John McVey

Try again, mate. Certainly, individual people back in Britain privately thought out-of-sight out-of-mind as you are implying, but the British government and their representatives here never acted that way. Australia in the penal years was not a dumping ground to chuck any old poor people or criminals etc as and when the government felt like it. It was the location of an actual prison system, complete with walled compounds and prison regimes etc, picked because this was the time when Britain was having its first population explosion fuelled by the industrial revolution and there was this newly discovered land that had hardly a soul in it. Note that the prison authorities got very upset if the prisoners escaped from ("absconded") the actual gaol compounds proper or chain-gangs out in the field, even though they knew damn fine that not a one of them was going to get back to Britain any time soon. It was not at all an open-air prison using the land and seas as natural walls, as you are trying to imply. There was a definite demarcation between inside-the-prisons and outside-the-prisons, where the insides were treated as such and the outsides (where non-prisoner employees and others lived) were properly policed just the same as any urban and rural area. On top of that there was a movement that got up and running right from the start as a bona-fide free-colonisation effort rather than being something tacked on to a penal colony. South Australia, unlike the other states, was never a penal colony, but was founded in 1836 by people who paid money to come here and start a new life (and before them were some whaler settlements, such as Port Lincoln). As had been prior planned and agreed to by the British Government before the first ship even sailed, the colony of South Australia became self-governing when the population passed 50,000. JJM

(This belongs in another topic/thread) Knowledge does not mean mechanical skill or reflex. The gag reflex, for instance, isn't knowledge. Knowledge in this context would mean being conscious of the existence of milk or of nipples or swallowing etc. In practice we find that all these things have to be learned. They're popular because people have a lot of exposure to them, they having good times doing them, and repeat the exposure by choice because they remember the good times. They're learned enjoyments reinforced and honed by repetition - and often pursued for entirely rational purposes (eg getting one's own food) that combine enjoyment with the action. It's the same principle behind how people choose careers, which Dr Locke once described somewhere (sorry, I can't remember where). If want of these things were actually innate then we'd find that the vast majority of the population would be climbing the walls itching to go fishing or hunting etc, but that's not what we find: sure, they're popular, but they're not the focal points of most people's existences, and there are large numbers of people who do none of these things yet have perfectly happy lives. JJM

Happy Birthday, Martin! JJM

Understandable, yes - but not excusable. Never confuse the two. Putting the situation in its best light, apparently the lack of government and attendant protection of property allowed unscrupulous foreign thieves to destroy Somali fishing grounds by systematic overfishing. That deprived the Somali fishermen of their normal means of living, so they turned to piracy. The problem is that the former is not in the slightest way an excuse for the latter. Certainly, these men are victims - but that is not sufficient justification for going out and victimising innocent others in turn. It is as justifiable as a man in the following scenario: a self-employed businessman with his own shop in a part of town that has started to become lawless goes to work and finds his business trashed by looters from across town. Being now financially ruined, he promptly takes up a gun and holds up the first truck that passes an arterial-road intersection near his burned-out storefront. The man's actions totally destroy any legitimate sympathy and help he might have received on the account of his being a victim (note that others HAVE been trying to help him and his neighbours for years, including trying to deal with the damn looters). Similarly, the truck driver is totally justified in responding with lethal force and the trucking business is equally justified in getting what law he can to clamp down on men like that former store-owner with their full force too. Further, it is totally out of order for onlookers and commentators to tut-tut the truck driver and trucking company for not wanting to consider the nuances of the businessman's predicament when they make those calls for response with force. These chatterers are essentially expecting the truck driver and company to be shmoos, so altruistic as to be expected to risk being killed without trying to defend themselves for the crime of being richer and happening to pass by. The proper response is the same as Prometheus made in Anthem: I am not a servant to their needs. I am not a bandage for their wounds. Whatever their terrible position, they have no grounds to expect leniency from innocent others or their armed representatives, not after putting those others' lives in danger. While we may express our sympathy for the prior circumstances, we are completely justified in using lethal force to say that their response to their situation is totally unacceptable. If they're going to force us into a kill-or-be-killed situation then that's too damn bad for them, all they can (or should) expect is to be on the business end of our bigger and sharper sticks. JJM

I didn't say that the merchants themselves shouldn't be armed, only that merchants shouldn't be the ones doing the active seek-and-destroy. By all means, arm the merchants - but for defence only. It's exactly the same principle as people being free to be armed while on the streets but not permitted to be crime-fighters because that's for the police to take care of. JJM

Lloyds looks to be taking the concept of Q-ships seriously again. A Q-Ship is a ship that appears to be an ordinary merchant but is secretly armed to the teeth and whose mission is to lure in and destroy commerce-raiding vessels. It's worth considering, but only as part of a broader program that includes overt government involvement. What Q-ships would provide is a cheaper and quicker means of identifying and killing individual pirates and pirate vessels. Proper Navy action and clear-cut admonitions from national governments are still required, because it is naval action that would deal with pirate port facilities and it is no-nonsense political words that lays down the law. Governments also need to take direct charge lest the seas become vigilantised: the Q-ships have to be crewed by disciplined Navy men with rational Rules of Engagement, not angry merchants with a grudge and itchy trigger fingers. True, the concrete outcome will be largely the same in the first instance, but it would be morally much cleaner and hence more viable as an integrated part of a longer-term solution. JJM

G'day Exy Back when I was starting out examining Objectivism I managed to get a fair bit of Objectivist literature from Commentary Books, but it's been over ten years since I got things from them. Since then I've gotten most of my material from Ayn Rand Bookstore (including back when it was Second Renaissance Books). As for your ethics theory issue, I second AJ's recommendation to read Dr Peikoff's "OPAR" - Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand. Read it right from the beginning and work your way through it diligently. Read to Chapter 3, then re-read ItOE (Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology), then go back to OPAR. If you can get your method of thinking straight, and are not afraid of questioning how and why you feel what you feel, you should have little trouble replacing your current ethical sentiments with something much better and objective. After that, get what other books you can and plow through them. The Ayn Rand Institute has a suggested reading page. As to the book-title acronyms we use, eg VOS, OPAR, ItOE, etc, you'll get used to them in time JJM

Why give states that power? A state as big as California, Texas or New York is going to have the same number or more of bad teachers and upper-level busy bodies as a whole medium sized country like Australia, so what's the improvement!? Moreover, those big states are notorious for being so influential in setting standards for book contents that their approval boards almost control the textbook contents for the whole of the United States. You're gaining nothing. Separate funding and content, if one can. If the political milieu of the day is for government funding of education, then an interim program prior to the abolition of government involvement would be for governments to provide funding directly to parents (eg Miss Rand suggested tax credits) rather than the schools. The schools themselves will be wholly private institutions, ether stand-alone or members of franchise-chains. The parents then pick and choose among them as they judge fit. If something like that got in place, abolition would then simply be a case of grandfathering it out after a certain birth-year cohort or similar. The hard part would be getting any change in at all that remotely hints at being a precursor to privatisation, because the collectivists will quickly recognise it for what it is and fight against it with all they've got. JJM

No, you're right. I was truncating the decimals and also working from memory, my mistake. Type 3N has a density of 15.45, according to gold.org I would say so, yes. Goldsmiths and jewellers have been doing this for centuries, and have their own gold caratage standards thoroughly in place. Since the basis for use of gold as money is that at some point it could be taken out of circulation and used as a material to make things with, the most practical thing to do is have the gold coins in the most popular standard caratage used for that purpose. I don't think industrial users would routinely do that as they'd get pure gold direct from trusted refineries in their preferred physical forms (eg rolls of very thin high-purity gold wire as used by chipmakers), so I think the market would quickly conform to what the jewellery trade works with. If so then the simplest thing to do is, as you suggest, have the money supply quoted in terms of set weights of the regionally predominant jewellery grade rather than as pure-gold-equivalents. Note also, though, that there is no one single caratage that is globally predominant. For cultural reasons, different regions have different grades. A call for 18ct on my part is westocentric, whereas the norm is 21 in the middle-East, 22 in India, and almost-24 in the far east. Regional money supplies would reflect these differences - and that means there'd still be a small job for finance people in FX markets, though there wouldn't be the volatility nor derivatives markets etc. The next issue then is what the other carats consists of. In relation to 18ct gold, I picked 3N because it is the one that still looks most like pure gold, whereas 2N is pale yellow, 4N is pink and 5N is red. 2N is also high in silver, and that would tend to make the value of the coin become too strongly dependent on the value of silver as well as gold. 3N also has that problem somewhat (whereas the 22ct Krugerrand, in which the other 2cts are copper, doesn't), but I think the liquidity would compensate for that. What I am sure of is that pure gold is impractical for coinage because it is so easily damaged and worn away, as well as making for smaller coins per weight because the material density is so high. Well then, since you recognised that I'll unfold another campchair, point out the esky and stubbie holder collection, and chuck another prawn on the barbie for yuh! JJM

It wasn't intended to appeal to emotion but to be a very concrete method of showing that two issues you're conflating are in fact completely separate. The issue you dodged remains: would his giving you money have any importance to determination of the morality of vigilantism against him? The fact that the government monopolises the provision of these services (which incidentally it should not be involved with at all) is irrelevant to whether or not the taxation that funds them is sufficient justification for a taxpayer to steal value back from the government. It is not an issue of morally accepting a user-pays system, because it isn't one; the whole point of collectivised services is the total divorce of which individuals pay what from which individuals get what benefit. Any numerical matching of amounts in any one individual's case is pure coincidence, nothing more. Thor's question relates strictly to the who-pays-what side, of how the payment was extracted and what a proper response to that is. In the same way that the services funded by payments have no bearing on the morality of their method of extraction, so too the benefits gained from the services have no bearing on someone's proper response to that extraction. JJM

For the record, I have long held the idea that the ideal coin composition would be type-3N 18ct gold (the other 6 carats in type-3N are 3 silver and 3 copper), because it looks good, is much sturdier than pure 24ct gold, lowers the metal density from 18 to 15 and so makes lower-gold-content coins more practical, and is one of the popular standards for high-end gold jewellery. A customer could then toss a few coins made of that onto the jeweller's bench, who could then directly take them to his workshop and make something without having to alloy it himself. In the more immediate future, I wouldn't say it isn't nanotech that's going to lead new gold extraction methods but chemistry and biotech, and off the top of my head I see two lines of development. Interestingly, as you're in Germany, you might be familiar with the history of both... The first is an extension of what already exists. A while back, Henkel invented a chemical that markedly improved copper recovery efficiencies at a cost-effective rate through in-situ leaching and beneficiation of low-grade copper ores. I don't see why a similar process might not be developed for other ores, including gold. So, there could be more development along these lines to improve efficiencies and thereby make mines with lower grades viable, which is precisely what happened with copper. The second is a revisiting of an old plan to extract gold from seawater. In the aftermath of WW1 and the war-reparations demands from the French, the German finance department of the day started looking into that as a means of obtaining the gold to pay off the reparations debt. It turned out that it wasn't viable, though the research did reveal that there is as much gold in seawater as there is in the ground (or thereabouts). That's a lot of gold! With the growth of biotech, especially saline algal research, perhaps one line of development is the rearing of goldphage algae or bacteria that are used to beneficiate seawater into biosludge gold ore. I happened to watch a program (Discovery Science, I think) just last week where a mining company in the Black Hills of South Dakota is using bacteria to extract gold-cyanide sludge out of the water it is using in its table mill, allowing more gold to be recovered and the water discharged be clean enough to fish in. So, this is not just pie-in-the-sky speculation. In the further future, gold is going to come from asteroid mining. As luck would have it, the old legend of The Mother Lode is not that far from the truth. I once came across a calculation that suggested that there is enough gold in planet Earth to cover the entire surface of the planet in a layer three inches thick - the problem is where it is presently situated. The basis for the calculation was the finding that the precious-metal content of asteroids is enormously higher than crustal rock (this was the same types of calculations done that finally proved that an asteroid was the main killer of the dinosaurs, because of tell-tale iridium spikes in rocks formed back then). The difference is then explained by the simple fact that nickel and iron are lighter than gold and lead etc, and so all the heavier metals sank to the planet core back when the planet was far more molten than it is today. The gold we find today is just that stuff that either didn't sink or got transported back to the surface again by mantle plumes and other geological processes. We will likely never get the gold that is still down there, but we can eventually get the gold in the remaining asteroids. About ten-fifteen years ago it was calculated that a typical asteroid the size of a football field (of which there are zillions) had a metals content worth about $1b! The value will be much higher in today's money. Juicy! Given that the Earth's population is projected to flatten out at around 10-12b, I don't think we're going to have medium or long-term problems of insufficient physical gold supplies. The issue is the short-term sociopolitical changes that would occur in a transition back to a gold standard, before new supplies come on stream. One of the "arguments" I saw against a return to the gold standard was that much of the world's gold is now in the hands of Indian housewives and that a return to the gold standard would see a massive transfer of wealth from the west to India. You can expect to see similar thinly-disguised racist sentiments as the call for a gold standard increases. In fact, after that time I'd be concerned with the devaluation of gold because of supplies being constantly dropped into markets, independently of gold's market value, as a by-product of mining asteroids for iron and nickel etc. The only floor to that would be marginal transportation costs of shipping it back to Earth, which would be a low floor indeed because the few tons per shipment would be being piggy backed on the thousands of tons of other materials - the gold could be shoved in a couple of crates stacked in a corner of the loading bay and not even noticed. In the meantime, the only real issue with the physical supply of gold is having enough gold for one respectable wedding ring per person, some for electrical circuits and other industrial use, and enough left over to be the backbone (along with silver) of the money supply. With the aid of silver, I don't see that being an issue because there's already 4.5b oz above ground today and the promise of much more to come. If we went to a gold standard and the population grew before these speculative sources bore fruit we wont have as much gold jewellery per person as we do now, but even so, anyone who wants some could get some and in a manner that wont wreck the financial system. JJM

Essentially, when a truly free and fair election by at least partly reasonable people is no longer the last word in who holds political office. Following the description of dictatorship in Miss Rand's essay "Collectivised Rights", that means the criteria are when there is censorship, election processes are themselves routinely subverted to political ends, "political crimes" are back on the books in a big way, and private property as such is systematically expropriated. The main two issues, IMHO, are cenorship and subverted electoral processes. If you've still got free speech and genuine elections then the issue is cultural revolution rather than political revolution, even if other crap makes one's blood boil. At that point, either one acts for cultural change or plans to go Galt in some way (including leaving the country, if that's viable). Any plans for a political revolution during this time would be conditional only, made in the hope they'd not have to be implemented but the realisation that they might well have to be. But anyway, I'm sure there are old threads on the topic about the place? JJM

Say some bastard raped you, then threw $250 at your feet. Does his crime entitle you to hunt him down a month later and harm him back in some way? Would the answer to that question change if it so happened that $250 was more than the going rate you'd get if you were a prostitute?? Naturally the second question is absurd, and the $250 has absolutely no bearing on the proper answer to the first question. So it is with taxation and what the money is spent on - benefiting from government programs has no bearing on whether it is right or wrong to steal from governments. Kyle is right on the money. I generally disagree with lawbreaking done as a matter of course just because the law in question is a great inconvenience, and I don't see how stealing one's own stuff back would be sufficient reason to break law. In relation to government in particular, either don't steal at all or include such action as part of a broad and integrated program of rebellion. The principle of rule of law should be adhered to until the government of the day needs to be turned out by means other than the ballot box. JJM

That's overstating the extent of the printing-money part of government debt, and not touching upon the actual and thoroughly convoluted process by which inflation is created. Central banks used to print cash and give it directly to the government, but that's not the main mechanism any more. Today, western governments get most of their borrowed money from investors. The Central Bank acts as an underwriter selling the debt instruments to those investors, and then credits the governments' accounts within the Central Bank with the monies so raised. The government then spends the money on whatever. So far there's no inflation. The inflation comes in when the Central Bank then buys back some of that debt from the private investors. It is for this purpose that the mechanism of inflation takes place. The CB has some money already in existence, but it also tops up that amount by generating a little more (today, electronically). That's the inflation there. The CB then uses that total to pay for the debt, and from there the new money enters the economy via the spending of those who sold back some of their holdings of government debt. So, yes, effectively CB's monetise government debt, and generates inflation as a result (and intent), but in a pretzel-like manner rather than directly. BTW, CB's differ in the precise detail of their motives for this, and hence differ in the numerical amounts involved and how they time it all etc accordingly. That's not true. Governments can eliminate their debt simply by taking in more revenues via normal means than they spend, and using the surplus to buy back debt that is then retired. The Howard Government here in Australia did a lot of that, for instance. Governments only become unable to do that when the size of the debt becomes so large that the goverment can't run at a surplus without accelerating inflation or without making producers go Galt (or worse, for the politicians that is) if the government raises taxes. Not exclusively. Look at the charters of modern central banks and you'll find some variant of a statement specifying three main goals to be promoted: - stability of the currency - maintenance of full employment - general economic prosperity and welfare of the people With the second, the modern monetary system is designed to create inflation with or without new debt, and to use that to devalue nominal wages and hence reduce unemployment. With the third, the monetary system is designed to allow control of interest rates and borowing limits of governments so they can borrow and spend (eg the latest round of stimulus packages) without making interest rates hit the roof. Notice, therefore, that CB's goals are in conflict with each other, and are also based on bogus economic theories as to what causes unemployment, inflation and rising interest rates. A lot of wrangling, politicking, spin-doctoring and blame-passing is based on trying to evade these facts. If the facts were accepted for what they are the premise behind all central banking as such would evaporate. In terms of morality CB's are an abomination, and in terms of practicality they are worse than useless. JJM

You are assuming that concern for the environment is in fact their primary concern and motive. Question that, and things begin to make sense thereafter. JJM

G'day Thor! Welcome to the Forum! Besides myself there are two or three around (who still do post from time to time, that is), though I don't think they're regulars any more. There are also a few active Kiwis, too. JJM

The question is flawed, beause your "obvious response" is the wrong approach. The onus is on others to demonstrate why a questioning of sanity is worth taking seriously. Sooooo, let me see if I have this right... a guy says that one cannot trust that what one sees is truly there on the grounds that it might be a figment of one's imagination... and he says that one ought therefore go by what others say... who may be a figment of one's imagination... and this guy (who may be a figment of your imagination - or are you of his?) thinks he's fit to question your sanity? Ooooookay. I doubt if it has occurred to him to look at it that way. Try it and see whether he makes a pretzel out of himself or starts to question his premises. If the latter then this is your opening. Show him that the bottom line is that it is inescapable that existence exists and that one knows it does, so one knows in principle that one can be in direct contact with realiy and know the truth about it. That's what you have to bring to the guy. Either he identifies for himself that existence exists, or he doesn't. If he does then you're in, and then it's a matter of time and decent exposition of Objectivist metaphysics and the antechambers of epistemology. Now, with that principle alone one is perfectly justified in saying that the onus is on those who say we can't be sure we can have contact with reality to put up or shut up, that they have to give solid arguments in favour of their position and not sit content with baseless accusations. They can't do it, though, they'll never be able to substantiate any of their claims and make them withstand scrutiny. Once you know what you're doing you can demolish anything and everything that the anti-consciousness brigade throws at you. The reason is that once you've got that principle of consciousness of existence, plus the axiom of identity with its corollary of causality, one can then work on the basis that one's sense organs are 100% causal devices and that every single last shred of sensory data is totally the integration of a wide variety of data streams generated by contact with the real world. There ain't no part of sensory data that ain't fully the product of real-world causes - those causes also happen to include the nature of the sensory apparatus itself, and hence is the basis for many medical sciences. After that, explaining illusions etc is a matter of explaining the difference between sensory-perception and inference. To be a clever-cloggs you can also delve into the nuances of automated perceptual integration and the potential for illusions at that level, such as the Necker Cube etc and all those others that frequently do the rounds in the "cool" email chain letters I'm sure most of us have received a number a times. That is also dealt with in those medical sciences, and again, you have nothing to fear there. For an encore you can round it out by satisfactorily explaining bizarre phenomena like synesthesia and phantom limb syndrome in a way that preserves the integrity of our perceptual contact with reality. And after that, the rest is the main hall of epistemology. All error is error of inference, not of perception. Inference is correctable, and verifiable by reference to perception, via full integration of all available data. Certainty takes work, but it is possible. That is what reason shows you how to obtain. If, OTOH, he still refuses to accept that existence exists, or goes all pretzel-like, there is nothing you can do to force him into it. Just keep on asking him - so long as you think he is honest - why on earth one should not accept the fact that existence exists, given the evidence? The content of the evidence is irrelevant, it is the mere fact that evidence exists that is sufficient to accept that existence exists. Ask him what reasonable grounds he has to reject it. At a certain point, however, if he keeps up his profession of skepticism on the matter that all one can do is consider him dishonest or that his sanity is indeed compromised, and that, either way, one should just walk away. JJM

Dr Peikoff said exactly the same thing, once, too. I don't recall where - one of his taped lectures, IIRC (ie well before the podcast series). There is also the argument in The Question of Scholarships, in The Voice of Reason. That also goes into more detail, and is similar to what both Professor Odden and Dr Peikoff describe. There are a number of threads in the forum on related issues, all regarding some variant of taking government money, and they all end up coming back to that essay and arguments drawn from it. JJM

John Harrison and Christian Huygens should get a mention. Harrison opened up the whole world to regular international trade because his invention - the accurate chronometer - allowed for reasonably good determination of longitude and thus reduced the risks involved in ocean voyages. Huygens is in a similar category as (and contemporary with) Newton - prolific in both the theory and practice of science and technology. For instance, he is the inventor of the escapement, the pendulum clock and the pocket watch, which then helped Harrison build his own devices. He is also credited for helping getting the ball rolling on modern designs of the internal combustion engine. JJM

The boom in the short run would come from the better use of the resources by the buyers, not what the government does with the cash. The boom, then, would be dependent on what sort of uses could be had with those resources, eg how someone could use umpteen thousand acres of Nevada desert, how someone could make an existing hydro dam work more efficiently etc. I expect that it will initially predominantly take the form of lower prices paid for those existing services (eg lower electricity tariffs, lower freight charges meaning lower prices of goods), which then frees up cash for investment and consumption elsewhere. Then after that we could see new developments in Nevada etc. As to the money raised, the money itself would just be moved from one set of bank accounts (the private buyers) to another set of bank accounts (the selling governments). It would then move again from that second set of bank accounts to a third set when the government paid off debt with it. In the longer term the government's reduced need for expenditure would open the door for the abolition of many taxes, which will firstly be felt more in the elimination of administrative overhead as much as a reduced liabilities burden. JJM

One method of ensuring a reasonably representative spectrum of donation is a sort-of rating system. Those who pay yay much per year to government get to advertise that fact, and everyone else gets to include their consideration of that when they are contemplating whether or not to trade with someone. The more they pay, the higher the rating they get to trumpet. Those who do not want to pay a single cent will not be forced to do so - but they have no right to complain if others respond in kind by refusing to trade with them or demand higher contribution rates as a condition of trade, and so on. The issue after that is how to determine what is an appropriate amount. I suspect that a good proportion of a politician's time - when not being an actual representative of constituents in their dealings with government issues, as should be the bulk of a politician's job - will be spent arguing that issue in session; probably 10-20% at least, given that it will be conjoint with discussion on expenditure of the amounts thus raised. When they've worked out what they have to say etc, I would say that once a month (or perhaps a quarter) the executive and legislative bodies would publish their respective reasoning & recommendations, and then individuals would make their own judgements on that and act accordingly. I can think of a variety of mechanics for this, all pefectly viable and reasonable. On top of that, I also think that a bare minimum donation level should be requisite for maintaining one's electoral franchise. That minimum wouldn't be much, say of the order of half an ounce of gold per year. Even the proverbial pimple-faced kid with a fast-food job could pay that without difficulty in an LFC country. The main intent is to open the door for the other mechanisms, both physically and pschologically. Call it a citizenship fee - those who don't want to contribute even that small sum don't get to call themselves citizens. It would not affect how the government otherwise defends the non-citizen resident's rights, though. The police, for instance, would still do everything in their power to uphold the rights of non-payers as payers, and wouldn't even be allowed to enquire into citizenship status (residential status when there is reasonable cause is another matter). One thing I am certain of is that the tax-free world is perfectly reasonable. Those who harp on to the contrary are actively avoiding thinking about how. JJM

Economically, trade and investments as noted. In the short term there would be job losses to the extent that employment was predicated on international trade. Unlike the rest of the world, however, the lack of controls on wages etc would see the unemployment not last long at all. On top of that, the banking sector in the LFC world would be at or close to 100% reserves, so there would not be the drawn out collapse of the money supply arising from what bank failures there may be. That in itself would make the necessary price adjustements able to be completed very much sooner and with less messing around due to people making mistakes regarding pricing structures. For that reason sNerd is right to say that the recession would be short and sharp. A general loss of operating profitability is only possible when the money supply is collapsing and the realised-prices of goods sold is falling sooner than the contracted-cost of goods sold. That wont happen (not much, or not at all) in the LFC country. The initial losses will also predominantly take the form of asset write-downs rather than operating losses, though both will be affected (again proportional to the connection with international trade). Operating profitability is liable to remain reasonable even as the write-downs cause headaches. So, in financial reports, for instance, expect to see red-ink in the abnormals and asset-devaluation lines while seeing that margins will (on average) tend to remain in the black, with individual cases again being predicated on the business's relationship to international trade. Once the write-downs are complete, the continuing operating-profitability will serve as a spring-board to the recovery. After the short and sharp recession, therefore, overall profitability will be restored fairly quickly. In the next short term after that, the LFC economy is likely to become more inwardly focussed because the bulk of the rest of the world is still likely to be following non-LFC policies or suffering from the after-effects thereof. The continuing operating profitability from above will still be reinvested, but with the rest of the world in turmoil the credit risk will be too high and so the investment will tend to be directed inward. The proportion of employment predicated on international trade (be that import or export) will fall, with the bottom limit being that amount necessary to have exports so as to pay for highly-required imports, such as particular items or resources that simply cannot be sourced locally (either cost-effectively or at all). I doubt that the proportion would drop that low, though. What it does mean, however, is that the future of the economy in this LFC becomes considerably more detached from the woes in the rest of the world. What happens after that depends on the path taken by the rest of the world. If the rest of the world gets its act together and keeps a sufficiently free economy then more investment money generate by people in the LFC country will begin to be directed back toward international trade and investment. If the rest of the world becomes a basket case, then the LFC country will likely (on pure economic terms) stay quite insular, and trade only for what can't be obtained locally. Whatever social, political and military matters may happen are another matter. The mere fact that the LFC country will be back on its own feet will not be sufficient to tell the rest of the world that what the people in the LFC country do and think is right. Thus these facts about the economic resilience of LFC, even with concrete evidence in stark full view of the rest of the world, cannot be relied upon by itself to rest on the assumption that the rest of the world will indeed take a hint and get its act together. Rather than being seen as a beacon, the LFC world could be said to be the devil incarnate and the cause of other countries' woes because the people of that country are just sooooo evil and selfish - "it's their fault we're poor!" Depending on the size and military strength etc of the LFC country in question, it could yet be in for a rough ride. That will in turn affect the nature of investment, employment, standard of living, and so on. JJM

Creativity with limited resources - the famous Tin Man, just outside Port Pirie, South Australia: Post-operative depression: JJM

I disagree. Bad ideas have the potential to kill by the million, and books are one of the chief vehicles by which complex ideas are transmitted. Remember that not everone is a researcher, or capable of deep analysis of the ideas presented in a book. The Division of Labour exists for a good reason, and evil men with evil books exploit that economic principle to achieve evil ends. For instance, a lot of people influenced by evil books looked to them in the first place for solutions to issues they had. The content in them will seem plausible and pass the readers' own basic examinations, and likely be supplemented by advice from experts who may also recommend those books. An evil book, contrasted with a merely wrong book, is one knowingly designed by its author to achieve that plausibility while employing deceit, usually in the service of ends at odds with the needs of worldly human life. If a reader has need of a solution and doesn't have the expertise to judge thoroughly the content of books or what experts say, what else are they to do except go by what seems reasonable to them as far as they can discern it? The readers will then implement those ideas in the books, and the consequences will unfold from there. In that way, books (both evil and not) that have bad ideas in them can be extremely harmful to the reader. JJM