A MarketPlace of Ideas                        

This series of shows were recorded on or before 1983.  They include many interviews with survivors on both sides of the Spanish civil war.

This is a fascinating study in how humanity lurches forward, resists change, grasps on to desperate ideas and is willing to kill each other in the process.   Spain was has a functional monarchy until the early 1930's.  When it tried moving forward to a republican form of government it wobbled and failed after a span of about 5 years.   Many people were more comfortable with the old order while some wanted to try radically new ideas.  Some of those ideas were stupid like communism and eliminating money in favor of a revolutionary council handing out chits.   Those thinking crazy thoughts can somewhat be forgiven because the monarchy had held on so long that the change hit Spain like an earthquake that had built up stresses over centuries.  On the other hand they invited war by trying to change too much at one time.  That is bound to upset someone and one has to consider this because lives are held in the balance.  Unstable stupid people do unstable stupid things like kill 500 people at a go with just the word of one person.

 So what resulted?  The forty years of the Franco dictatorship.  Hardly the progress the so called progressives wanted to accomplish.  It is adequate proof to me that true revolutions happen peacefully through people changing themselves and others.  That unfortunately that things change slowly.   And for libertarians like me I see the poor anarchists reject joining government only to learn the lesson that game theory teaches so clearly.  It only pays to be cooperative when your counter party is cooperative.  Otherwise it pays to be uncooperative.  The communists entered the government and solicited help from Soviet Russia.  They ended up pushing out the anarchists.  Quite an object lesson is what is to be overcome to institute true freedom with libertarian ideals.  This history may have bearing on the future for the next step forward in government is its near total elimination.  There will be resistance to this and I expect there will be some wars too.   People, including the peasants, are resistant to change even if it is for the good.

Episode 1

Episode 2

Episode 3

Episode 4

Episode 5

Episode 6

This is more an economic and political history of Britain than anything else.  The economic and political epochs of Britain are covered with nothing else talked about.  Even cultural events mentioned have strong bearing on economics with an example being a massive party that was the prototype rave.  Raves of this type are pay for entry models and more an economic effort than a party as much as they are talked up to the opposite.

Britain was on the edge of bankruptcy at the end of world war 2.  They owed money to the USA and at the same time they wanted to undertake a huge welfare effort including socialized medicine.  Sound familiar?   Sounds like the USA to me in 2009 under Obama. If you have interest in economics you need to watch all 5 of these shows.  In many ways the USA appears to be squarely on the same path as this has been empire.  

…..And just so you know Britain paid off the last of the loans from this era in the 2000′s. 

From video description: Britain in 1945; the country is victorious but nearly bankrupt. As Clement Attlee’s Labour government sets out to build ‘New Jerusalem’, Britain is forced to hold out the begging bowl in Washington. Though Ealing Studios produces a series of very British comedies and there is a spirit of hope in the air, the British people’s growing impatience with austerity threatens to take the country from bankruptcy to self-destruction.

Viewing Notes

• To be added upon second viewing

Links to all the videos

Andrew Marr’s History of Modern Britain
Episode 1 – Advance Britannia 1945-1955
Episode 2 – The Land of Lost Content 1955-1964
Episode 3 – Paradise Lost 1964-1979
Episode 4 – Revolution! 1979-1990
Episode 5 – New Britannia 1990-2007

This is the organ chart of socialized medicine.  It has kidneys, spleens, liver and onions and a whole lot of other organs your body does not. 

Congressmen must be very good engineers.  The reason I say this is because as an engineer I feel there is very little chance I could mathematically model the chances of success.  In fact more often than not when machines are this complicated they fail often and hard.  Thus I can only conclude that congressmen are smarter than I am.  In fact they must be demigods.  A god something bigger than Mercury and less than Jupiter.  And on a final note you maybe wondering where you are on this map of the corpus governmentus.  You reside on the rings around Uranus.  And thus you can assume the worse.  The flavor of the day will never change.

….. or you could be being hornswaggled.

Robert McNamara has died.  Unfortunately his brand of social engineering is alive and well.   You may know a couple of Roberts "innovations".  They include the F-111.

 And the ever jamming M-16 rifle.

His life demonstrates the abject failure of when the unwashed hands of government apparatiks touch the inner workings of our society. 

Read George Wills Article to understand better how McNamera introduced his own particular version of errors into the system. 

The apogee of McNamara’s professional life, in the first half of the 1960s, coincided, not coincidentally, with the apogee of the belief that behavioralism had finally made possible a science of politics. Behavioralism held — holds; it is a hardy perennial — that the social and natural sciences are not so different, both being devoted to the discovery of law-like regularities that govern the behavior of atoms, hamsters, humans, whatever.

This sort of social meddling has not ceased.  Unfortunately it has found a new home in the left.  Unable to fathom the mathematics of chaos they straddle the bucking bronco wild horse proclaiming over and over it will end differently this time.  This time we can break this wild horse called human reality.  This from the people who claim there is no god on one hand but on the other purport to have god like qualities of to-the-core understanding.  I think that is unlikely.

I guess all we can do is wait for Obama to be tossed off this pitch black mare with the bewitching eyes.  It will come sure as the sun rises.

We are accustomed to thinking of Germany as the bad guy as afterall this is the country that brought us Hitler. A tyrant and a lout. 

However turnabout is fairplay and now we have Angela Merkel acting in the name of freedom and the small guy everwhere.  She is holding firm against a third wave of stimulus.   This appears to have the lefties in a tizzy as it stands to make Obama look bad.  Germany by taking its knocks stands to recover sooner than the USA.  In addition the huge wave of inflation that will hit the USA when the economy finally does recover will not hit europe as hard.  I grieve for what Obama and the left are doing to the republic.   It is clear after the boy-king with sagging man boobs our country will never be the same.

I am however proud of the USA in one respect.   We successfully turned Germany into a country with a leader that is confronting Obama’s tyranny of the money printing press.   This printing press is taking us into slavery and corroding the bonds of interpersonal trust that make us a cohesive society.  Obama is the American Robert Mugabe complete with dellusions of grandeur.

It was has been said that as goes California so goes the nation.  If this is true I sense that a battle for democracy is ahead of us.   In Calfornia they are in a budget crisis.  The republicans are fighting any new taxes.  Right now the democrats only need 1 more republican vote to get their budget passed that includes tax increases and budget cuts.  However imagine what will happen if this 1 vote never arrives.   Should this happen there has already been talked about a maneuver to pass the budget with a simple majority.  This circumvents the requirement of 2/3 vote for a tax increase.   Now imagine if California faces any defaults?  Its easy to see where the courts could get involved and mandate that program X, Y and Z be funded.  This will circumvent the no taxation without representation assumption that is so dear to democracy.  At the point this occurs a crisis will be upon us.  In this day of the internet you can not expect those on the correct side of this equation to sit idly by while democracy is pimped out by the big spenders.  The federal government appears like it very soon may find itself in the same position.   Its up to the Chinese.   The Chinese are crazy if they buy any more federal government debt.  They may do it because they feel trapped by their previous investments.   A collapse of US government debt could make some huge treasury holdings worth alot less.   On their part these will be the wages of playing an unfair game of international trade.  They should have allowed their people to import freely from the USA.  In the long run it would have been better for China.  But then this is the era of poor choices and thus why should that be any different?

A friend just passed these video URL’s to me.   For the gullible out there you should watch this.

What happened to Fannie Mae / Freddie Mac / AIG  was more a direct result of easy money low interest FED policy than anything else.  Factoring in inflation our interest rates have been either %0 or even negative.  See my article about the Rolling Liquidity Bubble.

We had 3 rapid succession booms.  Internet / Real Estate / Oil.  How does one explain this? unDemocrats have a neurotic hatred of oil so there’s probably a surfeit of regulation in that area.  Yet oil boomed and is still relatively high at 100 US dollar per barrel.

What explains events?  I think its effective 0% interest rates.  When interest rates are too low people can afford to go lightly into them without the due diligence of intense worry.  Money got slung around in excess.  Momentum patterns set up in internet, housing and then oil.  When the speculators see a momentum pattern if they have sufficient liquidity they buy in and reinforce that pattern.  When you have excessive money supply a momentum pattern is bound to set up somewhere as people search for a way to increase their wealth.   People have survival instincts.  They do this naturally!  You want people to be suicidal ??? 

Speculators speculate.  That is what they do. Oh yes and you too are a speculator if you have ever bought anything for any reason.  Thus it makes no sense  to point fingers and say "Dirty low down speculators".   It only makes you look like an IQ challenged liberal.  It makes no sense to point your fingers at Barnie Frank and the unDemocrats.  unDemocrats do what unDemocrats do and that is skim off the casino like the mobsters they are.     There is only one form of regulation that prevents these speculative momentum patterns:  Meaningful interest rates !    You want to stop the skimmers?  Shut down the casino with meaningful interest rates.   No politician is going to go for that option.  It has to be forced upon them.   The 70′s only gave way to the 80′s after interest rates shot up and put the game to an end.    You can be assured that the current era of easy money will only end after the same sort of sequence.

Thus we play with fire if the terms of any of these gargantuan bailouts are too easy.  Unfortunately Its not realistic for me to ask that the offending entities be left to go out of business as no one asks my opinion.   If it were up to me their assets would be auctioned off to people with money.  The people with money right now are the last men standing.  They avoided the mistakes.   Who better to entrust?  The government? Please.  That’s crazy talk.

In the mean time we are hamstringing our financial sensing apparatus by banning short selling.  Most stock holders do not study companies intently.  They buy the stock on the advice of someone they know.   The options traders do us great favors by studying intently these companies.  For if you are an options trader and do not do your homework you soon have a new profession.

Reference this arty: Detroit’s sputtering Big Three turn to Washington for help

The car makers want some federally guaranteed loans to help them cope with tough times and more importantly raised CAFE standards that bring fleet averages up to 35 miles per gallon.

Nice. So rather than just let this CAFE thing die a slow death we are going to make huge loans to the car companies.  Never mind that we could just be the slightest bit patient and wait for the Chevy Volt et al come out in 2010.  With the advent of practical electric car solutions CAFE standards should be rendered obsolete in their current forms.  Yet we the tax payer are going to be on the hook for guarantees.

CONCLUSION:   The politicians probably just want to loan a bunch of money to the car companies because there are a ton of union thugs that work for them. 

I hope that these car companies do not become the Conrail of the 21st century.  We all know how helpful that little bit of socialism was.