Take me back to Constantinople

“Economic crisis, mounting national debt, excessive foreign commitments — this is no way to run an empire. America needs serious strategic counseling. And fast. It has never been Rome, and to adopt its strategies no — its ruthless expansion of empire, domination of foreign peoples, and bone-crushing brand of total war — would only hasten America’s decline. Better instead to look to the empire’s eastern incarnation: Byzantium, which outlasted its Roman predecessor by eight centuries. It is the lessons of Byzantine grand strategy that America must rediscover today.

Fortunately, the Byzantines are far easier to learn from than the Romans, who left virtually no written legacy of their strategy and tactics, just textual fragments and one bookish compilation by Vegetius, who knew little about statecraft or war. The Byzantines, however, wrote it all down — their techniques of persuasion, intelligence gathering, strategic thinking, tactical doctrines, and operational methods. All of this is laid out clearly in a series of surviving Byzantine military manuals and a major guidebook on statecraft.” By EDWARD LUTTWAK

Read more at foreignpolicy.com

 

HT: De unione ecclesiarum

Berkshares

I thought this was interesting.

“BerkShares are a local currency for the Berkshire region. Dubbed a “great economic experiment” by the New York Times, BerkShares are a tool for community empowerment, enabling merchants and consumers to plant the seeds for an alternative economic future for their communities. Launched in the fall of 2006, BerkShares had a robust initiation, with over one million BerkShares having been circulated in the first nine months and over two million to date. Currently, more than three hundred and sixty businesses have signed up to accept the currency. Five different banks have partnered with BerkShares, with a total of thirteen branch offices now serving as exchange stations. For BerkShares, this is only the beginning. Future plans could involve BerkShare checking accounts, electronic transfer of funds, ATM machines, and even a loan program to facilitate the creation of new, local businesses manufacturing more of the goods that are used locally.”- From Berkshares.org

A video about the Berkshares currency from the WSJ.

Ayn Rand vs Tolkien

I found this comparison of these two worldviews to be very interesting.

“Given the breadth and length of both novels, the comparison of Atlas Shrugged and The Lord of the Rings could go on much longer, revealing many new themes and interpretations. It seems, however, that even the few differences sketched above allow for a tentative answer to the questions raised in the introduction. As much as Ayn Rand’s novel, with its strictly modernist message, could have been at some point in the past an effective remedy against the plagues of socialism and collectivism, the world described in it does not fit today’s reality and does not help in introducing the idea of natural order. Today, it is no longer necessary to protect big business from people. On the contrary, it is people who need protection from big business, which now goes hand in hand with Leviathan in trying to create a homogenous and completely atomized society.

The Lord of the Rings shows not only the great danger associated with all attempts to defeat evil power by power, but it also teaches that collectives do not really exist, that every one of us is the hero of his own individual story, and that law and order can easily exist without the state. Despite its egoistic message, Atlas Shrugged is full of imperatives to act, to fight, to bring salvation. Rand’s characters suffer not only because the state reaches into their wallets, but because the society rejected their rational, “enlightened” vision of what is good and right.

Tolkien, on the other hand, disliked such imperatives. He hated the outlook that if something can be done, it has to be done, and once even admitted that the greatest deeds of mind and spirit are born in abnegation. That is most likely the reason his characters do not look for great challenges, nor wish to change the world, and instead live quietly, fulfilling Voltaire’s dictum Il faut cultiver notre jardin.

This is what makes The Lord of the Rings a much better means for conceptualizing the ideas of freedom than Atlas Shrugged. Reading Tolkien helps realize that, even after the “end of history,” the world and society can move in the direction of Merry Old England rather than a soulless homogenized mass of atoms. Moreover, The Lord of the Rings conveys an extremely important and optimistic message, namely that a plurality of many different cultures, languages, societies and visions, all existing together, yet separate and independent of each other, is still viable — not in a democratic regime, but in the new world of Hoppean natural order.”

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Juliusz Jablecki is summer fellow at the Mises Institute, and works with the Mises Institute, Poland.

Read the whole article here.

The Economy and The Gold Standard

The Daily Eudemon has been reading several different economists the last few months and here are some of his conclusions. Also take a look at his B is for Beer post.

Big Business, Big Government and the Economy

“Chesterton wrote years ago about Hudge and Gudge: Big business and big government. They work together, he said, to hurt the average man. They both claim to help the average man, but in the process, they help each other more and end up spitting on the average man. The bailouts of the Wall Street banks and the long-term cost they will impose on average taxpayers for the next 100 years make no sense, unless you understand this queer affair between big government and big business. The whole concept of the federal reserve is very odd, but you begin to get an uncomfortable sense of understanding when you realize there’s a long-standing clandestine relationship between NYC and DC.

I’m not alleging conspiracy, incidentally. I am alleging mutuality of self-interest and insider dealings, but that’s not my main point here (at some point, I am going to come up with a list of merchant-government collusion incidents that have occurred since The Glorious Revolution, but not now). My main point here is, those two bastards always seem to grow together but we always think of them as enemies.

It’s in government’s self-interest to let businesses get big. When they get big, the government can claim it needs to get bigger to protect the nation from big businesses. This is exactly what happened during the Teddy Roosevelt administration, and his cousin Franklin played a similar card during The Great Depression. We know Obama is going to play that card, too: In the wake of the scandals, we need more government oversight, maybe even a nationalization of the country’s banks.

And if that occurs, big businesses will get even bigger . . . because only big businesses will be able to afford the lobby costs and wine-filled dinners to sway favorable loans out government-controlled banks.” The Daily Eudemon

Read Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered by E.F. Schumacher

The Federal Reserve is the Problem

Here are a few good observations from Ron Paul.

“We are in this crisis because of an excess of artificially created credit at the hands of the Federal Reserve System. The solution being proposed? More artificial credit by the Federal Reserve. No liquidation of bad debt and malinvestment is to be allowed. By doing more of the same, we will only continue and intensify the distortions in our economy – all the capital misallocation, all the malinvestment – and prevent the market’s attempt to re-establish rational pricing of houses and other assets……

We are told that “low interest rates” led to excessive borrowing, but we are not told how these low interest rates came about. They were a deliberate policy of the Federal Reserve. As always, artificially low interest rates distort the market. Entrepreneurs engage in malinvestments – investments that do not make sense in light of current resource availability, that occur in more temporally remote stages of the capital structure than the pattern of consumer demand can support, and that would not have been made at all if the interest rate had been permitted to tell the truth instead of being toyed with by the Fed.

Not a word about any of that, of course, because Americans might then discover how the great wise men in Washington caused this great debacle. Better to keep scapegoating the mortgage industry or “wildcat capitalism” (as if we actually have a pure free market!)…..

Then come the scare tactics. If we don’t give dictatorial powers to the Treasury Secretary “the stock market would drop even more, which would reduce the value of your retirement account. The value of your home could plummet.” Left unsaid, naturally, is that with the bailout and all the money and credit that must be produced out of thin air to fund it, the value of your retirement account will drop anyway, because the value of the dollar will suffer a precipitous decline. As for home prices, they are obviously much too high, and supply and demand cannot equilibrate if government insists on propping them up.

It’s the same destructive strategy that government tried during the Great Depression: prop up prices at all costs. The Depression went on for over a decade. On the other hand, when liquidation was allowed to occur in the equally devastating downturn of 1921, the economy recovered within less than a year.”- Ron Paul

Economic Collapse

Rick Saenz at the blog “Dry Creek Chronicles” has posted a very interesting book review on the possible coming economic collapse. You can visit his blog here.