Per Bylund

Business Scholarship with a Swedish-Austrian Twist

Per Bylund

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On Not Getting It

[ad]As a student of economics I am exposed to idiotic statements more or less daily. What is so moronically stupid about these statements is not that they have to do with economics or that they are uttered by stupid people. On the contrary, the problem seems to permeat our postmodern society and most bright people are totally lost in “the way it is.”

What I am referring to is the scientific world view. This is not the scientific drive, i.e. the motivation to find the truth and to learn about the world, but the overly scientific anti-identification of that which is studied. It is as prevalent in the social sciences as it is in politics and buesiness management. There are no people around anymore, there’s only statistics and faceless aggregates.

In economics this is very obvious – the study of human action is almost completely reduced to discussions on how to mitigate biases and avoid multicollinearity in econometric functions. Now, in what sense would you gain understanding of why people act in certain ways through tweaking regression models? The obvious answer – and it is so obvious most economists simply don’t see it – is that you don’t. You don’t gain any knowledge whatsoever of why people acted a certain way through running tests of heteroskedasticity and deciding whether or not to use “White’s estimator.”

Economics is the most obvious victim of what I would like to call scientism, the belief that anything that uses aggregates and that is seemingly universal – through (at any price) avoiding to acknowledge the identity or personality of the individuals studied – is more valuable as a science. Actually, the common view is that as long as you can hide the fact that there are individuals in “the data” any conclusions you might draw are generally applicable.

In a recent discussion with a fellow student, I claimed that the empirical study of people is totally worthless unless your aim is to understand why exactly those individuals acted in that exact way in that exact situation. My point was that if the “experiment” would be repeated with the same people (as “data”) the outcome would be completely different because people learn. And if it would be repeated, and the situation could be set up exactly the same way, but the “data” (the people) would be different individuals the outcome would still be different – simply because they are different people and therefore react differently in a number of ways.

And on top of it all, these examples are still ridiculous – it simply isn’t possible to create the exact same situation again and expose people to it. Even if the setting (or framework) would be the same, the people would have different subjective experiences (no matter if they are “the same” or “others”), which would affect the results.

One could argue that this is why we have confidence intervals and standard deviations. But that implies that people act in such a way that the outcome of everybody’s actions are nicely distributed in a bell-shaped curve. How often would you say that happens? That would depend on what kind of people you happen to have in your sample, wouldn’t it? The point is that one cannot study people the way one studies dead matter, simply because people are people, i.e. thinking creatures that learn from experience and that aren’t reducible to a “nature” the same way a rock would be.

This “scientism” is not only prevalent in the [social] sciences – it is a cornerstone of modern politics as well as business management. In politics there is no such thing as an individual; it simply doesn’t happen that politicians discuss a certain individual. And if they happen to use the word “individual” they use it as a stereotypical “nature” of the items in the population they rule. In my ten years in party politics, I haven’t heard one politician discuss how decisions or policies affect individuals – the best I’ve heard is the use of stereotypical examples of “the average family” or “the single mom.” But never did anyone care to add flesh and blood to their dead skeletons.

There is a reason for this, even though politicians are usually too stupid to understand it. It simply isn’t possible to propose or support policies that affect people’s lives unless you make sure to forget that they are real people. Even cold-hearted, ignorant, and self-centered politicians wouldn’t have the guts nor morality to put hundreds or thousands of people in misery through pushing a button. Most people simply don’t have it in them to coldly calculate plusses and minuses while radically and forcefully change the lives of a great number of people with the stroke of a pen.

The lesson to learn is this: would there really be wars if those waging wars would see each and every person they would have to send to their deaths? It is unlikely, even though there are some really, really disturbed people out there.

The same is the case in large corporations, where the CEO or president usually has no clue about the people working for him (or her). Of course, the nature of a corporation is distinctly different from that of a state – the corporation gives, and any punishment from a corporation is to “not give”; a state takes, and any punishment is to “take more” or “kill” whereas every “reward” consists of “taking less” away from that person. Corporations can no doubt be horrible, but they are not a state.

The problem we have here is the “scientific” way of approaching one’s work: scientists who have no idea that the statistics they’re using are really people, won’t mind drawing horrible conclusions; politicians not understanding there are individuals and individual suffering as a result of every decision they make, don’t have a problem with “redistributing” from some to some or killing off some for the benefit of others; and business managers can take irresponsible risks when they can “simply”, if something goes wrong, cut the corporation’s employment with “10%” rather than, which is equally true, throw hundreds of families into unemployment and misery.

Scientism is the problem, and it arises as an effect of centralization. Centralization calls for stereotypes and grouping, for one-policy-fits-all kind of decisions, and cold-hearted leadership for some unidentified aim. What this world so desperately needs is radical decentralization. The problem with our society is not only that there is a huge parasitic cancer tumor feeding off our lives and liberties (i.e., the State), but that it is too large-scale and too centralized. Not only must the State go, but we need to get back to seeing people as people.

Seeing people as people is what so many individuals in our world have forgotten. Be they scientists, politicians or corporate managers – they all share the same fallacy in thinking that scale is a good thing, that personal ties are “in the way” and a problem for efficiency or whatever.

I am a person and I intend to continue being one. You better start seeing me as one.

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My View of Advanced Studies and Science

[ad#righthandside-tall]I’ve at the time of writing this post spent over a year in an American graduate program (doctorate) and there are some things I want to share with you. It is of course the case that most things taught are so-called mainstream science and as such it is as blindly fixed on empiricism and technical details as it is ignorant of the unreasonableness of the often contradictory underlying assumptions and premises. It has also, at least in my case as a graduate student in economics, evident that the science itself have to a large extent adopted statism in order to “fit” in the overall government command of education and research.

But it is not these problems, however important, that I want to discuss in this post. Instead, I want to discuss the structure of the education I’m getting and what it seems to focus. Herein lies an important lesson to be learned about education in general and especially how students are treated. It is obvious that many professors seem to struggle with understanding how to treat graduate students, which means they sometimes fall into the “undergrad trap” and talk to us like were we at the very beginning of our studies on a higher level.

An even more obvious fact is that professors seem to lack an understanding for the greater issues. Someone has told me that students tend to focus on theory and theoretical reasoning because “it is easier” than “real” empirical research. I strongly disagree with this view; I find it ignorant and, frankly, stupid. It is not easier to develop a good theory than, as is supposedly “more difficult,” to grab a data set, run [standardized] regressions and then claim to have found The Truth. Such a statement makes me lose whatever respect I had for the person making it; they deserve no respect – rather, they deserve to be despised.

Even though most professors do not share (or at least not state) this view, misunderstanding or non-understanding is common. Often the problems I identify with premises for published papers that we’re reading are ignored, probably because they require a philosophical mindset. I’m not saying I’m a prodigy or hyper-intelligent and that “all professors” are stupid; on the contrary, my experience in both the Swedish master programs and the American PhD program is that the professors are usually highly intelligent people. However, they are not scholars and therefore cannot grasp the essence of discussions on a purely conceptual or theoretical level. There are, of course, exceptions to this rule, but they are not many.

Professors have chosen to (in some cases been forced to) focus on details for so long that they have more or less forgotten what they’re doing is all about. They no longer have an interest in finding Knoledge or Truth (if this ever was the case), but are more interested in specific “cool” details of theoretical-empirical papers that have, for some reason, become famous. It is no doubt the case that details can be interesting – and even very interesting – but a detail or sub-reasoning can only be interesting if the overall theoretical framework is a reasonable construct upon a basis of sound premises. This is, I’m afraid, not often the case. Papers are very often empirical or try to develop a theory from a semi-inductive approach to knowledging, and as such it seems the authors have not spent much time thinking through the foundation of the theory developed.

It is a sad truth that even academic researchers doing theoretical work have been so “empiricized” by the pressure of mainstream that have lost touch with the real world as well as interest in and understanding for the importance of premises and assumptions.

This brain washing (to use my adviser’s words) begins early in people’s academic careers. Graduate school is supposed to create a basis of knowledge while teaching the student how to think critically, but the real nature of the programs is that they aim for the streamlining of thought rather than encouragement for individual, unique, pioneering thought. It is true that all programs pay lip service to the dogma that students must learn critical thinking and that they must engage in research on their own even if they are taking a heavy course load. But the truth is that as little time as possible is left for the student to actually engage in such activities.

My own experience is that advanced studies are not very difficult; there are of course problems of notation, language and concepts one has never encountered before, but the level of difficulty is not unsurmountable. It appears to be difficult simply because there is so much work involved with learning what is taught in the course, but the work is not primarily time and effort spent tryting to wrestle complex concepts or advanced reasoning. Most courses cover fairly intuitive concepts.

I realize that I sound like someone who believes he is a Nietzschean übermensch, but that is not at all what I try to say. I have struggled quite a bit with the courses I’ve taken; it is only after finishing the course work that I have realized that the level of difficulty was not as high as I thought. And it has nothing to do with my “understanding what I [now] know.” The problem i have with the structure of the courses is that they seem to focus so much on details and technicalities that students cannot grasp what the professor is trying to say.

Take, for instance, a course I took in advanced micro economic theory. The theory itself, and especially the concepts behind it, is relatively simple – if you know anything about economics you should understand what make actors demand or supply goods and services on the market. But that is not what the course is about. Instead, the course barges into a jungle of calculus where the student struggles with finding first and second order conditions of abstract functions supposedly symbolizing a person’s “utility function” or a firm’s “production function.”

Of course, in the real world there is no such thing as a production function – a firm has assets and produces output using the resources and assets at hand in the best way possible. They are not making a generic function of their business processes and then taking derivatives to find the “optimal point.” And there is even less of a utility function (a somewhat humorous concept, I might add).

The details and technicalities are what is important and the understanding for what is really going on – or why the discipline ended up with these functions and conditions in the first place – is not only left out, it is ignored, dismissed, and considered “unimportant.”

As an analogy, imagine an automobile manufacturer where the engineers are hired to focus on making components as efficiently as possible without thinking of their use in the whole. If no one thinks of what the automobile is supposed to do – or how to put it together – there will be no automobile. Just like experts in economics (which is my field) can talk of “properties” of functions for ages without ever mentioning or even considering what the functions are for, where they come from, or what they try to explain.

What is the importance of the generic, differentiable, mathematical function to how people act in a market?

Academia is so consumed by discussing the details that nobody has time for or ever considers the so-called “whole picture.” Even in “softer” courses it is the case that students need to read as many articles as possible on certain details and technical matters that there simply is no time for reflection. After reading a couple of dozen articles – in a short time period – that all discuss the same technicality, how many students would you think are able to take a step back and reflect on the importance of the technicality qua technicality? Not very many.

It is therefore the case that academic education of today bears no resemblance whatsoever with the classical education of Ancient Athens (such as Plato’s Academy or Aristotle’s Lyceum) or even the education in the modern era. For instance, when German philosopher Immanuel Kant taught courses he discussed problems of morality and let the students consider his own theory and comment on it. I am not saying that the education of that time was unstructured or that it was some kind of dopey discourse post-modern style, but that there was a fundamental interest in ideas.

It may be unfair to compare the modern “hard” science of economics with the soft philosophies of Plato, Aristotle, and Kant. But the thing is that Aristotle, for example, spent a lot of time on explaining natural phenomena and did so systematically and in an as structured and scientific way possible in that time and age. Yet his aim was not to dissect a detail of a small part of that which he found – he strived to understand and explain the world around him.

A criticism to my comparison of modern economics and the natural science research of Aristotle is that today’s society – as well as our knowledge – is way too advanced to use Aristotles methods. This may be true to some degree, but do not kid yourself – we are not as advanced compared to previous times as you would like to think. In terms of knowledge, we’re to a large extent in the process of rediscovering what scientists hundreds of years before us discovered, described, explained, and understood.

As a matter of fact, we have forgotten the reason for doing scientific work and research. We have to rediscover the purpose of what we are doing, but so far we are so focused on the details and technicalities that we haven’t even started acknowledging that we’re missing the whole picture and even parts of it through staring at one stroke of the pen.

Science is literally worthless if we cannot allow us to reflect on it and make it useful on a higher level of  abstraction; we are so busy doing scientific research that we have forgotten what the research is for.

So it is not surprising that that the [few] questions I [find it worthwhile to] ask aren’t understood. I am no Cicero, so perhaps my questions could be much more clearly articulated. But I doubt that the problem is primarily my inability to phrase the questions clearly enough – the problem, I maintain, is that they are of another nature than what science is thought to be all about. I cannot help finding similarities between theories, conflicts in implicit underlying assumptions, and problems in the questions being asked (rather in how they are answered). I am not interested in the technicalities or detailed answers; I am interested in the questions.

Perhaps you say that it is sad that I was not born a few hundred years ago, in a time where people still thought the way I think and were interested in the kind of things I am interested in. That is, in a time before the sciences were divided into separate disciplines and before the quantification of knowledge-seeking. And you may be right – I was born too late.

But on the other hand, science has lost its way and is maundering without compass or aim. I am certain that we will soon discover that we are not asking the right questions – and that we aren’t really asking questions at all. The recent interest for so-called “interdisciplinary research” is definitely a step in the right direction, even though it is a very small step. Science, I believe, will once again find a way back to the path of knowledge discovery; it is a matter of when not if.

From this perspective, I’d like to think that I was not born a few hundred years too late. Rather, I was born too soon. Or perhaps I can help science find its way back to its roots and purpose; that is, find the way home.

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Slaves Playing Slaves

[ad#righthandside-tall]The increase in mechanisms of government mass surveillance of the peoples of Europe, which is of a magnitude that cannot be exaggerated, is finally causing critical discussion in the blogosphere and elsewhere. In one of the European countries that is so far most affected by this unprecedented power-grab by governments (including super-governments such as the European Union) and politicians, Sweden, the discussion is successfully being limited to the blogosphere even though the media is beginning to feel it necessary to do some reporting.

Since this, for political activists holding post-enlightenment individual rights dearly,  is a battle that has to be fought on many [political] levels, the discussion sometimes seems a bit irritated or frustrated. And properly so, there is no way a discussion limited to the blogosphere can change political discussions unless they manage to mobilize large numbers of people to protest the decisions. They are indeed trying and trying, but failing.

One method that is used by the activists trying to push government back through stopping the mass surveillance propositions, and one that is very often used by political interests and interest groups as well as (I presume) lobbyists, is the power of individual contact with the people’s representatives in the regional, national, or supernational parliaments. Politicians, as we know, tend to seek the path of least resistance. If too many people complain and ask the politicians to stop doing whatever it is they’re doing, they often choose to not do it. After all, they tend to believe that they are the representatives of the people, but as such they are also subject to the popular vote – and making enemies might mean losing office.

The method is presumed to be effective, since politicians want to stay in power and supposedly tend to listen if a large number of people state that they reject a certain policy. Most of the frequent political power-grabs are done without anyone at all finding out (at least, not until it is way too late), but when politicians have the great unfortune of people finding out what they are up to they do [pre]tend to listen.

But is this really an effective means to change politics and to push back the State’s continuous attempts to feed of yet a few of our liberties? First of all, anyone realizes that the method has an inherent problem: it is dependent on a sufficient number of people caring enought to actually do something to stop it, and this in turn requires organization to make it happen. Reaching out and then making sure people do what they are supposed to is, it seems, almost always a too great obstacle to overcome. So most attempts fail.

The failures to make use of the method should not, however, affect our analysis of whether it is an effective method (if used properly). That a lot of attempts do fail is a problem of organization and should make most groups reconsider and perhaps choose a different method for whatever political aim they may have, but it does not mean the method is inherently bad.

Also, the illusion – and it is an illusion – that politicians actually listen to the electorate is at best quite naive, but it also most seriously affects the effectiveness of this method. Politicians have no reason to listen to the electorate simply because they have the power and can hide behind not being accountable – their actions are almost never individual actions but group actions, and as such it is both difficult to identify who is responsible for what. And even if this were the case, there is almost never only one or a few politicians responsible for a decision: they voted as they did because of log rolling, their “hands were tied” (which is not true, but I certainly wish this was the case), or “one has to choose one’s battles,” and there are most certainly other ways of seeing it so that the individual politician “tried his best.”

Furthermore, and this is an important point, the attempt to make politicians listen to the electorate through contacting them about a certain issue presumes the democratic system works the way we’re taught that democracies work. This is literally never the case: democratic States are not “of the people, by the people, for the people” but of the ruling class, by the ruling class and for the ruling class – at the expense of the people.

But there are other reasons why this is an inherently bad method.

Contacting politicians trying to make them change their minds about something is the same as sucking up to them. Being utterly despicable people who are so insignificant and rotten that have no other way of achieving a sense of greatness but by using hired muscles to push idiotic policies down people’s throats, and this is what politicians are, they are in office mainly for people to suck up to them. Politicians like to be treated the way they demand to be treated: as a post-feudalism class of kings and masters.

The reason politicians “listen” to the electorate is not that they serve those who vote, but because they are so fundamentally worthless in the marketplace for products and services that they are terrified of not being reelected. And they are so utterly small-minded that they cannot even imagine a life where they are not rulers with serfs, where they do not enjoy the illusion of being a just ruling class “to serve others.”

In the freed market, where people may lead their lives as they see fit, you truly serve others – you make a living and profits through making other people’s lives better in a number of ways. This is, in essence, what politicians try to achieve without doing the work necessary: they want to be both “of service” and through it enjoy people’s gratitude and not put in a cent’s worth of labor. They want to free-ride on everybody else only to balance the fact that they are truly insignificant and couldn’t ever be successful in actually helping people.

In fact, politicians want to enjoy the might and glory of absolutist royalty.

The democratic State is but the extension of the feudal system. The difference is that the democratic State allows for some mobility (you can join the ruling class, and you can be thrown out of the palace) but also demands and requires the illusion of legitimacy. Feudalism was never legitimate and never asked for legitimacy – it was a system based solely on violent force. But the “modern” power of the democratic State is one that thrives only when it is considered legitimate in the minds of its slaves; it is, therefore, more devilishly evil in how it has solved the problem of keeping slaves in line, but at the same time vulnerable. There is a reason why democratic States find it necessary to have public schooling, public day care centers for children, an dpublicly financed science. Without the brain washing, the State would evaporate.

This is why contacting “one’s representative” in whatever parliament is such a bad method: it only strengthens the legitimacy of their rule, increases their power, while reinforcing your statist mindset. Not only do politicians like it, they are dependent on it. And they play the game of “listening” to voters simply because that is how they best play the game – changing their vote for a future policy when people seem to want it is but to strengthen the foundation of political power.

As the political activists working so hard to force government back (if only stopping its one small step forward) should realize every time they are “successful,” the policy will still be enacted as law. The only difference, except for perhaps the wording of the proposition, is that it may be postponed a little bit. And at the same time, political power as an [oppressive] institution has been reinforced so that it will last yet another set of years.

So when you engage in writing letters to politicians, what exactly would you expect to accomplish? You are the slave pleading to your masters, where the masters thrive off your crawling in the mud at their feet: they still get to say whether or not and you have to abide by their wishes.

I say get upp from where you are kneeling; stop the groveling. You are a slave but there is no reason for you to encourage and cherish your masters. It is better to stand tall and proud than to kneel to the ugliest power seen by man; I would rather let them be and take the pain than fight them in their game played in their backyard and according to their rules – where winning is possibly only through further subjection.

I choose to fight them through refusing to grant them legitimacy, not through accepting their fake sense of rightousness and pleading to their “good will.” They have no good will – they claim us as slaves and long to be our masters. It is only through peaceful non-compliance that the oppressive bluff can be called; only though refusing to play along can the true face of the system be seen.

Do you think submission to your masters is an effective way of bringing about change?

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Why Empirical Research Isn’t Scientific

[ad#righthandside-tall]In this day and age, science is considered a field for empirical study. The word “science” is almost synonymous with “empirical.” Actually, it runs deeper than that: whatever is not explicitly empirical is automatically dismissed as unscientific, ideological storytelling or masturbation dressed in scientific wording. This was not always the case, but that is not the point I wish to make here. What I would like to do is discuss the implications of empirical science and why its adoption as The True Science is so dangerous.

There are problems with empirical science, and I would even go so far as to claim the implications of a distincly empirical science are a lot more problematic than the “storytelling” of scientific methods not primarily empirical. The reason for the problem of empiricism is partly due to the well-known induction problem. Just because something has happened in a certain way in the past doesn’t mean it will happen the same way in the future. The likelihood of future phenomena being like they were in the past may be greater for the natural sciences than in the social sciences; but even if the small step from past to future in the social sciences is more of a giant leap than a step, it is still fundamentally problematic even in the natural sciences to use historical empirical data to “foresee” the future.

The reason for this is that there is seldom the case that one simple rule is applicable on a phenomenon without influence from other, probably unknown, parameters. It is almost never the case that a phenomenon tomorrow will take place under the exact same circumstances as an event tomorrow. We may think this is the case, but concluding that we know this is the case – even in a controled laboratory – is a bit premature (or, rather, ignorant).

Some “laws” in the natural sciences seem to be applicable on certain phenomenon and have been “verified” in a number of cases already. But what this means is not that the law is necessarily correct, only that the law comes close enough to explaining what is really going on. There is no way we can tell with 100% certainty that we have found the true explanation, even if it were the case that the theory has been verified a billion times. Or even if it hasn’t been falsified.

But this is not to say that we cannot know anything, which seems to be a popular belief nowadays in fields adopting e.g. postmodernist “theory.”

My concern is not the natural sciences, even though empiricism in such “law-based” sciences is problematic. My main concern is the social sciences, in which empirical research as the hegemonic view of science is literally killing the accumulation and creation of new knowledge. Economics is no doubt the field that has come furthest of the social sciences, and  it is therefore in worse shape than the other disciplines.

The reason empirical research worries me is that it tends to be without aim. A scientist conducting empirical research is a slave to the data collected; he can not come to any conclusion that does not fit the data and he also cannot verify that the conclusion drawn based on the data is correct.

Imagine a physicist conducting an every-day experiment when teaching a class the rules of gravity. He drops his pen and expects it to fall to the floor. But imagine the pen instead floats in the air for a while before it rushes to the floor. This would seem to falsify the law of gravity, and the whole class could see it. But the explanation may be as simple as the class on the next floor is doing an experiement with powerful magnets. The problem with blind empirical research is that there is no way of saying that the data is wrong or that there is another explanation.

The example of the pen may seem ridiculous, but it is important and can be applied on basically any experiment or study. What we do not anticipate and control for is hardly ever noticed, and so the data we have collected – even if the data is itself correct – may lead us astray. Induction, which is the same as purely empirical research, leaves us clueless of whether there was something wrong in data collection or data handling. What we don’t know can totally change the outcome of empirical research; actually, empirical research presupposes that we do not know and that we try to control for our “biases” as far possible. What the scientist believes, thinks, etc is supposed to not affect the data.

Then apply this on a social science such as economics, where that which is studied consists of people. Studying a simple market transaction, say the purchase of gum, and collecting all the data we possibly can could tell us something. For instance, we might find out that in a certain neighborhood gum is sold to 10% of customers at a price of $1.25 whereas in an adjacent neighborhood the same kind of gum in the same kind of convenient store is sold to 20% of customers at a price of $1.65. Adding another store, a little further down the road, we find that 25% of customers buy that same type of gum for $1.99.

With the customers being basically the same, and the stores are the same as is the gum, we must conclude that the higher the price the more people buy gum. This doesn’t make sense at all, so most of us would discard the findings and claim that there is something wrong with the data. Perhaps the stores are all along a route to a small airport where people usually buy gum to chew during take-off to avoid discomfort due to rapidly changing cabin pressure, and that could explain the strange findings?

If economics were empirical we couldn’t tell that something ought to be wrong. Imagine a number of empirical studies such as this one, and we suddenly have a verified false theory. Or, even worse, we have a number of conflicting results and have to way of knowing what is the right explanation. Economics, just as any social (and natural) science, is dependent on knowing what to look for, how to look for it, and what to expect from the data. Without such theories of what should be the case we are blind and do not know where we are heading or whether we are going in the right direction.

This is partly what is happening in the social sciences today, where the different disciplines increasingly overlap and study the same things. But they come up with different results even though the studied phenomenon is the same. The reason conclusions in e.g. sociology, economics, and political science can be different even if the same phenomenon is studied depends on the perspectives and theories prevailing in the respective fields. This fact would be used by an empiricist as an argument for the pure empirical research – to let the data tell the story without human bias. But what this shows is exactly the opposite.

The reason they reach different conclusions is that they are guided by perspectives and theories that are all wrong – but they are wrong in different ways. Only through studying the same phenomenon from different perspectives trying to explain what is going on, and through inter-disciplinary research, can the truth be found. Empirical research can never tell us what is going on, but only what we were able to record at a certain moment or time period.

The empirical researcher might say that empirical research is not totally without theory, which means that it is guided by theory – but that theory can be tested empirically and that theories that don’t fit the data should be discarded or at least modified. But this presumes that we can control the setting fully and that we know that what we find is everything and correct – it presumes the researcher is God.

The researcher is not God, and that is the very reason research must make errors and mistakes. Because we are not omniscient we must be allowed to make mistakes yet learn from them. This goes as much for a five-year-old growing up as it goes for the scientific community. We know that whatever facts we have established empirically can be wrong; we know that we might have overlooked something. The results of science must make sense, and science makes sense only if we begin with theory. The pen floating in the air for a minute doesn’t make us wonder what happened to gravity, but what – at that very moment – we’re not seeing because a pen floating in the air doesn’t make sense.

It doesn’t make sense because we know that things tend to fall to the floor rather than float in the air, and we know all other things in the room are indeed “behaving” the way we expect them to. So the pen doesn’t falsify our understanding of gravity – it is the result of some phenomenon/parameter we are not seeing.

The same is true, and even more so, for social sciences, where we study human behavior. In the case of the convenient stores we know, a priori, that no human being would buy gum unless that which he gives up to get the gum is worth less than the value he places in the gum. So the fact that gum is sold at greater volumes in one store at a greater price than in other stores means there must be a reason why customers in the former value gum more. Maybe they have more money? Maybe they expect greater utility from the gum for some reason? Our not knowing means there is something we need to find out. If we were looking at the data without a theory to interpret and assess what we find, we would have to discard what we know is right. We know that people cannot give up something that is of value to them for something that is of less value to them – unless there is something making them act irrationally.

The “storytelling” of non-empirical sciences may indeed be incorrect, but so can any conclusion – because the researcher is not God (and if the researcher was God, of what use would doing research be?). But non-empirical research can still tell us about the true state of the world without necessarily being verified by data. Non-empirical knowledge is the starting point, and empirical research may show us that we are unknowingly omitting something important – if we don’t see what we expect to see there obviously must be something missing: either our expectations are based on a false understanding of the world, or there was something making the data unreliable (collection or registration errors, or some other phenomenon taking place at the same time that we didn’t foresee and “control for”).

The truth is that empirical research cannot take us forward – it can only provide data of the past. Empirical research cannot even tell us about the past without interpretation which necessarily makes use of the imagination of the researcher – that which he already knows and understands. The researcher’s understanding is the key to making new knowledge, whereas the data can only strengthen the researcher’s case through making the explanation convincing to others.

There is a reason most contemporary disciplines have been further fragmented into sub disciplines, e.g. economics into micro economics, macro economics, etc. There is also reason why these sub disciplines generally don’t mix. The reason is not that they are on different levels or study different phenomena, but that economics as a primarily empirical research has lost its understanding of the human being. Through endless simplifications and idealizations (in the Weberian sense) micro economics have gone its own way in the study of certain phenomena, guided by data alone; macro economics has taken the same methodological path, but has ended up somewhere else. They are no longer compatible, which causes friction and frustration and therefore makes it necessary to keep them apart.

But are micro and macro economics different “sciences”? No, they both study economic phenomena resulting from human [inter]action and should therefore be fully compatible; if they were true, they would offer the same kind of explanations to the studied phenomena and be able to provide a greater understanding for how human beings interact and what to expect from future interactions. Instead, we should expect to see further fragmentation as research conducted in micro economics will show “great divides” between economists researching somewhat different phenomena or using different techniques.

With an empirically based research agenda scientists will soon find that their findings don’t go well together with other scientists’. Since “data don’t lie” researchers of the same type will create sub groups with different “proven” theories in each group explaining the same kind of phenomena. This fragmentation will, theoretically, go on until each individual researcher has his own discipline in which his own understanding, based on the data, is “law.”

Economics doesn’t need more unguided empirical research (I’m exaggerating somewhat here), but a general understanding for what it studies and what to expect from future empirical research. Such understanding cannot be provided by data, but must be the result of introspection and reasoning based on experience and supported by observation. Data is a means to strengthen one’s theory or understanding and a way of showing others interested in the same kind of phenomena the benefits of your explanation.

Data and statistics can presumably show what really happened, but only to the extent that we had already tried to explain the phenomenon – our understanding of the world is crucial in the selection, collection and interpretation of data. Statistical analysis can at best tell us that we’re missing something, but it cannot tell us what is missing, what we don’t understand, or what to expect from this kind of phenomenon in the future. It is but a tool we can use to make sure we haven’t overlooked something.

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On The War on Terrorism Brings Mass Surveillance – In Sweden

[ad#righthandside-tall]While mass surveillance and the permanent abolishment of people’s rights in the United States come as no surprise after the terrorist attacks on 9/11 2001, it may be surprising to some that the politics of fear is now latest fashion all over the world. Even in countries that are utterly insignificant in international politics, and so “neutral” that terrorists would never even think of such places as possible targets, politicians play the same game to gain full and immediate support for increasing their powers.

Even in Sweden, a country known to be so faithfully “neutral” that it does not engage in conflict and rather take the side of totalitarians to avoid getting dragged into diplomatic hardship, politicians are using the “threat” of terrorism to instate mass surveillance of the state’s serfs people. In an article published today I tell the story of the political game played by both sides of the “aisle” to have a law enacted, which gives a military-run agency the right – no the responsibility – to go through all people’s communications.

In the case of Sweden it is obvious that the media has no role. If this political game had been played 20 or 30 years ago no one in Sweden would have heard anything about it until years after the law was passed. The media is not interested in such reporting that can truly hurt government, since the media’s sole source of “information” is government itself. You cannot bite the hand that feeds you for long without starving.

The discussion in Sweden, and the reason people are upset about the new surveillance scheme, is solely a result of private bloggers digging up facts, interviewing people, and analyzing public statements as well as behind the scenes talk and events. The “blogosphere” has made the mass surveillance of Swedish citizens by “its own” government news, and now the media – reluctantly – is following its lead.  To the politicians’ chagrin.

Whereas the Swedish government is undoubtedly trying to take the lead in surveillance and “security” issues in Europe, currently a political realm dominated by the United Kingdom, it is but a few steps ahead of the pan-European body of political rule: the European Union. While the Swedish government has now enacted a law that makes the privacy of anyone in Sweden the property of its military defense, the European Union will soon call for national legislation to further strengthen the State’s and Super-national organization’s hold on people’s lives. Surveillance is the first step, now comes international cooperation and a European “situation center” with access to all national data and with the implicit power to do whatever it feels like all over Europe and beyond.

The European Union is indeed a politicians’ project to make Europe even uglier than the United States, and they are not far from succeeding.

As has been pointed out by bloggers, the law recently passed in parliament is only the first step towards a fully Orwellian society. It is not the case that we “might” be heading that way and it is also not the case that a State with total control of its people will emerge from this: it has already emerged. What we are currently seeing is but the friendly face of government that is necessary to gain people’s acceptance before it unleashes all of its powers. Just like in the United States, where the federal government has effectively stripped people of all notion of having rights, they do not use it yet in order to make people feel that “it wasn’t so bad” and that the whistleblowers were wrong “again.” It will soon be time for government to use the powers it has formally given itself.

There is no doubt which side won the Cold War in terms of values: the Soviet Union may have disappeared, but the States of the so-called “free” West have adopted almost all of its policies. The “land of the free” has even publicly announced that they have their own Gulag on a military base in Cuba, and with the full-scale surveillance and secret police forces all over North America and Europe it will soon be impossible to claim that the freedoms and rights formulated during the Enlightenment have survived the 20th century. They have not, and people are bound to find out sooner or later.

For more information, see my articles On The War on Terrorism Brings Mass Surveillance – In Sweden and The Endarkening.

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On Inflation Research as Propaganda

[ad]In an article published today on LewRockwell.com I discuss the implications of the inflation statistic often used in economics research. As I argue, it is not only the case that the statistic doesn’t show the whole extent of the problem–it is also the case that the inflation statistic used in economics research necessarily benefits the State. As scientists supposedly with expertise in how the market works, how could it be the case that they use a definition of a [non]market phenomenon that without question benefits the entity that is known to disrupt and cause problems in the market?

One possible answer has to do with how and why economics evolved from a theorizing social science to a math-dependent natural science wannabe pseudo-science. As the story is often told, economics became a solely calculus-based “science” during the time of world wars. Prior to this period the common understanding of economics was that it would not be possible to exactly foresee how people would act; rather, the task of economics was to explain why we see certain phenomena arise in the unhampered marketplace.

At the time of war the neglectedy minority proposing to calculate human action the same way the law-based movement of atoms or molecules were hired by the State to find efficient ways to use resources and transport equipment. In a time of artificial shortages in most markets these economists were relied on to find the super formula to make the most of what was still available–to calculate an optimum of consumption for the population so that the war machine could continue without interruption.

After World War II this bastard strain of economists had won the State’s approval and were therefore made “mainstream” in economics research through appointments in [public] universities and government agencies. Since that day what was previously real economics has been a suppressed and ill-conceived theoretical social science deemed “unscientific” due to its lack of exactness in calculations.

Whether this is what really happened to the economics profession or not is not relevant to the fact that economics since World War II is a theoretically ill-founded but calculus-driven social science pretending to be an exact natural science. It is also true that the economics profession like no other social science profession serves the State in numerous agencies and departments.

The State relies heavily on economics to say what the exact effect of certain scenarios or the enactment of certain policies will be. And as a result economists rely heavily on the State for their financial well-being as well as the prestige they have become accustomed to.

Asking the question “que bono?” (who benefits?) makes it easy to see that economists themselves would directly benefit from using definitions and theories that directly or indirectly makes the State look good. As a supposedly exact science, which at least manages to give exact answers to questions, known for not ever being right in its predictions, it wouldn’t make much of a difference if definitions and theories used were to benefit a certain party. After all, it is a win-win situation for economists–they still cannot provide a correct answer to the questions asked and will keep their prestigous jobs while the State that feeds them isn’t hurt “too much” by the numbers and explanations derived from them.

It is of course impossible to tell if this is the reason the commonly adopted definition of inflation is the mainstream’s “general price increase” while the Austrians’ definition of inflation as “increase in money supply” is neglected or ignored. In either case, the price increase definition effectively hides a large portion of the real inflation even if we adopt the mainstream understanding of the market. My article discusses the obvious propaganda ingredient in this false definition.

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I’m back!

After almost two months of inactivity on this blog I’m finally back. The reason for this inactivity is not that I’ve been abducted by aliens and I have also not been imprisoned by government (the latter probably a lot more likely than the former), but simply that I’ve been on vacation and have spent the summer trying to reawaken my creative side–a whole year of advanced neoclassical economics studies has effectively shut some lines of thought out of my brain, and forced creative abilities almost out of reach. Two weeks at the Ludwig von Mises Institute and three weeks away from “it all” certainly helped getting in touch with my brain again.

So finally I believe I have the energy and creativity to write again–I’m back as my “old” self. This blog will therefore be resurrected in a couple of days when I have another article published on LewRockwell.com. After that I should be able to keep this blog updated about as frequently as before the break. Stay put.

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They Hate Us Because We Are Free?

[ad#righthandside-tall]The common argument for the war on Iraq as well as for the hysteria created by the political elite as well as the media is that it is “either them or us.” Why is this the case? Because they “hate us because we are free.” If this were the case we would indeed be in trouble, at least if they (the “haters”) were millions and millions and hated us so much that they had no problem dying to see us less free.

Of course, this doesn’t make much sense. Why would anyone blow himself up only because someone else is free? And are there thousands or millions of people like that? There could very well be some people who would consider dying for restricting others’ freedoms – at least, we know there are people willing to send others to die for this cause. After all, politicians and kings have acted in exactly this way for centuries. So the threat could be real.

But why is the threat limited to a certain ethnic group (Arabs) living in a certain region (the Middle East) and belonging to a certain religion (Islam)? There should be quite a few old-style Soviet Russians who would die to (even literally) see the old arch enemy the United States tremble with fear. And we know that anti-Americanism is a prevalent phenomenon in places like Europe and Latin America. Yet the warmongering politicians on Capitol Hill point only at Muslim Arabs living in the Middle East (and to some degree Muslim Arabs in the United States). This doesn’t make any sense.

Sense or nonsense, let’s play with the thought that the hatred towards freedom is ethnically, geographically, and religiously conditioned, i.e. that the political rascals are right. Then it wouldn’t make any sense to attack Iraq and Afghanistan while partnering with Saudi Arabia and Pakistan and even subsidize the regimes in the latter countries. If these people really hate “us” because we are free and this hatred is an effect of them being Muslim Arabs living in the Middle East, then why are some our allies and others our enemies?

After all, the official version of the Iraq war is that the Iraqi people has been liberated and that a new, democratically elected government shall take over and rule the land. Why would such a government have any effect on the people’s hatred? Wouldn’t it be better to occupy the country and have American politicians directly rule the Iraqi people through a government loyal to Washington, D.C., and populated by non-Arab, non-Muslim, non-Middle Eastern people? Attacking Iraq to get rid of Saddam Hussein and terrorism while handing over power to a people that according to the official propaganda “hates us” simply “because we are free” doesn’t make any sense.

But let’s assume that it does make sense, i.e. that their hatred is ethnically, geographically, and religiously based but that they can easily be taught not to hate if they can rule themselves through democratic process. And let’s assume this hatred is limited only to groups in the countries currently occupied by the United States as well as Iran but not its allies (forget about Usama bin Laden being Saudi and the Al Qaida camps in Pakistan for a minute). Then what?

The most important task for the United States government is pretty obvious: hunt the “haters” down in order to preserve the freedoms they hate so much and are willing to die to see us lose.

I’ll readily admit that the US government is doing the hunting, even though they are obviously pretty darn bad at it. Or did the CIA train Usama (oops…) so well that he now can so totally fool his former teachers? In either case, the hunting for this man and his fellow terrorists goes on seven years after the terrible events on 9/11 that literally shocked the whole world.

But what about our freedoms? They have carefully been dismantled by the same government that is now in the Middle East spending our money to kill the people who are threats to those very freedoms. The Patriot Act, the Military Commissions Act, and a whole set of new laws have given the United States government enormous powers (read: removed formal paper-barriers) to listen in on people’s phone calls, steal their properties, throw them in jail, torture and even kill them – without any restrictions or individual rights at all.

This doesn’t make any sense at all, unless the government is very, very serious about removing the threat at any cost. Hunting down the terrorists while stripping Americans of all their freedoms would certainly thwart all threats to those now forever lost freedoms: there will be no one to hate us, and nothing to hate. But is the cost worth it? Is the government, presumably instituted among men to protect our “inalienable” rights, really representing us when it strips us of those rights in order to “protect” us?

We can only conclude that even if we accept a lot of the political BS we’re fed as truths, the argument still doesn’t make sense. It doesn’t make sense at all.

Yet many seem to fall for it.

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My View of Capitalism

[ad]It seems a lot of the criticism towards myself as well as my attempt to finally “unify” the anarchist movement, through stripping it of the dogmatic, false belief that there are incompatible schools of anarchisms, is based on the uses and definitions of the word capitalism. In endless posts on anarchist forums I have been attacked in person or indirectly through my writings for my being capitalist, while I’ve also been attacked numerous times by statist libertarians (a.k.a. minarchists) and anarcho-capitalists for not being a capitalist.

It seems obvious that both of these criticisms cannot be right, but also that one of them should. In fact, however, they are both wrong. I am both a very strong opponent of capitalism and believe very strongly that capitalism is synonymous with the only true free society.

The reason for this is not an inherent contradiction in my views, but lies solely in the dogmatic view of the critic. Those who criticize me for being a capitalist while “pretending” to be anarchist/libertarian see capitalism as an economic system very much like the one we have today. It is a system of hierarchy based on privileges. Capitalism steals from the poor and gives to the rich; it regulates, oppresses, and exploits those who aren’t in the right networks and those who lack the “right” contacts, and it rewards those who are loyal to Power.

Capitalism is in this sense but a newer version of old-style oppressive feudalism. Instead of local or regional lords with the permission from the monarch to tax and enslave their people, we have huge corporations given the privileges by the State to conduct business and reap profits at tax payers’ expense. These protected capitalists are as privileged as the feudal lords; their privileges are basically the same.

Even though many don’t seem to realize this, such a system is fundamentally based on State power. It cannot survive without a monopoly of violence continuously enforcing and upholding the privileges – there’s nothing inherent in production, trade, consumption or money that creates a privileged wealthy class with a “right” to oppress others. This is a state of things dependent on law, and therefore on the State.

When large corporations establish a new factory, without being concerned with former or neighboring property owners’ rights nor with the environment or whatever, they do so not because it is an inherently profitable move. It is only profitable because they have been given the legal right (privilege) to do so, and can thereby escape most of the costs arising due to the disrespectful choice of location, production process, plant size, etc.

The same is true with the enormous benefits of the so-called economies of scale available to contemporary corporations. There is no reason to believe bigger is always better; in fact, the opposite is often true, the smaller is better fit for a flexible and changing world, has lower costs (no bureaucracy), relies on its direct relationship with customers, etc. But the all-encompassing State continuously subsidizes big business through supplying public roads, free or cheap land and labor, tailor-made legislation and monopolies, or even corporate welfare.

The reason it is always profitable to grow and expand and become bigger is solely because of the State. A huge plant may be able to produce a monstrous quantity of products at a low per-item cost, but only through being able to exploit cheap labor and free or almost free transportation is it a great deal. If corporations were to bear their costs for transportation they would find bigger at a certain point becomes more expensive.

If this system is capitalism, I am absolutely opposed to it. If this is capitalism, I am an anti-capitalist to 100%.

But this is not in any sense what anarcho-capitalist thinkers mean by capitalism. On the contrary, anarcho-capitalists are as strongly opposed to this system of State enforcement and privilege for corporate interests – call it corporatism, capitalism, fascism, or whatever – as I am. To anarcho-capitalists, capitalism is everything the contemporary system is not (even though there are, indeed, a number of ignorant status quo-hailing anarcho-capitalists – just as there are a bunch of utterly ignorant “money is the true evil” anti-capitalist anarchists).

Capitalism to anarcho-capitalists is what individualist anarchists and mutualists refer to as the “free market.” It is the state of things without government, where trade is free and voluntary and something that individuals engage in if they find it in there interest to do so (and they often should). The free market, even though it may include large-scale production, sees no privileges and no special deals for corporations. On the contrary, in this free market capitalism there is no privileged class and also no one to hand out privileges.

Free individuals producing or exchanging goods and services, whether they do it separately or in groups/collectives and in a money or barter economy, do not create a system of privilege. If it were the case that free individuals voluntarily interacting with each other would always, through some kind of inherent nature of interaction, create hierarchies and structures of power there would be no chance for freedom. Ever. So it simply cannot be true that free individuals in voluntary interaction will be destined to create states and exploitative relationships.

Not even the existence of property would cause such a hierarchy, unless property itself is established by the State (and it cannot if there is no State). Property according to anarcho-capitalists is a right to use and control that which you have legitimately acquired – and this can only be done through directly mixing your own labor with that which is unowned and unused and unclaimed. Property, in other words, does not to anarcho-capitalists mean the same thing as de facto property is today. And a free market, even if based on the anarcho-capitalist definition of property, would not make the vast riches of the privileged class possible while keeping others in poverty; it would indeed make people wealthy, but the free market makes everybody wealthy – at nobody’s expense.

I, for one, do not fully share the view of property commonly advocated by some anarcho-capitalists, since I see great problems (philosophically) in the Lockean version of property acquisition that many anarcho-capitalists have basically adopted. Rather, I advocate a use-based approach to property that in a much better way makes use of the scarce resources in this world and also is better at both restricting ownership and allowing for more fair accumulation. It is a “softer” approach to property that literally takes the best of the private property and possession-right theories of ownership.

In either case, the anarcho-capitalist view of capitalism has nothing to do with the capitalism described above and used by the anti-capitalist anarchist schools. It is a seldom-mentioned and little known fact that Murray Rothbard, the anarcho-capitalist icon, was in favor of homesteading from the State – that e.g. workers have the right to take over their factories just like students and faculty have the right to take over state university campuses (see “Confiscation and the Homestead Principle” [pdf]). This should tell dogmatic anarchist anti-anarcho-capitalist folks something.

For the record, however, I do not call myself anarcho-capitalist even though I do use anarcho-capitalism as an example in this post. I am a market anarchist with views fitting nicely within the “triangle” of individualist anarchism, mutualism, and agorism – topped off with a little influence (but only a little) of Stirnerism. This view has a lot in common with much of anarcho-capitalism, no doubt, but it isn’t.

In general, I try to avoid using the word “capitalism” because it is so easily misunderstood, and because it seems a lot of people really don’t want to realize they are using it dogmatically so that they can continue to falsely dismiss people they don’t like (or don’t understand). I am nevertheless fully, completely, and absolutely opposed to capitalism in the former sense above, while a staunch proponent of capitalism in the latter. My views are, even though the same word is used in both the positive and negative, fully compatible. Indeed, since the word is used in two distinctly different ways – where one is almost the direct opposite of the other – it is necessary to be both pro and con capitalism. Unless your view prohibits people from freely and voluntarily interact and exchange favors, goods, and services – but that surely wouldn’t be anarchism.

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Starving Politicians

[ad#righthandside-tall]When starved people find food they tend to desperately swallow everything and not take time to chew the food properly. We’ve all felt the same thing: when we’re really, really hungry and finally get that so desired meal our heartrates go up, we feel stressed, and we eat as quickly as we can without really knowing why. In a sense, we give in to the beast within, the stoneage man who thinks only about survival and reproduction. When food is scarce, which is what hunger means to us, we devour as much as possible to make sure we survive.

Of course, in our modern and civilized society, at least in the so-called West, there’s almost no reason to quickly devour the food. There’s plenty of food and plenty of time to eat it, and eating too fast is usually a bad thing – our bodies tell us to slow down. But the instinct is hard to overcome, since it is and has been so fundamental for our survival as species for three million years.

So when we’re really hungry and are served food we basically give in to the caveman withing – we forget everything that is civilized and expected of us only to get those calories our bodies need to continue functioning.

The same seems to have been the case in politics in this century. Just like people used to eating a lot easier get hungry, politicians learned in the 20th century that they had a lot of power within their grasp. In fact, their powers increased greatly during the last centry, often as a product of unnecessary (the propaganda somehow left out the “un” of the word) wars fought only to increase the powers of the State. With such an appetite built up by the political class, we’re bound to see a quickly growing State – and thus to see our liberties being quickly undermined and taken away.

Then came the crises in the 1970s and the following credit-based “glorious” 1980s, and with them came a change that the statists on the left are still talking about: the so-called revolutions of Thatcher in the UK and Reagan in the US. These were not regimes as great for individual liberty as statists on the right often claim they were, but they nevertheless to some degree forced back the State in certain areas. In other words: political power was forcefully decreased – mostly in rhetoric, but also to some degree in reality. A new trend was seen in the Western world, where the State was slightly pushed back in order to utilize the enormous wealth producing potential of the market.

Politicians, often in the statist left, loudly complained about sometimes fictional and sometimes obvious injustices caused by these new economy-supporting (big business fascist) polices. The so-called globalization that this caused has since been a bad word for leftist statists.

Politicians on the statist right enjoyed their time in the sun, since they rhetorically are advocates of a less restricted economy and therefore in the minds of people were the creators of the new economy and the great prosperity it generated. (How politicians can be thought of as creators of something good in any normal sense of the word is completely incomprehensible – they are at best relatively harmless parasites.) But the statist right soon found that a somewhat liberated people and economy is much more difficult to command – while they had gained and strengthened their power as the economy seemed to be booming (in pre-inflation numbers, of course) they were losing power at a fast rate as people got richer.

In some sense, but hardly in general terms, the powers of the State were somewhat more restricted compared to what it had been before. Or rather: the steady and ever increasing rate of bigger government in the Western world throughout the 20th century had somewhat declined. And, as we know, with a learned habit to consume large volumes of wealth comes a great appetite. This appetite could not be satisfied, and so the politicians suffered.

It was not until the terrible events on 9/11 that the trend could be reversed. President Bush and his hungry lackees quickly seized the opportunity and played on people’s fears to gain support for radically strip Americans of their rights and freedoms while starting wars in order to further keep the people in the dark and make them agree to support “temporarily” established torture champers, to not mind thousands of dead soldiers in foreign lands, to approve of increased taxes (mostly indirectly through government debt), and to accept the “need” for government to seize totalitarianism powers domestically.

Bush and his league of starved, power-craving parasites took advantage of the situation and did what any starving caveman would at a table filled with foods: they devoured anything they could get their hands on, and they did it quickly – possibly (hopefully) more quickly than they should’ve.

As soon as cavemen (politicians) around the world learned of this opportunity they set out to do the same thing. After all, they too were starving for greater powers and unrestricted possibilities of growing their supply of it. And so countries all over the world have adopted the “anti-terrorism” laws that fundamentally restrict the domestic populations and strip them of any rights against the government that they supposedly used to enjoy. That these laws do not target terrorists or even people the State would consider terrorists (i.e., people not paying “enough” taxes) to the same degree they are all directed towards the domestic population.

Surveillance and control hardly ever target such things terrorists would be likely to use (the government doesn’t have such great imagination); they only target what most people use or do most of the time. We now have large-scale phone and e-mail surveillance, video-monitored public places, and a large number of authorities that need to approve of our intention to do certain things. Who can truthfully say they believe politicians sincerely thing they will stifle terrorism through listening in on your aunt’s phone calls or monitor her actions while riding the subway or buying groceries?

The new powers established by and for the State are even more ridiculous considering where these measures have been taken. For instance, Sweden will shortly allow its military to routinely save and catalogue all e-mail and phone traffic at any point transmitted across the national border. Now who would’ve thought that Sweden, the cowardly State not even brave enough to take a stand as the Allies were winning WWII, would be a target for terrorists? The fact that all parties unreservedly support this large-scale surveillance should tell us something – it is so obviously in the political powers’ interest to have this infrastructure of surveillance that they don’t even bother to make it seem like there are differences between the parties.

What we’re seeing is simply starving politicians devouring everything they can get their hands on. And they will be at it for as long as people let them, since there are of course no real restrictions on government. They are in power and they make the restrictions; they can at any time repeal or ignore these restrictions if it is in their interest.

I, for one, hope they devour our liberties so fast they choke to death – or at least get a really bad stomach ache.

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