Gödel and the School Board

In the early decades of the Twentieth Century there was an interest in creating  a purely formal system  for mathematics consisting of symbolic objects and propositional entities  created by concatenations of symbols according to the rules of the system without much reference to what the objects or entities  actually were or meant and which was complete in the sense that  every such  entity allowed by the rules of the system  would be decidable as valid or not according to the rules of the system. (Why people worried about doing this is interesting in itself, but that is a story for another day.) In 1930 Kurt Gödel  proved that such a complete formal system was impossible, basically by showing that any such system tripped over an elaborate version of the liar paradox.

Bureaucrats, school administrators, and officials typically have a somewhat analogous set of interests and desires. Many of them yearn in a heartfelt way for a set of rules complete and comprehensive enough to dictate their actions and rulings in every case without any need for applying intelligence, common sense, general principles, or considerations of context. Indeed this reverence for and reliance upon rules and the accompanying reluctance to consider context and actual meaning are often seen as the hallmarks of the bureaucratic mentality.

These is also a relevant  analogue of Gödel’s theorem, not a proof,  but an observation: it is impossible to construct a set of formal rules governing human behavior which will answer every question under their purview in a just and appropriate way without applying thought and considerations of context to individual situations.

A general understanding and acceptance of this limitation and its implications probably would spoil the lunches of public servants everywhere and induce devastating clinical depression in human resources directors and school superintendents from coast to coast - neither a particularly bad thing.  However it should also be a warning to those libertarians who yearn for a somewhat similarly comprehensive set of rules for a free society. It reminds them that there will always be unusual cases and special situations.

As a simple example consider a free  society with laws and rules respecting property rights. Suppose that person A buys rural land completely surrounding the land owned and occupied by person B. It is fairly easy to come up with laws based on principles of individual rights saying that in such a situation A must grant B some sort of easement to come and go to and from his property, and B while using the easement must  respect A’s general right to control his own property.  Such rules, however, may not get things anywhere near to an actual solution, particularly if there are unusual conditions about the properties or if A  and/or B is a jackass.  It then would be necessary to arrive at an ad hoc solution based on general principles of fairness and reasonableness and the details of the particular situation.  A reasonably written law would anticipate such situations and allow for their resolution in this manner rather than striving for prescriptive completeness. A reasonably thought out legal and political theory would do the same. This incompleteness is not a problem for libertarian theory. It is really only a reminder that most of the time you can’t get away without thinking and paying attention to the facts and details. 

Seeing Obama Clearly

A devout Baptist expired in his sleep one night and awakened happily to find himself in heaven. While looking around and taking in his surroundings, he noticed an old, white bearded fellow outfitted in cowboy boots and a ten gallon hat strutting around, barking out orders, and generally behaving in an overbearing manner.

“Who’s that?” he asked the person next to him.

“Oh,” the person replied,  “that’s God. He thinks he’s Lyndon Johnson.”

old joke circa mid-1960’s

Change the costume a bit, and you would have a perfectly good Obama joke, fitting his  personality and ideology as well as the old one did Johnson’s. In many ways there really is not that much new or different about Obama. Regardless of the fear mongering of conservative pundits and the fantasies of his press agents in the traditional media, Obama is not a historic man of destiny, reshaping the nation  to his will. He is not Napoleon (he just has the complex). He’s not even Mussolini, despite the remarkably similar jutting of the chin. He is just a typical American leftist doing what leftists do when they get the chance, as a quick look at history can help to illustrate.

Roosevelt’s New Deal prolonged the depression and left the nation’s economy in many ways more hamstrung and regulated and its bureaucracy more powerful than today. The country was definitively far more union-ridden, and Roosevelt’s attacks on business, success,  and wealth make Obama’s seem mild.  Certainly none of Obama’s questionable or even illegal executive orders comes close to Roosevelt’s sending a whole class of innocent, loyal Americans to concentration camps by executive decree.

 Johnson’s left wing agenda and authoritarian vision were at least as grandiose as Obama’s, and he was far better at getting his plans enacted into law. He was fully as arrogant and power mad as Obama, and his corruption and abuses of power were perhaps greater. (As an aside he was probably also slightly more vulgar.)

 Though Carter’s ideology and failures are obvious and well known, people sometimes forget that the celebrated moderation of the later years of Clinton’s administration was a result of and a pragmatic reaction to political defeat. In the first couple of years when he was proposing the things he actually wanted, Clinton was about as far to the left as Obama has been. Hillarycare, his  most important proposal,  was more socialistic and authoritarian than Obamacare – Obamacare for example having, as far as we know, no provisions for criminal penalties for people selecting their own doctors.

While we can accept that some of Obama’s notions, hatreds, and desires may be unusual, his actions and behavior are mainly typical of the American left when it gets power. He is doing what leftists usually do. He is harming those leftists usually harm. He is favoring those leftists usually favor. During his first two years in office, he had the votes in congress to run roughshod at least some of the time. He no longer does. Obamacare is a mess that will have to be fixed or repealed some day. It is not permanent or politically untouchable.  His opponents need to keep their heads. He is a crafty, dedicated enemy of liberty and limited government who should not be taken lightly. He is not Attila, the booger man, or the destroyer of the republic. Those conservatives who paint him as such overate him as much as he and  his sycophants do and play into his hand. What is needed is a clear headed recognition  that he is  another dangerous  opponent, one to be taken seriously and opposed seriously, but not one to be panicked or awed by. A little less gloom and a few more good, offensive jokes might be a good place to start.

Same Old Hollywood

Some conservatives are annoyed that a company that makes video games based on the characters and events of the Star Wars movies has added a planet of homosexuals to a game.  (Many of the rest of us think it is merely a bit of cosmic nonsense even Mel Brooks probably could not have made up but would have had good fun with if he did.)  They probably need to relax and surely should not have been surprised. Hollywood has always followed  the politically  correct prejudices of the day as some examples will illustrate. Of course all of this will be  broad generalization about what I think are trends, not strict patterns without variation. Counterexamples  bucking the trends are plentiful and easy to find.

The first really famous American movie The Birth of a Nation, which was released in 1915, excused slavery, glorified the Ku Klux Klan, and presented black people as dangerous semi-savages who had to be kept in line.  This fairly accurately reflected the racial prejudices of the time, the Jim Crow politics of the south, and the views of the segregationist president of the United States Woodrow Wilson (who praised the movie’s accuracy and viewpoint).

The 1920’s were a time of popular disillusionment over the Great War, more relaxed social mores particularly for women, fewer social restraints concerning sex, and greatly increased prosperity.  A good fraction of the silent movies of the decade followed those trends fairly closely.

Things changed with the coming of the depression and  the Roosevelt administration. A reaction against the licentious and freewheeling ‘20s led to a motion picture code restricting both the depiction of sexuality and the content of plots. Movies of the 1930’s  tended to extol Roosevelt and the New Deal, attack wealth, business, and profit, glorify the mistreated and exploited little guy, and reflect the general collectivist political mood of the day. One movie Gabriel Over the White House even promoted a folksy, all-American version of the fuehrerprinzip as a solution for the nation’s problems.  Political correctness still dictated favorable treatment of the Confederacy and the Old South and no discussion of Jim Crow or the injustices suffered by black people in the south (perhaps because of a fear of offending movie goers in that region, perhaps also because the solidly Democratic south was a cornerstone of Roosevelt’s political power).  Gone With the Wind is the best known example of this, but a perhaps more blatant one comes from The Santa Fe Trail in which John Brown and his abolitionists and not the slaveholders are shown as the ones exploiting the black people.

The wind of course changed again after Pearl Harbor.  Industrialists were no longer presented as villainous exploiters but rather as dedicated partners with labor as producers for the war effort.  Instead of social conflicts, movies showed us guys from all groups and backgrounds (except for blacks) coming together as harmonious units to fight the war and tended to display a syrupy, new found reverence for traditional habits, religion, and folkways. War movies gave us cruel and vicious Nazis  (though almost all actually underestimated the Nazis’ actual savagery and crimes) and utterly depraved and barbarous Japanese. While a distinction was often made between ordinary Germans and Nazis, the Japanese were generally presented as evil as a race. This  fit the national mood at a  time when the Roosevelt administration was putting loyal Japanese Americans into concentration camps. There were as also various  pro-Soviet pictures such as Mission to Moscow and  The North Star glorifying and whitewashing  our cobelligerent of the time.

Movies’ presentations of Russia and communism changed completely and with almost Orwellian suddenness in the immediate post war years as  the Cold War began and the public learned about Soviet espionage and subversion in the United States. Hollywood gave us movies such as The Red Danube  and  Pickup on South Street showing Soviet  brutality in occupied nations and Soviet spying in the United States. Pro-collectivist propaganda in movies of that time usually was both subtle and well disguised.

During the era of good feeling of the Eisenhower and Kennedy years, movies generally were less obviously political in content than either immediately before or after that time. They did tend to reflect a national mood of optimism, ability to recognize and solve problems, and pride in the country and its history.  The trend of glorifying traditional mores, beliefs, and life styles continued, as did code based restrictions on the depiction of sexual activity and  the content of plots.

Things changed rapidly in the disastrous Johnson, Nixon, and Carter years.  Pessimism, cynicism, and overt hostility to the country and its culture became commonplace in both the general milieu and  the movies. Hollywood responded to the freer sexual mores of the time by abandoning the production code and its restrictions. New taboos and stereotypes regarding race and women  replaced the old, both in movies and society. Various old time Hollywood communists and fellow travelers who had been silent or careful during the post war years joined with a younger generation of leftists to give the movies a definite leftward slant. 

The 1980’s and 1990’s saw a bit of a counter trend as the country prospered, became more optimistic,  won the Cold War, and enjoyed the benefits of peace and success. It was not quite a return to the 1950’s, but films probably were on average less political and pessimistic. Then came George W. Bush, Barack Obama, the financial crisis, two long wars, and  the dogmatic political correctness of the present day. When the winds change again, probably so will Hollywood. It is that kind of business. Indeed one reason present day Hollywood people present business people in such a bad light may be that the only business they know well is their own.

The Return of John Pugsley

Many years ago John Pugsley published The Alpha Strategy, a book warning of the reckless and dangerous government policies of the day and advocating that people protect themselves from inflation by stocking up with long term (indeed multi-year if shelf life allowed)  supplies of food, tools, household goods, clothing items not subject to changing fashion, wine, and other storable items and by investing in commodities in preference to stocks or bonds. Pugsley’s thesis made good sense as a response to the events of the inflationary depression of the 1970’s. The book was well received and sold well enough to  make a best sellers’ list.  

However, his timing was awful. The book came out in 1980 and was widely distributed in 1981 just as Paul Volker’s fed was reversing the inflationary policies of the last decade and Ronald Reagan was giving the nation a different set of government policies, policies that would help lead to a quarter century of peace, unparalleled prosperity, declining inflation, and high real investment returns on both stocks and bonds. A person following Pugsley’s advice in 1981 would have missed out on some of the greatest investment opportunities of all time and would have lost money on a number of investments in commodities, including  precious metals.  Pugsley continued writing for many years before his death in 2011, but it is fair to say that he was never again as well known as he had been for a while in 1981.

Now, though, we have an inflationist federal reserve printing  money at truly shocking rates, a stagnant economy, high unemployment coupled with high monetary inflation, a lost decade and a third in the stock market, a pair of long and pointless wars in Asia, a pervasive sense of malaise with large numbers of people believing their children will have less opportunity and poorer lives than their own, an increasingly intrusive government imposing anti-growth regulations and restraints on the economy, and in George W. Bush and Obama a pair of presidents quite reminiscent of Richard Nixon and Jimmy Carter. It’s not exactly a repetition of the 1970’s, but there are some  similarities.

There are of course significant differences as well. The biggest is that this time there is no international threat comparable to the Cold War, which in the 1970’s the United States was losing. Also while we have had very serious monetary inflation, so far we have had only moderate price inflation this time unlike the 1970’s which had both.  Interest rates of all durations are at multi-decade  lows instead of the multi-decade highs of the 1970’s, and bonds have not yet  fallen into a bear market. 

 Still it may be time to take another look at John Pugsley and his alpha strategy of over thirty years ago.  Unless this is one of those rare times when it is valid to make the dreaded claim  that it’s  different this time, our present monetary inflation probably will lead to higher rates of  price inflation. It takes a great deal of faith in Ben Bernanke to assume the fed can act in just the right way at just the right time to prevent all that new money from producing higher prices above and beyond the stated inflation target limits.  Bonds have been in a secular bull market since about the time Pugsley published his book. With the P/E of a ten year treasury at over fifty to one and the P/E on a five year treasury at over one hundred and twenty five to one, and with both delivering a before tax nominal yield less than the present rate of inflation, it is hard not  to think that that bull market probably is in a bubble phase. Stocks are more attractive. They have done poorly for over a decade and will eventually do well, but it is not prudent  to be invested one hundred percent in stocks or anything else. Gold and silver have already had a multi-year run and may be near or even past long  term tops.  Cash has no immediate risk, but faces the near certainty that the longer it is held the less it will buy.

So it may not be a bad idea to follow some of Pugsley’s advice and do some stocking up on durable items to lock in lower prices than we will see in  the future. His book has useful advice on what things to buy and what things to avoid and tips on storage, insurance, and other practical considerations. The opportunity cost of doing  some of this versus investing more in bonds is quite low right now, and the risk is far less.  Doing a little investing in commodities may not be a bad idea either. Of course I would follow his alpha strategy only in  moderation and not whole hog. Remember 1981.  

Gun Control

A reelected Obama and his allies have begun new efforts for more gun control laws. We who believe in individual rights and limited government need to oppose those efforts.

We who believe in a right to arm ourselves do so as a consequence of a belief in a more fundamental right – the right of every person to self defense. We believe that a person has a right to protect himself, his family and associates, and his property against attack. Most of us also believe that a person can and should acquire the tools and skills to do so competently and effectively, which in the present context usually means getting firearms and learning to use them well and safely.  This belief in a right of self defense is the basis of our position on the political questions of  gun control, and, at bottom, a denial of  and contempt for that right are the basis of the position of the proponents of restrictive gun control.

It is no coincidence that most advocates of gun control are committed statists. There are a several  obvious reasons for this. If one believes that the government should decide and control most or all aspects of the citizens’ lives, it is natural for him also to think that the government is competent to provide all the protection anyone should ever need. If one believes that individuals are incompetent to deal with the vicissitudes and challenges of everyday life without the direct supervision of their betters in the government, it is natural to believe that  they are also unable to defend themselves and would be better off not resisting but rather submitting and hoping for the best when threatened or assaulted. Also, for those always seeking greater and more intrusive power, a disarmed populace is easier  to rule.

This last point is very important. The founding fathers of this country recognized the value of an armed citizenry as a deterrent to tyranny. It still is, and remains so as a general principle irrespective of how benignly the government or any government may be behaving at any particular time.  Governments and the notions of those in them change over time, and this deterrence is valuable as a permanent check on changes in really wrong directions. (In the light of all the conspiracy theories going around, I probably should mention explicitly that since this is a  general principle, it  has nothing to do with one’s opinion of the character or ambitions of either Obama or George W.  Bush.)

That leads to an  immediate political question for the millions of law abiding gun owners  to ask political advocates of gun control: since we pose absolutely no threat to them, why are they so eager to disarm us?  In the absence of any convincing answer, it is reasonable to consider the possibility that at least part of the reason is that they intend us harm and want us  to become more easily manageable.   

Sports Writing

Sports writing used to be a straightforward and fairly respectable occupation. Sportswriters covered the games and events, wrote occasional encomia to the great players, usually  left athletes’ personal lives alone except for public scandals and sob stories about players visiting sick kids, and generally had enough sense to know that the events they were covering were games presented for the amusement and entertainment of the public and not the destruction of the Hindenburg or the discovery of penicillin. While the trade certainly had its hacks, ignoramuses, and shamelessly heavy handed homers, many sportswriters were good and entertaining reporters,  and some, such Blackie Sherrod, were among the best and most thoughtful writers in any area of journalism. 

Things changed a few decades ago with the coming of so called socially significant reporting in sports. In principle this meant that in place of crusty old sportswriters who wrote mainly about sports we would have sensitive, socially aware sports journalists who would treat athletes and sporting events in the light of and as metaphors for a wider and deeply meaningful social and political context. In practice it meant that the American sports fans were treated to some of the most grandiose, self absorbed nonsense appearing in print or over the air anywhere, offered up by poseurs who strained to explain that sports (and thus those who reported on sports) were something far more important than mere games.  The epigones of Damon Runyon were supplanted by the epigones of Howard Cosell.

The new fashion quickly developed its own characteristics, rules, forms, and  clichés.  Readers usually could expect journalists to display their depth and significance by a tendency to inject themselves and their feelings into the stories they were covering, an icky emotionalism that would have embarrassed an old fashioned sob sister,  an unwavering devotion to the politically correct  prejudices of the day, a dutiful reverence for all things hip and urban, a snarky disdain for the lifestyles of most ordinary Americans, an almost morbid fascination with race, and an uncontrolled penchant for hyperbole and sweeping social generalization. 

People looking for an exemplary embodiment of this school of sports journalism can find one in Jane Leavy’s biography of Mickey Mantle.  (The book is also a well researched and well written biography apart from all the socially significant nonsense.) The title itself – The Last Boy Mickey Mantle and the End of America’s Childhood – proclaims that this book is no mere presentation of the life history of a guy who played baseball but rather some really big time, serious and significant stuff. The rest of the book lives up to that beginning ,and touches most of the expected bases. We are told that with his blond hair and winning smile Mantle served as “an unwitting antidote to the darkness and danger embodied in that other Fifties icon, Elvis Presley”, that he was the “Last Boy in the last decade ruled by boys”, and that  Mantle’s story is everyone’s story of a nation’s transition from  innocence to cynicism.  The author repeatedly injects herself and her feelings into her story, including a narrative of a fifty year old Mantle’s drunken sexual advances to her. She gives us the obligatory moralizing over race in the form of  fretting over whether Willie Mays was denied his due of affection and respect from fans because he was black and the obligatory linking of the end of Mantle’s career in 1968 to the assassinations  of the same year. She displays  an ongoing, pervasive condescension toward both of Mantle’s rural Oklahoma background and his later home in Dallas. The tone of the book is best summarized by a remarkable quote about the 1964 World Series, a quote which could have come from a particularly wickedly clever parody of the genre of socially significant sports writing. “The Cardinals lineup, with Curt Flood and Lou Brock in the outfield, showcased the future of America – young, black, ethnic, fast.”  That’s hard to top, but the author comes close to matching it in a number of places.

So do the writers and talking heads in much of the sports media these days. It would be nice to see an end to the reign of significance, but I don’t think that is the way to bet. 

Fiscal Cliff

The results of the recent goofy drama in Washington over the so called fiscal cliff should be a reason for optimism among those who favor lower taxes and smaller government. Yet many or most conservatives are  reacting with anger and gloom as though they had been routed by the leftists, focusing on the narrow and obvious and missing the more significant. Obama certainly won a tactical, political victory in that he got an increase in income taxes on  highly productive and successful people as he had demanded and promised his followers. However, that victory was inevitable from election day. It was guaranteed by Obama’s reelection and the political inanity of creating temporary tax rates during the Bush administration (and extending them as temporary in 2010). Obama was holding all the good cards.  The Republicans could give him what he said he wanted and raise taxes on some of the people or resist, do nothing, and give him a tax increase on everyone who pays income taxes, and one that he could blame on them to boot.  It was literally a case of heads he wins, tails they lose.

What many people are missing is that both the bill that was passed and the entire debate reflect a long term strategic trend favoring those of us opposed to high taxes and big government. We had the most committed leftist president in at least forty years, flush with hubris after his  reelection on a platform of punishing the successful, and the most he dared to propose was a change of a few hundred basis point in the income tax rates of about two percent of the population. He and his party did not attempt to raise general income and estate tax rates back to the levels of the 1990’s (which themselves  were lower than the rates after the first round of tax cuts under Reagan), even though they could have had those tax rates simply by sitting still and letting the clock run.

What Obama got was a bill that was  less than he demanded and that left him and the left in a weaker position going forward. Income tax rates were  raised on fewer successful people than he had proposed. The vast majority of taxpayers kept the present rates.  Estate taxes were limited by a five million dollar exemption  that was indexed to inflation. The alternative minimum tax was also  indexed to inflation. Income tax  rates were made “permanent” for everyone, meaning that in the future the politicians actually will have to vote to do so if they want to raise taxes. This took away the intrinsic advantage Obama had in this controversy and made future taxes increases harder to do and less likely to happen. Republicans conceded nothing on the debt limit or anything else that would have limited their ability to deal with spending in the future.  To call Obama’s victory pyrrhic is a gross understatement.  Now with taxes out of the way at least for a while, it is  time for a fight over spending.