found that cold caused 7.29 percent of these deaths, while heat caused only 0.42 percent. And of these temperature-related deaths, “moderately hot and cold temperatures” caused 88.85 percent of the deaths, while “extreme” temperatures caused only 11.15 percent.

Third, while the earth’s temperature has risen, the number of natural disaster deaths has been sharply declining. In 2019, EMDAT, The International Disaster Database, reported that since the 1920s, the number of people killed annually by natural disasters has declined by over 80 percent. And this happened as the world’s population quadrupled from less than two billion to over seven and half billion.

Fourth, the global air pollution death rate has fallen by almost 50 percent since 1990. In 2019, University of Oxford economist Max Roser and researcher Hannah Ritchie reported in Our World in Data that “since 1990 the number of deaths per 100,000 people have nearly halved.”

Fifth, any impact on the economy is likely to be minimal. In 2019, the National Bureau of Economic Research estimated that if the earth’s temperature rises by 0.01° C per year through 2100 – 25 percent faster than it actually has since 1880 – total U.S. GDP in 2100 will be 1.88 percent lower in 2100 than it would otherwise be.

But the Congressional Budget Office in 2019 projected that in 2100, GDP per person will be about 180 percent higher (based on its projection of a 1.3 percent annual real long-term potential labor force productivity growth rate). So even if the reduction that NBER estimates pans out, GDP per person will still be about 178 percent higher.

NBER also made a more extreme projection: if the earth’s temperature rises by 0.04° C per year through 2100, five times the actual rate since 1880, total U.S. GDP will be 10.52 percent lower in 2100 than it would otherwise be. Sounds dramatic. It’s not. This farfetched scenario leaves GDP per person about 170 percent higher.

In other words, per person income in 2100 will be almost triple today’s level, regardless of global warming.

Finally, restricting carbon emissions to attempt to stop global warming is the wrong path – even the most severe restrictions will have almost zero impact on the earth’s temperature. Climatologist Patrick J. Michaels calculated that if the United States eliminated all carbon emissions – which would not only require Americans to give up fossil fuels, but also to stop breathing (to cease exhaling carbon dioxide) – it would only reduce global warming by a negligible 0.052° C by 2050.

Don’t make the same mistake as Krugman and other false prophets of global warming doom. Check the facts. Global warming has not been harmful and presents no danger to future generations.

David M. Simon via Real Clear Markets.

Sorry Paul Krugman, Cryptocurrency and Blockchain Are the Future

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Economist Paul Krugman has made no attempt to hide his skepticism about cryptocurrency and blockchain technology over the last several years. In 2013, he even penned an article titled “Bitcoin is Evil” in which he lambasted the cryptocurrency as a weapon created by libertarians with the specific intention to disrupt the central banks. And while the latter may be at least partially true, Krugman’s arguments against Bitcoin always sound more like the rantings of jealous schoolboy left out of an inside joke than that of an economist.

And yet, no matter how much Bitcoin, blockchain, and other cryptocurrencies have proven their worth, Krugman still chooses to condemn and dismiss them. In his latest attack, he accuses Bitcoin of setting the monetary system back by 300 years. While Bitcoin has arguably launched the economy into a future where currency is digital and free from government intrusion, Krugman’s fears ultimately boil down to a fear of a decentralized economy.

Past or Future?

When he speaks of setting the monetary system back 300 years, Krugman is referring to a time when money was backed by gold and other precious metals rather than the government’s word. This, of course, made it much harder for central planners to manipulate the money supply as they could only circulate currency that could be backed by something physical.

While this is preferable to those of us who believe that money should have intrinsic value, Krugman disagrees. And he views this affection for gold-backed currency as nothing more than irrational nostalgia. In fact, he believes that real monetary innovation came about when we abandoned gold-backed currency in favor of fiat money— a “milestone” he attributed to the rise of central banks.

He even goes as far as to say that government-issued currency is more legitimate than cryptocurrency simply because the government is more trustworthy than the unknown creator of Bitcoin. In his new article he states:

“Banknotes worked because people knew something about the banks that issued them, and these banks had an incentive to preserve their reputation. Governments have occasionally abused the privilege of creating fiat money, but for the most part governments and central banks exercise restraint, again because they care about their reputations.”

I am not sure what planet Krugman is living on, but the government is constantly meddling with our money supply. In fact, this is precisely why major financial crises arise in the first place. And every time their intervention goes horribly wrong, they use taxpayer dollars to bail out “too big to fail” entities. And it this behavior that has led so many people to distrust government-backed currency and opts for a more decentralized option.

Decentralization is the Future

While gold-backed currency and cryptocurrency are very different, they both make it harder for central planners to manipulate the money supply. When each paper dollar must be backed by gold or another precious metal, you have a fixed supply. The same is true of Bitcoin, which has a set number that can be mined. But Krugman doesn’t like being bound by these rules and believes that fiat currency has value simply “because men with guns say they do.”

He writes:

“But you’re supposed to be sure that a Bitcoin is real without knowing who issued it, so you need the digital equivalent of biting a gold coin to be sure it’s the real deal, and the costs of producing something that satisfies that test have to be high enough to discourage fraud.”

Instead of creating something as complex as the blockchain, where each transaction is anonymous, verified to prevent double spending, and then placed on the public ledger, Krugman thinks we need only trust that those in power are virtuous and know what is best for us.  

And by creating a decentralized system where individuals no longer have to rely on governments to issue mediums of exchange, he believes we are returning to the dark ages of monetary policy. In other words, he fears we are moving into a future where central planners are losing control of the monetary system. And while most Keynesian economists inherently fear a world that they do not imagine they can control, many individualists have cause for celebration.

He states:

“…cryptocurrency enthusiasts are effectively celebrating the use of cutting-edge technology to set the monetary system back 300 years. Why would you want to do that? What problem does it solve? I have yet to see a clear answer to that question.”

While it may not be obvious to Krugman, Bitcoin’s appeal comes from very fact that it is not controlled by governments or the central banks. It could also very well make the role of central banks completely irrelevant in the near future.

The problem it solves is the very thing Krugman praises: it allows individuals to bypass corrupt governments and central banks in favor of decentralization.

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