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M. Porcius Cato

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Blog Entries posted by M. Porcius Cato

  1. M. Porcius Cato
    I'm constantly stunned by the media's misrepresentation of economic facts. Consider the oft-repeated claim that the US manufacturing sector is "ailing", "hard hit", "dying", and all the rest. Why you'd think it was the Roman republic! Well, it is--strong and healthy, but terribly misunderstood.
     
    Here are the real statisticsabout U.S. manufacturing in 2006:
     
     
  3. M. Porcius Cato
    So far Ron Paul strikes me as the most Catonian of US Presidential contenders. Though he's much, much older than the historical MPC (who was John Edwards' age when he died at Utica), Paul's opposition to fruitless military adventures, his principled constitutionalism, and his general philosophical outlook would certainly piss off any modern-day Caesar (or Livia).
     
    Here's Ron Paul on The Daily Show.
  5. M. Porcius Cato
    Ron Paul, the libertarian presidential candidate who bears some resemblance to the historical Cato, has apparently eclipsed John McCain in the fundraising effort, according to this ABC news story.
     
    I'm wondering who a good Roman analog for John McCain might be. Regulus, perhaps, the war hero tortured by the Carthaginians? Nominations welcome.
  6. M. Porcius Cato
    I blogged earlier about the robust health of U.S. Manufacturing, so I was miffed to read that the word hadn't gotten out to the Washington Post, where Harold Meyerson recycles the same old myths in his critique of NAFTA.
     

    The amazing thing about the free-traders' arguments is that they never change. Today's free-trade commentaries make the same points as the pro-NAFTA editorials of 1993-94. Now, as then, bilateral trade is a win-win proposition for the peoples of both signatory nations. It raises living standards in developing nations. An educated American workforce has nothing to fear from competition. [...]
     
    Read these commentaries, and you'd never know that America has gone from being a nation that manufactured things to a nation that manufactures debt. Manufacturing (as Kevin Phillips points out in the forthcoming issue of the American Prospect, which I edit) accounted for 25 percent of America's gross domestic product in the 1970s but just 12 percent in 2006. Finance, which amounted to 12 percent of GDP in the '70s, amounted to 20 percent in 2006.  
    Sigh. The figures presented are correct, but completely misleading. Yes, it's true that manufacturing accounts for less of the GDP than it used to--but that's not because manufacturing declined but because other sectors of the economy skyrocketed even faster than manufacturing did. The fact is that U.S. manufacturing output has TRIPLED (yes, TRIPLED) since the good old days of the 50s when manufacturing was king of the economy.



     
    Seems like the anti-free traders are attempting to revive manufacturing by manufacturing lies.
  8. M. Porcius Cato
    In a speech here in Columbus, Barack Obama posed an unusual challenge to McCain's independence: "He hasn't been a maverick. He's been a sidekick. He's like Cato to the Green Lantern."
     
    Don't they teach anything at Harvard Law School? For the record, it's Green Hornet, not Green Lantern.
     



  11. M. Porcius Cato
    I mentioned in a thread on the Gracchan grain dole that the distribution of income is typically best described by a power function (sort of like an exponential/logarithmic curve). You probably have some inking of this distribution if you've ever heard a politician or professor complaining bitterly about the fact the top 1% owns 50% of the wealth (or whatever it is in your local area).
     
    However, economists have been pointing out for some time that this power law of income distribution really says nothing about corruption or anything like that: it's simply a consequence of there being a distribution of motivation/merit/opportunity/etc that is applied over the long term.
     
    To illustrate this prinicple, I thought I'd check whether the power function also describes the distribution of posts made to UNRV. As you can see in the chart below, the fit of the function is almost perfect!

    I thought this was a pretty cool example of economics applied to everyday life.
  12. M. Porcius Cato
    I admit to be a congenital contrarian. I choose Cato over Caesar, Macs over PCs, ancient history over modern, and so on. As John Tierney puts it, "Just because everybody believes something doesn't make it wrong, but that's a good working hypothesis."
     
    Given this penchant, it's probably no surprise that I've been highly skeptical about the CO2 theory of climate change since I first heard about it in 1990, a particularly hot summer in the US. Although I wrote my very first research paper on the topic (back in high school), I hadn't followed up on it since then. In the meantime, however, much has changed: initially, all a skeptic could say was, "the evidence is not convincing because it doesn't rule out alternative explanations for the same data"; now, skepticism is buttressed by an alternative theory of climate change--the solar energy theory of climate change--that does a much better job of explaining the data than the much-popularized CO2 theory.
     
    If you're interested in seeing the two different theories presented for a popular audience, I'd recommend Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth" (for the CO2 theory) and BBC's "The Great Global Warming Swindle" (for the solar energy theory). You can watch the BBC special on Google Video for free.
  14. M. Porcius Cato
    Great review in the NY Times. I don't know what is more disheartening: (1) how violently totalitarian Communists--like the lackeys of Stalin--celebrate their resistance to local authoritarian fascists--like the thugs of Franco, or (2) how naively Western liberals buy into #1.
  17. M. Porcius Cato
    "We are all Greeks," Shelley once wrote, rather exuberantly. It's easy to see why he'd say that. As Rabbi Michael Lerner observed, "Along with Greek science and military prowess came a whole culture that celebrated beauty both in art and in the human body, presented the world with the triumph of rational thought in the works of Plato and Aristotle, and rejoiced in the complexities of life presented in the theater of Aeschylus, Euripides and Aristophanes."
     
    Only Lerner wasn't giving Hellenism a sales pitch. See, not every one is a 'Greek' in Shelley's sense of the term, including sectors of far-left post-modernism, the evangelical Christians, most of the Islamic world, the Taliban... and then there were the Maccabees, whose struggle against Hellenism is celebrated during Hanukkah.
     
    Christopher Hitchens asks that we call it quits.Bah, Hanukkah: THE HOLIDAY CELEBRATES THE TRIUMPH OF TRIBAL JEWISH BACKWARDNESS
  18. M. Porcius Cato
    Although Google has been rightly taken to task for capitulating to Chinese demands to assist in censoring dissidents on the internet, rival Yahoo has been doing vastly worse--actually assisting Chinese authorities in tracking down and imprisoning dissidents. More in today's New York Times. What a shame--now I'm going to have to abandon Yahoo entirely.
     
    Does anybody have a suggestion for a good MyYahoo alternative?
  19. M. Porcius Cato
    Marius is infamous (perhaps to a degree that is unwarranted) for opening up the ranks of the Roman legions to the landless, propertyless "head-count" of Rome. The result: an army that unquestioningly obeyed its commanding officers, even when the officers threatened to topple the republic (and finally did).
     
    The widely-vaunted alternative to this ever-present threat--in the US, most recently revived by Douglas MacArthur; elsewhere, seen in military coups from Venezuela to Pakistan--is "civilian control," with military officers accepting the implict charge to accomplish the civilian mission no-questions-asked.
     
    Is this the best alternative? A recent piece in NYT Magazine suggests that civilian control--at least as it is currently practiced--has its own problems, especially the problem of rewarding generals who fail to give frank advice to civilian leadership. It's a fascinating article, and well worth reading.
     
    My first impression is that "private armies" versus "civilian control" is a false alternative--the real alternative to private armies are armies that uphold the laws--that would be the real Anti-Marian Reform. Beyond that, generals who fail to give frank assessments of what can be realistically accomplished are guilty of a derliction of duty--not just to their commander in chief, but to their country.
  20. M. Porcius Cato
    Apparently the daughter of John F. Kennedy wants to be a senator. Having held no previous political office, which seems to have been both a necessary and a sufficient condition to be a senator in the Roman republic, her ambition is remarkable for a number of reasons. But what is says about political culture in the US and Rome is what has me fascinated.
     
    One of the trickier Latin political terms is nobile. The root of our word, "noble," it connotes royalty and aristocracy. But the Latin term was initially much more humble than that. It simply meant "known". And in a city the size of Rome, where all magistrates were chosen by the people, name recognition was (then as now) an invaluable political asset. Just the name Cornelius or Metellus was a political asset, a sign that the candidate was no fly-by-night-nobody, but would have something to live up to -- viz., centuries of other Cornelii or Metelli that had used their own name recognition for the good of the republic.
     
    It's all terribly unfair, of course. Cato the Elder, a New Man, used to upbraid the people for getting bamboozled by well-known names and for failing to recognize well-administered offices. Nobility--in the sense of an aristocracy--was what he warned would happen if the people continued to be dazzled by nobilitas, in the sense of name recognition. (Indeed, another New Man later used the old name of Julius for his own benefit, and the rest is history.)
     
    I always wondered if this dumb reliance on name recognition came from the fact that politics in Rome was face-to-face. With no mass media, one had precious little to go on when voting for a dozen or so lower magistrates, except the names: X. Caecilius Metellus versus X. Nomen Nescius, etc. Adding to this impression is the fact that dynastic political families have been the exception, rather than the norm, in the American republic. Our own nobiles -- Adams, Roosevelt, Kennedy, Taft, Bush, and so on -- are vastly outnumbered by New Men with no family legacy: Polk, Lincoln, Eisenhower, Obama, and so on.
     
    But now I'm not so sure. With (caroline) KENNEDY running against (andrew) CUOMO, it certainly feels like Metellus versus Cornelius all over again. Personally, I'm hoping for more candidates with funny-sounding names.
  21. M. Porcius Cato
    American religious broadcaster and all-around wacko Pat Robertson was talking to God recently (or at least stopped taking his meds), when Robertson learned that Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon's stroke was caused by the Vengeance of God. Apparently God is none-too-pleased about the Likud-founder/bolting prime minister
    "dividing God's land" .  
    No word from Robertson yet about why God was OK with Saladin and his little capture of Jerusalem. Maybe God just likes turbans. Or maybe Pat Robertson isn't really the question-asking type.


     

  22. M. Porcius Cato
    First, Yahoo! cravenly handed over user records to Chinese auhoritarians authorities. Then, "Don't be Evil" Google promptly complied with Chinese demands to censor results from web searches. What next? The censorship of No-MSG recipes on Epicurious.com? Will the whole internet be forced to kowtow to the brownshirts in Beijing?
     
    Not on Jimbo Wales' watch! Wikipedia, the ultimate source of truthiness on the internet, will not yield to Chinese demands to censor their content. Read the whole story here.
  23. M. Porcius Cato
    Today's NYT has an interesting report that claims that the Virginia Tech killer's history of mental illness made his gun purchase illegal. The report is interesting because (1) it challenges the assumption that more gun control laws are needed to prevent future VT-type massacres, (2) it demonstrates the difficulties in enforcing existing legislation, and also (3) it illustrates how small differences in the implementation of federal law at the state level can have devastating repercussions. From my perspective, this is an interesting set of observations because it fits in with neither the standard 'liberal' view on the alleged obsolescence of the Second Amendment nor the standard 'conservative' view on the supremacy of States' rights. Rather, the implication of (1) and (3) is that a strong federal government--strictly bound by the Constitution--is potentially more effective at meeting the legal needs of the people than is commonly supposed by liberals and conservatives alike. Further, the implication of (2) is that this potential requires cooperation from state authorities. This makes me wonder whether there are many more issues like this one and whether there is a non-governmental organization that monitors such issues.
  24. M. Porcius Cato
    Left-wing Gauls are in an uproar that the leader of the Republic is...jogging. "Le running" is apparently too individualistic and too (say it with disgust) American for some. I guess they'll just have to replace their favorite term of abuse, "creeping Americanism", with "jogging Americanism"!
     
    There's a great response to this fashionable idiocy by that Cato of perfidious Albion, fellow jogger Boris Johnson. (Of course, Cato didn't actually jog, but as a good Stoic, he did walk a lot -- and it's a looong walk from Egypt to Utica.)
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