I need a haircut. My barber needs my custom. My barber’s landlord needs his rent-check. My barber’s landlord’s bank needs his mortgage payment. The corporate bank needs the local office to stay solvent. Etcetera, etcetera. It cascades upwards. The lockdown, if it were ever justified, is now simply an economic suicide pact. We need to live free or we will die.
Economics
What Is It Like To Suffer a Preference Cascade?
What is happening right now, globally, in re the Chinese Flu, is an inflection point in human history. This is so, no matter what the facts might actually turn out to be – the facts medical, epidemiological,, financial, economical, political, cultural, you name it – which now all appear to all of us so obscure, and (we cannot but think) intentionally obfuscated and obscured, by those in the higher reaches of the global culture interested in this or that outcome, for their own purposes, rather than for the sake of the good, the true, the beautiful. It does not really matter what those facts might turn out to be. Ex post, they shall, certainly, tell. But, for the moment, being mostly unknown, they simply cannot; almost every datum is now somewhat masked by countervalent noise of some sort. So, we proceed all of us on the basis of what we know. And what we know extends not much further than our own households, and beyond that our familiar networks, intimately connected via the web despite their geographic dispersion.
The Worst Good Friday of This Age – So, the Best
The present global corona virus lock down, however well-meant or effective or warranted it may be, is unquestionably the greatest assault on human society since WWII. It’s nothing near as bad as that titanic war, of course, but it’s bad. It attacks man on all fronts: biological, financial, economic, social, psychological, cultural – and, of course, and at root, and so most importantly, spiritual.
Almost no one is going to be able to worship in Church today, or what is far worse, the day after tomorrow. The churches will be almost completely empty this Easter.
This means that the lock down is a gigantic tactical victory for the Enemy. The whole Church is in abeyance, for a time; and this is massively hard on morale in our ranks. It means then that this Lent, and especially this Triduum, is bound to be a time of unusually intense demonic oppression. At this time, more than at any other in recent memory, our Enemy is likely to press his attack with utmost vigor. And indeed, priests and deacons all over the world have reported a huge surge in demonic activity, ranging from spiritual lassitude, dryness, heaviness or despair, to possession.
Letter To an Investor
A client wrote me over the weekend, asking if I thought recent news of apparent flattening of the curve of new infections of Chinese Flu in Italy, Spain and, perhaps, even New York City, portended incipient prevalence over the virus. I responded:
Everything You Do Is Worship
We think of worship as something we do mostly in church. It is time we dedicate especially to God. But every moment of our lives is dedicated to something or other; and we would not be doing anything we do if those things to which they are dedicated were not important to us; if we did not think them worthy of our attention, and of our effort.
Preference Cascade Incoming
As an investment advisor, I’ve been pretty tied up the last couple of weeks, for obvious reasons – although I will say that the reaction of our clientele so far to the corona virus crisis – or, is it a ‘crisis’? – seems to be, “Well, these things happen from time to time, best to just hunker down and wait; after all, that worked well the last 23 times this sort of thing happened.” Which is true. Now more even than usual, any investment decisions we might make in view of the present crisis are in the nature of things obsolete by the time they occur to us. And when the market plunges, pretty much the best thing looking forward is to own the market – because reversion to the mean. But their reaction is heartening, too, as a testament to their sanguine equanimity – which is to say, to their wisdom.
What is more, we are tied into a network of roughly 100 advisory firms such as my own, and that reaction seems to be pretty normal among all their clients, in their thousands upon thousands. Which is doubly heartening.
Where To Find More American Workers
As employment has boomed in the US of late, more and more workers who had long ago given up looking for work have again entered the labor market, and found work. This growth in the supply of American workers has prevented wages and inflation from rising much, despite the greatly increased demand of the private sector for labor of all kinds. It’s been great. But with downward pressure of all sorts on immigration of all sorts, there is now serious worry that the former “reserve army of the unemployed” is approaching depletion, and that the supply of new labor is drying up; that the labor market is going to heat up enough to ignite significant demand led inflation, laying the groundwork for a recession.
Enclosing the National Commons
An externality is a cost of economic activity that is not easily ascertainable, or accounted for, and that therefore is not usually covered by the prices of goods. Externalities are costs that are suffered, but not paid for. Because the market has a hard time recognizing them properly, they are considered a sort of market failure; and the perfection of markets involves accurate accounting for externalities, and for their inclusion among the factors of production, and thus of the prices of goods and services. Perfect markets internalize all costs.
Many externalities are costs imposed on commons: goods held in common by the whole commonwealth – by everybody, and by nobody in particular. Precisely because they are difficult to account for, externalities are not usually controlled costs. The commons they injure are then subject to unbridled exploitation.
Imports have obvious benefits, or no one would want to pay for them. They also impose externalities.
Chastek Asks a Good Question
James Chastek’s Just Thomism is one of the sites I read without fail. I like it because he teaches me lots of things. He closed comments a while ago because responding to them took up too much time. So here is what I would have commented at his blog if he still allowed comments, in response to this post:
Many of the books in the “decline of the West” genre – which was already old by the time Weaver published Ideas have Consequences in 1948 but which still sells (Deneen’s Why Liberalism Failed) – tell a curious narrative of decline over very large time scales. If Nominalism or Hobbesianism were as harmful as claimed, why is the diseased host still alive a half-millennium later?
Now that’s a good question. I myself have contributed a fair bit to the literature wailing and bemoaning nominalism. How do I answer the question?
The Optimal Tonlieu
Tonlieux have been a topic of discussion lately in libertarian circles. A tonlieu is a fee paid to a sovereign in exchange for safe passage or residence in his domains or for access to the markets thereof, and for the protection of his laws. Tonlieux were common in Medieval Europe. Domains of all sorts – cities, counties and abbeys, and of course duchies, principalities, and kingdoms – charged a fee to travellers who traversed or stayed in their lands or transacted in their markets (or used their bridges, ferries, or roads), no matter how short or long their stay. Payment of the tonlieu was manifest in an insignia – a visa – on a passport, which amounted to a receipt for payment. If you were in country without a current visa, you were not reliably under the sovereign’s protection, and so (in general, and with due allowance for differences in the detail of enforcement from one domain to another) might be fair game for footpads and highwaymen, thieves and burglars, muggers and fraudsters; and might be without recourse in any local court of law (which usually amounted to the throne room of the local sovereign); and might furthermore be subject to immediate deportation upon detection by the cops, if not also taking without compensation (in such cases the cops would take their cut of the expropriated assets and pass them up the hierarchy, with each level taking a cut, and the sovereign fisc last in line, although not least)(“civil forfeiture” has been around for a very long time: ‘cop’ is from the Latin capere, to take).
The recent proposals for tonlieux vary considerably. Since I’ve been talking up the notion for years, I might as well here offer a more detailed explanation of what I would propose. It is of course subject to change as I learn more.
