The One About Rabbits

Saturday, April 30th, 2016

Watership Down by Richard Adams What is the evidence that people despair in The West? Bruce Charlton offers this:

Two bits of evidence came to mind while thinking about Richard Adams’s great fantasy novel Watership Down (1972) — the one about rabbits. If you have not yet read it: you should give it a try: I will try to avoid spoilers.

During their adventures, the heroes come across two contrasting dystopias: Cowslip’s Warren, which superficially seems like a hedonic, lotus-eater’s paradise; and Efrafa which embodies military virtue of courage, loyalty and organization.

But although both warrens have good qualities, each has a sign that something is very wrong, and indeed intolerably, fatally wrong — and these are signs we see in the modern West.

In Cowslip’s Warren the ‘poet’ rabbit is a kind of degenerate who tells ‘decadent’ stories of despair, paradox, unattainable yearning, the beauty of horror — and the traditional encouraging stories of the rabbit’s trickster-god El-Ahrairah are regarded by the Warren with embarrassment as being childish, simplistic, outdated.

Something is deeply wrong when the creative artists communicate inversions of the Good.

And in Efrafa, for all the efficiency and technical capability, the does (female rabbits) have stopped reproducing (by reabsorbing their kittens): a sign of their profound stress and despair.

I feel this way about our civilization. Our most admired and accomplished art is despairing, our women have (all but) stopped reproducing.

Whatever else is happening is pretty much irrelevant: these signs indicate extreme, underlying despair — which despair is what underpins our self-hatred, our inability to defend our values, the active but denied pursuit of cultural suicide.

Posted in Media, Policy | 1 Comment »

The Elbonian Zombie Virus

Thursday, April 28th, 2016

The Elbonian Zombie Virus is a thought experiment of Scott Adams’:

Imagine that the tiny nation of Elbonia suffers a Zombie Virus outbreak. Luckily, the virus does not spread easily, but prolonged personal contact with an infected zombie increases the odds of transmission. Once infected, the Elbonian becomes a zombie killer. As it turns out, most people are immune to the virus. Over 99% of the public have no risk of catching it. But 1% is far too many zombie killers.

Imagine we have no way to detect this Elbonian Zombie Virus infection before symptoms occur. And let’s say that the problem started in Elbonia and so far has not gone beyond its borders. There is no cure for the Elbonian Zombie Virus. So what would world health organizations do?

For starters, they would quarantine the entire nation of Elbonia to limit the damage. This is obviously unfair to all uninfected Elbonians but it is also the only practical way to protect the rest of the world. Once the quarantine is in place, the professionals can get to work on a cure.

Now here’s the interesting part. What is the functional difference between the Elbonian Zombie Virus and radical islamic terrorism?

Posted in Policy, War | 2 Comments »

Lawyers and Salesmen

Thursday, April 28th, 2016

One of the things the Z Man has learned in life is that the salesmen for a company will be the most honest with you about their company:

That’s not to imply that salesmen are all honest in their sales pitch. That’s not what I mean. I’m talking about life inside the company. Ask a sales guy, who is not selling you something, about his boss and his co-workers and he’ll usually give you the unvarnished truth. Often, they are the guys who know the flaws best, because they have to work around them to make deals.

That’s the thing with sales people.  They work for themselves, even though they take a salary and are employees. Some portion of their pay, maybe the bulk of it, is derived from their performance as a salesman. All sales people have quotas and have to produce. Otherwise, they get fired. There’s no hiding in the bureaucracy for them. That means self-deception is not of any use to them. They have to know the defects of their firm and its products in order to mitigate them in front of clients.

The weird thing about salesmen is they never assume they are the cleverest guy in the room. Paranoia is a healthy trait in sales, as there are a million little things that can scuttle a deal. Working from the assumption that there could very well be someone in the room who knows something you don’t is a good way to avoid surprises. You ask more questions and you listen better. If you’re walking around thinking you are Wile E. Coyote, a safe could fall on your head.

I used to fish with a guy who made his living selling cars. He got into it as a way to pay for college. He would sell cars on the weekend and at night, while going to school during the day. When he finished college, he found that he could make a better living selling cars than anything else so he kept selling cars. Eventually he settled into selling BMW’s and Mercedes. He was able to make a nice, middle-class living at it, without too much stress.

Making small talk one day I mentioned something about lawyers and he laughed and told me that lawyers are his best clients, followed by stock brokers. I naturally assumed it was because they made a lot of money and had expensive tastes. That was not it at all. He told me that overselling a lawyer was one of the easiest things to do in car sales. They walk around thinking they know everything and so they fall for every car sales trick in the book.

So, where’s he going with this?

I’ve been thinking about this watching the political ructions. Donald Trump is a salesman and a very good one so he is doing extremely well as a novice politician, because politics is about sales. His competitors are mostly lawyers, who never took him seriously, because they are lawyers and smart. Everyone knows this so surely the smart lawyers will have no problem with the sales guy and his cheap theatrics.

The commentariat is similarly full of lawyers and people who went to law school.

[...]

Now, the guys in the sales department have a different experience. They also have high verbal skills, but they spend their days losing many more deals than they win. They face the reality of their limitations every day. They also know that if they don’t sell, they don’t eat. There’s no failing up in their business. It’s why the sales guys can feast on lawyers. They have no illusions about themselves.

It’s another reason to wonder if the recipe for the managerial state contains ingredients that poison the stew. Failing up is a feature of the managerial class. They go from one failure to the next, rarely ever answering for their blunders. The economic team that advised Obama on the stimulus, for example, landed cushy positions in the academy. Tim Geithner is making millions influence peddling for Wall Street. This despite being 100% wrong about in their predictions.

A system based on mediocrities walking around convinced they are the smartest people in the room will inevitably become unstable.

Posted in Business, Policy | 2 Comments »

Weapon Laws in Germany

Wednesday, April 27th, 2016

Jörg Sprave of The Slingshot Channel is famous for his crazy improvised weapons, but he also collects real weapons, which isn’t nearly as illegal in Germany as an American might imagine:

Posted in Policy, Weapons | 5 Comments »

Paycheck to Paycheck

Tuesday, April 26th, 2016

Since 2013, the federal reserve board has conducted a survey of American consumers. One question makes it clear just how many middle-class Americans are living paycheck to paycheck:

The Fed asked respondents how they would pay for a $400 emergency. The answer: 47 percent of respondents said that either they would cover the expense by borrowing or selling something, or they would not be able to come up with the $400 at all.

Americans are financially fragile. Neal Gabler calls this embarrassing condition financial impotence:

A 2014 Bankrate survey, echoing the Fed’s data, found that only 38 percent of Americans would cover a $1,000 emergency-room visit or $500 car repair with money they’d saved. Two reports published last year by the Pew Charitable Trusts found, respectively, that 55 percent of households didn’t have enough liquid savings to replace a month’s worth of lost income, and that of the 56 percent of people who said they’d worried about their finances in the previous year, 71 percent were concerned about having enough money to cover everyday expenses. A similar study conducted by Annamaria Lusardi of George Washington University, Peter Tufano of Oxford, and Daniel Schneider, then of Princeton, asked individuals whether they could “come up with” $2,000 within 30 days for an unanticipated expense. They found that slightly more than one-quarter could not, and another 19 percent could do so only if they pawned possessions or took out payday loans. The conclusion: Nearly half of American adults are “financially fragile” and “living very close to the financial edge.” Yet another analysis, this one led by Jacob Hacker of Yale, measured the number of households that had lost a quarter or more of their “available income” in a given year — income minus medical expenses and interest on debt — and found that in each year from 2001 to 2012, at least one in five had suffered such a loss and couldn’t compensate by digging into savings.

Credit cards are just too tempting:

If you ask economists to explain this state of affairs, they are likely to finger credit-card debt as a main culprit. Long before the Great Recession, many say, Americans got themselves into credit trouble. According to an analysis of Federal Reserve and TransUnion data by the personal-finance site ValuePenguin, credit-card debt stood at about $5,700 per household in 2015. Of course, this figure factors in all the households with a balance of zero. About 38 percent of households carried some debt, according to the analysis, and among those, the average was more than $15,000. In recent years, while the number of people holding credit-card debt has been decreasing, the average debt for those households carrying a balance has been on the rise.

More disturbing stats:

The personal savings rate peaked at 13.3 percent in 1971 before falling to 2.6 percent in 2005. As of last year, the figure stood at 5.1 percent, and according to McClary, nearly 30 percent of American adults don’t save any of their income for retirement.

“If you want to have financial security,” says Brad Klontz, “it is 100 percent on you.”

One thing economists adduce to lessen this responsibility is that credit represents a sea change from the old economic system, when financial decisions were much more constrained, limiting the sort of trouble that people could get themselves into — a sea change for which most people were ill-prepared.

It is ironic that as financial products have become increasingly sophisticated, theoretically giving individuals more options to smooth out the bumps in their lives, something like the opposite seems to have happened, at least for many. Indeed, Annamaria Lusardi and her colleagues found that, in general, the more sophisticated a country’s credit and financial markets, the worse the problem of financial insecurity for its citizens. Why? Lusardi argues that as the financial world has grown more complex, our knowledge of finances has not kept pace. Basically, a good many Americans are “financially illiterate,” and this illiteracy correlates highly with financial distress. A 2011 study she and a colleague conducted measuring knowledge of fundamental financial principles (compound interest, risk diversification, and the effects of inflation) found that 65 percent of Americans ages 25 to 65 were financial illiterates.

Posted in Economics, Policy | 2 Comments »

Why You Can’t Argue with the New Left

Monday, April 25th, 2016

Arnold Kling recommends Scruton’s Fools, Frauds and Firebrands, which profiles a number of continental Europeans whose names are unfamiliar to most Americans today:

Although few of us are conversant with the likes of Theodoro Adorno, Gyorgy Lukacs, and Slavoj Zizek, reading about them makes one realize how much of an imprint they have left on contemporary college campuses and even on the approach to politics taken by Barack Obama.

A major theme of Fools is that the New Left evolved a set of intellectual tactical moves against their opponents. These included creating a false left-right spectrum, delegitimizing other points of view, indicting capitalism and tradition for all wrongs while being vague about alternatives, and using Newspeak to present authoritarianism as a defense of freedom and human rights.

Posted in Economics, Policy | 4 Comments »

The Reactionary Mind

Sunday, April 24th, 2016

Ross Douthat guides fearful New York Times readers into the reactionary mind:

Over the last year, America’s professional intelligentsia has been placed under the microscope in several interesting ways.

First, a group of prominent social psychologists released a paper quantifying and criticizing their field’s overwhelming left-wing tilt. Then Jonathan Haidt, one of the paper’s co-authors, highlighted research showing that the entire American academy has become more left-wing since the 1990s. Then finally a new book by two conservative political scientists, “Passing on the Right: Conservative Professors in the Progressive University,” offered a portrait of how right-wing academics make their way in a left-wing milieu. (The answer: very carefully, and more carefully than in the past.)

Meanwhile, over the same period, there has been a spate of media attention for the online movement known as “neoreaction,” which in its highbrow form offers a monarchist critique of egalitarianism and mass democracy, and in its popular form is mostly racist pro-Trump Twitter accounts and anti-P.C. provocateurs.

I suspect these two phenomena are connected — the official intelligentsia’s permanent and increasing leftward tilt, and the appeal of explicitly reactionary ideas to a strange crew of online autodidacts.

A strange crew of online autodidacts? Touché.

Reactionary assumptions about human nature — the intractability of tribe and culture, the fragility of order, the evils that come in with capital-P Progress, the inevitable return of hierarchy, the ease of intellectual and aesthetic decline, the poverty of modern substitutes for family and patria and religion — are not always vindicated. But sometimes? Yes, sometimes. Often? Maybe even often.

Both liberalism and conservatism can incorporate some of these insights. But both have an optimism that blinds them to inconvenient truths. The liberal sees that conservatives were foolish to imagine Iraq remade as a democracy; the conservative sees that liberals were foolish to imagine Europe remade as a post-national utopia with its borders open to the Muslim world. But only the reactionary sees both.

[...]

Maybe one answer is to avoid systemization, to welcome a reactionary style that’s artistic, aphoristic and religious, while rejecting the idea of a reactionary blueprint for our politics. From Eliot and Waugh and Kipling to Michel Houellebecq, there’s a reactionary canon waiting to be celebrated as such, rather than just read through a lens of grudging aesthetic respect but ideological disapproval.

A phrase from the right-wing Colombian philosopher Nicolás Gómez Dávila could serve as such a movement’s mission statement. His goal, he wrote, was not a comprehensive political schema but a “reactionary patchwork.” Which might be the best way for reaction to become something genuinely new: to offer itself, not as ideological rival to liberalism and conservatism, but as a vision as strange and motley as reality itself.

Posted in Policy | No Comments »

Intention is salient

Saturday, April 23rd, 2016

Bernie Sanders has proclaimed that democratic socialism isn’t un-American, Harrison Searles notes:

He says that it is in us all. And in that he is correct: The desire for an egalitarian and unified society is an element of human nature. Such desires are part of our genetic inheritance. A yearning for democratic socialism is a legacy of the band societies that our distant ancestors lived in. Those social instincts were an essential part of the success of the hominid line.

With those instincts, our ancestors were able to traverse the evolutionary minefield of selfishness and competing interests through speech and participatory, consensus-based decisionmaking. Egalitarian decisionmaking complemented the other traits defining the hominid line, including linguistic talent and hypercognition, to make Homo sapiens a master of social interaction. Many animals exploit cooperation for survival, but Homo sapiens are astounding in their ability to do so creatively. In their shared struggle for existence, our ancestors worked socially together in their egalitarian bands. Until the dawn of civilization, just 10,000 years ago, those simple societies were the context of all human interaction. Our genes have not changed very much since the start of civilization. At root, we are still band-man.

With the emergence of vastly complex commercial societies, cooperation began to take on a new form and meaning. Abstract rules, rather than instinctual impulses, came to guide how cooperation worked. The principles of property and voluntary agreement were extended to a widening array of things and activities. With the invention of such abstract rules came the invention of the autonomous individual.

Today, in the context of family and friends, people still rely on primordial social instincts. But those natural proclivities have taken an ever more secondary role in governing cooperation within the whole of society. In “The Fatal Conceit” and other writings, Friedrich Hayek argued that the desire for policies like those favored by Sanders is an atavistic reassertion of people’s primal social instincts. Hayek suggested that there was a conflict between the instincts biologically evolved in bands and the abstract rules culturally evolved in civilization. Yet the yearnings for solidarity and centricity remain a lingering part of human nature. When they are not treated with caution, those yearnings can be turned into misguided policies.

What Daniel Klein calls “the people’s romance” remains a hazard of modern politics. It is the yearning for solidarity; it is the yearning for sentiment, action, and experience that encompasses “the people.” It makes us uneasy with the abstract rules that individuate and detach our social experiences. In an experimental setting, Klein and collaborators have shown our demand for encompassing experience and sentiment.

Over millions of years our minds evolved to read emotional cues and to forms narratives of intention, but not to see unintended consequences. Our minds are adapted for emotional intelligence, not cost-benefit analysis. The people’s romance is a systemic bias that we have to be mindful of. As Paleolithic animals in modernity, we have to be wary of temptations to appraise a policy by the emotional impact of what we see rather than by the consequences of what we don’t see. What we see, above all, is what we imagine to be intended by the central players. Intention is salient.

Posted in Policy | 5 Comments »

A Thought Collective

Friday, April 22nd, 2016

Scientific inquiry is prone to the eternal rules of human social life:

In a 2015 paper titled Does Science Advance One Funeral at a Time?, a team of scholars at the National Bureau of Economic Research sought an empirical basis for a remark made by the physicist Max Planck: “A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.”

The researchers identified more than 12,000 “elite” scientists from different fields. The criteria for elite status included funding, number of publications, and whether they were members of the National Academies of Science or the Institute of Medicine. Searching obituaries, the team found 452 who had died before retirement. They then looked to see what happened to the fields from which these celebrated scientists had unexpectedly departed, by analysing publishing patterns.

What they found confirmed the truth of Planck’s maxim. Junior researchers who had worked closely with the elite scientists, authoring papers with them, published less. At the same time, there was a marked increase in papers by newcomers to the field, who were less likely to cite the work of the deceased eminence. The articles by these newcomers were substantive and influential, attracting a high number of citations. They moved the whole field along.

A scientist is part of what the Polish philosopher of science Ludwik Fleck called a “thought collective”: a group of people exchanging ideas in a mutually comprehensible idiom. The group, suggested Fleck, inevitably develops a mind of its own, as the individuals in it converge on a way of communicating, thinking and feeling.

This makes scientific inquiry prone to the eternal rules of human social life: deference to the charismatic, herding towards majority opinion, punishment for deviance, and intense discomfort with admitting to error. Of course, such tendencies are precisely what the scientific method was invented to correct for, and over the long run, it does a good job of it. In the long run, however, we’re all dead, quite possibly sooner than we would be if we hadn’t been following a diet based on poor advice.

Posted in Policy, Science | No Comments »

Left Cop, Right Cop

Friday, April 22nd, 2016

Somewhere in the Clinton years, Z Man began to sour on official conservatism:

Anyway, I slowly came to the conclusion that the whole Right-Left dynamic was just a myth. One of things about working in Washington, even briefly, is you learn quickly that politics is nothing like you see on TV. Two people on a show ripping one another apart will be at the bar after the show yukking it up like old pals. That’s because they are old pals. The Right-Left narrative has simply become a convenient framework for the reality show called politics. This has been true since the 80’s.

Once you free your mind, if you will, of that framework through which you are expected to see your world, you have to make sense of what you see. If the Right-Left construct is just a version of good cop/bad cop where the people in the media hustle the rest of us so they can live above their utility, then what’s really going on in the world? How do things really work?

Posted in Policy | 4 Comments »

Identity

Wednesday, April 20th, 2016

If you stand for nothing, you’ll fall for anything, this video from the Family Policy Institute of Washington argues:

Posted in Education, Policy | 5 Comments »

Income and Household Demographics

Sunday, April 17th, 2016

American households in different income quintiles differ in predictable ways:

Mean number of earners per household. On average, there are significantly more income earners per household in the top income quintile households (1.98) than earners per household in the lowest-income households (0.41). It can also be seen that the average number of earners increases for each higher income quintile, demonstrating that one of the main factors in explaining differences in income among U.S. households is the number of earners per household. Also, the unadjusted ratio of average income for the highest to lowest quintile of 15.9 times ($185,206 to $11,651), falls to a ratio of only 3.3 times when comparing “income per earner” of the two quintiles: $93,538 for the top fifth to $28,417 for the bottom fifth.

Share of households with no earners. Sixty-three percent of U.S. households in the bottom fifth of Americans by income had no earners for the entire year in 2013. In contrast, only 3.1% of the households in the top fifth had no earners in 2013, providing more evidence of the strong relationship between household income and income earners per household.

Marital status of householders. Married-couple households represent a much greater share of the top income quintile (76.8%) than for the bottom income quintile (16%), and single-parent or single households represented a much greater share of the bottom one-fifth of households (84.0%) than for the top 20% (23.2%). Like for the average number of earners per household, the share of married-couple households also increases for each higher income quintile, from 16% (lowest quintile) to 35% to 50% (middle quintile) to 64% to 77% (highest quintile).

Age of householders. More than 7 out of every 10 households (71.9%) in the top income quintile included individuals in their prime earning years between the ages of 35-64, compared to fewer than half (43.9%) of household members in the bottom fifth who were in that prime earning age group last year. The share of householders in the prime earning age group of 35-64 year olds increases with each higher income quintile.

Compared to members of the top income quintile of households by income, household members in the bottom income quintile were 1.4 times more likely (21.8% vs. 15.8%) to be in the youngest age group (under 35 years), and almost three times more likely (34.2% vs. 12.3%) to be in the oldest age group (65 years and over).

By average age, the highest income group is the youngest (48.8 years) and the lowest income group is the oldest (54.4 years).

Work status of householders. Almost five times as many top quintile households included at least one adult who was working full-time in 2013 (78.8%) compared to the bottom income quintile (only 16.1%), and more than five times as many households in the bottom quintile included adults who did not work at all (69.4%) compared to top quintile households whose family members did not work (12.4%). The share of householders working full-time increases at each higher income quintile (16.1% to 43.9% to 60.4% to 70.7% o 78.8%).

Education of householders. Family members of households in the top fifth by income were almost five times more likely to have a college degree (64.6%) than members of households in the bottom income quintile (only 13.5%). In contrast, householders in the lowest income quintile were 15 times more likely than those in the top income quintile to have less than a high school degree in 2013 (24.2 % vs. 1.6%). As expected, the Census data show that there is a significantly positive relationship between education and income.

Selected Characteristics of US Households by Income Quintile 2013

Posted in Economics, Policy | No Comments »

One of History’s Most Successful Aggressor Nations

Saturday, April 16th, 2016

The United States is one of history’s most successful aggressor nations:

We conquered almost the entirety of continental United States through a series of small but undeniably aggressive wars against the Indians who were in possession. We also made a serious but unsuccessful effort to conquered Canada in 1812. Much of the Southwest was originally taken from the Mexicans who were in occupation by two wars, one by the Texans and then, when we annexed Texas, by us. There were still many Indian tribes who did not recognize Mexican sovereignty or our sovereignty when we replaced them. The wars with Geronimo in that area were among our most difficult aggressive wars. We of course bought Florida from Spain, but only after making it clear we would compel an exit by force if they decided not to take our money.

Let us consider first the Indians. It should be said that in many cases there were European powers who claimed parts of the future United States, and they were either were forced to “cede” those parts by war, or sold them to us, but in most cases north of Mexico the area was actually controlled by Indian tribes and the European sovereignty was more or less theoretical. Until our armies had driven out the Indians it is very hard to argue that these areas were actually in our possession.

Let me begin at the very beginning with the settlement of the English colonies. Beginning with the settlements in Virginia and those in New England, colonists had gradually build up a thin layer of essentially European civilization along the Atlantic Coast of what would eventually become the United States. This colonization had proceeded by simply seizing land, sometimes compensating the Indians already there and sometimes fighting wars with them. In general apparently no one ever really considered their rights in the matter. In these areas colonial powers issued charters to their colonists that rather assumed that they had a right to do this. Locke, for example, drew up a charter for the Carolinas in which people’s ownership of land came from their farming it. He paid no attention whatsoever to the natives already there.

But it should be said that the native tribes were not absolutely peaceful. Indeed small groups of Indians tended to raid outlying white settlements. This would continue to be true almost up to the 20th century. Indeed there was one raid in which Indians attacked a federal court in the late 1980s. In what the Europeans call the seven years war and we called the French and Indian war the two major powers in the North American continent, France and England, attempted to involve the Indian tribes in their war. There were raids from some tribes on the English colonies and English entered into treaties with some of these tribes under which they would protect our colonies in return for a guarantee of their keeping’s existing tribal lands. It was this guarantee that prevented or impeded the westward push on the colonists and they objected to it.

[...]

It should be said that the Indians in general lived by hunting and gathering and required a great deal of land to support individual families and tribes. Efforts were made, particularly in the Louisiana Purchase to get them to farm the land but this was in general unsuccessful. Thus land that might support 20,000 settlers was occupied by perhaps only 500 Indians. Purchase of the land was difficult because the Indians had no clear-cut tribal or family ownership. The individual tribes were in almost continuous minor wars with each other and hence purchase of land from one would not extinguish the claim of another. Nevertheless, with rare exceptions, we and the other “European” claimants simply ignored Indian rights and issued charters to settlers or in Mexico, conquistadors.

It is interesting that with the occupation of the entire United States by Americans we stopped engaging in wars of conquest.

Posted in Policy, War | 8 Comments »

What Happened after the Vietnam War

Friday, April 15th, 2016

What happened after the Vietnam War, although covered by the newspaper, has been largely forgotten:

I suspect that the invasion of a large number of intellectuals, who regarded their antagonism to the war and their demonstrations to that effect as a high point in their lives, means that they must forget or suppress the mass murderers that followed the Communist victory.

The first of these mass murderers occurred in Cambodia. As soon as we withdrew our forces from Vietnam, it was possible for the Communist to take over Cambodia without any interference from us. They carried off what was the most intense campaign of mass murder anywhere in the world. They only killed 2 million people but as percentage of the rather limited population of Cambodia this was a record breaker. There was a brief attempt to blame it on United States, but that faded out very quickly. Now I think you can say that the whole thing has gone into the memory hole.

There were also the boat people. Apparently the Communist government in Vietnam was anti-Chinese and a large number of people, exact number is not known, were put into leaky boats and shoved out to sea. Estimates of the death rate run between three-quarters of million and million and a half. It may be that this was one of the reasons for China attacking North Vietnam. The boat people got a lot of newspaper publicity at the time and a number of people who been strongly supporting the North in the war signed a full-page advertisement in the New York Times in which they in essence apologized. The matter has, however, been largely forgotten since then.

Posted in Policy, War | No Comments »

Victory in ’68

Wednesday, April 13th, 2016

It seems likely that the actual reason for Johnson entering the war was neither the brush in the Gulf of Tonkin, nor the shelling of the American hospital, Gordon Tullock suggests:

I think Johnson simply saw that it would
make it much easier for him to defeat Goldwater if he stole from Goldwater his military position. In any event the sending of troops many of whom were drafted, and who were under command of a rather inept general, Westmoreland, rapidly developed serious domestic difficulties in United States for the war in Vietnam, but insured Johnson’s victory in ’68.

Posted in Policy, War | 1 Comment »

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