Category: Current Affairs

Is Greed the Engine of Capitalism?

The Financial Times reports on a piece of silliness from the Pope:

Pope Benedict XVI on Tuesday condemned the “grave deviations and failures” of capitalism exposed by the financial crisis and issued a strong call for a “true world political authority” to oversee a return to ethics in the global economy.

One mistake the good Pontiff is making is to confuse capitalism and capitalists.  One who cannot see the difference may fallaciously conclude that the greed of some capitalists is rooted in capitalism.  Here is a post from a while back that counters the notion:

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The Medical-Industrial Complex, Part II

Part I is here.

The liberal-leftist animus against corporations is undoubtedly excessive, as is their pollyannish trust in Big Government solutions to every problem under the sun; but this should not blind us to corporate irresponsibility especially when the corporate types work hand-in-hand with liberals to 'medicalize' the ordinary difficulties of life.

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The Medical-Industrial Complex

No doubt you have heard of ADD. Recently I learned of a new medical condition known as ADHD: attention deficit hyperactive disorder.

What could be called the medical-industrial complex is a curious alliance of soft-headed liberals eager to invent diseases and celebrate their 'victims' and money-grubbing corporate types out to turn a quick buck. Liberals invent the diseases and syndromes, while the big pharmaceutical companies supply the drugs for their alleviation. Compliant shrinks and medicos write the prescriptions and serve as go-betweens while Big Government programs divert tax dollars from legitimate uses to enrich the doctors and drug companies.

Merton, Marilyn, and David Carradine

Thomas Merton, Journal (IV, 240), writing about Marilyn Monroe around the time of her death in 1962:

. . .the death was as much a symbol as the bomb – symbol of uselessness and of tragedy, of misused humanity.

He’s right of course: Monroe’s was a life wasted on glamour, sexiness, and frivolity. She serves as a lovely warning: Make good use of your human incarnation! Be in the flesh, but not of the flesh.

The fascination with empty celebrity, a fascination as inane as its object, says something about what we have become in the West. We in some measure merit the revulsion of the Islamic world. We value liberty, and rightly, but we fail to make good use of it as Marilyn and Anna Nicole Smith failed to make good use of their time in the body. Curiously enough, a failure to make good use of one's time in the body often leads to its early destruction, and with it, perhaps, the possibility of spiritual improvement.

Curiously, Merton and Carradine both died in Bangkok, the first of accidental electrocution on 10 December 1968, the second a few days ago apparently of autoerotic asphyxiation.  The extremity and perversity of the latter practice is a clear proof of the tremendous power of the sex drive to corrupt and derange the human spirit if it is allowed unfettered expression.  One with any spiritual sensitivity and depth ought to shudder at the thought of ending his life in the manner of Carradine, in the heteronomy and diremption of the flesh, utterly enslaved to one's lusts, one's soul emptied out into the dust.  To risk one's very life in pursuit of intensity of orgasm  shows a mind unhinged.  Thinking of Carradine's frightful example, one ought to pray, as Merton did thousands of times: Ora pro nobis peccatoribus.  Nunc et in hora mortis.

The Irrationality of Playing the Lottery

I have posted several times over the years on the irrationality of playing the lottery and on the immorality of state sponsorship and promotion (via deceptive advertising) of lotteries.  The following e-mail, however, raises an interesting question that gives me pause:

As I was reading this story of an impoverished young rancher who won $88 million net with a Powerball ticket, I was wondering whether you'd allow that a case could be made for the rationality of his gamble. The young man and his whole family were in desperate financial circumstances with no way to cover back taxes, livestock loans, etc. They faced foreclosures, eviction, etc. The young man bought one ticket. He was not a chronic heavy lotto-gambler. The one ticket did not make his situation worse. Arguably, the lottery gamble was his only hope of salvaging his situation. If you have only ONE way to save yourself, the odds don't really matter.

Actually, according to the account linked to above, the cowboy bought $15 worth of tickets.  So he bought more than one ticket.  But no matter.  Let us assume that this $15 was the only money he ever spent on the lottery.  And let's also assume that the cowpoke was at the end of his rope — pun intended — facing foreclosure and imminent residency on Skid Row.  We may also safely assume that the young man will never again play the lottery.  (For he seems resolved not to fritter away his winnings  on loose women and fast cars.) The question is whether it was rational for him in his precise circumstances to spend $15 on lottery tickets.
 
Now one question to ask is whether the rationality of a decision can be judged ex post facto.  I would say not.  A rational agent agent is one who chooses means that he has good reason to believe are conducive to the ends he has in view.  A rational decision is one made calmly and deliberately and with 'due diligence' on the basis of the best information the agent has available to him within the limited time he has at his disposal for acquiring information.  A rational decision cannot be rendered irrational by a bad outcome, and an irrational decision cannot be rendered rational by a good outcome.
 
So I am inclined to say that our cowboy made an irrational decison when he decide to spend $15 on a chance to win millions.  The fact that, against all odds, he won is irrelevant to the rationality of his decision. The decision was irrational because the chances of winning anything significant were astronomically small, whereas the value of  $15 to someone who is down to his last $15 is substantial. 
 
But I can understand how intuitions might differ.  Suppose we alter the example by supposing that the man will die and knows that he will die if he does not win today's lottery.  Suppose he has exactly $15 to spend and he spends it on lottery tickets.  He now has nothing to lose by spending the money.  It is perhaps arguable that, in these precise circumstances, it is prudentially if not theoretically rational for the cowpoke to blow his last $15 on lotto tickets.
 
Just what is rationality anyway?
 

Taxation and Liberty

On 17 April I wrote:

Taxation, then, is a liberty issue before it is a 'green eyeshade' issue: the more the government takes, the less concrete liberty you have. Without money you can't get your kids out of a shitty public school system that liberals have destroyed with their tolerate-anything mentality; without money you cannot live in a decent and secure neighborhood.

But I just now found something over at Jim Ryan's Philosoblog that gives me reason to think that I blundered.  Ryan writes:

As Isaiah Berlin said, echoing the Bishop Butler, "Everything is what it is: liberty is liberty, not equality or fairness or justice…." Unjustly high taxation is unfairness, injustice, and theft. It is not a violation of liberty rights. The price for ignoring this fact is that we let the verbal trap stand and you lose the basis for dismissing out of hand the leftist's argument for redistribution of wealth. There is plenty of reason to indict unjustly high taxation. There is no need to resort to verbal trickery. Leave the verbal trickery to the leftist, isolate it, and expose it.

Although Ryan was not responding to me when he wrote this, he could say to me, Your talk of 'concrete liberty' being lessened by high taxation smacks of the very sort of thinking that you presumably oppose in leftists.  Liberty is liberty.  There is no such thing as concrete liberty.  As opposed to what? Abstract liberty?  You would agree that justice is justice and that there is no such thing as social justice or economic justice.  Similarly with liberty.  It is what it is and not some other thing.  The argument against high taxation is not that it violates or lessens your liberty.  It doesn't. The problem with it is that it is unjust.  High taxes don't violate yout liberty; at most they impede the exercise of your liberty, which is something different.

I need to think further about this.

Taxation: A Liberty Issue

Despite their name, liberals seem uninterested or insufficiently interested in the 'real' liberties, those pertaining to property, money, and guns, as opposed to the 'ideal' liberties, those pertaining to freedom of expression. A liberal will go to any extreme when it comes to defending the right to express his precious self no matter how inane or obnoxious or socially deleterious the results of his self-expression; but he cannot muster anything like this level of energy when it comes to defending the right to keep what he earns or the right to defend himself and his family from the criminal element from which liberal government fails to protect him. He would do well to reflect that his right to express his vacuous self needs concrete back-up in the form of economic and physical clout. Scribbler that I am, I prize freedom of expression; but I understand what makes possible its retention.

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