Today’s News 9th July 2018

• Comparing Average Rent In 540 Cities Around The Globe

  If you’ve ever wanted to know how much it costs to live around the world by budget, look no further. A Reddit user used data extrapolated from Numbeo to create a chart of the average cost to rent a dwelling in 540 cities worldwide, separated in $50 increments and color-coded by geographic region.

  It costs an average of $800 per month, for example, to rent in Bangkok, Montreal and Muscat, Oman.

  

  KyleKun’s process: 

  I used Numbeo’s Cost of Living Index Rate (pulled on June 16, 2018) to obtain the rent index for the cities featured in this chart. I used my home town of Cincinnati’s average monthly rent (about $950) as the reference number to calculate every other city’s average monthly rent, based on each city’s respective rent index.

  Next, I rounded each rental value to the nearest $50 interval. You can check my work here… I tried to choose cities that somewhat contrasted with each other, were in totally different geographies, or in cases where it was sort of unexpected (to me) that the cities had similar rental costs based on the data.

  That said, things such as affordability and average dwelling size are absent this analysis – which KyleKun says he plans to integrate in the future. Crime rate, happiness index and average temperatures would also be interesting metrics to be able to filter and sort by in an interactive format – but let’s not get carried away. 

  (click to enlarge)

  

  In terms of affordability – the most expensive (San Francisco) doesn’t necessarily mean it’s the least affordable. As UBS reported recently, Hong Kong may not be the most expensive city to live in – but it’s the world’s most unaffordable – as a skilled service worker needs to work an average of 20 years to buy a 650-square-foot (60 square meter) apartment near the city center. 

  [insert: ubs unaffordable.jpg , hong kong centaline.jpg ]

  

  

  It will be interesting to see what KyleKun’s chart looks like 10 years from now, and how many years the average skilled service worker in Hong Kong needs to afford a tiny apartment. 

  

• NATO Is Obsolete

  Authored by Christian Whiton via The National Interest,

  “Europe is prosperous and treats America like a patsy. Let it stand on its own.”

  Before President Donald Trump attempts real diplomacy with Russian President Vladimir Putin at a summit in Helsinki on July 16, he’ll first be subjected to another summit. That first summit is a gathering of leaders of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). These leaders continually assure the United States they are America’s best allies, even as most contribute little to America’s defense and rack up huge trade surpluses with the United States. Trump will insist on a better deal but should go farther and wind down U.S. membership in NATO.

  

  After the alliance was established in 1949, its first secretary general, Lord Hastings Ismay, summed up its purpose concisely: “to keep the Russians out, the Americans in, and the Germans down.” The unofficial mission matched the time well: Western Europe’s postwar future was clouded by the prospect of a Soviet invasion, American insularity, or German militarism—all possible given the preceding decades of history.

  Nearly seventy years later, none of these concerns still exist. Furthermore, NATO’s opposing alliance during the Cold War, the Warsaw Pact, quit the Soviet Bloc in 1989, and the Soviet Union itself passed into history in 1991—twenty-seven years ago.

  Despite endless searches for a new mission to justify its massive burden on U.S. taxpayers, NATO has failed to be of much use since then. As its boosters like to remind us, after 9/11, the alliance invoked its Article 5 mutual-defense provision on our behalf. But action from America’s allies did not follow the grandiose gesture—the NATO mission in Afghanistan relied mostly on U.S. forces and effectively failed.

  Today, the alliance’s bureaucrats and some member states spotlight a threat from Russia as a reason for keeping the organization alive, along with a laundry list of “train and equip” missions.

  

  Yet NATO members’ defense budgets don’t reflect a real sense of danger from Russia or anyone else. Among the twenty-nine members, only the United States is really serious about its Article 3 obligations to defend itself, spending approximately $700 billion or 3.5 percent of its GDP on defense. No other NATO member comes close to this proportion, and the vast majority fail even to meet the modest, self-imposed requirement to devote at least 2 percent of GDP to defense.

  Britain and Poland are rare members that meet the 2 percent requirement. One of the worst free-riders is Canada, which spends just 1 percent of its GDP on security, amounting to $20 billion. Furthermore, Germany spends a similarly pathetic 1.2 percent.

  Compare that to non-NATO members facing real threats, some of which spend 5-10 percent of their GDPs on defense. These include Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, who must contend with Iran and spend nearly a combined $100 billion. Israel, which faces the same enemy, adds $15 billion to the equation.

  Despite protestations of poverty at a time when their economies have never been larger, NATO members are more than willing to rack up additional liabilities, knowing America has their back. Last year, the alliance welcomed Montenegro. It is now poised to admit the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, which would mean the United States is pledged to defend a nation that devotes just $120 million per year to its own defense, not quite as much as the Cincinnati Police Department.

  But the reality is there is no truly capable Russian foe seriously threatening the West. Russia has one million uniformed personnel in its military, the world’s second-largest behind America, but the European Union could easily afford to match that with its combined $17 trillion economy—ten times larger than Russia’s. However, it needn’t bother as Moscow spends just $61 billion on its overwrought military, which doubles as an employment program.

  Russia’s Vladimir Putin has gotten the most from Russia’s military, occupying parts of Georgia and Ukraine and gaining influence in Syria by backing the Assad regime. Still, his success in all three cases rested heavily on surprises that Moscow seems unlikely to be able to repeat against prepared and adequately funded European militaries.

  Yer we should expect to hear none of this nuance at the NATO summit, as poohbahs of the dying old European political order gather to tut-tut President Trump in the alliance’s fancy new $1.4 billion headquarters, funded predominantly by American taxpayers.

  To get out of this abusive relationship, Trump should begin the process of limiting America’s role in NATO. A good model is that of Sweden, which cooperates with NATO on some matters and not on others. Such an approach could allow joint training, but end the practice of having over-burdened U.S. taxpayers foot the bill for wealthy Europeans’ security. As part of this plan, Trump could mothball U.S. bases in Europe and shift most resources spent there and in the Atlantic to the Indo-Pacific region, where China and Iran pose real threats to America—and against which NATO is irrelevant.

  

  Europe is prosperous and treats America like a patsy. Let it stand on its own.

  

• The Most Intolerant Wins: Nassim Taleb Exposes The Dictatorship Of The Small Minority

  Authored by Nassim Nicholas Taleb via Medium.com,

  (Chapter from Skin in the Game)

  How Europe will eat Halal …  Why you don’t have to smoke in the smoking section …  Your food choices on the fall of the Saudi king… How to prevent a friend from working too hard… Omar Sharif ‘s conversion …  How to make a market collapse

  The best example I know that gives insights into the functioning of a complex system is with the following situation. It suffices for an intransigent minority –a certain type of intransigent minorities –to reach a minutely small level, say three or four percent of the total population, for the entire population to have to submit to their preferences. Further, an optical illusion comes with the dominance of the minority: a naive observer would be under the impression that the choices and preferences are those of the majority. If it seems absurd, it is because our scientific intuitions aren’t calibrated for that (fughedabout scientific and academic intuitions and snap judgments; they don’t work and your standard intellectualization fails with complex systems, though not your grandmothers’ wisdom).

  The main idea behind complex systems is that the ensemble behaves in way not predicted by the components. The interactions matter more than the nature of the units. Studying individual ants will never (one can safely say never for most such situations), never give us an idea on how the ant colony operates. For that, one needs to understand an ant colony as an ant colony, no less, no more, not a collection of ants. This is called an “emergent” property of the whole, by which parts and whole differ because what matters is the interactions between such parts. And interactions can obey very simple rules. The rule we discuss in this chapter is the minority rule.

  

  The minority rule will show us how it all it takes is a small number of intolerant virtuous people with skin in the game, in the form of courage, for society to function properly.

  This example of complexity hit me, ironically, as I was attending the New England Complex Systems institute summer barbecue. As the hosts were setting up the table and unpacking the drinks, a friend who was observant and only ate Kosher dropped by to say hello. I offered him a glass of that type of yellow sugared water with citric acid people sometimes call lemonade, almost certain that he would reject it owing to his dietary laws. He didn’t. He drank the liquid called lemonade, and another Kosher person commented: “liquids around here are Kosher”. We looked at the carton container. There was a fine print: a tiny symbol, a U inside a circle, indicating that it was Kosher. The symbol will be detected by those who need to know and look for the minuscule print. As to others, like myself, I had been speaking prose all these years without knowing, drinking Kosher liquids without knowing they were Kosher liquids.

  Figure 1 The lemonade container with the circled U indicating it is (literally) Kosher.

  

  Criminals With Peanut Allergies

  A strange idea hit me. The Kosher population represents less than three tenth of a percent of the residents of the United States. Yet, it appears that almost all drinks are Kosher. Why? Simply because going full Kosher allows the producer, grocer, restaurant, to not have to distinguish between Kosher and nonkosher for liquids, with special markers, separate aisles, separate inventories, different stocking sub-facilities. And the simple rule that changes the total is as follows:

  A Kosher (or halal) eater will never eat nonkosher (or nonhalal) food , but a nonkosher eater isn’t banned from eating kosher.

  Or, rephrased in another domain:

  A disabled person will not use the regular bathroom but a nondisabled person will use the bathroom for disabled people.

  Granted, sometimes, in practice, we hesitate to use the bathroom with the disabled sign on it owing to some confusion –mistaking the rule for the one for parking cars, under the belief that the bathroom is reserved for exclusive use by the handicapped.

  Someone with a peanut allergy will not eat products that touch peanuts but a person without such allergy can eat items without peanut traces in them.

  Which explains why it is so hard to find peanuts on airplanes and why schools are peanut-free (which, in a way, increases the number of persons with peanut allergies as reduced exposure is one of the causes behind such allergies).

  Let us apply the rule to domains where it can get entertaining:

  An honest person will never commit criminal acts but a criminal will readily engage in legal acts.

  Let us call such minority an intransigent group, and the majority a flexible one. And the rule is an asymmetry in choices.

  I once pulled a prank on a friend. Years ago when Big Tobacco were hiding and repressing the evidence of harm from secondary smoking, New York had smoking and nonsmoking sections in restaurants (even airplanes had, absurdly, a smoking section). I once went to lunch with a friend visiting from Europe: the restaurant only had availability in the smoking sections. I convinced the friend that we needed to buy cigarettes as we had to smoke in the smoking section. He complied.

  Two more things.

  First, the geography of the terrain, that is, the spatial structure, matters a bit; it makes a big difference whether the intransigents are in their own district or are mixed with the rest of the population. If the people following the minority rule lived in Ghettos, with their separate small economy, then the minority rule would not apply. But, when a population has an even spatial distribution, say the ratio of such a minority in a neighborhood is the same as that in the village, that in the village is the same as in the county, that in the county is the same as that in state, and that in the sate is the same as nationwide, then the (flexible) majority will have to submit to the minority rule.

  Second, the cost structure matters quite a bit. It happens in our first example that making lemonade compliant with Kosher laws doesn’t change the price by much, not enough to justify inventories. But if the manufacturing of Kosher lemonade cost substantially more, then the rule will be weakened in some nonlinear proportion to the difference in costs. If it cost ten times as much to make Kosher food, then the minority rule will not apply, except perhaps in some very rich neighborhoods.

  Muslims have Kosher laws so to speak, but these are much narrower and apply only to meat. For Muslim and Jews have near-identical slaughter rules (all Kosher is halal for most Sunni Muslims, or was so in past centuries, but the reverse is not true). Note that these slaughter rules are skin-in-the-game driven, inherited from the ancient Eastern Mediterranean [discussed in Chapter] Greek and Semitic practice to only worship the gods if one has skin in the game, sacrifice meat to the divinity, and eat what’s left. The Gods do not like cheap signaling.

  Now consider this manifestation of the dictatorship of the minority. In the United Kingdom, where the (practicing) Muslim population is only three to four percent, a very high number of the meat we find is halal. Close to seventy percent of lamb imports from New Zealand are halal. Close to ten percent of the chain Subway carry halal-only stores (meaning no pork), in spite of the high costs from the loss of business of nonpork stores. The same holds in South Africa where, with the same proportion of Muslims, a disproportionately higher number of chicken is Halal certified. But in the U.K. and other Christian countries, halal is not neutral enough to reach a high level, as people may rebel against forceful abidance to other’s religious norms. For instance, the 7th Century Christian Arab poet Al-Akhtal made a point to never eat halal meat, in his famous defiant poem boasting his Christianity: “I do not eat sacrificial flesh”. (Al-Akhtal was reflecting the standard Christian reaction from three or four centuries earlier — Christians were tortured in pagan times by being forced to eat sacrificial meat, which they found sacrilegious. Many Christian martyrs starved to death.)

  One can expect the same rejection of religious norms to take place in the West as the Muslim populations in Europe grows.

  So the minority rule may produce a larger share of halal food in the stores than warranted by the proportion of halal eaters in the population, but with a headwind somewhere because some people may have a taboo against Moslem food. But with some non-religious Kashrut rules, so to speak, the share can be expected converge to closer to a hundred percent (or some high number). In the U.S. and Europe, “organic” food companies are selling more and more products precisely because of the minority rule and because ordinary and unlabeled food may be seen by some to contain pesticides, herbicides, and transgenic genetically modified organisms, “GMOs” with, according to them, unknown risks. (What we call GMOs in this context means transgenic food, entailing the transfer of genes from a foreign organism or species). Or it could be for some existential reasons, cautious behavior, or Burkean conservatism –some may not want to venture too far too fast from what their grandparents ate. Labeling something “organic” is a way to say that it contains no transgenic GMOs.

  In promoting genetically modified food via all manner of lobbying, purchasing of congressmen, and overt scientific propaganda (with smear campaigns against such persons as yours truly), the big agricultural companies foolishly believed that all they needed was to win the majority. No, you idiots. As I said, your snap “scientific” judgment is too naive in these type of decisions. Consider that transgenic-GMO eaters will eat nonGMOs, but not the reverse. So it may suffice to have a tiny, say no more than five percent of evenly spatially distributed population of non-genetically modified eaters for the entire population to have to eat non-GMO food. How? Say you have a corporate event, a wedding, or a lavish party to celebrate the fall of the Saudi Arabian regime, the bankruptcy of the rent-seeking investment bank Goldman Sachs, or the public reviling of Ray Kotcher, chairman of Ketchum the public relation firm that smears scientists and scientific whistleblowers on behalf of big corporations. Do you need to send a questionnaire asking people if they eat or don’t eat transgenic GMOs and reserve special meals accordingly? No. You just select everything non-GMO, provided the price difference is not consequential. And the price difference appears to be small enough to be negligible as (perishable) food costs in America are largely, about up to eighty or ninety percent, determined by distribution and storage, not the cost at the agricultural level. And as organic food (and designations such as “natural”) is in higher demand, from the minority rule, distribution costs decrease and the minority rule ends up accelerating in its effect.

  Big Ag (the large agricultural firms) did not realize that this is the equivalent of entering a game in which one needed to not just win more points than the adversary, but win ninety-seven percent of the total points just to be safe. It is strange, once again, to see Big Ag who spent hundreds of millions of dollars on research cum smear campaigns, with hundreds of these scientists who think of themselves as more intelligent than the rest of the population, miss such an elementary point about asymmetric choices.

  Another example: do not think that the spread of automatic shifting cars is necessarily due to the majority of drivers initially preferring automatic; it can just be because those who can drive manual shifts can always drive automatic, but the reciprocal is not true.

  The method of analysis employed here is called renormalization group, a powerful apparatus in mathematical physics that allows us to see how things scale up (or down). Let us examine it next –without mathematics.

  Renormalization Group

  

  Figure 2 shows four boxes exhibiting what is called fractal self-similarity. Each box contains four smaller boxes. Each one of the four boxes will contain four boxes, and so all the way down, and all the way up until we reach a certain level. There are two colors: yellow for the majority choice, and pink for the minority one.

  Assume the smaller unit contains four people, a family of four. One of them is in the intransigent minority and eats only non-GMO food (which includes organic). The color of the box is pink and the others yellow . We “renormalize once” as we move up: the stubborn daughter manages to impose her rule on the four and the unit is now all pink, i.e. will opt for nonGMO. Now, step three, you have the family going to a barbecue party attended by three other families. As they are known to only eat nonGMO, the guests will cook only organic. The local grocery store realizing the neighborhood is only nonGMO switches to nonGMO to simplify life, which impacts the local wholesaler, and the stories continues and “renormalizes”.

  By some coincidence, the day before the Boston barbecue, I was flaneuring in New York, and I dropped by the office of a friend I wanted to prevent from working, that is, engage in an activity that when abused, causes the loss of mental clarity, in addition to bad posture and loss of definition in the facial features. The French physicist Serge Galam happened to be visiting and chose the friend’s office to kill time. Galam was first to apply these renormalization techniques to social matters and political science; his name was familiar as he is the author of the main book on the subject, which had then been sitting for months in an unopened Amazon box in my basement. He introduced me to his research and showed me a computer model of elections by which it suffices that some minority exceeds a certain level for its choices to prevail.

  So the same illusion exists in political discussions, spread by the political “scientists”: you think that because some extreme right or left wing party has, say, the support of ten percent of the population that their candidate would get ten percent of the votes. No: these baseline voters should be classified as “inflexible” and will always vote for their faction. But some of the flexible voters can also vote for that extreme faction, just as nonKosher people can eat Kosher, and these people are the ones to watch out for as they may swell the numbers of votes for the extreme party. Galam’s models produced a bevy of counterintuitive effects in political science –and his predictions turned out to be way closer to real outcomes than the naive consensus.

  The Veto

  The fact we saw from the renormalization group the “veto” effect as a person in a group can steer choices. Rory Sutherland suggested that this explains why some fast-food chains, such as McDonald thrive, not because they offer a great product, but because they are not vetoed in a certain socio-economic group –and by a small proportions of people in that group at that. To put it in technical terms, it was a best worse-case divergence from expectations: a lower variance and lower mean.

  When there are few choices, McDonald’s appears to be a safe bet. It is also a safe bet in shady places with few regulars where the food variance from expectation can be consequential –I am writing these lines in Milan’s cental train station and as offensive as it can be to a visitor from far away, McDonald’s is one of the few restaurants there. Shockingly, one sees Italians there seeking refuge from a risky meal.

  Pizza is the same story: it is commonly accepted food and outside a fancy party nobody will be blamed for ordering it.

  Rory wrote to me about the asymmetry beer-wine and the choices made for parties: “Once you have ten percent or more women at a party, you cannot serve only beer. But most men will drink wine. So you only need one set of glasses if you serve only wine  –  the universal donor, to use the language of blood groups.”

  This strategy of the best lower bound might have been played by the Khazars looking to chose between Islam, Judaism, and Christianity. Legend has it that three high ranking delegations (bishops, rabbis and sheikhs) came to make the sales pitch. They asked the Christians: if you were forced to chose between Judaism and Islam, which one would you pick? Judaism, they replied. Then they asked the Muslim: which of the two, Christianity or Judaism. Judaism, the Muslim said. Judaim it was and the tribe converted.

  Lingua Franca

  If a meeting is taking place in Germany in the Teutonic-looking conference room of a corporation that is sufficiently international or European, and one of the persons in the room doesn’t speak German, the entire meeting will be run in… English, the brand of inelegant English used in corporations across the world. That way they can equally offend their Teuronic ancestors and the English language. It all started with the asymmetric rule that those who are nonnative in English know (bad) English, but the reverse (English speakers knowing other languages) is less likely. French was supposed to be the language of diplomacy as civil servants coming from aristocratic background used it –while their more vulgar compatriots involved in commerce relied on English. In the rivalry between the two languages, English won as commerce grew to dominate modern life; the victory it has nothing to do with the prestige of France or the efforts of their civil servants in promoting their more or less beautiful Latinized and logically spelled language over the orthographically confusing one of trans-Channel meat-pie eaters.

  We can thus get some intuition on how the emergence of lingua francalanguages can come from minority rules–and that is a point that is not visible to linguists. Aramaic is a Semitic language which succeeded Canaanite (that is, Phoenician-Hebrew) in the Levant and resembles Arabic; it was the language Jesus Christ spoke. The reason it came to dominate the Levant and Egypt isn’t because of any particular imperial Semitic power or the fact that they have interesting noses. It was the Persians –who speak an Indo-European language –who spread Aramaic, the language of Assyria, Syria, and Babylon. Persians taught Egyptians a language that was not their own. Simply, when the Persians invaded Babylon they found an administration with scribes who could only use Aramaic and didn’t know Persian, so Aramaic became the state language. If your secretary can only take dictation in Aramaic, Aramaic is what you will use. This led to the oddity of Aramaic being used in Mongolia, as records were maintained in the Syriac alphabet (Syriac is the Eastern dialect of Aramaic). And centuries later, the story would repeat itself in reverse, with the Arabs using Greek in their early administration in the seventh and eighth’s centuries. For during the Hellenistic era, Greek replaced Aramaic as the lingua franca in the Levant, and the scribes of Damascus maintained their records in Greek. But it was not the Greeks who spread Greek around the Mediterranean –Alexander (himself not Greek but Macedonian and spoke a different dialect of Greek) did not lead to an immediate deep cultural Hellenization. It was the Romans who accelerated the spreading of Greek, as they used it in their administration across the Eastern empire.

  A French Canadian friend from Montreal, Jean-Louis Rheault, commented as follows, bemoaning the loss of language of French Canadians outside narrowly provincial areas. He said: “In Canada, when we say bilingual, it is English speaking and when we say “French speaking” it becomes bilingual.”

  Decentralize, Again

  Another attribute of decentralization, and one that the “intellectuals” opposing an exit of Britain from the European Union (Brexit ) don’t get. If one needs, say a three pct. threshold in a political unit for the minority rule to take its effect, and on average the stubborn minority represents three pct. of the population, with variations around the average, then some states will be subject to the rule, but not others. If on the other hand we merged all states in one, then the minority rule will prevail all across. This is the reason the U.S.A. works so well as, I have been repeating to everyone who listens, we are a federation, not a republic. To use the language of Antifragile, decentralization is convex to variations.

  Genes vs Languages

  Looking at genetic data in the Eastern Mediterranean with my collaborator the geneticist Pierre Zalloua, we noticed that both invaders, Turks and Arabs left little genes and in the case of Turkey, the tribes from East and Central Asia brought an entirely new language. Turkey, shockingly, still has the populations of Asia Minor you read about in history books, but with new names. Further, Zalloua and his colleagues have shown that Canaanites from 3700 years ago represent more than nine tenth of the genes of current residents of the state of Lebanon, with only a tiny amount of new genes added, in spite of about every possible army having dropped by for sightseeing and some pillaging. While Turks are Mediterraneans who speak an East Asian language, the French (North of Avignon) are largely of Northern European stock, yet they speak a Mediterranean language.

  So:

  Genes follow majority rules; languages minority rule

  Languages travel; genes less so

  This shows us the recent mistake to build racial theories on language, dividing people into “Aryans” and “Semites”, based on linguistic considerations. While the subject was central to the German Nazis, the practice continues today in one form or another, often benign. For the great irony is that Nordic supremacists (“Aryan”), while anti-Semitic, used the classical Greeks to give themselves a pedigree and a link to a glorious civilization, but didn’t realize that the Greeks and their Mediterranean “Semitic” neighbors were actually genetically close to one another. It has been recently shown that both ancient Greeks and Bronze age Levantines share an Anatolian origin. It just happened that the languages diverged.

  The One-Way Street of Religions

  In the same manner, the spread of Islam in the Near East where Christianity was heavily entrenched (it was born there) can be attributed to two simple asymmetries. The original Islamic rulers weren’t particularly interested in converting Christians as these provided them with tax revenues –the proselytism of Islam did not address those called “people of the book”, i.e. individuals of Abrahamic faith. In fact, my ancestors who survived thirteen centuries under Muslim rule saw advantages in not being Muslim: mostly in the avoidance of military conscription.

  The two asymmetric rules were are as follows.

  First, if a non Muslim man under the rule of Islam marries a Muslim woman, he needs to convert to Islam –and if either parents of a child happens to be Muslim, the child will be Muslim.

  Second, becoming Muslim is irreversible, as apostasy is the heaviest crime under the religion, sanctioned by the death penalty. The famous Egyptian actor Omar Sharif, born Mikhael Demetri Shalhoub, was of Lebanese Christian origins. He converted to Islam to marry a famous Egyptian actress and had to change his name to an Arabic one. He later divorced, but did not revert to the faith of his ancestors.

  Under these two asymmetric rules, one can do simple simulations and see how a small Islamic group occupying Christian (Coptic) Egypt can lead, over the centuries, to the Copts becoming a tiny minority. All one needs is a small rate of interfaith marriages. Likewise, one can see how Judaism doesn’t spread and tends to stay in the minority, as the religion has opposite rules: the mother is required to be Jewish, causing interfaith marriages to leave the community. An even stronger asymmetry than that of Judaism explains the depletion in the Near East of three Gnostic faiths: the Druze, the Ezidi, and the Mandeans (Gnostic religions are those with mysteries and knowledge that is typically accessible to only a minority of elders, with the rest of the members in the dark about the details of the faith). Unlike Islam that requires either parents to be Muslim, and Judaism that asks for at least the mother to have the faith, these three religions require both parents to be of the faith, otherwise the person says toodaloo to the community.

  Egypt has a flat terrain. The distribution of the population presents homogeneous mixtures there, which permits renormalization (i.e. allows the asymmetric rule to prevail) –we saw earlier in the chapter that for Kosher rules to work, one needed Jews to be somewhat spread out across the country. But in places such as Lebanon, Galilee, and Northern Syria, with mountainous terrain, Christians and other Non Sunni Muslims remained concentrated. Christians not being exposed to Muslims, experienced no intermarriage.

  Egypt’s Copts suffered from another problem: the irreversibility of Islamic conversions. Many Copts during Islamic rule converted to Islam when it was merely an administrative procedure, something that helps one land a job or handle a problem that requires Islamic jurisprudence. One do not have to really believe in it since Islam doesn’t conflict markedly with Orthodox Christianity. Little by little a Christian or Jewish family bearing the marrano-style conversion becomes truly converted, as, a couple of generations later, the descendants forget the arrangement of their ancestors.

  So all Islam did was out-stubborn Christianity, which itself won thanks to its own stubbornness. For, before Islam, the original spread of Christianity in the Roman empire can be largely seen due to… the blinding intolerance of Christians, their unconditional, aggressive and proselyting recalcitrance. Roman pagans were initially tolerant of Christians, as the tradition was to share gods with other members of the empire. But they wondered why these Nazarenes didn’t want to give and take gods and offer that Jesus fellow to the Roman pantheon in exchange for some other gods. What, our gods aren’t good enough for them? But Christians were intolerant of Roman paganism. The “persecutions” of the Christians had vastly more to do with the intolerance of the Christians for the pantheon and local gods, than the reverse. What we read is history written by the Christian side, not the Greco-Roman one.

  We know too little about the Roman side during the rise of Christianity, as hagiographies have dominated the discourse: we have for instance the narrative of the martyr Saint Catherine, who kept converting her jailors until she was beheaded, except that… she may have never existed. There are endless histories of Christian martyrs and saints –but very little about the other side, Pagan heroes. All we have is the bit we know about the reversion to Christianity during the emperor Julian’s apostasy and the writings of his entourage of Syrian-Greek pagans such as Libanius Antiochus. Julian had tried to go back to Ancient Paganism in vain: it was like trying to keep a balloon under water. And it was not because the majority was pagan as historians mistakenly think: it was because the Christian side was too unyielding. Christianity had great minds such as Gregorius of Nazianzen and Basil of Caesaria, but nothing to match the great orator Libanius, not even close. (My heuristic is that the more pagan, the more brilliant one’s mind, and the higher one’s ability to handle nuances and ambiguity. Purely monotheistic religious such as Protestant Christianity, Salafi Islam, or fundamentalist atheism accommodate literalist and mediocre minds that cannot handle ambiguity.)

  In fact we can observe in the history of Mediterranean “religions” or, rather, rituals and systems of behavior and belief, a drift dictated by the intolerant, actually bringing the system closer to what we can call a religion. Judaism might have almost lost because of the mother-rule and the confinement to a tribal base, but Christianity ruled, and for the very same reasons, Islam did. Islam? there have been many Islams, the final accretion quite different from the earlier ones. For Islam itself is ending up being taken over (in the Sunni branch) by the purists simply because these were more intolerant than the rest: the Wahhabis, founders of Saudi Arabia, were the ones who destroyed the shrines, and to impose the maximally intolerant rule, in a manner that was later imitated by “ISIS” (the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria/the Levant). Every single accretion of Sunni Islam seems to be there to accommodate the most intolerant of its branches.

  Imposing Virtue on Others

  This idea of one-sidedness can help us debunk a few more misconceptions. How do books get banned? Certainly not because they offend the average person –most persons are passive and don’t really care, or don’t care enough to request the banning. It looks like, from past episodes, that all it takes is a few (motivated) activists for the banning of some books, or the black-listing of some people. The great philosopher and logician Bertrand Russell lost his job at the City University of New York owing to a letter by an angry –and stubborn –mother who did not wish to have her daughter in the same room as the fellow with dissolute lifestyle and unruly ideas.

  The same seems to apply to prohibitions –at least the prohibition of alcohol in the United States which led to interesting Mafia stories.

  Let us conjecture that the formation of moral values in society doesn’t come from the evolution of the consensus. No, it is the most intolerant person who imposes virtue on others precisely because of that intolerance. The same can apply to civil rights.

  An insight as to how the mechanisms of religion and transmission of morals obey the same renormalization dynamics as dietary laws –and how we can show that morality is more likely to be something enforced by a minority. We saw earlier in the chapter the asymmetry between obeying and breaking rules: a law-abiding (or rule abiding) fellow always follows the rules, but a felon or someone with looser sets of principles will not always break the rules. Likewise we discussed the strong asymmetric effects of the halal dietary laws. Let us merge the two. It turns out that, in classical Arabic, the term halal has one opposite: haram. Violating legal and moral rules –any rule — is called haram. It is the exact same interdict that governs food intake and all other human behaviors, like sleeping with the wife of the neighbor, lending with interest (without partaking of downside of the borrower) or killing one’s landlord for pleasure. Haram is haram and is asymmetric.

  From that we can see that once a moral rule is established, it would suffice to have a small intransigent minority of geographically distributed followers to dictate the norm in society. The sad news, as we will see in the next chapter, is that one person looking at mankind as an aggregate may mistakenly believe that humans are spontaneously becoming more moral, better, more gentle, have better breath, when it applies to only a small proportion of mankind.

  The Stability of the Minority Rule, A Probabilistic Argument

  A probabilistic argument in favor of the minority rule dictating societal values is as follows. Wherever you look across societies and histories, you tend to find the same general moral laws prevailing, with some, but not significant, variations: do not steal (at least not from within the tribe); do not hunt orphans for pleasure; do not gratuitously beat up passers by for training, use instead a boxing bags (unless you are Spartan and even then you can only kill a limited number of helots for training purposes), and similar interdicts. And we can see these rules evolving over time to become more universal, expanding to a broader set, to progressively include slaves, other tribes, other species (animals, economists), etc. And one property of these laws: they are black-and-white, binary, discrete, and allow no shadow. You cannot steal “a little bit” or murder “moderately”. You cannot keep Kosher and eat “just a little bit” of pork on Sunday barbecues.

  Now it would be vastly more likely that these values emerged from a minority that the majority. Why? Take the following two theses:

  Outcomes are paradoxically more stable under the minority rule — the variance of the results is lower and the rule is more likely to be emerge independently across populations.

  What emerges from the minority rule is more likely to be be black-and-white.

  An example. Consider that an evil person wants to poison the collective by putting some product into soda cans. He has two options. The first is cyanide, which obeys a minority rule: a drop of poison (higher than a small threshold) makes the entire liquid poisonous. The second is a “majority”-style poison; it requires more than half the liquid to be poisonous in order to kill. Now look at the inverse problem, a collection of dead people after a dinner party, and you need to investigate the cause. The local Sherlock Holmes would assert that conditional on the outcome that all people drinking the soda having been killed, the evil man opted for the first not the second option. Simply, the majority rule leads to fluctuations around the average, with a high rate of survival.

  The black-and-white character of these societal laws can be explained with the following. Assume that under a certain regime, when you mix white and dark blue in various combinations, you don’t get variations of light blue, but dark blue. Such a regime is vastly more likely to produce dark blue than another rule that allows more shades of blue.

  Popper’s Paradox

  I was at a large multi-table dinner party, the kind of situation where you have to choose between the vegetarian risotto and the non-vegetarian option when I noticed that my neighbor had his food catered (including silverware) on a tray reminiscent of airplane fare. The dishes were sealed with aluminum foil. He was evidently ultra-Kosher. It did not bother him to be seated with prosciutto eaters who, in addition, mix butter and meat in the same dishes. He just wanted to be left alone to follow his own preferences.

  For Jews and Muslim minorities such as Shiites, Sufis, and associated religions such as Druze and Alawis, the aim is for people to leave them alone so they can satisfy their own dietary preferences –largely, with historical exceptions here and there. But had my neighbor been a Sunni Salafi, he would have required the entire room to be eating Halal. Perhaps the entire building. Perhaps the entire town. Hopefully the entire country. Hopefully the entire planet. Indeed, given the total lack of separation between church and state, and between the holy and the profane (Chapter x), to him Haram (the opposite of Halal) means literally illegal. The entire room was committing a legal violation.

  As I am writing these lines, people are disputing whether the freedom of the enlightened West can be undermined by the intrusive policies that would be needed to fight fundamentalists.As I am writing these lines, people are disputing whether the freedom of the enlightened West can be undermined by the intrusive policies that would be needed to fight Salafi fundamentalists.

  Clearly can democracy –by definition the majority — tolerate enemies? The question is as follows: “ Would you agree to deny the freedom of speech to every political party that has in its charter the banning the freedom of speech?” Let’s go one step further, “Should a society that has elected to be tolerant be intolerant about intolerance?”

  This is in fact the incoherence that Kurt Gödel (the grandmaster of logical rigor) detected in the constitution while taking the naturalization exam. Legend has it that Gödel started arguing with the judge and Einstein, who was his witness during the process, saved him.

  I wrote about people with logical flaws asking me if one should be “skeptical about skepticism”; I used a similar answer as Popper when was asked if “ one could falsify falsification”.

  We can answer these points using the minority rule. Yes, an intolerant minority can control and destroy democracy. Actually, as we saw, it willeventually destroy our world.

  So, we need to be more than intolerant with some intolerant minorities. It is not permissible to use “American values” or “Western principles” in treating intolerant Salafism (which denies other peoples’ right to have their own religion). The West is currently in the process of committing suicide.

  The Irreverence of Markets and Science

  Now consider markets. We can say that markets aren’t the sum of market participants, but price changes reflect the activities of the most motivatedbuyer and seller. Yes, the most motivated rules. Indeed this is something that only traders seem to understand: why a price can drop by ten percent because of a single seller. All you need is a stubborn seller. Markets react in a way that is disproportional to the impetus. The overall stock markets represent currently more than thirty trillions dollars but a single order in 2008, only fifty billion, that is less than two tenth of a percent of the total, caused them to drop by close to ten percent, causing losses of around three trillion. It was an order activated by the Parisian Bank Société Générale who discovered a hidden acquisition by a rogue trader and wanted to reverse the purchase. Why did the market react so disproportionately? Because the order was one-way –stubborn — there was desire to sell but no way to change one’s mind. My personal adage is:

  The market is like a large movie theatre with a small door.

  And the best way to detect a sucker (say the usual finance journalist) is to see if his focus is on the size of the door or on that of the theater. Stampedes happen in cinemas, say when someone shouts “fire”, because those who want to be out do not want to stay in, exactly the same unconditionality we saw with Kosher observance.

  Science acts similarly. We will return later with a discussion of how the minority rule is behind Karl Popper’s approach to science. But let us for now discuss the more entertaining Feynman. What do You Care What Other People Think? is the title of a book of anecdotes by the great Richard Feynman, the most irreverent and playful scientist of his day. As reflected in the title of the book, Feynman conveys in it the idea of the fundamental irreverence of science, acting through a similar mechanism as the Kosher asymmetry. How? Science isn’t the sum of what scientists think, but exactly as with markets, a procedure that is highly skewed. Once you debunk something, it is now wrong (that is how science operates but let’s ignore disciplines such as economics and political science that are more like pompous entertainment). Had science operated by majority consensus we would be still stuck in the Middle Ages and Einstein would have ended as he started, a patent clerk with fruitless side hobbies.

  *  *  *

  Alexander said that it was preferable to have an army of sheep led by a lion to an army of lions led by a sheep. Alexander (or no doubt he who produced this probably apocryphal saying) understood the value of the active, intolerant, and courageous minority. Hannibal terrorized Rome for a decade and a half with a tiny army of mercenaries, winning twenty-two battles against the Romans, battles in which he was outnumbered each time. He was inspired by a version of this maxim. At the battle of Cannae, he remarked to Gisco who complained that the Carthaginians were outnumbered by the Romans: “There is one thing that’s more wonderful than their numbers … in all that vast number there is not one man called Gisgo.

  Unus sed leo: only one but a lion.

  This large payoff from stubborn courage is not just in the military. The entire growth of society, whether economic or moral, comes from a small number of people. So we close this chapter with a remark about the role of skin in the game in the condition of society. Society doesn’t evolve by consensus, voting, majority, committees, verbose meeting, academic conferences, and polling; only a few people suffice to disproportionately move the needle. All one needs is an asymmetric rule somewhere. And asymmetry is present in about everything.

  

• Grand Bargain Taking Shape? U.S. To Pull Out Of Al-Tanf

  Authored by Tom Luongo,

  If you’ve followed my work for the past year you know that my default position has been there is a potential Grand Bargain for Peace in the Middle East.  From the moment President Trump first berated the Arabs in Riyidh last year on his first foreign trip for supporting terrorism, I’ve felt that the final outcome over Syria would culminate in such an agreement.

  

  Elijah Magnier is reporting now that the framework for a U.S. pull out of its position at Al-Tanf near where the borders of Jordan, Syria and Iraq come together has pretty much been agreed upon in advance of Trump and Vladimir Putin’s Summit on July 16th in Helsinki.

  Russian advisors visiting the Syrian capital Damascus are confident that the US forces will pull out of al-Tanf and will also aim to completely withdraw from north of Syria (al-Hasaka and Deir-Ezzour) in the next six months.

  According to top decision makers based in Damascus, the US President Donald Trump is pushing his administration to approve an already prepared total withdrawal plan. Despite Trump’s limited knowledge of foreign policy and being unaware of the consequences of his decisions in the international arena, however, he found no convincing elements – said the sources, who asked to remain anonymous – in the presentation by his administration where US forces could benefit from the continuation of their presence in such a hostile environment and without suffering hits in the future. Trump’s biggest fear to see the US special forces deployed in the north of Syria and in Iraq returning to the country “in plastic bags”. He would certainly find it hard to offer any explanation for the US occupation of the Levant after the defeat of ISIS (the “Islamic State” group) or what remained of it in Syria and Iraq.

  What Putin and Trump will work out is whether they can trust each other enough to allow each to do the job they need to do to make this work.  By the time the summit happens, the SAA Tiger forces should have taken back most of the province of Dara’a up to the Golan Heights, effectively restoring the 2011 border.

  The Grand Bargain I’ve been proposing has been, simply put, the U.S. and the Russians acting as guarantors of the local actors behavior.  It requires Russia to remain in Syria indefinitely, supporting the Assad government’s rebuilding of the country.

  And it requires the U.S. to remove its military presence, by declaring victory over ISIS and leaving.  But, in its wake leave an explicit guarantee of Israel’s and Saudi Arabia’s defense in the case of future Iranian adventurism.

  The Russians act as a buffer to break up the Shia Crescent concerns of the Israelis, Turkey goes home, the Kurds negotiate a settlement with Damascus and the Saudis get to live a few more years before their domestic troubles overwhelm them.

  I said on May 24th of last year just after Trump’s Speech in Riyadh:

  Russia’s alliance with Iran and China is unbreakable at this point. They have designs to build a trade empire across Asia that the world hasn’t seen in centuries. Putin has the means and the respect by all parties on both sides to remove Iran’s troops from Syria and get Hezbollah to stand down if the right deal is signed.

  He has the military might to make it all stick.

  The Turks and President Erdogan have over-played their hand and have been abandoned by both Putin and Trump. He will behave himself or be removed from power. His days of playing both sides against each other are over…

  … He [Putin] and Trump are in opposite domestic positions. Trump needs this win to shut up the loony left. Putin doesn’t, even though he’s facing a re-election campaign in 2018.

  So, setting the table for Trump to come in, statesmanlike, and broker an historic peace deal is exactly his style.

  We’re not there yet, but the pieces are in place. As long as Trump doesn’t make another mistake like the al-Shairat bombing and keeps a lid on his military commanders he will eventually gain Putin’s trust.

  This story has not been without it twists and turns.  There have been the multitude of false flags, provocations and prevarications from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to try and scuttle this deal.

  It even survived another colossal Trump mistake in responding to another false flag attack on civilians with chemical weapons this year.

  But, over the course of it all, Trump has held firm while Putin made deals with everyone to give them a little of what they want.  The Saudis are going to get slightly more market share in oil to help with their fiscal situation.  Israel will likely get to keep the Golan Heights in perpetuity, much to the pleasure of the board of Genie Energy.

  Trump and Netanyahu still wants regime change in Iran as part of this deal, but Trump is in no real position to get that concession from Putin.  That is exactly what the U.S. media is trying to position him to demand.

  Bloomberg is trying to make this deal sound like Putin is betraying Iran by making deals over oil production caps, while offering up Iran’s withdrawal from Syria as some ‘big win.’

  For Iran, the overriding goal is to maintain its influence inside Syria and keep supply lines open, said Ehud Yaari, an Israel-based fellow at the Washington Institute.

  “Russia has an interest to bleed Iran in Syria, to weaken Iran but not collapse Iran because it may lose the Assad regime, which is its major card,” said Sami Nader, head of the Levant Institute for Strategic Studies in Beirut. “They want Iran in check and under control.”

  This is pure Netanyahu-esque spin.  Russia doesn’t have the goal of bleeding out Iran in Syria, Israel does.  And every one of Bibi’s little lies have been calculated to convince Trump to extend the U.S. presence there indefinitely for his reasons.

  If Magnier is correct then this strategy has failed completely.

  Assad isn’t going anywhere and Iran has no desire to stay in Syria once the U.S. leaves.  As the Western media keeps trying to tell us, there’s a revolution happening back home.  IRGC forces are needed there, which is why Netanyahu is abjecting against any deal with Putin before said overthrow of the mullahs takes place.

  Too bad Putin and Trump have both put the kibosh on that.  Trump needs another major geopolitical win to crush his deep state and Democratic (I repeat myself) opposition in the mid-terms while also changing the mandate for NATO.

  Russia has Iran’s back when it comes to sanctions, fuel marketing, oil exports and the like.  Iran is key to the success of uniting Central Asia under China’s One Belt, One Road initiative, which includes making India and Turkey partners in the project.

  For Putin to get a restructuring of NATO, border security in Syria, draw-down of U.S. troops there and probably in Afghanistan as well and potentially recognition of Crimea, there has to be something else on the table.

  The bargaining chips are Jerusalem, Yemen, Nordstream 2 and Iranian regime change.  Nordstream 2 and regime change are off the table.  The big question is are the other two within their purview to negotiate.

  Doubtful, certainly at this point in time.

  For now, the Grand Bargain is taking shape.  Phase one is the hardest part, the trust part. Since U.S. and Russian military commanders have been in communication for nearly three years coordinating around each other it seems plausible the trust is there.

  The work’s been done.  Now, just sing the deals and remove/reposition the troops.  It is the next phase that is murkier.  Trump wants explicit guarantees from Putin that Iran won’t develop a nuclear weapon.

  For him to get that guarantee means removing the regime-change threat from the table as well as allowing Tehran to develop trade relations without the U.S. stifling them.  This is why I think the most likely casualty in this situation will be Yemen.  Iran will have to withdraw support from the Houthi rebels like Trump will remove the U.S. troops from Syria.

  As one of my readers said to me privately, the other day, this is beginning to feel like 1945, the only difference is that Trump and Putin aren’t meeting at Yalta, to remake the world.

  *  *  *

  Please support the production of independent and alternative political and financial commentary by joining my Patreon and subscribing to the Gold Goats ‘n Guns Investment Newsletter for just $12/month.

  

• Vacant Lot In Silicon Valley Listed For $15 Million

  Silicon Valley is one of the most expensive areas to live in the United States. In its epicenter, Palo Alto, California, the median price for a single-family home is roughly $2.6 million. Meanwhile, the median price of a single-family home across the country is $240,000. The housing bubble in Silicon Valley extends throughout the San Francisco Bay area to the north, which has developed into the housing affordability crisis.

  Not too long ago, we reported on an 897 square feet Palo Alto bungalow – recently listed for $2.6 million. At $2,800 per square foot, the price was equivalent to the most extravagant penthouses in New York City and or Miami.

  We even covered a listing back in April, where someone in the southern region of the San Francisco Bay Area listed their burned-out shack in San Jose’s Willow Glen neighborhood for $800,000.

  Now, another absurdity has crossed our real estate bubble radar — this time, it is a vacant, one-acre dirt lot in Palo Alto, listed for a whopping $15 million.

  

  The vacant lot at 4103 Old Trace Road “is the ONLY FLAT VACANT Acre parcel in Palo Alto available,” according to the Redfin listing. The plot of land is minutes away from venture capital firms, Stanford University, downtown Palo Alto, and about 15 minutes from Google’s Googleplex Headquarters.

  

  The listing says “Dream it & Build it,” however the future owner must first shell out $15 million-plus the cost of a new structure. The listing emphasizes “Location! Location! Location!,” and tells prospective homebuyers to “visualize an exquisite villa with vineyard” on the 1.03-acre parcel.

  

  The “exquisite villa” would be lacking privacy, as it is situated on the corner of a congested two-lane road. Nevertheless, this is the price one may pay very late into an overheated real estate market fueled by a tech bubble that could be large than in 2000. Tech workers in the region have the highest incomes in the country, and couple it with 10-years of zero lower bound rates via the Federal Reserve, well, a massive housing bubble was formed.

  To visualize the extent of the housing bubble in Silicon Valley, Wolf Richter provides an excellent chart below:

  “The index for “San Francisco” includes the counties of San Francisco, Alameda, Contra Costa, Marin, and San Mateo, a large and diverse area consisting of the city of San Francisco, the northern part of Silicon Valley (San Mateo county), part of the East Bay and part of the North Bay. The index jumped 1% from March, 11% from a year ago, and 38% from the insane peak of Housing Bubble 1. It’s up 164% since 2000.”

  

  With new warnings of a global slowdown, the yield curve 2/10 nearly flat, James Powell’s auto-tightening, quantitative tightening, stretched real estate prices, trade wars, overvalued stock and bond valuations, and an exploding deficit, this is not a recipe for a sustained booming economy. President Trump and Wall Street have recently made their rounds of force-feeding economic propaganda to Americans, hoping that they could spur consumption, as if the heavily indebted middle class needs to buy more things they do not need, nor stuff they cannot afford.

  As for now, it seems as Trump’s debt-fueled tax cut has spurred a monstrous stealth QE round for corporations, including trillions in buybacks, dividends, and merger and acquisitions.

  The can has been effectively kicked down the road for the tech sector, but eventually, tax reform will evaporate and lead to the next round of tech layoffs. When that occurs, well, it could be straw that broke the camel’s back for real estate markets in Silicon Valley. Buyer beware.

  

• Headless Robespierre's Cautionary Tale For The 'Alt Left' Unleashed On America

  Submitted by John Griffing,

  America is on the cusp of something it has never truly experienced: mob rule.

  

  To “feed” a mob, witch-hunts are essential. New enemies must be in constant supply to keep the mob moving. Problematically, witch-hunts never end well for the witch-hunters.

  Just ask Maximilien Robespierre, one of the chief architects of the French Revolution and the infamous “Reign of Terror.”

  

  It was 1794. Heads were rolling, literally, and “Madame la Guillotine” was more popular than ever. At first, the mob was content with the heads of King Louis XVI and Queen Marie Antoinette. The king bankrupted France by helping America win its independence with mountains of debt, all while a horrible famine ravaged the nation simultaneously. Many died of starvation. It was during the famine that the queen told her subjects, “Let them eat cake.”

  With the king and queen gone, the mob’s appetite grew. They now required the heads of the aristocracy.

  After the aristocracy was gone, Robespierre’s Committee on Public Safety (a massive misnomer) began sending anyone and everyone to the Guillotine — even other members of the committee itself — in order to satisfy the appetite of the mob. Georges Danton, the other influential thinker behind the French revolution, was executed by the committee.

  Royals lurked under every rock and behind every tree, and unsupported suspicion was the only thing needed to deprive a person of their head.

  In the ultimate twist of irony, the mob eventually required Robespierre’s head.

  

  The lesson? For mobs, it’s never enough. And communities that passively surrender to mob rule in the face of civil unrest are like those who feed a crocodile, hoping to be eaten last.

  Replace the revolutionary French with the “alt left,” and a disturbing pattern emerges. With the violence perpetrated by the “alt left” reaching barbaric levels, it is time to stop tolerating lies about their motives.

  The“alt left” is not against racism or white nationalism. They are for anarchy — and that’s a big difference. In short, the “alt left” is a mindless mob.

  And just like Robespierre’s “Reign of Terror,” the “alt left” mob may eventually accomplish its presumed objective: forcibly removing President Donald Trump from office, one way or another. But that will likely not be enough to satisfy the moving target of “alt-left” bloodlust, because the stated objective is never the real objective.

  For the mob, breaking stuff and hurting people (often for pay) is the real objective. And for Antifas, the ever-evolving “cause” is a facade to justify animal behavior unfit for a free and open society.

  Sure, not all Democrats are Antifas, but all Antifas are undoubtedly Democrats. Consider that top Democrats — many of them seasoned public servants — now regularly incite violent riots and actively promote the president’s assassination.

  Here’s a list of 133 savage acts of documented violence (or incitement) by far-left Democrats against Trump supporters, Republicans and White House officials, including actor Peter Fonda’s call to throw Trump’s 11-year-old son Barron in a cage with pedophiles, and the latest example of outright assault against a person wearing a MAGA hat — this time a young teenager.

  The violence advocated by the far left makes them complicit in the breakdown of society and the subsequent rise of mob rule. And the advocates of mob violence are not just fringe radicals or a few nut-jobs. Their ranks also boast senior Democratic Party officials and members of former President Barack Obama’s administration.

  Only a week ago, California Democratic U.S. Rep. Maxine Waters openly called for the “harassment” and physical intimidation of Trump officials. Democratic Sen. Chuck Schumer condemned Waters, but it must be remembered that last year he told New York state to pull police protection from First Lady Melania Trump and Barron. Democratic 2016 vice presidential candidate Tim Kaine called for riots in streets after Trump’s victory, and was joined by former U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch, who also called for riots.

  Former CIA Director John “Benghazi” Brennan — a man who once voted for a Communist presidential candidate and may have converted to Islam — twice called for a coup against Trump. Obama’s Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Rosa Brooks went as far as putting a plan for a military coup in writing around the same time CNN was running hypothetical “what if Trump was brutally murdered before the inauguration?” segments.

  Democratic-aligned mainstream media and left-leaning entertainment icons are also guilty of perpetuating the rise of mob rule. Former MSNBC heavyweight Keith Olbermann begged foreign intelligence agencies to overthrow the U.S. government, and did not see the irony. More recently, the Washington Post’s Jennifer Rubin asked mobs to harass Trump and White House officials for “life.”

  And what about entertainers? Well, they are getting a lot less entertaining, and a lot more felonious. Bill Maher joked that Ronald Reagan shooter John Hinckley, Jr. should be released, so that he can kill Trump, and only a few months ago, comedienne Kathy Griffin photographed herself holding a life-like wax model of Trump’s severed head in the style of ISIS. Last week, far-left filmmaker Michael Moore said he would lead a citizen army of “one million people” to “surround” Washington, D.C. in order to prevent lawful Supreme Court nominations by Trump. Famous musicians are also promoting violence. Madonna said she is “thinking” of bombing the White House to kill Trump, Snoop Dog released a music video depicting Trump’s murder and singer John Legend applauded Rep. Maxine Waters for advocating violence, while subsequently making similar appeals himself.

  By any measure, Democrats now support mob rule. Every single time a Democrat advocates violence in place of discussion, they are supporting mob rule, not democracy, and they should be treated as potentially hostile.

  When someone – anyone – starts a conversation with an assumption that the other person is evil, there can be no further conversation. Moreover, logical debate is not possible with violent mobs in ninja costumes viciously attacking those with whom they politically disagree.

  History repeats itself, especially when mobs burn the pages on which it is written, and destroy monuments to the events history records. Tragically, Democrats only pay attention to history when it involves Nazis, and mostly fictional Nazis.

  Robespierre speaks from the grave: mobs are never good, especially for the mobs.

  

• "Dark Path Ahead": Why American Farmers Dread The Trade War

  While automakers – and their dealerships – are getting most of the headlines this week, the effects of the escalating trade war (sorry, officially a trade tantrum, or trade discussion according to The White House) between Presidents Trump, Xi, and Putin are rippling across numerous US industries – directly, and indirectly.

  

  Makers of whiskey, cheese, auto parts and more are contending with the global tariff battle – but it is US farmers that appear to be suffering the most.

  

  Casey Guernsey, a spokesman for Americans for Farmers and Families, says in emailed statement that:

  “China dealt its latest blow to American agriculture today with threats of even more tariffs on the horizon,”

  “Following Canada’s tariffs on U.S. products earlier this week, America’s farmers and families are staring down a dark path with no signs of relief in sight”

  “We are counting on the administration and Congress to reach a resolution on responsible trade policies — before we’re forced to shut down our operations for good”

  And he was not alone, American farm groups, companies and officials reacted as China’s tariffs on agricultural products went into effect on Friday.

  Iowa Senator Joni Ernst appeared on CBS’ “Face The Nation” warning that”

  …farmers, ranchers are “always the first to be retaliated against” in these types of “trade negotiations,” adding that farmers have been put in “very vulnerable position.”

  Iowa Secretary of Agriculture Mike Naig says in statement on website:

  “The continued escalation of trade tensions with China is having a real impact on Iowa farmers and businesses,”

  “We have seen a significant drop in prices for both crops and livestock and this is creating even more stress and uncertainty during what was already a difficult time for the ag economy”

  “There are real issues in our trade relationship with China that need to be addressed, but Iowa agriculture cannot continue to bear the brunt of the retaliation from our trading partners”

   Jim Heimerl, president of the National Pork Producers Council and a hog farmer from Johnstown, Ohio, says in statement:

  Tariffs from China, Mexico mean “40 percent of total American pork exports now are under retaliatory tariffs, threatening the livelihoods of thousands of U.S. pig farmers.”

  “We now face large financial losses and contraction because of escalating trade disputes. That means less income for pork producers and, ultimately, some of them going out of business.“

  “We need these trade disputes to end”

  U.S. Wheat Associates says in statement on its website:

  “Unable to accept the risk of escalating import prices, Chinese customers stopped making new purchases of U.S. wheat last March,”

  “The exchange of punitive tariffs between Washington and Beijing today represents the next phase of what could be a long and difficult struggle that will likely inflict more pain before we reach an unknown resolution”

  “Farmers are eager to move past this dispute and start trading wheat and other agricultural products again soon”

  John Heisdorffer, a soybean grower from Keota, Iowa, and president of the American Soybean Association, says in statement on website:

  “Soybeans are the top agriculture export for the United States, and China is the top market for purchasing those exports,”

  “The math is simple. You tax soybean exports at 25 percent, and you have serious damage to U.S. farmers”

  Cheese producers have had to discount their products to keep customers; some have had orders put on hold. Companies will struggle to find customers quickly for the extra cheese, given high reserves in storage and international competition, producers and analysts said.

  “We have seen large drops in our dairy product sales prices at all levels,” said Catherine de Ronde, economist for the Agri-Mark Inc. dairy cooperative. “It will create a significant backup of dairy products.”

  “We are going to see more significant impacts to inventory,” said Tom Bailey, executive director of dairy for Rabobank, a food and agricultural lender. “We will struggle to move this product into other markets.”

  All of which fits perfectly with the fact that US stocks soared as the trade tariffs struck home

  

  The impact on agricultural community comes at a particularly painful time as the suicide rate among American farmers is already soaring.

  

  Finances are probably the most pressing reason: Since 2013, farm income has been declining steadily according to the US Department of Agriculture. This year, the average farm is expected to earn 35% less than what it earned in 2013.

  “Think about trying to live today on the income you had 15 years ago.” That’s how agriculture expert Chris Hurt describes the plight facing U.S. farmers today.

  Farmers are at the mercy of extreme weather like hurricanes that threaten crops to agricultural commodity prices that have fallen below breakeven production levels. And prices will likely only continue to fall as America’s trading partners slap tariffs on American agricultural products.

   

  

• Is Libertarianism Utopian?

  Authored by Duncan Whitmore via The Mises Institute,

  Libertarianism – and any political position that leans towards a greater degree of freedom from the state – is opposed both ethically and economically on a number of substantive grounds. The proposition that without the state we would have inequality, destitution for the masses, rampant greed, and so on is a familiar charge which attempts to point out that libertarianism is undesirableand/or unjustifiable.

  

  A further point of opposition is that libertarianism and the drive towards it is simply utopian or idealistic, and that libertarians are hopeless day dreamers, lacking any awareness of how the world “really” works. In other words, that, regardless of whether it may be desirable, some combination of one or more of impossibility, improbability or the simple unwillingness of anyone to embrace the libertarian ideal renders libertarianism either wholly or primarily unachievable. It is this specific objection that we will address in this essay.

  Let us first of all recount the libertarian ethic of non-aggression, which states that no one may initiate any physical incursion against your body or your property without your consent. From this we can state that the goal of the libertarian project, broadly, is a world of minimised violence and aggression. Consequently, the questions we have to answer is whether a world of minimised violence and aggression is unachievable and, hence, utopian.

  Impossibility

  The first aspect to consider is whether the attainment of the libertarian ethic is either a physical or logical impossibility. Clearly, in order to be valid, an ethical proposition must be within the grasp of physical capability. An ethic requiring each person to be in two places at once, or to make three apples equal five apples by adding only one more would be ludicrous. These are unattainable goals, regardless of how hard one might try. Similarly, we can dispose of ethical propositions which are not strictly impossible but, we might say, are technically impossible on account of the fact that the means required to achieve them are inaccessible to all or most individuals. For example, an ethic that requires a person to leap from Britain to China would fail in this regard. Such a feat is not strictly impossible as a person’s feet could leave the ground in Britain and fly through the air to China. But the means of fulfilling this imperative have not yet come into our possession and so as a guide to acting now in the world as it is today it is plainly hopeless.

  When we consider the libertarian ethic, it is clear that it does not come anywhere near these kinds of impossibility. In fact, this ethic, being a requirement to not commit certain acts, is one of the easiest of all ethics to adhere to. You simply have to refrain from initiating any act which interferes with the physical integrity of another person’s body or property – something which you can do, right now, sitting in your armchair. Thus, it is within the power of everyone here on Earth, right this very moment, to bring about a world free of violence and aggression simply by not moving one’s body towards committing such acts. Indeed, we can even say that it is physically harder to breach the ethic – if I want to commit a violent act I have to actually get up, find someone, and muster the effort to assault or rob them instead of following the much lazier route of just keeping still.

  This may seem rather trite, but compare the physical attainability of this ethic with other ethics such as conquering poverty, spreading democracy, promoting equality, or even more ethereal goals such as seeking happiness and fulfilment. All of these are regarded, in the mainstream, as perfectly valid and noble, and yet they are far harder to achieve than the libertarian ethic because they all require some kind of positive action. Conquering poverty requires more work, more productivity and more wealth creation; spreading democracy seems to require armed invasions, active peacekeeping, the setup of institutions to hold elections and the willingness of the population to get off their backsides and vote (assuming, of course, that such an ideal is genuine and not simply a veneer for power and control over resources); equality requires the active redistribution of wealth which has to have been created by productive effort in the first place. On the ground of impossibility, therefore, we can say that libertarianism, which is derided, is the least utopian goal amongst all of these others, which are lauded.

  If this was not enough, however, the state, the very same people telling us that the libertarian ethic is null and void, attempts to achieve goals each day that are readily accepted by the mainstream and yet are, on a proper understanding, literally impossible. For instance, it is impossible to guarantee full employment if you impose minimum wages; it is impossible to price a good or service below its market value and to not expect it to be inundated by demand and, thus, shortages (think healthcare, jammed roads, etc.); and it is impossible to create wealth by printing paper money. Yet the state believes that it can do all of these things.

  On this last point, we surely have to acknowledge the sheer impossibility and, consequently, the utopianism of the current situation of endless debt and extravagant spending. At the birth of social democracy, Western nations had accumulated several generations’ worth of capital that had raised the standard of living by a significant magnitude. This provided a seemingly inexhaustible fund for politicians to bribe voters, showering them with goodies in the form of retirement benefits, welfare payments, nationalised industries, publicly owned infrastructure, and so on in return for their votes. Because politicians like to spend and spend and spend without raising current taxes, much of this spending was fuelled by borrowing, with the productivity of accumulated capital enabling tax revenue to service this debt. The borrowing and inflation has benefited the bookends of society – the poorest, who receive the majority of the welfare payments, and the very rich, whose assets survive the inflation by rising in nominal value – as well as the baby boomer generation, which benefited from being able to receive the goodies before the bill to pay for them fell due. The profligate waste disguised a gradual but relentless capital consumption until now productivity can no longer provide for the burgeoning level of spending. Governments today are even struggling to service the interest on their debt through tax revenues, having to borrow more just to pay down previously accumulated debt. Particularly now as the aforementioned baby boomer generation has begun to retire, leaving behind it a decimated workforce supporting a heavy generation of retirees, this situation is likely to only get worse.

  Assuming, therefore, that sufficient productivity to meet all of these liabilities is not going to occur, there are three possible options – to default on the entitlements; to default on the debt; or to print enough money to pay for everything.

  The first option would cause mass social unrest; the second would cause financial markets to collapse; and the third would cause hyperinflation of the currency.

  This is an unpleasant but soon to be necessary choice. It is precisely because the monetary orthodoxy is no longer working that solutions that have a non-state impetus, such as a return to gold, or crypto-currencies stand out in relief as viable alternatives rather than impossible dreams. Thus it is ridiculous for even moderate statists to claim that libertarianism is utopian when the lifeblood of social democracy – state managed money and finance – is on the verge of collapse.

  Human Nature

  A second reason why it is alleged that the libertarian ethic is utopian concedes the fact that it is not strictly impossible to achieve but, rather, that it is contrary to some vaguely defined impression of “human nature”. This view is nearly always based on the (correct, but superficial) observation that “man is a social animal” and that humans have, throughout their history, grouped themselves together into different collectives such as tribes, cultures, nations and, ultimately, states. The vicissitudes of these kinds of groups – that is, rules that subjugate the individual to the collective and, ultimately, the presence of violence and aggression – supposedly mean that the libertarian ideal is unrealisable, at least to the degree that libertarians would prefer.

  Most of these critiques fail owing to their conflation of the state with society, and their resulting assumption that the libertarian admonishment of the former leads to a denial of the latter. As a corollary they misconstrue also the libertarian emphasis on individual rights as advocacy for some kind of selfish, atomistic existence.

  These views can normally be disposed of easily enough as there is, of course, no libertarian quarrel with either social organisations or society as a whole – libertarianism takes full account of the social dimension of humanity. Such critics simply fail to realise that the role of society is not to fulfil a “common purpose” or some kind of undefined “common good” dictated by the state but to act as a means for each individual to better satisfy his own purposes peacefully and voluntarily. Nor does the pursuit of such purposes, permitted by individual rights, have anything to do with selfishness – a person is as free to choose to spend his entire life helping others as much as he is to hoard a vast fortune that he shares with no one.

  Rather, the claim we wish to examine here is a more basic one. This is whether the kinds of complex institution with which libertarians are preoccupied – that is, states, governments, parliaments, bureaucracies, etc – owe themselves to “human nature” in the sense that these things are, in some way, biologically inevitable; or whether they are, in fact, the product of consciously wrought human choice. To put it bluntly, is the impetus which caused humans to create the state of the same ilk that causes a pig to roll in muck?

  This question is either tacitly assumed to be yes or completely ignored by the “human nature” objection to libertarianism. For example, during his misinformed attempt to demonstrate the disregard of libertarianism for the social dimension of human existence, American biologist Peter Corning has the following to say:

  One problem with [the libertarian] (utopian) model is we now have overwhelming evidence that the individualistic, acquisitive, selfish-gene model of human nature is seriously deficient […] The evidence about human evolution indicates that our species evolved in small, close-knit social groups in which cooperation and sharing overrode our individual, competitive self-interests for the sake of the common good […] We evolved as intensely interdependent social animals, and our sense of empathy toward others, our sensitivity to reciprocity, our desire for inclusion and our loyalty to the groups we bond with, the intrinsic satisfaction we derive from cooperative activities, and our concern for having the respect and approval of others all evolved in humankind to temper and constrain our individualistic, selfish impulses.

  It is difficult to dispute much of this account. However, Corning never explains what caused these things to arise or why it was that humans embraced them. Why do we co-operate? Why do we share? Why do we have a “desire for inclusion”? Why is there a “loyalty to the groups we bond with”? Why are we preoccupied with a “respect and approval of others”? Did all of these things just happen in the same way that flies swarm to dung, or were there some kind of consciously appreciated reasons for each human to embrace these things?

  The fact that these questions remain unanswered suggests that it is the critics of libertarianism who have failed to examine human nature fully and, consequently, have the deficient understanding of the concept. The aspect of human nature that most certainly does exist – that which separates us from other animal species – is the ability to determine, consciously, our goals, and to use the mental faculty of reason to investigate the world around us in order to discover the best means for pursuing those goals. These conscious human choices and subsequent, deliberate actions are evident at a very basic level. We may each, of course, act reflexively, such as when you touch a red hot object and recoil in an instant. Such an action is not the product of choice but of stimuli that provoke your brain into an automated reaction to prevent imminent bodily harm. Such actions are, therefore, a part of our nature and there is very little that we can do to prevent them. Nearly everything else a human does, however, is the product of his conscious choice. Even when we act emotionally or out of instinct – for example by punching another person in a fit of rage or satiating the carnal desire for intercourse by having sex with a stranger – we are still expected to choose to exercise control over these impulses. Such expectation is manifest in the fact that if the act in question happens to be illegal the law will still hold us responsible. Only mental impairment to the extent that there is a severely diminished connection between thoughts and actions will absolve one of moral responsibility for even our more animalistic outbursts.

  To ignore this aspect of conscious choice is to ignore the sparkling jewel in the crown of human nature, and leads one to draw fundamentally false conclusions about social phenomena. As Murray N Rothbard puts it:

  Only human beings possess free will and consciousness: for they are conscious, and they can, and indeed must, choose their course of action. To ignore this primordial fact about the nature of man – to ignore his volition, his free will – is to misconstrue the facts of reality and therefore to be profoundly and radically unscientific.

  This ignorance to which Rothbard refers renders the “human nature” objection to libertarianism as one of the laziest counterarguments, endowing superficial observations of human behaviour with some kind of inevitability and, thus, immunity from moral scrutiny. For if human behaviour is the product of conscious choice then not only is such behaviour in no sense “natural” but the very fact of choice indicates that alternative paths cannot be ruled out – and that, therefore, the libertarian is not struggling with futility against human nature,but rather, is pursuing the perfectly achievable path of influencing human will. As we shall see now, this is precisely the case.

  In deciding the best course of action for fulfilling the ends that he desires, each human has to make a choice between three broad routes of accomplishment. First, an atomistic, isolated existence; second, social co-operation; or, third, violence, pilfer and pillage. The first has been almost universally discarded on account of its failure to furnish anything but the most impoverished existence. The other two, however, can prove extremely fruitful for those who pursue them.

  Whether the pursuit of social co-operation on the one hand or of violence on the other has prevailed at any one time is a product of the human evaluation of the particular circumstances and how to best meet his goals within those circumstances. Appreciation of those circumstances is a product of mental effort – in each case, there were goals and humans pursued, deliberately, what they thought were the best means available for attaining those goals in the environment in which they found themselves. Even though the evaluation may have been wrong and resulted in failure, the fact remains that whichever path was taken did not owe itself to any “natural”, uncontrollable, instinctive urge. If we marvel at the great achievements of social co-operation – for example, the gothic splendour of St Pancras railway station; the intricacy of the internal combustion engine; or the ambition of Microsoft to put a PC in everyone’s home – we can see that the people who created these things were motivated by something more than a scramble to satiate some engrained longing for “community”. Similarly, on the violent side, neither of the world wars occurred because everyone felt that it had been too long since the last punch up. The only human institutions that can be possibly be accorded the description of being in some way “natural” are those which emerged as a result of the (oft-abused) term “spontaneous order” – institutions such as language, money, market prices, and so on which are not the deliberate result of any one individual or group of individuals acting together. But even these institutions are the result of consciously chosen human purpose – they just lack deliberate human design. For instance, we would have neither money nor prices if people did not choose to trade.

  Because of the varying circumstances of history – some of them natural phenomena, and some of them the product of the past actions and ideas of humans – it has been the case that the incidence of either social co-operation on the one hand or violence on the other have each waxed and waned throughout the sands of time. Each millennium has been punctuated by periods of relative tranquillity and periods of relative turmoil, with the violent route peaking in the most recent hundred years or so. Meanwhile, social co-operation received significant boosts during the agricultural and industrial revolutions.

  The unfolding of the latter provides a clear example of how circumstances can motivate human choices. For instance, contrary to the romanticised view of pre-industrial, rural life, humans abandoned their backbreaking and unproductive agricultural lifestyles to flee to urban centres because the prospect of industrial work, made possible by new inventions and machinery, promised a much higher standard of living than was previously possible. In other words an expansion of social co-operation was the most attractive option. However, after the elapse of one hundred years or so of wealth creation, it became possible for socialist theories to persuade people, on account of the unequal “distribution” of this wealth, that violent appropriation from those who had gained more was now more appealing. Thus, the twentieth century was plagued by varieties of socialism that made the false promise to disgorge all of this wealth from the allegedly exploiting classes and thus banish the deprivations of the workers forever. However, once all of this failed in the late 1980s and early 1990s, people again turned to market economies. Now we appear to be languishing somewhere in between, with Western societies, the apparent victors of the Cold War, continuing to socialise their economies and consume their capital under the aegis of increasingly authoritarian governance, whereas Asian societies appear to be doing the opposite.

  The fact that each human moves himself towards either social co-operation on the one hand or towards violence on the other in order to better achieve his needs can be illustrated further by envisaging a future when almost all needs are satiated, i.e. when material scarcity is all but conquered. It would not be impossible for economic progress to one day reach a level where any good or service, including the provision of private security and defence, could be produced at the touch of a button. In other words almost all of our needs could be provided for in exchange for a trivial amount of effort. If this was the case then surely it is obvious that the need for any human to pursue either social co-operation or violence on a wide, systematic scale would be all but obliterated? Why bother co-operating with your fellow human, or why bother shooting at him, if everything you want can be provided from some kind of Star Trek style “replicator” device? Even if someone did shoot at you what defensive purpose would the state serve if everyone’s person and property could be protected by, say, some kind of invisible force field? If we ever come to live in such a quasi-paradise is it not clear that any kind of large, systematic organisation that serves to enable either social co-operation or violence – states, companies, etc. – would dissolve for a lack of any achievable purpose? All that is likely to remain is groups that would exist solely for pleasure – families, friendship groups, congregations, and groups revolving around pastimes, etc. Thus, what would emerge is something akin to that which is advocated for by “purist” libertarians who supposedly ignore “human nature” – human existence where systematic collectives and pervasive violence are largely relegated to distant memory. Such a society is, no doubt, a whimsical fantasy, at least in our lifetimes. But it is clear that its failure to emerge would be as a result of a shortfall in economic progress and not on account of any discord with “human nature”.

  The fact that co-operation is a means to the fulfilment of complex ends does not deny the fact that co-operation itself presents benefits – for example, from a sense of belonging, familiarity, and overcoming a feeling of loneliness. But even some of the groups that we seemingly take for granted, such as the family, were originally motivated by a consciously appreciated, economic concern – in this case trying to find the best environment in which to raise children.

  Similarly, there may well be nutcase theories that exalt violence and war for the sake it. However, the objects of idolisation are often the derivatives of war rather than war itself, such as heroism, comradeship, bravery, victory parades, national pride, medals, and so on, to the extent that these things are viewed as ends in and of themselves. Actual war, on the other hand, is very unlikely to gain mainstream traction without a powerful economic incentive. Even when the idolisation of war seems to crystallise into a more substantive ideology – such as in Nazism – there is still something of a chicken or egg problem. Did the Nazi elevation of “blood and soil” and the wehrbauer (“warrior peasant”) appear first and then gain momentum only because of the economic circumstances of Germany at the time? Or did they arise later as somewhat romanticised embodiments of what was required to accomplish the already perceived economic necessity of lebensraum?

  Nevertheless, even if we were to ignore all of these issues and say that co-operation and violence were engaged in purely for the sake it, none of this would make a dent to our basic thesis which is that they are the product of conscious, human choice – that the ends were evaluated consciously and the means undertaken deliberately.

  With all of this in mind, therefore, we can turn to the question of the existence of the state. Without a shadow of a doubt, the state is the most violent and aggressive institution humans have ever spawned. There is not a single conflict that is worthy of mention in the history books that was not caused by the state or a proto-state entity, nor is there any such conflict that would not have been ameliorated by either reduced or absent state involvement. It is for this reason that libertarians focus all of their efforts on this institution. Thus, the objection to libertarianism on account of the allegation that it is contrary to “human nature” concerns, primarily, the question of whether the state is a phenomenon of “human nature” that we have to put up with and is, consequently, useless to fight.

  From our preceding analysis, it should already be clear that this is not the case. The state exists for no other purpose than to serve as the ultimate vehicle of pursuing the violent method of achieving ones goals – of forcibly taking from some in order to benefit others.

  The state has not existed as a uniform entity throughout human history. Rather, it has blossomed and withered in accordance with people’s desire to use it as such a tool of exploitation and the conviction of the public to either tacitly accept or actively promote its existence. All of the “great” institutions of states that we see today – parliament buildings, executive departments, highly trained armed forces and the complex weaponry and equipment they use, and so on – none of these things is in any way “natural”. Rather, they owe their existence to the fact that specific people, at specific times and places, believed that creating them was a worthwhile endeavour. Their final form that we see today is simply the outcome of centuries of consciously chosen behaviour.

  The nature of the conflicts that the state has provoked has also varied – invasion, wars and conquests, direct enslavement of the domestic population, heavy taxation, etc. None of these things simply “occurred” out of nowhere but were undertaken for specifically chosen purposes. Moreover, it is also the case that the strength and power of the state has varied throughout history and varies also across the globe today – all the way from the horror of the former Soviet Union, possibly the worst state that there has ever been, down to the relative powerlessness of the Swiss canton. It is, therefore, far from ridiculous for libertarians to condemn the state as immoral and evil or for them to fight for institutions (or for a realigned global balance of power) that makes the route of violent appropriation via the state a less attractive option. This is something that the Swiss model has achieved domestically and which, globally, may be achieved by the relative rise of China and Russia as a counterweight to the hitherto condition of American uni-polarity that has allowed the latter to promulgate untrammelled aggression across the globe.

  The state, therefore, is firmly and undeniably a consequence of human choice, not of human nature, and, as such, it is entirely legitimate to expose it to moral examination. As Karl Hess said:

  Libertarians are not determinists who feel that unseen, mystic forces move men and history in inexorable patterns, up and down fated graphs. Libertarians, being radicals, know that men can move history, that Man is history, and that men can grasp their own fate, at the root, and advance it.

  We might as well round off this defence against the “human nature” objection to libertarianism by pointing out that human nature is, in fact, the raison d’être of freedom, not its antithesis. Libertarianism understands humans for what they are – independently thinking, desiring, choosing, and acting beings. Whichever way you look at it there is no higher unit than the individual person who undertakes these activities. Even when our thoughts and desires are influenced by others and the groups we choose to join, the choice to pursue them ultimately remains ours – and, as a result of any particular choice, it is us as individuals who each feel the joy of success and the pain of failure. Libertarianism allows each human, warts and all, to act to fulfil these independent desires and choices within the confines of his own person and property, or within any joint enterprise with willing partners.

  Statism, on the other hand, has always had to override these individual choices, desires, and actions in order to fulfil some grander vision of a “better society”. In the first instance it hopes that these individual desires can be assumed away by imagining that some kind of newly moulded man will work with glee towards “higher” ideals that are desired by the leaders and busybodying visionaries. What they do not realise is that the initial popularity of statism emanates from the fact that individual people think that it will promote what they want while forcing others to shoulder the burden. If socialism, for example, means “from each according to his means to each according to his needs”, everyone expects to be in the category of “needs” rather than “means” – they seldom consider the fact that they may be the ones with the “means” who suffer day and night to meet someone else’s “needs”. As soon everyone realises that the latter is the reality then any incentive to co-operate dissolves and so the state has to wheel out the guns and gulags in order to force people into line. This discord with human nature is one of the reasons why socialist experiments have collapsed while freer societies have prospered. It is, therefore, individual freedom and not an automated, robotic adherence to the state that is in keeping with human nature.

  Radicalism vs. Gradualism

  The third and final version of the argument that libertarianism is “utopian” and which we shall explore here accepts that libertarianism is neither physically impossible nor necessarily contrary to human nature; however, so this argument goes, libertarianism still fails as the democratic state is so entrenched in the world and people are so inherently statist that any hope for a libertarian society will founder upon the rocks.

  The basic thrust of this argument is an assault on libertarianism’s inherently radical nature, and the alleged hopelessness of pursuing radical ideas more generally. Anti-libertarians are content to dismiss any form of libertarianism on these grounds alone; some free market proponents, on the other hand – such as the late Milton Friedman – have accepted this argument and attempt to achieve greater freedom by working within the state system through some kind of gradualism. We will challenge both the anti-radicalist defence of statism and the gradualist approach to freedom here.

  In the first place, a proposition may be radical on account of the fact that an opposing proposition is widely accepted and well entrenched. However, it does not follow from this that the importance of either the truth or justice of an unpopular proposition is in any way diminished. For instance, everyone may have once thought that the earth was flat and was at the centre of the universe. However, this consensus changed neither the fact that the earth is actually spherical and orbiting the sun, nor the fact that such an understanding would yield significant progress for human knowledge of their environment. Similarly, if everybody thought that it was perfectly acceptable to murder blacks or rape women and, moreover, everybody was merrily raping and murdering, this would not change the fact that these are inherently evil acts against which every effort should be made to stop them – and, moreover, that the stoppage should be immediate. The difficulty of countering well entrenched views will certainly render our strategy in pursuing a radical goal more difficult, but it does not, contrary to the anti-libertarian stance, invalidate the goal in the first place. Truths do not go away merely because everyone wants them to and in some cases revelation of the truth – such as the true nature of the state and the way it blights mankind – would have such powerful consequences that suffering the difficulty of attainment is worth it. Indeed, we might say that the failure to speak truth to power – or to overwhelming odds – is a sign of cowardice more than it is a sign of realism. The complexities involved in mustering the requisite courage are perhaps best captured by Joseph R Peden when he says:

  The libertarian revolution is not the work of a day – or a decade – or a life-time. It is a continuous process through the ages. The focus of the struggle changes from time to time and place to place. Once it involved the abolition of slavery; now it may be women’s liberation; here it may be a struggle for national independence; there it may center on civil liberties; at one moment it may require electioneering and party politics; at another armed self-defense and revolution […] There is a tendency among many libertarians to look for an apocalyptic moment when the State will be smashed forever and anarchy prevail. When they realize that the great moment isn’t about to come in their time, if ever, they lose faith in the integrity and plausibility of libertarian philosophy […] [This] should warn us that libertarianism can quite easily become an adolescent fantasy in minds that are immature and unseasoned by a broad humanistic understanding. It should not be an idée fixe or magic formula, but a moral imperative with which once approaches the complexities of social reality.

  From observing the unfolding of history, we can see quite clearly that ideas – and radical ideas especially – do matter. As the Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset reminded us “civilisation is not ‘just there’ – it is not self supporting.” In other words, the existence of civilisation cannot be taken for granted and requires instead our active willingness to engage with the ideas which uphold it while repelling those that seek to destroy it. Most of either of such ideas have, at some point, begun as radical, popularly derided theories embraced by only a few intellectuals or pamphleteers – yet their subsequent, widespread adoption has had profound consequences. For instance, without enlightenment philosophy, it is unlikely that the American, French and Industrial Revolutions would ever have occurred; Karl Marx died in relative obscurity outside of radical circles, yet his theories went on to enslave half the globe; democracy has scarcely been taken seriously for almost the entire history of political thought, yet now one is laughed out of the room for even entertaining the suggestion that it is anything shy of brilliant. Moreover, it is difficult to dispute the fact that the triumph of democracy has endowed the state with a hitherto unseen halo of legitimacy that has served to justify its ever increasing expansion and perpetuation of atrocities. For example, millennia of monarchs, emperors and entrenched dynasties failed to create a world trading entirely with paper money; yet democracy “achieved” it in just a few decades.

  In short, therefore, what people think has changed dramatically and has had very real effects upon humanity. Consequently we must be prepared to influence what they think if we want to change the course of history. Ideas that are pummelled today will be praised tomorrow, and the seeming remoteness of victory today does not mean that victory will never arrive. As T S Eliot said

  If we take the widest and wisest view of a Cause, there is no such thing as a Lost Cause, because there is no such thing as a Gained Cause. We fight for lost causes because we know that our defeat and dismay may be the preface to our successors’ victory, though that victory itself will be temporary; we fight rather to keep something alive than in the expectation that it will triumph.

  Turning now to gradualism, any strategy which has jettisoned an ultimate goal or radical principle ends up bringing about a state of affairs that it is qualitatively different. The reason for this is that such a strategy needs to fill its ideological vacuum with some other guiding philosophy in order to inform its choices. For explicitly gradualist approaches towards freedom this has ended up being some kind of utilitarianism. In addition to this, as the focus of such gradualism has been to work hand in hand with as opposed to against the state, its proponents have been forced to accept the state’s perpetuation of basic injustices (such as its taxes, regulations, and monopoly over law, order and defence), thus morphing any of their criticism in this regard to being criticisms of degree rather than of kind. Consequently, any fulfilment of their obsession with “efficiency” has allowed the gradualist approach to accommodate and expand these injustices as they see fit. Therefore, the nature of the liberalising project has morphed into something which, rather than challenging injustice, instead permits it to be accommodated or replaced by further injustices.18

  For example, debates in the nineteenth century over the abolition of slavery were mired by considerations of whether the slaveholders should be “compensated” for the loss of their “property” in the slaves. It took the radical philosopher, Benjamin Pearson, to point out that it was the slaves who should be compensated for their years of misery while the slaveholders should be punished. Similarly, proposals for “school vouchers” wax lyrical about the benefits of “choice”, “competition” and “consumer sovereignty” without considering the choice and sovereignty of the tax payers who are mulcted to pay for it all, let alone the indoctrinating nature of state education. And, of course, any talk of tax reform is persistently blighted by some perceived necessity for any changes to the tax code to be “revenue neutral” – a concern which, judging by its prominence in the first paragraph of its 2017 tax reform plan, seems to be a priority for the Adam Smith Institute.

  So going back to our earlier, hypothetical society that enjoys raping women and murdering blacks, such approaches would translate into proposals to “compensate” murderers and rapists for their loss of enjoyment from murdering and raping; or to issue “rape vouchers”; or to ensure that “murder reform” was “murder neutral”. Framed in this light we can see that these proposals are not only utterly ridiculous but completely immoral – and, moreover, would result in something that is qualitatively different from anything we would regard as a free society.

  This critique of the gradualist approach does not seek to admonish anyone who accepts a movement towards an ultimate goal which, although falling short of it, yields a significant improvement. For example, we could accept, say, a 10% reduction of all taxes across the board with no strings attached, even if a residual tax burden remains. The point is that one must, in the first place, approach the table hoping to get everything that one wants in the fullest and quickest manner possible. When confronted by murder, rape, and slavery, for instance, one must begin by hoping to eradicate these abominations completely. All actual outcomes must then be judged in relation to this yardstick. On the other hand, if you come to the table demanding only half measures then you will never leave with anything more than half measures. No doubt, it is for this reason that William Lloyd Garrison said “gradualism in theory is perpetuity in practice.”

  Neither also are we seeking to criticise anyone who would caution us against abolishing a certain injustice on account of the fact that an even greater calamity might follow – such might be the case if, for example, welfare recipients rioted as a result of their funds being cut off. This is simply an expression of prudence that seeks to prevent causing more harm to the existing victims of the state than has already been inflicted. It is a million miles away from the travesty of the gradualist approach which regards the livelihoods of the perpetrators of injustice, whether they are murderers, rapists, slaveholders or just parents who expect “society” to educate their children, as being more important than the liberty of the victims. As Murray N Rothbard says:

  Gradualism in theory indeed undercuts the goal itself by conceding that it must take second or third place to other non- or antilibertarian considerations. For a preference for gradualism implies that these other considerations are more important than liberty.

  Indeed, the fatal flaw of gradualism is that it cares too much about rocking the boat rather than dealing with the pirates who have commandeered it (although we should probably also mention that the opportunity to share in the rum barrel plays a dimension in this regard). The purpose of radical ideas, however, is not to keep the ship afloat – it is to come to the rescue when it sinks. And, as noted earlier, our ship of heavily socialised democracy is almost certainly going sink at some point. When, for instance, Soviet communism collapsed in the 1980s-1990s, the last thing their long-suffering people wanted was a watered down version of that which had already failed them so catastrophically. Given that Western academics had been so pre-occupied with glorifying Marxism or preaching Keynesianism this one, great opportunity to administer the coup de grâce to all forms of socialism while they were on their knees was simply wasted.

  In at least two cases where free market reforms have been implemented successfully and long lastingly – in Hong Kong under John James Cowperthwaite and in New Zealand under Roger Douglas, both of whom were the Finance Ministers in their respective jurisdictions – a crisis was met with a “big bang” approach that swept away statist interference across the board in one, fell swoop. Douglas himself took the time to explain why such an approach and only such approach is likely work.

  First, clear goals and introducing them speedily prevent special interest groups from dragging the project down – by the time these people have worked out how to respond to a particular reform another one has already appeared. Second, reaching those clear goals in quantum leaps, rather than step by step, means that their positive effects appear much sooner, generating public support for them very quickly. This renders any endeavour to reach consensus with interest groups prior to the introduction of reforms – which Douglas regarded as rarely possible – unnecessary. This also demolishes the problem of residual economic distortions which linger when only some state interference is rolled back in a piecemeal fashion. Third, the snowballing effect of support gained from tangible progress and prosperity completely neutralises the opposition – devoid of the ability to suggest any practical alternative that could be so good, they are reduced to spouting empty platitudes.24 And finally, the faster you go the shorter the period of any uncertainty concerning the legal and regulatory environment, allowing businesses and entrepreneurs to make plans and invest capital sooner.

  All in all, Douglas took his shot and made the kill while his opponents hadn’t even picked up their guns. The fact that the results spoke for themselves initiated a circular motion where rapid and radical reform led to actual success that, in turn, served to create increased support for further reform. This contrasted with the approach of Douglas’ predecessor, Robert Muldoon (who was Prime Minister concurrently) who would only change things if no one was left worse off in the short term. Thus he ended up changing little.

  We can round off this defence of radicalism by conceding to both anti-libertarians and to gradualist free marketers their best possible scenario. What would happen if the libertarian goal was, in fact, achieved in one, fell swoop and the state vanished, right now, in an instant? What would happen if, to mimic a scenario posited by Leonard Read26​, we could push a big red button which would enable us to obliterate the state immediately and unremorsefully?

  Statists would like to tell us that society would soon collapse into murderous chaos; gradualists would probably say the same thing. But would this necessarily be the case? As we said earlier, the existence of the state is a product of conscious choice – it is a means for achieving certain ends. When the state ceases to provide the means for fulfilling these ends it will not be the case that we all give up and fail to look for an alternative. Nature abhors a vacuum, and acting man even more so.

  Therefore, if the state was to vanish in a puff of smoke, there may well be a transitory period of restlessness but people would soon take steps to protect and defend their property, with these private means eventually replacing the monopolistic provision of the state. Actual breakdowns of civil order have never lasted long enough for such private means to flourish or to crystallise into formal organisations, but we have seen their genesis in prominent incidents when the official, state police failed to come to the rescue – for example, in Koreatown during the 1992 Los Angeles riots, the 2011 UK riots, and in Ferguson, Missouri, in August 2014.

  In any case, it is not true that people refrain from engaging in private murder and theft simply because the state would clobber us if we did otherwise. Without the state the number of people willing to commit private murder and theft would still be in the minority. The majority abstain from these acts not because the government is preventing them from doing them but because a) they recognise them as evil and b) beyond the confines of immediate gratification they are ultimately counterproductive to maintaining the standard of living. Abolishing the state will not change this view. If any proponent of a statist order was to suggest otherwise then it is permissible to ask him what he would do if the state vanished suddenly. Would he be among the looters and plunderers? Would he be out smashing windows and burning down shops? Or would he be trying to create some semblance of civil order? If he would opt for the latter then on which grounds would he assume that everyone else would choose the former? In fact, getting rid of the state will annihilate the institution which is viewed as being the sole conduit for acts of violence to be perpetrated legitimately. Thus, by removing this veneer of legitimacy, the immediate destruction of the state would bring about a swift, moral improvement of the populace rather than its retrogression into barbarism.

  Interestingly, the gradualists in this instance have a weaker argument than the outright statists. Statists have an overriding distrust of the marketplace to create any kind of acceptable social order and so their conclusion that the immediate disappearance of the state would lead to chaos does, at least, have some consistency. Gradualists, however, wax lyrical about how “efficient” private individuals are when it comes to giving us more food, clothing, cars, and so on. But, for some reason, they do not trust those private individuals to manage any transition to a free society.

  Conclusion

  In closing, we can note that although libertarian principles are shamelessly radical, the path to fulfilling them may not be that radical at all. Centralising, statist projects, such as the EU, attempt to destroy the cultural, customary, and religious foundations of Western civilisation in order to replace it with their own, artificially constructed, trans-national, multicultural monoliths. It is, in fact, theseaims that are being rejected as too radical by the subjugated populations. In challenging them libertarians are, for the most part, trying to stop the world from being created anew, rather than create it anew ourselves. Moreover, the leftist/statist frenzy has now descended into being such a farce that political satirists are finding it too difficult to make things up – and that what they previously considered as far fetched jokes based on just a kernel of truth are inflating into full blown reality.

  This is not difficult to understand in an age which regards itself as immune to not only well-established social customs but is also engaging in an Orwellian endeavour to rewrite basic logic and common sense – that “free speech” is now speech the left agrees with; that “tolerance” means violently assaulting those who disagree with you; that “hate crime” is more evil than real crime2; that gender does not exist, or if it does exist then there is something like fifty of them; that we need to argue about who can use which toilet. In confronting all of this it seems that libertarians do not need to appear radical and certainly not utopian – instead, we may just need to be “normal”.

  

• Underground Doomsday Bunker Embroiled In Colombian Drug Money Sting

  The developer of a high-end underground residential housing project advertised as a “five star playground with DEFCON 1 preparedness” is the subject of a federal criminal complaint after he agreed to launder money for Colombian drug cartels.

  John Eckerd – owner and manager of the $330 million Trident Lakes condo project, along with an unnamed co-conspirator accepted money they thought to be the proceeds from the Colombian drug trade – but it was actually undercover FBI agents according to Dallas local station CBS 11.

  

  

  The court documents allege Eckerd, 54, and an unidentified co-conspirator accepted $200,000 in purported drug money from undercover FBI agents over the past year. The federal sting culminated in February with Eckerd allegedly agreeing to launder $1 million from Colombian drug dealers through Trident Lakes, a planned 700-acre residential project in rural Fannin County.

  An undercover FBI agent posing as a former narcotics trafficker learned of Eckerd last September when the unidentified co-conspirator, who lives in New Jersey, suggested that Eckerd’s development in rural Fannin County could be used to launder narcotics profits.

  …

  Eckerd, a McKinney resident, has been out on $100,000 bond since March. His attorney, Dallas defense lawyer Bob Webster, declined an on-camera interview, but questioned the charges against his client. –CBS 11

  “As you know, the government, they can write in a variety of terms,” Webster told CBS 11 News. “And they choose the terms.”

  A U.S. magistrate judge granted a continuance in the case in May, writing that “plea negotiations currently are in progress, and both the United States and the Defendant seek additional time to achieve successful resolution of these negotiations, which would render trial of this matter unnecessary.”

  The Trident Lakes project made headlines two years ago while advertising the project – yet aside from building a horse-themed water fountain, neighbors say nearly nothing has been done on the property. It was to feature an 18-hole golf course and 796 subterranean condos fortified to withstand catastrophic events from nuclear war to the next global pandemic. Sizes range from 1,084 to 3,974 sqft. Prices for each unit ranged from $449,000 to $1.9 million according to a FAQ on the Trident Lakes website.

  

  

  Everybody is attracted to our grand entrance. And by everybody, we mean this inquisitive cow. Moooooovehlous! https://t.co/vu93i7IiaJ pic.twitter.com/ky81Hqw1dQ

  — Trident Lakes (@TridentLakes) March 20, 2017

  Trident Lakes is our vision of luxury living in a resort-style community with multiple layers of security. All residences are specially engineered, efficient and spacious earth-sheltered condominiums with oversized terraces. Integrated into the community is a variety of amenities including a gun-range, three Caribbean-style lagoons, horseback riding, walking trails, golf, tennis, clubhouse and more. From the front gate to the front door of your condominium, Trident Lakes has designed security and sustainable living into every detail. Trident Lakes delivers investment quality real estate for the sophisticated buyer who seeks pleasure and peace in a perilous world. –Trident Lakes

  

  After disaster strikes: 

  Each condo will be connected – via a series of tunnels – to a community center which will include areas for dry food storage, DNA vaults, exercise rooms, communal greenhouse and meeting areas. Because of our detail to planning and populating, Trident Lakes will be prepared to mitigate the dangers.

  According to Business Insider, “A former spokesperson for Trident Lakes told Business Insider via email in 2017 that the development was still “in the early stages of development.”

  “We’re building more of an interactive, sustainable community, rather than just a hole in the ground to hide in,” the spokesperson said in that email. “Trident Lakes will be an above-ground country club resort with all the bells and whistles, but also — if need be — one of the safest places on Earth in our underground condominiums and communal living spaces.”

  The doomsday getaway for the ultra-rich was featured in national and local media, including The Atlantic, Texas Monthly, Forbes, and Business Insider.

  After the election of President Donald Trump in 2016, Americans took up new interest in doomsday preparations, as the possibility of a new Cold War set in. One company that manufactures and installs bunkers said it saw business climb over 500% in 2017. –Business Insider

  Read the complaint below:

  

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