The Murph Report » Individual Rights

Douglas Rasmussen | Morality and Role of Capitalism

Chris — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 05:07:50 +0000

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=THRqf_E_mPg

Douglas Rasmussen is a professor of philosophy at St. John’s University. In this lecture given at an International Society for Individual Liberty conference in 1991, he introduces subjective value to the general concept of human flourishing. He references F.A. Hayek’s article “The Use of Knowledge in Society” to make the argument that a familiarity with and respect for concrete particular knowledge is necessary not only for market economies to emerge but is also important when applied to the human matrix of decision-making for leading a moral and fulfilled life. Basically, each individual and each individual alone has the particularized local knowledge to make the determinations about which proportions of competing value classes will lead to fulfillment in their lives; thus there is no ‘one size fits all’ standard of happiness that can be provided by prescriptive institutions.

Douglas Rasmussen | The Evolution of Liberalism

Chris — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 04:51:10 +0000

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rPKK1uE17Ko

If to liberalize something means to set it free or to loosen restrictions on it, how is it that the word ‘liberal’ in contemporary American parlance is synonymous with economic regulation and an increase in the coercive power of government? Douglas Rasmussen, a professor of philosophy at St. John’s University, briefly explains the history behind the term.

Produced by Caleb Brown, Evan Banks, and Austin Bragg.

TYLER ELM | Business sustainability prospers where environmentalism fails

Chris — Sun, 05 Feb 2012 09:22:16 +0000

By TYLER ELM, The Gazette

Regardless of government or an imperfect Kyoto Protocol, many Canadian companies will continue their efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions because it is in the best interest of their business and the environment. A new “environmentalism” – business sustainability – is prospering where traditional environmentalism has failed – in the board room.

What has been driving the change among business, educators and nonprofits to embrace sustainability as a business strategy rather than an isolated environmental initiative?

More than half of the world’s 100 largest economies are corporations, not countries. This is more than a statistic; it’s a tipping point. Predictably, the role and expectations of business in society change with it. Call it “enlightened self-interest” but whatever your label, the alignment of the for-profit mandate and the pursuit of environmental benefits yields material results.

Business sustainability is the creation of economic value from enhanced social and environmental outcomes. This strategy makes companies better by fostering the development of managerial competencies and the organizational networks needed to succeed in a changing global-political economy and the social expectations that come with it. Beyond the value of better outcomes, the process of “learning-by-doing” and collaborating with NGOs and other stakeholders improves the way we work.

In a corporate environment, sustainability is most successful when it is employed as a strategic framework for innovation, value creation, and organizational enhancement. Whether you’re increasing energy productivity, reducing packaging, sourcing paper from sustainably managed forests or developing products that meet emerging social needs, you’re tapping into multiple sources of value.

When I consider the hundreds of sustainability initiatives we have undertaken at Canadian Tire since 2008, they were not motivated by any laws, accords or treaties, but by good business sense. And this trend continues to grow. In the first nine months of 2011, my colleagues completed 365 sustainability initiatives in the areas of product and packaging redesign, transportation, and building operations. Their efforts are forecasted to annually avoid $4.5 million in costs, 2,269 tonnes of waste and 5,264 tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions, while also generating almost $1 million in new revenue from the deployment of clean-technology.

Their work reflects a broader movement. To better understand the scope of business sustainability in Canada, consider Canada’s Clean50. This partnership between Delta Management Group and Corporate Knights recognized 50 individuals and teams who had made the greatest contributions to sustainable capitalism in Canada in recent years.

The list covers many facets of society – the public sector, NGOs, educators, financial services, manufacturing, retail and more. Honourees, such as John Wiebe, Tima Bansal, Frank Dottori and Galen Weston aren’t waiting for the government to tell them what to do. They lead because it’s in their best interests to lead and be a source of innovation in a changing world.

Milton Friedman’s edict – that the business of business is business, and the creation of shareholder profit, its fundamental mandate – is just as true now as it ever was. Yet what has changed is the context within which business operates, and thus how one bounds this edict. The sources of value available to business and the competitive forces acting upon it are dynamic. We should not be surprised by shifts in business criteria, sources of value, or changes in the business activities required delivering a winning value proposition.

Canada’s sustainability journey predates Kyoto and will continue into the future because of innovative Canadians leading by example.

Tyler Elm is vice-president of business sustainability at Canadian Tire Corp. and was named to Canada’s Clean50.

George Reisman | CAPITALISM: A Treatise on Economics

Chris — Sun, 05 Feb 2012 07:16:35 +0000

The Clearest and Most
Comprehensive Defense of the
Capitalist Economic System Available
1096 pp. hardcover

Open your Acrobat Reader and browse through the entire book now in pdf and see the wealth of original economic theories and irrefutable logical arguments it offers in defense of economic freedom and laissez-faire capitalism. The book is on line in its entirety, here on this web site, in one large, fully searchable pdf file, with all entries in the table of contents and lists of figures and tables hyperlinked to the material to which they refer. Feel free to download the file to your hard drive and look through it at your leisure. Unlike the CD-Rom edition, however, the online version does not allow printing or copying and pasting.

Janet Albrechtsen | Why rational optimism beats ephemeral happiness

Chris — Sun, 05 Feb 2012 07:06:37 +0000

Janet Albrechtsen
From: The Australian

FASHIONABLE academics, activists and politicians presume to tell us how miserable we are to justify their notions about the sunny path to human happiness.

The British Office for National Statistics now asks people whether they are happy. British Prime Minister David Cameron wants to draw up a happiness index to govern policy, while a group called the Action for Happiness, launched in April by the Dalai Lama, has set down its own rules for riding the road to happiness. Bhutan, we are told, is the happiest place on earth, which is curious given that hordes of refugees are not crossing the borders into the small landlocked kingdom. These clever chaps promise to make us happy if only we would follow their clever ideas

Here’s a better idea. Rational optimism beats ephemeral happiness. While there is something familiarly depressing about a grand leader promising to make us happy – Stalin did it, so did Hitler – the best form of contentment comes from learning some history.

Enter Matt Ridley. On a grey, wintry Sydney morning last week, the author of The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves delivered a fast-paced, fact-laden history lesson about the extraordinary trajectory of mankind.

Speaking at the Centre for Independent Studies, Ridley quoted British historian Thomas Babington Macaulay, who once asked: “On what principle is it that when we see nothing but improvement behind us, we are to expect nothing but deterioration before us?” That was in 1830, even before the industrial revolution delivered vast improvements to the way we live. Two centuries later, after even greater innovation and progress, it is passing strange that rational optimism remains such a rarity.

Asked about this conundrum, Ridley points to the intelligentsia. Calamitous predictions about the future, not calm reasoning about the past, sell books and sustain careers. And “there’s more of the intelligentsia around now so you hear more from them”. The “apocaholics” predict doom and gloom from Malthusian population explosions, AIDS epidemics, bird flu pandemics, peak oil problems, depleting ozone layers, acid rains, deforestation, urbanisation, and over-consumption. The list is long.

By contrast, Ridley, a lanky, dry-witted Brit, an Oxford-educated scientist, former editor at The Economist, author of a string of books about evolution and all-round polymath, takes the rational road. Looking at the past to predict the future, he finds a rising line of glorious human triumph.

Start with one simple measurement. Appropriately fitted out with a CIS tie covered in small light bulbs, Ridley asks how long you have to work today to earn an hour of reading light. On an average wage today, half a second of work will pay for an hour of light. In 1950, the average wage earner worked eight seconds to run a conventional filament lamp; in 1880, 15 seconds of work was needed for a kerosene lamp; and more than six hours of work for an hour of light by tallow candle in the 1800s. In 1750BC, your average ancient Babylonian needed to work more than 50 hours to get an hour of light from a sesame oil lamp. That 43,200-fold improvement, says Ridley, signifies “the currency that counts, your time”.

By any other measure, too, we are also better off. The world population has multiplied six times since 1800, yet on average we live twice as long and, in real terms, earn nine times more money.

Even in the space of 50 years, from 1955 to 2005, as Ridley writes in his book, “the average human being on Planet Earth earned nearly three times as much money (corrected for inflation), ate one-third more calories and could expect to live one-third longer. She was less likely to die as a result of war, murder, childbirth, accidents, tornadoes, flooding, famine, whooping cough, tuberculosis, malaria, diphtheria, typhus, typhoid, measles, smallpox, scurvy or polio. She was less likely, at any given age, to get cancer, heart disease or a stroke.

“She was more likely to be literate . . . to have finished school . . . own a telephone, a flush toilet, a refrigerator” and so on and so forth.

All this when the world population more than doubled. As Ridley notes, the UN estimates that poverty was reduced more in the past 50 years than in the previous five centuries.

Anyone can recount the facts of human progress, even the doomsayers were they more curious. What marks out Ridley is his explanation of our success. After looking back at thousands of years of evolution, natural selection and culture, he finds that we started to prosper not when our individual brains grew in size – Neanderthals had bigger brains that we do – but when our collective brain grew. Ridley traces the start of our extraordinary cultural revolution to a time, about 100,000 years ago, when, unlike other species, we started to exchange goods and ideas with people beyond our own communities.

“At some point in human history, ideas began to meet and mate, and to have sex with each other.” Culture quickly became cumulative. “Exchange is to cultural evolution as sex is to biological evolution,” writes Ridley.

By a process similar to natural selection, sound ideas triumphed and will continue to triumph so long as we enable them to “meet and mate”. Looking back on history, Ridley rediscovers the ideas of Adam Smith and Friedrich von Hayek, and adds evolutionary biology to explain why homo sapiens progresses at a much faster rate than any other species. Constant innovation comes from a free market for ideas – not to mention goods and services.

Look at your computer mouse, says Ridley. No single person knows how to make one. The factory worker who assembled it didn’t drill for oil to make the plastic. “At some point, human intelligence became collective and cumulative in a way that happened to no other species.”

That’s Ridley’s reason for being a rational optimist. At every juncture, humans have adapted, innovated and changed in the face of dire predictions. Prosperity depends on a bottom-up process from people learning from and sharing with others.

No wonder the happiness gurus, eager to impose their idea of happiness upon us, eschew history. As Ridley explores in his 400-page plus race through history from the Stone Age to the 21st century, government departments and bureaucracies, whether we’re talking Egyptian pharaohs or British Rail, didn’t drive innovation. People do.

And consider how technology has ramped up the pace at which people can share with and learn from others. Ridley, the rational optimist, predicts innovation will accelerate at a much faster pace than ever. Which is happy news if only we can steer clear of the Scylla and Charybdis of modernity, the imposers of happiness who favour top-down diktats about happiness and the apocaholics who shudder at technology, scoff at globalisation and regard free trade in anything – even ideas – as an abomination.

Jeremy Kolassa | A Powerful Argument for Minarchism, Built on the Foundation of Peace

Chris — Sun, 05 Feb 2012 06:33:59 +0000

by Jeremy Kolassa @ United Liberty

[In the voice of that narrator guy from Law & Order:]

In the libertarian movement, there are two separate but equally important groups: the minarchists who support a minimal state, and the anarchists would believe in no state at all.

These are their stories.

DUN-DUN!

Such could be the introduction to any documentary about modern libertarianism. It’s quite true: there has been a raging argument between those who want a minimal state that does only a few bare functions (law enforcement, defense, prisons, perhaps roads and fire departments) and those who want absolutely no state whatsoever. It lead to a split in the Libertarian Party in the 80s, after Ed Clark received 1% of the presidential vote in 1980, when anarchists felt the party wasn’t being radical enough. You see the argument vocalized on anarchist websites, such as this writer at Strike the Root who declares that minarchists are “the enemy.” It isn’t helped that it anarchism does seem logical, from a certain standpoint: how can you be for liberty yet still want a state? That’s a contradiction!

Fortunately, a very powerful argument for libertarian minarchism has emerged, one that is built on the foundation of peace.

Stephen Pinker just wrote the book The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, and gave an interview to reason about it. In his interview, he points out some very fascinating facts about why violence has gone down. The first point is that the free market (aka “capitalism”) leads to peace:

Pinker: A second is the growth of commerce; opportunities for positive-sum exchange, as opposed to zero-sum plunder. When it’s cheaper to buy something than to steal it, that changes the incentives, and you get each side valuing the other more alive than dead—the theory of gentle commerce [that comes] from the Enlightenment.

This should come as a no-brainer to any libertarian. When you don’t have a need to take from someone using force to get what you want, of course, violence decreases. But what he also points out is that the rise of states led to less violence as well:

reason: Let’s go through some of the reasons and processes by which the world became less violent. It began with what you call the pacification process, which involved the creation of states.

Pinker: The first states seemed to have in their wake a massive reduction of death in tribal raiding and feuding, basically because it’s a nuisance to the overlords. So you have things like the Pax Romana, the Pax Islamica, the Pax Sinica, in China, where the emperors would much rather have the peasants alive to stock their tax rolls and armies, and be slaves or serfs. So they had a selfish interest in preventing too much internecine feuding among their subject peoples and basically kept them from each other’s throats. Not that it was a life that we would consider particularly pleasant. You’re substituting a lot of violence among tribes and villages and clans for a lesser amount—but still a brutal form of violence—from the state against its citizens.

The next transition, after you have the government preventing people from committing violence against each other, you now have the problem of preventing the government from committing violence against its own peoples. And that was, basically, the advent of democracy and the various reforms of the Enlightenment.

Obviously, these first states were not the best, but did they clamp down on the excesses of violence. Once you had that in place, then you had to go and reform those states so they wouldn’t hurt their own people. Pinker also notes a psychological change, when people “counted to 10 and swallowed their pride rather than lashing out with a dagger when they’d been insulted.” Again, states played a role in this:

Now that just begs the question of why would there have been this psychological change. [German sociologist Norbert Elias] identified two exogenous factors, his first being the consolidation of kingdoms. Instead of a patchwork of little fiefdoms and duchies and principalities and baronies, you had kingdoms where criminal justice was nationalized, and that allows justice to be reckoned by a more disinterested third party, and it keeps warlords from cycles of vendetta and feuding. [This occurred] together with the expansion of the infrastructure of commerce, both the physical infrastructure in the form of roads and wagons and carts and mills, and also a financial infrastructure: currency that could be recognized throughout a kingdom once the king had established control, and enforceable contracts, tilting the incentive structure from conquest to exchange.

Essentially, free markets + limited government = peace. If only all math was that easy.

Libertarians are usually decried as anarcho-capitalists who want to abolish the state, but that’s only true for a small subset of us. Most of us recognize that we need a state in order to maintain a functional free market system. I myself find anarcho-capitalism to be wanting, especially when it comes to law. If we had an anarchy with private courts, you could just go on forever with the appeals to different courts, and you’d be stuck in limbo forever. Private police are all well and good, but what if there’s a problem with your credit card payment, or for whatever reason, no one will service you? Then, of course, is the fact that the whole thing relies on human beings being rational beings who will apply cost-benefit analysis to everything. Of course no one will shoot each other up, because that will cost money, anger people, and likely lose you customers.

Well, I have news for you: humans are anything but rational.

Swinging the pendulum back the other way, having a large government also does not do well for peace, which means we have to focus on keeping it small enough to protect our property and our rights (as well as enforce contracts), while limited to those areas and no farther (or maybe just a teency-wincy farther, such as roads.) It’s like Goldilocks: not too hot, not too cold.

Pinker notes other things which should make any libertarian smile. The first is that, with the rise of literacy and debate, stupid positions become harder and harder to defend:

Likewise [with] slavery. If you don’t examine your practices too deeply, if you do things because that’s the way my father did it, and that’s the way it’s always been done, and the Bible says it’s OK, and it would be disruptive if we changed, then you might think that slavery is not so bad. But if you start to argue with someone, if someone says, “Hey, slavery really can’t be defended,” and you try to defend it, you’re eventually going to lose the argument, just the way you’d lose a fallacious mathematical argument.

I argue that both the technologies of exchange of ideas and the political infrastructure, namely the freedom of speech—not getting burned or broken or disemboweled if you come up with a heretical idea—will, just in the nature of social relations, push in certain directions, and they’re going to be humanitarian directions. Because humanitarian treatment is just a better way for people to live together than constant war or exploitation.

I think this is good for libertarianism. It will still be a difficult slog, mind you, but more and more the statist positions are becoming difficult to sustain. Those on the left are contorting themselves in order to make their positions sound credible, and even they aren’t totally believing that stimulus works. On the right, well, they’re already pretzels when it comes to “gay marriage” and “limited government.” There are always going to be ignorant ideologues that will refuse to acknowledge the truth, but we can work around them.

And then, finally:

reason: Moving to this century, you claim we are now in the midst of the Long Peace and the New Peace. What is the Long Peace, and what is the New Peace?

Pinker: Long Peace is a term that I took from the historian John Gaddis, referring narrowly to the absence of war, direct war, between the U.S. and the USSR, confounding all predictions in the late ’80s when he coined the phrase. He and a number of military historians, even in the ’80s, said, “Hey, something very weird is going on. The U.S. and the USSR aren’t going to war. Everyone said they would. How come they haven’t?” And more generally, people noticed, “Hey, what about Western Europe, France and Germany? They’ve gone an awful long time without fighting a war. This is kind of historically unusual.”

There were predictions even then in the late ’80s that something had changed historically, that the use of war, as Clausewitz put it, as continuation of policy by other means, had really changed. War had been taken off the table as a live option. The absence of war involving developed countries, say the 40 or 45 richest countries, and between the great powers, was unusual even in the ’80s. And here we are 25 years after that, and our luck has held out.

The New Peace is another phenomenon that very few people are aware of. Namely, there are war nerds who meticulously tabulate the number of battle deaths year by year in each of a number of categories of armed conflict: civil wars, interstate wars, colonial wars, and so on. They have been stunned, in plotting their data, to notice there’s been a big decline in wars in the rest of the world, starting around the end of the Cold War. All of those nasty little civil wars in Africa, South Asia, and Central and Latin America kind of fizzled out, and no one’s even noticed. More important, the number of people killed has plunged. This past decade, even with all of the wars that we read about, has had the lowest rate of battle deaths of any decade since they started keeping score in 1946. That’s the phenomenon I call the New Peace—that the Long Peace is starting to spread to the rest of the world.

There you have it, folks. Minimal government plus free markets (and not stateless capitalism) leads to long-term peace and prosperity.

That’s the most powerful argument for minarchism you will see anywhere. It’s a powerful argment for liberty. Now we need to let everyone else know about it.

Matt Ridley | Deep Optimism

Chris — Sat, 04 Feb 2012 09:20:18 +0000

Matt Ridley: Deep Optimism from The Long Now Foundation on FORA.tv

Matt Ridley | Uncommon Knowledge Rational Optimism Interview

Chris — Sat, 04 Feb 2012 08:47:14 +0000

Uncommon Knowledge: Matt Ridley from The Hoover Institution on FORA.tv

Matt Ridley | The Rational Optimist book talk (with Q&A)

Chris — Sat, 04 Feb 2012 07:46:46 +0000

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9-zLK50w4Q0

Author and rational optimist Matt Ridley spoke at The Centre for Independent Studies about the overwhelming evidence that shows life is getting better – despite an abundance of pessimistic counterclaims.
Today there are more than 6 billion people on the planet, 99 per cent of whom are better fed, better sheltered, better entertained and better protected against disease than their Stone Age ancestors. The availability of almost everything a person could want or need has been going erratically upwards for 10,000 years and has rapidly accelerated over the last 200 years…

Yet, bizarrely, however much things improve from the way they were before, people still cling to the belief that the future will be nothing but disastrous. In this original, optimistic book, Matt Ridley puts forward his surprisingly simple answer to how humans progress, arguing that we progress when we trade and we only really trade productively when we trust each other. The Rational Optimist will do for economics what Genome did for genomics and will show that the answer to our problems, imagined or real, is to keep on doing what we’ve been doing for 10,000 years — to keep on changing.

Matt’s books have sold over 850,000 copies, been translated into 30 languages, short-listed for six literary prizes and won two awards. His work has appeared in The Economist, Sunday Telegraph, The Daily Telegraph, The Times, Guardian, New Scientist, Wall Street Journal and The New York Times, amongst other publications. Matt is Co-founder and President of the International Centre for Life.

Matt’s book, The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves, provides compelling and positive evidence that life has improved dramatically and continues to do so.

A Brief Defense of Minarchism (minimal state libertarianism/classical liberalism)

Chris — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 09:17:31 +0000

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2idxs0gN948