Notes: Inflation/Deflation

Kyle Bennett posted to Facebook:

"One beef with Austrians. They seem to have a fetish for price deflation (which in itself is no problem) to the point of preferring a monetary deflation. At least, I've not yet seen any Austrian writer address the effects on credit markets of persistent deflation, which are qualitatively different than the effects of inflation. I'd like to find this addressed academically so I can test my thinking against it."

I wrote:

"The notions of inflation and deflation are not praxeological concepts. They were not created by economists, but by the mundane speech of the public and politicians. They implied the popular fallacy that there is such a thing as neutral money or money of stable purchasing power. From this point of view the term inflation was applied ... See Moreto signify cash-induced changes resulting in a drop in purchasing power, and the term deflation to signify cash-induced changes resulting in a rise in purchasing power.

However, those applying these terms are not aware of the fact that purchasing power never remains unchanged and that consequently is always either inflation or deflation."

~~~~~

That's the first paragraph and first sentence of the second paragraph of a section from Chapter XVII ("Indirect Exchange") of von Mises "Human Action", p. 422.

I'm not near my whole library and can't cite this discussion for you from my Austrian section, but my own integrations of theory over the years supply my conclusions.

What's important about inflation is its political context. An enforced inflation, from which people have no recourse, is the central killing problem that people of proper economic understanding have with inflation. In proper markets (i.e.-- those which can only be "markets" because they are not subject to force), inflation and deflation are actually taking place all the time: these are price (signals) adjustments of supply and demand consequential to relative quantities of a currency or currencies vs. quantity of goods for which they might be traded. Ordinarily, these natural variations are small enough and (the crucial thing) transparent enough, both in advance (to the shrewd observer) and as they happen, that they do not disrupt value-stores or standards implied in the very concept of money.

A monetary deflation and price deflation will always proceed concurrently. I don't know what you mean by "fetish", but Austrian theory -- in my understanding -- draws crucial distinctions between real market dynamics and the political horrors that we live today. This is all very important, and I'm pretty sure that the answer to the credit market questions would be found within these conceptual bounds.

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The Whip Of The Week

"Jeremy Irons has seven homes."

(link -- Samizdata)

Who could even make this stuff up?

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Well Done, Ma'am

Miss Laura gets to play with big kids.

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The Hinge Generations

McPhillips:

"The Left worked through academentia, through its media salons, through its sniffs and conceits, through its exhausted disdain for Americans themselves, through deep liars like Chomsky and cracker-barrel Marxists like Zinn."

It's pretty simple for a whole paragraph: just one sentence and not especially complex, although one must know the players, an awareness present in far, far too few Americans now. Not much to it, really, except for fact and truth, which is all one ever really needs.

No; what I find compelling in it is the past tense. Last night, I was driving up the road and thinking about some fairly large-scale writing. I conceived a section-lead that went like this:

"The long train of human history had been filled with endless revolutions, evolutions and chance transmissions of arbitrary power. People had grown habitual to the ridiculous and endlessly horrible idea that some could presume the power -- not the right -- of life and death over countless others, and this idea had rolled across centuries without principled question, gathering priceless and unique individuals as the grease under its wheels. In all the annals, however, an America had never fallen."

This is my working concept, now: that it's over, and that all that's left are the particular details of collapse. That will be a rich story in itself, for sure, but we are living a truly unparalleled tragedy. It is unparalleled in that this was the first country in history founded on rational ideals of individualism (even accounting for the original sin of black slavery), and it is a tragedy in that it has been destroyed from within.

It is interesting to note that there are those alive today who are living a uniquely notable experience because they are now still alive to see the end of America, but old enough to have lived its peak. The past century or so has seen the seeding and cultivation of ideas only now coming to terrible yield. However, the enormous impetus of America's original conception, coming together as it did with the Industrial Age, managed to carry various aspects of this country's culture (material, intellectual, aesthetic, etc.) to heights which were the apple of the world's eye through most of the twentieth century, and for good reasons. Even to this day, one can easily find anywhere in the world some benighted peasant who still longs for The Great Feast of Ostentatious Consumption that America represents to most people who haven't been studied by critical sociology. Of course, that poor bastard never got to blast gas through a Chevy 454 SS at three gallons (or more) for a dollar, never had the quality of information delivered to his door that we once had, and his country never celebrated life on the scale that ours did before everybody really started hating themselves and then -- of course -- everything else, and their arts showed it.

There was a time, within the lives of people alive today, when American life was a celebration. God's curse of rot upon all those who took it in heart and mind to cast some as outlaws by way of race, but we were producing our way out of that. By the time rock & roll came along, all that rot was on its way to the grave, even if the best days of Dr. King's life had to be burned down in that cause. Naturally, the blight of racism will never be completely gone because you can't do a damned thing about stoopidness. However, there were also generations in this country seeing each other across racial lines and the laws were being beaten into shape. No more Bull Connors cracking attack dogs on black people in the street in broad photographic daylight: now, everybody can get their door kicked-in in the middle of the night when the SWAT-Fifes don't have their poop in a group.

There are many alive today who satisfy themselves as "Americans" even as they remain ignorant of things that were being lost before they were born -- "free spirits" who were tattooed with federal numbers on traditional paperwork and who have never worked a day in their lives without accounting their very existence in dollars to the law. Their grandfathers could build houses if and where they wanted to once they had accrued the moral authority (that's "money", kids) to do it: these people can barely un-flatpack a bookshelf, but at least they wouldn't have to beg zoning permits for that.

Even as it slides, though...

("Won't be nothin'
Nothin' you can measure anymore"

-- Leonard Cohen, "The Future")

...they will notice the cold bite of the state. These are special generations -- the earliest of them just passing now and the last of them alive in albums with long hair and bell-bottoms -- who can see it all freezing right in front of their eyes. Their children are groomed to the cold from birth now. All the time, they know less and less about the sheer gaiety of life that once was this country, and what it took to produce that. They take for metaphysically-granted political (and their consequent cultural) structures emergent right in front of them that were once the stuff of "fevered McCarthyism". The worst part of that is the complicity of their parents, who should know better because they actually lived a great deal of what's been lost, now.


This is my working concept: there is no America anymore.

This is because it's not really about geography, although there just can't be an America anywhere else; not after all the history-blazing mind, body, heart and soul that countless heroes have stamped upon this land. It's not about some stumbling homunculus of a land, however, propped upright on stilts of pious nonsense. There is an idea to it -- a mind to drive the machine, which is what it takes to keep the whole species in out of the cold and happy and thriving. It is one of the great, great things monumental to history that nobody grasped technology the ways that Americans did, and for all the whining and crying from brainless snots through much of the last half of the twentieth century, it must be said that they lived beyond the reach of kings only few generations before them because of the ways that tools multiply the power of the human mind and body.

And only free people do this. That's why we were what we were, and why we won't be soon enough for these people to live that, too.

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Why Can't You Mind Your Own Business, Berliner?

A couple of weeks ago, I was taken for a late-night drive past Mr. B's Elbow Room and Restaurant, in Gary, Indiana. We didn't have time to step in for a drink, which was disappointing. The next day, I'd said that I would have loved to hang because it's my favorite bar in Gary. My boss said, "Hey, now..." See, he thought I was making a joke out of it, which was the furthest thing from my mind.

The last -- the only -- time I was ever there, maybe six years ago now, everything in the room except the soft-porn videos and the music stopped dead, and every single head turned to look at Jid and me standing in the door. The place was utterly jammed, shoulder-to-shoulder, and we were the only white faces in the room. The pulsing heave of the dance floor stopped in a single settling pause, a bartender stopped in mid-pour, and if there was a dog in the room, then he was standing there with one hind-leg in the air and nothing happening while the look on his face said, "What the fucking fuck?"

It had been a completely innocent mistake that Jid and I had entered the place. Believe it or not, we thought that we had seen someone we knew -- yes; in Gary, Indiana -- running in the door, and since we were tired and irritated, we figured that we would go have a drink. It's a long story. Well, the person who we thought we knew wasn't there, and there we stood in this local joint where it's jumping up & down on the foundations on a Saturday night deep in a black neighborhood. As Jid later put it, "We were way white".

We kinda looked at each other, and one of us said, "Well, there's the bar..." We just sort of edged our way along toward the bar as politely as possible. God bless 'em, they let us through, and we were soon parked at the corner of the bar, having a sip and trying to be as cool as we could. I don't know how many white people they get dropping in at The Elbow Room, but they looked at us like we were zoo specimens while they were dancing. Soon enough, we must've bored everybody or something, because it was no big deal and the place was grooving like it must have been before we walked in. A couple of people said "Hi," the bartender was professionally attentive, and we all had a good time.


Comes now some dismal little potted-brain able to type this rubbish:

"Last night, on the Rachel Maddow Show (of all places for this to happen), Rand Paul said that he wasn't necessarily comfortable with the government telling private businesses how to deal with race. Specifically, he didn't seem particularly favorable to desegregating lunch counters.

Pretty much everyone is rightfully offended by this sentiment. The question of whether or not it is an overreach of government to desegregate lunch counters is long settled."

How can this be "settled"? Who the hell settled it, and how?

I'm here to tell this creep, Berliner, that if the owner of The Elbow Room had ordered my friend and me to leave his (get it?) establishment that night, we would have had no choice but to obey instantly, because we understand and respect private property, and would never go running to the likes of him for a sanction that he had no right to presume.

No matter what you do, creep, you will never peaceably make your way around this principle. You can try all the force you want, but the elements of peoples' heart & mind character in which matters like racism abide are not available to your steel-patchouli do-goodery. You might think that you're doing "the good of society" (third paragraph) by stripping others of their right to decide on their own associations (whether you like them or not, or whether they're even rational or not), but you're not. All you're doing is feeding the hate with your obdurate refusal to grasp elemental facts of reality, to wit:

• Private property is a requisite element of human efficacy, and...
  
• Racism has never been destroyed by the force of law, and it never will be.

Oh, you'll destroy a lot else in the effort. I have every confidence in that. It's just that, knowing that, and seeing how dumb you really are, I only wonder whether you like the idea of all that destruction, you bloody ignorant moron.


(Link: The Liberty Papers)

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Your Very Curious Facts For Today

Nobody writes like me, and I miss reading me.

Dammit.

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No.

“I can’t afford to care. The United States government has priced me completely out of the market.”

I say it all the time. Every time.

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I've Got Your "Zip"...

McP --

"I think that Billy at first dreaded the prospective enterprise of reading the book, for reasons of his own that I wouldn’t try to pry into. But he zipped through it in about a day and a half, which suggests that he succumbed to its fever pace."

{hah} Let me put it this way: I had on what was once called my "axe-murderer look", behind which I am to be left absolutely alone at every turn and no matter what. I walked around the house with it and almost never put it down.

Get yours today.

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"Corpse In Armor"

I don't have time right now for a full-blast review, dammit. I finished Martin's book yesterday, and must note something about it here right away, because I'm that glad that I read it.

In the early 1980's, I once did a summer of Robert Ludlum novels, pulling about a half-dozen of them ending with "The Matarese Circle". They were among the last of my taste for fiction, succeeding the science-fiction short stories (a favored form) of my youth. Naturally, they were compelling reads, for their style, pace and complexion of plot. They all did their jobs, and I really liked that.

This book hangs on thin-edges of plausibility, and I told Martin so in a phone call yesterday. It really works, nonetheless, because we live in times so implausible to ordinary American sensibilities inherited from the twentieth century. There is an elemental thesis to this book, which is that world socialism was happy to have Islamist terrorism as an ally against America. I heartily agree. This is the largest context of the book: the fact that all kinds of devils will league happily against us precisely because this country is the best thing the world ever saw. Within that context, the action runs fast and hard, but one can always find time for spots of philosophy, even during interrogation.

And -- my god, but who would have thought? -- Ragnar Danneksjöld has cousins in this thing.

This book does its job, and more. I would read it if I were you, but I'm me, so I already have, and I'm glad I did.

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The Rise Of The Petitotalists

"In a society riven into 'us' and 'them', an ambitious young person might well want to be one of the group in the know, one of the unmolested."

(Anna Funder -- "Stasiland", p. 156)

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History Notes

• Today, the great, great Lena Horne died. She was ninety-two years old and people will listen to her for as long as anyone living now will ever see into the future. Thank you, Miss Horne. You were wonderful.
  
  
• Today, Andrei Vyshinsky was not nominated to a seat on the United States Supreme Court.
  

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Notes Abroad The 'Sphere

Thank you, Michael. I don't know you, but if you mean what you say, then I think you have what it's going to take to save this country.

I hope it never comes to that for you, me, or anybody else.

Onward, Sir.

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The Last Of The Greatest

"Fighter Pilot -- The Memoirs of Legendary Ace Robin Olds" -- Robin Olds, Christina Olds and Ed Rasimus, 2010, St. Martin's Press.

~~~~~

I knew who Don Blakeslee was by the time I was ten years old. In all the rest of my life, I don't believe that I have ever known another human being in direct person who also knew that name. I knew the names and exploits of Don Gentile, Francis Gabreski, Hubert Zemke, Robert S. Johnson, Alex Vraciu, Richard Bong, James Howard, and many more: none of them ever named by anyone else, ever, in my presence.

It was 1966 when I was ten years old, and these names were then only about twenty years in the history books. To a person of that age, twenty years seems like an incomprehensible forever but, that year, World War II still glittered on the receding horizon over the shoulder of American consciousness. Lots of those living had lived through it and enough had been written about the consuming devotion of great men who prevailed in an awful struggle to come to the attention of a rapt child. These men had done it in the air: that most instantly unforgiving of all elements alien to humans.

It has always seemed strange to me, but there are people in the world to whom this "air" business seems very strange. The very idea of launching off of the earth at all brings the shakes to enormous numbers of people, as does the general idea of combat. Even many (or most) who can come to terms with one general idea or the other, or both, nonetheless cannot realize how the drive to do this sort of thing becomes manifest in reality, nor the deeply satisfying impression of the experience in a man's life, when it's done. All of that therefore, and because men who flew single-seat and single-engine airplanes in battle were the very paragon of a uniquely twentieth century warrior, sharply uptaken on technology remote from ordinary experience, the images that they cast upon the culture were virtually mythic.

For years, these aliens gave battle over Korea and stroked mythic deeds for history pages, but barely five years on from World War II, things were already happening to obscure the images. Technology was refining the endeavor: jets were far more capable and expensive to produce, with the effect that the sky-wide formations of the air-screw propeller age went thundering into the past. The first all-jet battles involved fewer airplanes, they took place amid grievous ethical and political ambiguities very different from the moral clarity of World War II, against a foe barely able to manage such technical capacity, and in an odd corner of the world whose import was difficult to grasp. In the previous war, it was fairly common for American pilots to shoot down multiple enemies in one day. By the time of Korea, such stories were hard to come by, and a lot of the action didn't get the same cultural play that had gilded the image not many years before.

What was difficult for a child in the 1960's to know was that history was still being stroked. By the time of my tenth birthday, the last great American fighter pilot was just getting into his last combat groove in an even more odd corner of the world.


Robin Olds was born right on time for this glory, and reared in the presence of blooded heroes. Arnold, Spaatz, Eaker, Doolittle, Udet, Turner; all these and more were guests in his father's house. He was awed speechless on meeting Eddie Rickenbacker. At a very early age, he was taken with the intense brotherhood of these men, forged in awful danger. On his graduation from West Point, his wings were pinned by the only officer ever to hold five-star rank in two different arms of American military service: General Henry "Hap" Arnold. It's as close it gets to divine blessing in this endeavor.

He went to war a young man, but with inborn ability and a fierce drive to excel. Some might pause at considering his natural sensitivities, but he was alert to the world and over time learned how to maneuver his own rollicking spirit around people not like him: what and who they were, how to get the best out of them for the job at hand, and growing to greater responsibility and authority along the way. By the end of World War II, he was an Army Air Corps major at twenty-three years old and a proven combat leader.

No matter his gifts, a great deal of his career was never easy for him. He took a gut-level view of work in what became the United States Air Force, his keen intellect keeping a concise essence of the matter, and this did not always endear him to a burgeoning institution often settling un-critically into doctrine. He saw straight through to his mission and did not shrink from fighting his own service in order to protect his own troops under his orders. Always eager for battle, he repeatedly volunteered for combat, finally offering his general's star for another chance, in the face of ridiculous political opposition.

More than twenty years after his first war, all of his clarity came to focal purpose just when it was needed most, and perhaps desired least except by those under his command in the 8th Tactical Fighter Wing, based at Ubon Royal Thai Air Force Base. This episode alone is worth the reading of the whole book about him, for its insight to how the best leadership works and always has. He started at the bottom in his own command, letting everyone know that he would soon be better than all of them, and then he was. By then, his men knew that he was the real thing, seldom ever seen in real life, and they would fight their hearts out for him.

It is a grotesque turn of history that this man's passion was consumed in the waste of Vietnam. It is a measure of his purity as a warrior that he released all of that passion to an effort that he knew was half-assed and wrong for that reason. For all the bureaucratic rubbish and its effects on the force, he took his pleasure where few would ever think to look: in the air, in the teeth of the enemy. His longing for his family, two daughters and a marriage that eventually went down with the war, is heartbreaking to consider, but for the fact of what he was and where his own nature demanded that he should be. The very day that he returned home, he spoke his mind on the war to President Lyndon Johnson in no uncertain terms: a move to give all his associates the shivers, but that was who he was. He was an honest killer.


In July of 1946, Major Robin Olds reported to March Field, California, assigned to the 412th Fighter Group under Colonel Tex Hill, formerly of the American Volunteer Group, also known as "The Flying Tigers" of World War II fame in China. The 412th was the first operational jet unit in American service, and Col. Hill had more pilots assigned to him than he knew what to do with. He essentially told Olds to go find a job in the unit. Flight scheduling in the jets was extremely competitive, and the solution that Olds hit upon was to wander out to the flight-line like he knew what he was doing, approach the first line-chief he saw and ask how to start the engine in the P-80 Shooting Star. It was the first jet airplane that he had ever touched. With no formal instruction whatever except what he got in a couple of minutes from the ground crewman, he just lit that thing up and took off.

It's difficult for people now to project just how completely impossible a scene this would be, today. The force is different, the institutions are different, the men are different, and nobody will ever achieve these feats again. Never again will anyone wangle their first jet fighter checkout by just walking out to the flight-line with nothing but an attitude and conning somebody into telling him how to start the damned thing and then just roaring off into the wild blue. It's something authentically glorious that's gone now. It is also emblematic of an approach to this work -- and accommodations for it -- for which there simply is no place anymore. This was a blessed life in the middle of the golden age of American military aviation, and we will never see its like again.

Ed Rasimus and Christina Olds (the General's daughter) have done a splendid service at gathering his memoirs for us, and you should go read them. When you do, then take a good long look at that photograph on the cover. Those men are bearing the last of the greatest on their shoulders, immutably into history.

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Robin Olds — "Fighter Pilot"

I've got it, Ed-san. Arrived yesterday and I started it last night.

My god: this man had his wings pinned by Hap Arnold (p. 17). This is like a condescension from Olympus. He was touched, early on. What on earth else could he have ever been?

"The fighter pilot had to be born."

(me, fourteen years ago)

Thank you, sir. This is a treasure.

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