- Bussjaeger, Carl.
Bargaining Position.
Lyndeborough, NH: http://www.bussjaeger.us/, [2010] 2011.
-
In
Net Assets (October 2002)
the author chronicled the breakout of lovers of liberty from
the Earth's gravity well by a variety of individual initiatives
and their defeat of the forces of coercive government which
wished to keep them in chains. In this sequel, set in
the mid-21st century, the expansion into the solar system
is entirely an economy of consensual actors, some ethical and
some rogue, but all having escaped the shackles of the state, left to
stew in its own stagnating juices on Earth.
The Hunters are an amorous couple who have spent the last decade
on their prospecting ship, Improbable, staking claims
in the asteroid belt and either working them or selling the larger
ones to production companies. After a successful strike, they decide
to take a working vacation exploring Jupiter's leading
Trojan position. At this
Lagrangian point
the equilibrium between the gravity of Jupiter and the Sun creates a
family of stable orbits around that point. The Trojan position can be
thought of as an
attractor
toward which objects in similar orbits will approach and
remain.
The Hunters figure that region, little-explored, might collect all
kinds of interesting and potentially lucrative objects, and finance
their expedition with a contract to produce a documentary about their
voyage of exploration. What they discover exceeds anything they imagined
to find: what appears to be an alien interstellar probe, disabled
by an impact after arrival in the solar system, but with most of its
systems and advanced technology intact.
This being not only an epochal discovery in human history, but
valuable beyond the dreams of avarice, the Hunters set out to
monetise the discovery, protect it against claim jumpers, and
discover as much as they can to increase the value of what they've
found to potential purchasers. What they discover makes the
bargaining process even more complicated and with much higher stakes.
This is a tremendous story, and I can't go any further describing it
without venturing into spoiler territory, which would desecrate
this delightful novel. The book is available from the
author's Web site
as a
free PDF download;
use your favourite PDF reader application on your computer or mobile
device to read it. As in common in self-published works, there are a
number of copy-editing errors: I noted a total of 25 and I was reading
for enjoyment, not doing a close-proof. None of them detract in any way
from the story.
- White, Andrew Dickson.
Fiat Money Inflation in France.
Bayonne, NJ: Blackbird Books, [1876, 1896, 1912, 1914] 2011.
ISBN 978-1-61053-004-0.
-
One of the most sure ways to destroy the economy, wealth, and
morals of a society is monetary inflation: an inexorable and
accelerating increase in the supply of money, which inevitably
(if not always immediately) leads to ever-rising prices, collapse in
saving and productive investment, and pauperisation of the working
classes in favour of speculators and those with connections to the
regime issuing the money.
In ancient times, debasement of the currency was accomplished
by clipping coins or reducing their content of precious metal.
Ever since Marco Polo
returned from China
with news of the
tremendous innovation of paper money, unbacked paper currency
(or
fiat money)
has been the vehicle of choice for states to loot their
productive and thrifty citizens.
Between 1789 and 1796, a period encompassing the French
Revolution, the French National Assembly issued
assignats,
paper putatively backed by the value of public lands
seized from the Roman Catholic Church in the revolution.
Assignats could theoretically be used to purchase these
lands, and initially paid interest—they were thus a
hybrid between a currency and a bond. The initial issue
revived the French economy and rescued the state from
bankruptcy but, as always happens, was followed by a
second, third, and then a multitude of subsequent issues
totally decoupled from the value of the land which
was supposed to back them. This sparked an inflationary
and eventually hyperinflationary spiral with savers wiped out,
manufacturing and commerce grinding to a halt (due to uncertainty,
inability to invest, and supply shortages) which caused wages
to stagnate even as prices were running away to the upside,
an enormous transfer of wealth from the general citizenry to
speculators and well-connected bankers, and rampant corruption
within the political class. The sequelæ of monetary
debasement all played out as they always have and always
will: wage and price controls, shortages, rationing, a rush to
convert paper money into tangible assets as quickly as possible,
capital and foreign exchange controls, prohibition on the
ownership of precious metals and their confiscation, and a one-off
“wealth tax” until the second, and the third, and so
on. Then there was the inevitable replacement of the discredited
assignats with a new paper currency, the
mandats,
which rapidly blew up. Then came Napoleon, who restored
precious metal currency; hyperinflation so often ends up with a
dictator in power.
What is remarkable about this episode is that it happened
in a country which had experienced the disastrous
John Law
paper money bubble in 1716–1718, within the living memory
of some in the assignat era and certainly in the minds of the
geniuses who decided to try paper money again because “this
time is different”. When it comes to paper money, this
time is never different.
This short book
(or long pamphlet—the 1896 edition is just 92 pages)
was originally written in 1876 by the author, a president
of Cornell University, as a cautionary tale against advocates of
paper money and
free silver
in the United States.
It was subsequently revised and republished on each occasion the
U.S. veered further toward unbacked or “elastic”
paper money. It remains one of the most straightforward
accounts of a hyperinflationary episode ever written, with
extensive citations of original sources. For a more detailed
account of the Weimar Republic inflation in 1920s Germany, see
When Money Dies (May 2011);
although the circumstances were very different, the similarities
will be apparent, confirming that the laws of economics manifest
here are natural laws just as much as gravitation and electromagnetism,
and ignoring them never ends well.
If you are looking for a Kindle edition of this book, be sure to download
a free sample of the book before purchasing. As the original editions
of this work are in the public domain, anybody is free to produce an
electronic edition, and there are some hideous ones available; look
before you buy.
- Krauss, Lawrence.
Quantum Man.
New York: W. W. Norton, 2011.
ISBN 978-0-393-34065-5.
-
A great deal has been written about the life, career, and antics
of
Richard Feynman,
but until the present book there was not a proper scientific
biography of his work in physics and its significance in the
field and consequences for subsequent research. Lawrence Krauss
has masterfully remedied this lacuna with this work, which
provides, at a level comprehensible to the intelligent layman,
both a survey of Feynman's work, both successful and not, and
also a sense of how Feynman achieved what he did and
what ultimately motivated him in his often lonely quest to
understand.
One often-neglected contributor to Feynman's success is
discussed at length: his extraordinary skill in
mathematical computation, intuitive sense of the best way
to proceed toward a solution (he would often skip several
intermediate steps and only fill them in when preparing work
for publication), and tireless perseverance in performing
daunting calculations which occupied page after page of
forbidding equations. This talent was quickly recognised
by those with whom he worked, and as one of the most junior
physicists on the project, he was placed in charge of all
computation at Los Alamos during the final phases of the
Manhattan Project.
Eugene Wigner
said of Feynman, “He's
another
Dirac.
Only this time human.”
Feynman's intuition and computational prowess was best demonstrated
by his work on
quantum electrodynamics,
for which he shared a Nobel prize in 1965. (Initially Feynman didn't think
too much of this work—he considered it mathematical mumbo-jumbo
which swept the infinities which had plagued earlier attempts at a
relativistic quantum theory of light and matter under the carpet. Only
later did it become apparent that Feynman's work had laid the foundation
upon which a comprehensive quantum field theory of the strong and
electroweak interactions could be built.) His invention of
Feynman diagrams
defined the language now universally used by particle physicists to
describe events in which particles interact.
Feynman was driven to understand things, and to him understanding meant
being able to derive a phenomenon from first principles. Often he
ignored the work of others and proceeded on his own, reinventing as
he went. In numerous cases, he created new techniques and provided
alternative ways of looking at a problem which provided a deeper
insight into its fundamentals. A monumental illustration of Feynman's
ability to do this is
The Feynman Lectures on Physics,
based on an undergraduate course in physics Feynman taught at Caltech
in 1961–1964. Few physicists would have had the audacity to
reformulate all of basic physics, from vectors and statics to
quantum mechanics from scratch, and probably only Feynman could have
pulled it off, which he did magnificently. As undergraduate pedagogy,
the course was less than successful, but the transcribed lectures have
remained in print ever since, and working physicists (and even humble
engineers like me) are astounded at the insights to be had in
reading and re-reading Feynman's work.
Even when Feynman failed, he failed gloriously and left behind work
that continues to inspire. His
unsuccessful attempt
to find a quantum theory of gravitation showed that Einstein's
geometric theory was completely equivalent to a field
theory developed from first principles and knowledge of the
properties of gravity. Feynman's foray into computation produced the
Feynman Lectures On Computation,
one of the first comprehensive expositions of the theory of
quantum computation.
A chapter is devoted to the predictions of Feynman's 1959 lecture,
“Plenty
of Room at the Bottom”, which is rightly viewed as the
founding document of molecular nanotechnology, but, as Krauss
describes, also contained the seeds of genomic biotechnology, ultra-dense
data storage, and quantum material engineering. Work resulting in more
than fifteen subsequent Nobel prizes is suggested in this blueprint
for research. Although Feynman would go on to win his own Nobel
for other work, one gets the sense he couldn't care less that others
pursued the lines of investigation he sketched and were rewarded for
doing so. Feynman was in the game to understand, and
often didn't seem to care whether what he was pursuing was of
great importance or mundane, or whether the problem he was working
on from his own unique point of departure had already been solved
by others long before.
Feynman was such a curious character that his larger than life
personality often obscures his greatness as a scientist. This
book does an excellent job of restoring that balance and showing
how much his work contributed to the edifice of science in the
20th century and beyond.
- Zubrin, Robert
Merchants of Despair.
New York: Encounter Books, 2012.
ISBN 978-1-59403-476-3.
-
This is one of the most important paradigm-changing books since
Jonah Goldberg's
Liberal Fascism (January 2008).
Zubrin seeks the common thread which unites radical environmentalism,
eugenics, population control, and opposition to readily available means
of controlling diseases due to hysteria engendered by overwrought
prose in books written by people with no knowledge of the
relevant science.
Zubrin identifies the central thread of all of these malign belief
systems: anti-humanism. In 1974, the Club of Rome, in
Mankind at the Turning Point,
wrote,
“The world has cancer and the cancer is man.”
A foul synthesis of the ignorant speculations of
Malthus
and a misinterpretation of the work of
Darwin led
to a pernicious doctrine which asserted that an increasing human
population would deplete a fixed pool of resources, leading to conflict
and selection among a burgeoning population for those most able to
secure the resources they needed to survive.
But human history since the dawn of civilisation belies this. In fact,
per capita income has grown as population has increased,
demonstrating that the static model is bogus. Those who want to constrain
the human potential are motivated by a quest for power, not a desire
to seek the best outcome for the most people. The human condition has
improved over time, and at an accelerating pace since the Industrial
Revolution in the 19th century, because of human action: the
creativity of humans in devising solutions to problems and ways to
meet needs often unperceived before the inventions which soon
became seen as essentials were made. Further, the effects of human
invention in the modern age are cumulative: any at point
in history humans have access to all the discoveries of the past and,
once they build upon them to create a worthwhile innovation, it is
rapidly diffused around the world—in our days at close to the
speed of light. The result of this is that in advanced technological
societies the poor, measured by income compared to the societal mean,
would have been considered wealthy not just by the standards of the
pre-industrial age, but compared to those same societies in the
memory of people now alive. The truly poor in today's world are those
whose societies, for various reasons, are not connected to the engine
of technological progress and the social restructuring it inevitably
engenders.
And yet the anti-humanists have consistently argued for limiting the
rate of growth of population and in many cases actually reducing
the total population, applying a “precautionary principle”
to investigation of new technologies and their deployment, and
relinquishment of technologies deemed to be “unsustainable”.
In short, what they advocate is reversing the progress since the year
1800 (and in many ways, since the Enlightenment), and returning to an
imagined bucolic existence (except for, one suspects, the masters in
their gated communities, attended to by the serfs as in times of
old).
What Malthus and all of his followers to the present day missed is
that the human population is not at all like the population of
bacteria in a Petri dish or rabbits in the wild. Uniquely, humans
invent things which improve their condition, create new resources
by finding uses for natural materials previously regarded as
“dirt”, and by doing so allow a larger population to
enjoy a standard of living much better than that of previous
generations. Put aside the fanatics who wish to reduce the human
population by 80% or 90% (they exist, they are frighteningly
influential in policy-making circles, and they are called out by
name here). Suppose, for a moment, the author asks, societies in
the 19th century had listened to Malthus and limited the human
population to half of the historical value. Thomas Edison and Louis
Pasteur did work which contributed to the well-being of their
contemporaries around the globe and continue to benefit us today.
In a world with half as many people, perhaps only one would have ever
lived. Which would you choose?
But the influence of the anti-humans did not stop at theory. The book
chronicles the sorry, often deceitful, and tragic consequences when
their policies were put into action by coercive governments. The destruction
wrought by “population control” measures approached, in some
cases, the level of genocide. By 1975, almost one third of Puerto Rican
women of childbearing age had been sterilised by programs funded by
the U.S. federal government, and a similar program on Indian reservations
sterilised one quarter of Native American women of childbearing age,
often without consent. Every purebred woman of the Kaw tribe of
Oklahoma was sterilised in the 1970s: if that isn't genocide, what is?
If you look beneath the hood of radical environmentalism, you'll find
anti-humanism driving much of the agenda. The introduction of
DDT in the 1940s
immediately began to put an end to the age-old scourge of malaria.
Prior to World War II, between one and six million cases of
malaria were reported in the U.S. every year. By 1952, application of
DDT to the interior walls of houses (as well as other uses of the
insecticide) had reduced the total number of confirmed cases of
malaria that year to two. By the early 1960s, use of DDT had
cut malaria rates in Asia and Latin America by 99%. By 1958, Malthusian
anti-humanist
Aldous Huxley
decried this, arguing that “Quick death by malaria has been
abolished; but life made miserable by undernourishment and over-crowding
is now the rule, and slow death by outright starvation threatens
ever greater numbers.”
Huxley did not have long to wait to see his desires fulfilled. After
the publication of Rachel Carson's
Silent Spring
in 1962, a masterpiece of pseudoscientific deception and fraud,
politicians around the world moved swiftly to ban DDT. In Sri Lanka,
where malaria cases had been cut from a million or more per year
to 17 in 1963, DDT was banned in 1964, and by 1969 malaria cases had
increased to half a million a year. Today, DDT is banned or effectively
banned in most countries, and the toll of unnecessary death due to
malaria in Africa alone since the DDT ban is estimated as in excess of
100 million. Arguably, Rachel Carson and her followers are the greatest
mass murderers of the 20th century. There is no credible scientific evidence
whatsoever that DDT is harmful to humans and other mammals, birds,
reptiles, or oceanic species. To the anti-humanists, the carnage wrought
by the banning of this substance is a feature, not a bug.
If you thought
Agenda 21 (November 2012)
was over the top, this volume will acquaint you with the real-world
evil wrought by anti-humanists, and their very real agenda to
exterminate a large fraction of the human population and reduce the
rest (except for themselves, of course, they believe) to pre-industrial
serfdom. As the author concludes:
If the idea is accepted that the world's resources are fixed
with only so much to go around, then each new life is unwelcome,
each unregulated act or thought is a menace, every person is
fundamentally the enemy of every other person, and each race or
nation is the enemy of every other race of nation. The ultimate
outcome of such a worldview can only be enforced stagnation,
tyranny, war, and genocide.
This is a book which should have an impact, for the better, as great
as Silent Spring had for the worse. But so deep is the
infiltration of the anti-human ideologues into the cultural
institutions that you'll probably never hear it mentioned except
here and in similar venues which cherish individual liberty and
prosperity.