Over at the City Journal, Guy Sorman writes about the more empirical approach to economics has began to accumulate evidence showing the superiority of capitalism to socialism. He writes:

Though economics as a discipline arose in Great Britain and France at the end of the eighteenth century, it has taken two centuries to reach the threshold of scientific rationality. Previously, intuition, opinion, and conviction enjoyed equal status in economic thought; theories were vague, often unverifiable. Not so long ago, one could teach economics at prestigious universities without using equations and certainly without the complex algorithms, precise (though not infallible) mathematical models, and computers integral to the field today.

No wonder bad economic policies ravaged entire nations during the twentieth century, producing more victims than any epidemic did. The collectivization of land in Russia during the twenties, in China during the fifties, and in Tanzania during the sixties starved hundreds of millions of peasants. The uncontrolled printing of currency destabilized Weimar Germany, facilitating the rise of Nazism. The nationalization of enterprises and the expulsion of entrepreneurs ruined Argentina during the forties and Egypt a decade later. India’s License Raj—requiring businesses to obtain a host of permits before opening their doors—froze the country’s economic development for decades, keeping millions impoverished.

Honestly, the party is over. If economics is going to apply itself in a rigorous scientific matter in understanding the effect of economic policy on wealth, economics will establish a set of laws that will be highly supportive of capitalism and greatly damaging to socialism. The evidence is overwhelmingly in favor of capitalism.

The state of affairs today is entirely different. When the Soviet Union crumbled, the socialist model that it embodied imploded, too—or, more precisely, the Soviet Union fell because the socialist economic system proved unworkable. Now only one economic system exists: market capitalism. Virtually everywhere, the public sector has given ground to privatization; currency has escaped state control, to be governed by independent central banks; competition has taken wing, thanks to the deregulation of markets and the opening of borders; taxation has become less progressive, so as to encourage entrepreneurs and create jobs.

The results have been breathtaking. Opening economies and promoting trade have helped reconstruct Eastern Europe after 1990 and lifted 800 million people, many of them in China, Brazil, and a now-license-free India, out of poverty. Even in Africa and the Arab Middle East, nations that have embraced capitalism have begun to escape from the terrible underdevelopment that has long plagued them.

In one sense it’s an exciting time because we are going to see the next great institution of knowledge develop. Over the last century science became the go to discipline for determining the ‘truth’ of natural phenomenon. During our lifetime we will see the rise of capitalism as the go to economic system for generating wealth, and more importantly helping the poor. It will become common sense that capitalism is the solution to the problems of poverty.

Guy gives the ten pedagogical points of capitalism. Of particular interest to me is this one:

5. Creative destruction is the engine of economic growth. As the Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter famously argued, capitalism unleashes a “gale” of innovation that “incessantly revolutionizes the economic structure from within, incessantly destroying the old one, incessantly creating a new one.” This ceaseless replacement of the old with the new—driven by technical innovation and entrepreneurialism, itself encouraged by good economic policies—brings prosperity, though those displaced by the process, who find their jobs made redundant, can understandably object to it.

In conjunction with competition, creative destruction is the single biggest reason why capitalism will always beat out any other kind of economic system. It’s through this realization that I wish to build my research around. While I take for granted the fact that capitalism is superior, the question becomes why does capitalism succeed? From a neuroscientific perspective I would like to argue that the institutional organization of capitalism syncs nicely with the regions of the brain that are optimal at creating wealth. Alternatively, I could argue that the institutional organization of socialism is inimical to those regions or perhaps a combination of both.

If I had to throw down some conjecture, I think its because socialism, on the whole, engages a moral system, while capitalism, on the whole engages an empirical system. A moral system attempts to affect change by influencing people directly while an empirical system influences people indirectly. By removing itself from the moral propositions required of influencing people directly, capitalism can evaluate value more directly, or should I say honestly than socialism can.

Capitalism sets up an organizational structure in which people are not able to affect each other directly (often called private property). For this reason, people in capitalism must come up with non-moral ways to affect people. For example, if you can’t force people to buy your car, then you have to find a way to make them want to buy your car. This creativity is what expands wealth. However, with socialism, the power hierarchy permits direct influence of people and normally is the only way to affect the system. In socialism, you can force people to buy a car which eliminates the creativity of persuading them to buy it, and in turns eliminates the potential gain in wealth.

What’s crucial in the difference between the organizational structures is where responsibility lands. In the organizational structure of socialism, responsibility for change is in the hands of those that make up the power hierarchy. In order to affect change, you must be morally persuasive in the eyes of the bureaucrats that hold the power. Those that are unable to influence the bureaucrats will eventually adopt the disposition that they are not responsible for their predicament. I think this will have longer term affects on the brain that will emulate clinical depression.

Looking at the organizational structure of capitalism, it’s clear that responsibility for change is given to each person. By protecting private property, a person quickly learns that whatever changes they make to improve their lot in life will be protected by the state. People very quickly adopt the disposition that they are responsible for their life. This will engage a very different set of cognitive process which I would like to argue are ideally suited for generating wealth.

But I want to say one more thing, particularly because many of my readers have selected science as their career. There is no way to see the process of scientific investigation, but as simply a special case of capitalism. Scientists select a concept in which they investigate thoroughly. They then apply a series of experiments to define and give properties to their concept. What’s crucial is realizing that the concept under investigation cannot be forced to reveal its properties. It’s only through the time consuming process of trial and error can a concept’s properties by teased out. Simply put: this is capitalism.

Capitalism does not allow a person to force another person to do their bidding. Instead capitalism forces the person to conduct a process of trial and error to develop the product or service that another person will find valuable. The organizational structure of capitalism forces people to use the same regions of the brain that are used in scientific investigation. It’s through this process that wealth is generated and the poor become wealthy.

I would like to be able to put people in the scanner and apply different organizational structures to see what regions of the brain are activated. Again, just conjecturing here, I wouldn’t be surprised if the organizational structure of capitalism more often activates the striatal region. It would also not be surprising to see that socialism on the whole activates the STS and other regions needed for determining the intentionality of others. Perhaps, a better operational definition of this kind of concept would be to predict that people that have spent a great deal of time in a socialistic organizational structure show activation more closely associated with clinically depressed people then healthy controls.

I had never considered this, but John Stossel makes an excellent point:

Most every politician and pundit says “energy independence” is a great idea. Presidents have promised it for 35 years. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we were self-sufficient, protected from high prices, supply disruptions and political machinations?

The hitch is that even if the United States were energy independent, it would be protected from none of those things. To think otherwise is to misunderstand basic economics and the global marketplace.

To be for “energy independence” is to be against trade. But trade makes us as safe. Crop destruction from this summer’s floods in the Midwest should remind us of the folly of depending only on ourselves. Achieving “energy independence” would expose us to unnecessary risks — such as storms that knock out oil refineries or droughts that create corn — and ethanol — shortages.

America is still kicking ass:

Americans’ greatest moral failure in my lifetime,” he said, “has been that we still don’t abide by that basic precept in Matthew that whatever you do for the least of my brothers, you do for me.”

Sorry, but he can hang that one up. Whatever the case is with his own selfishness, the evidence of an internationally superior Americans generosity is impressive, beginning with the numbers on our charitable giving. We give twice as much as the British per capita, and according to The American magazine, seven times as much as the Germans and 14 times as much as the Italians.

Even in inflation-adjusted dollars, the amount given each year just keeps getting larger, and meanwhile, we do far more volunteer work than in other industrialized countries.

Of course, Obama isn’t just talking about private giving, and could face serious embarrassment if he were. As has been reported about a study by Arthur Brooks of Syracuse University, conservatives give almost a third more money to charities than liberals, who mostly have more to give.

Directing this at Darwin, how do you reconcile American donating so heavily when compared to countries that seemingly care more about the poor when measured through their economic welfare policies? Stated otherwise: if capitalism leads to neglecting the poor, why is a country that has much more pro-capitalism policies then other countries donating much more money to the poor?

Knowing this, can you honestly maintain the position that pro-capitalism policies lead to more suffering of the poor because of less donations?

In reference to the fact that conservatives are more chartable than liberals I can’t help but wonder if the reason liberals support coercion is because they personally know they will not donate. Knowing they are stingy, they assume everyone else is, and turn to the state to force people to be ‘charitable’. They assuage their guilty by making everyone give to the poor.

I stand by my statement that their is an inherent contradiction in supporting redistribution policy and failing to donate all of your wealth to the poor.

Glenn Reynolds from Instapundit has this to say:

Obama’s comments seem to echo the claims of U.N. official Jan Egeland that the U.S. response to the Indian Ocean tsunami was “stingy.” That charge was bogus — there was over a billion dollars in private tsunami relief from Americans — and it turned out that the U.N. wasted a lot of its own relief money on overhead. But that’s how it is with nanny-state approaches: They dampen private impulses toward unselfishness, even as officials line their pockets. Is this what Obama wants?

Arguably, while liberals intention’s are good, inevitably the policy they implement seems to become ripe for abuse by politicians and bureaucrats. This really is a strong argument for being against wealth redistribute. It does not solve the so-called problem of wealth inequity and ends up consolidating a great deal of power into a small groups of people.

Update: A page laying out the numbers.

Pretty nifty video of some 3d animation of some cellular processes. Check it out here.

This post talks about how the GRE sets up a situation that favors wealthy applicants over poorer applicants. Not sure how I feel about his position.

Walzer develops an “open ended distributive principle,” whereby “No social good x should be distributed to men and women who possess some other good y merely because they possess y and without regard to the meaning of x.” In the case of education, there is an ongoing debate over the exact criteria of merit that should govern the distribution of admissions slots at colleges and professional schools. However, there should be consensus that using money to get “inside information” about tests is a troubling development. The law should try to ameliorate the differential access of poor and rich to courses designed to prepare them for the SAT, LSAT, MBE, and other pivotal tests.

In a lot of ways this is what i’ve been trying to say. If the GRE does not test knowledge then how why should it be used as a method of evaluating merit?

So I was watching some of the Olympic swimming competition last night when I noticed something. Many of the competitors representing different countries train n the US. The announcer would say swimmer X from country Y trains at Stanford, or they would say Swimmer Z, from country G, trains at Texas State university. It got me thinking about how many Olympic gold medals are won by athletes that trained in the US.

The US already does a find job of dominating the Olympics by winning many medals just with athletes that represent America. I can only imagine how much more dominating our country would appear if there was more emphasis on where medal winning athletes trained.

I also can’t help but think that one of the reasons the Olympics is not that interesting is precisely because much of the training is done in the US. If you are from country X its harder to get excited about one of your athletes when his success is in large part because of training in the US. To me, saying an athlete represents your country is as much about being able to say your country produced that excellent athlete as it about saying that athlete feels an affiliation towards the country. When the Olympics allows for very liberal policy on determining national origin they end up hurting the meaning of the competition.

I wonder if this this lax policy hurts the games more than if the Olympic committee were more demanding of athlete training in the country they want to represent. If I had to guess, I would say the competition benefits more from letting athletes train in any country since it insures there are more worthy competitors leading to more exciting matches.

Over at Random Jottings, John Weidner responds to Walter Shapiro saying:

Without overstating these bonds, I naively believed that I knew Edwards as well as I understood anyone in the political center ring. Yet I never saw this sex scandal coming — partly because I accepted the mythology that surrounded the Edwardses’ marriage and partly because I assumed that any hint of a wandering eye would have come out during the 2004 campaign. But then Rielle Hunter and the National Enquirer brought us all into the real world…

by saying this:

What malarky. You were besotted with Edwards because he was (or was pretending to be) a liberal Democrat. And Edwards almost certainly paid flattering attention to the guy who was writing a book about his campaign. You dolt, Edwards and his wife almost certainly coldly planned how to woo you, and knew what your weaknesses are. That’s what trial lawyers do with a jury. They study every scrap of information available on each juryman, and, like chameleons, tailor the message, and paint their very selves, to fit them. (I know about this stuff; my dear wife’s on the other side, the good side, fighting scoundrels like Edwards every day.)

Everybody who retained any objectivity could see that he was a phony, and were not surprised by this. When a guy talks populism and green-ism while building the biggest mansion in the county, there’s a 99% chance that he’s a sham. When a guy spends minutes in front of a mirror fluffing his hairdo, there’s a 99% chance that he will not resist the sexual temptations available to a celebrity.

John Weidner is right by the way. Only a freaking moron could possibly delude themselves into thinking this rich man actually cares about the poor. The extent of your concern for the poor is measured by those sacrifices you personally commit to remedying the problem. John’s commitment to the poor was so strong that he was unwilling to sacrifice no one dollar of his personal millions to help the poor. Such a lack of commitment tells me all I need to know about Edward’s commitment to the poor.

Its ironic that liberals are always hyper sensitive to the sexual hypocrisy of the right but completely oblivious to the material hypocrisy of the left. Liberals rain arrows of hatred down upon you if you take a strong moral stance against infidelity and fool around but give you a free pass if you strongly denounce wealth all the while enjoying a decadent lifestyle. On some level this would make liberals that charge republicans as hypocrites are themselves hypocrites.

One more thing, I argue, that by definition, a rich liberal concerned about wealth inequality, is by virtue of their wealth, a hypocrite.

Jennifer Rutten over at Contentions nails the meaning about press coverage and the Edward’s scandal perfectly.

We also have the obligatory column from Clark Hoyt admitting that the New York Times was wrong, but denying that their reticence to cover the Edward story was the result of liberal bias. Yes, who could imagine such a thing of the paper which ran a front-page, uncorroborated story of the Republican nominee’s alleged relationship with a lobbyist some nine years ago?

The Edwards mess is the most recent and visible, but hardly unique, example of the mainstream media’s hear no evil/see no evil approach to newsgathering. How many other stories has the MSM missed, denied or avoided? From Rathergate to Reverend Wright to the success of the surge, the pattern is the same: MSM stalls, shuffles its collective feet, and doggedly ignores information for as long as possible until they can no longer do so with a straight face. The fact that these stories without exception work to the detriment of Democrats is apparently a grand coincidence.

Over at Red State, Pejman defends the Washington Post in a rare moment in which they give a sober assessment of Barack’s plan to tax Big Oil. He writes:

For properly calling shenanigans, the Washington Post will likely be sneered at by members of the self-annointed “reality-based community.” In this way, the newspaper will be subjected to what we can term a “windfall honesty tax” in which truth-telling itself is penalized by any means necessary. The windfall honesty tax takes no money out of your pocket directly, of course. But by robbing the political discourse of the necessary realism with which to intelligently fashion and implement policy, the windfall honesty tax, when applied against clear and logical economic thinking, is infinitely better at lightening your wallet as any pickpocket could ever hope to be.

At it’s core, capitalism is the right to do what you see fit with your property. Using the state to forbid entities from using their property (taxing Oil Profits) as they see fit violates the very essence of capitalism.