Here’s the version with no accents:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QG4jhlPLVVs

In ‘Haiti house’, the owners are more wealthy than they would be if their window were repeatedly broken; and in ‘North America mainland’ house, the owners are less wealthy than they would be if their window were never broken.

But from this viewpoint alone, we cannot tell which one of the two is the wealthier. One can have just enough wealth to live in a house of $200 000 with an intact window, and the other enough wealth to live in a house of $2 000 000 with a window repeatedly needing repair while staying the wealthier of the two for a very long time.

The only thing we can say is that either one would be wealthier with a useful window keeped intact,
and less wealthier with a useful window repeatedly broken and repaired.

Concerning the industry in general, it is not affected, whether windows are broken or not: only the consumer side is.

Nature is doing the breaking job.

Heating and cooling are doing the repair job. They are the glaziers.

The good weather is the useful window.

Each time we have to heat or to cool, it is like if we have repeatedly to repair an useful window that has been broken or needed some other kind of reparations.

The “broken window” argument is that we shouldn’t be grateful for bad things happening on the basis that they create a need to fix the problem. The fact that a borken window creates employment for glaziers disguises or hides what other productive enterprises a) the shopkeeper with the broken window would have spent their money on and b) what the glaziers would do instead of fixing broken windows.

Now with the weather issue you raise I’d say there are two points that separate this from a broken window:

Firstly, is a temperate climate necessarily a bad thing (a broken window)? Although it means there will be seasons that require additional heating, temperate also means that it is often more comfortable to work than if it were a dry or tropical climate; there may be increased productivity over hotter areas, which may require air conditioning to provide the same level of comfort. Also, hotter climates cause more perspiration / evaporation and therefore there is a greater need for rehydration, for people, crops and animals. The costs of both cooling and hydration in a hotter climate offset the costs of heating in a temperate one.

Secondly, and more directly related to the point made in the broken window argument, we don’t justify living in a temperate climate because it gives heating engineers and fuel sellers gainful employment. That is just a positive externality, a happy side effect for the people who make a living this way. If we could choose to make the climate so it was never too hot nor too cold, the broken window argument suggests that we shouldn’t debate this decision on the basis of whether that would put heating engineers / air conditioning engineers out of work – they would doubtlessly do something else productive unrelated to climate control. If we would (or could) sustain a temperate climate only to maintain the need for these jobs, the broken window fallacy is in full effect.

We may however debate the choice of ‘perfect’ climate with regard to whether it really is perfect – what effect would it have on crop growth and animal habitats if we removed these extremes, for example. That would be to discuss whether extremes of climate are a problem or a necessary and benficial natural occurence. It would not be related to the broken window argument, unless the window was broken to let some cool air in and we have no intention of replacing it.

Finally, the differences in economic success across countries evidently has less to do with weather and is more closely related to how the economies are structured. Whatever effect a temperate climate has had on the fortunes of the USA, Canada, UK, countries such as Australia, Malaysia and Singapore have had their economic successes too despite being outside the temperate regions. What all have in common is a highly evolved market-based approach to the economic problem, albeit with a high degree of government ownership in the case of Singapore.

Interesting question though, and I hope my answer helps you with the broken window part of it; I believe it’s one of the most widely encountered fallacies and yet one that often goes unchallenged.

But for him, there will be no additional enjoyment at all if he buys the heating system, while there will be an additional enjoyment if he buys the boat. The boat is an addition to his wealth, his quality of life, while the heating system is not.

It seems to be that the nations in the more in those temperate climates have done better economically in the last couple of centuries. When you have to pay to heat your house in the winter and either cool your house in the summer (or summer in a different place as the wealthy did more frequently in the 19th century) you have a situation not unlike the broken window fallacy. Your are paying for heat or cooling that you might not otherwise have paid for if you were living in say Haiti or Hawaii. But yet no one could argue that those places (especially Haiti) have been doing better than say the North America mainland. But heating and cooling are very much like breaking windows. I mean there are expenses involved that you would not have had to pay for had the weather been better. So nature is doing the vandals job in a sense. But yet these economies where heating and cooling are essential seem to be doing better than economies where people are not constrained by the spending that climate forces upon them.

I am sure I am missing something here. Please enlighten me.

“I know that most men, including those at ease with problems of the greatest complexity, can seldom accept the simplest and most obvious truth if it be such as would oblige them to admit the falsity of conclusions which they have proudly taught to others, and which they have woven, thread by thread, into the fabrics of their life”

- Leo Tolstoy

Nor is that the kind of make-work the USG is currently engaged in. If you can point to specific parts of the stimulus program that consist of unproductive work, please do. There’s no doubt that there are some; any time politicians get involved there’s plenty of pork to be shared. But by and large, the money goes toward goals I, as a taxpayer, can go along with. I’d like to see the country get cleaned up, now that we have so much idle capacity and so many unemployed people to work with. It makes a lot of sense to me, like hiring people to clean up your yard or basement instead of just giving them a handout. Or telling them to go to hell.

As I’ve explained over and over again, they are your wars because of your woeful ignorance or disgusting compromises. Why did you choose Obama as your agent when he time and again funded these murderous boondoggles and when he clearly convinced the money men that he would continue them and be their man to sell new ones?

“And as for Naomi Klein herself, I cannot accept the arguments of someone who thinks that the mercantalist policies of the Bush administration are in any way free-market.”

Have you actually read the book? This sound a lot more like something you’d read about her here than it does anything she might have written.

In the book, “free market” has a distinct set of quotes around it. It’s used much more in the Milton Friedman mold than it is in any sense Hayek might have put the phrase. And what it describes, loosely, is the loosening of any constraints against the combination of capitalist rapacity and US military might (and economic muscle) throughout the world. For her the term is synonymous with economic imperialism having a free hand to dominate any nation on earth, economically by preference, but militarily as need be.

It’s the belief that the United States is the only nation entitled to have ever had a revolution against economic domination. And we’ve already had ours. Everyone else has to buckle under, and see their revolutions crushed.

That, I believe, is different from the sense in which the term is employed at mises.org.

Also, she does not condemn our mercantilist policies as being Bush inventions. We have had mercantile plans to dominate the Western Hemisphere since the days of Manifest Destiny. Since Polk’s conquest of Mexico. Since Taft’s snapping up of the Philippines just as they were fighting their own war of independence. Democrats, whenever they’re in office, carry on precisely the same master plan as do the Republicans.

A more neutral term for the policy might be “neo-liberal”. Could you get behind that? Maybe you should check the book out at the library again, and have a second glance at it.

Matt

“… before the world will see anything resembling a free society, most of these people are going to have to die of old age or in the catastrophe that *they* are mindlessly bringing on.”

I think I wrote something to that effect on an index card once, so as not to forget it, and then I circled and drew a slash through it with red. Not because I didn’t believe it. Here is why I actively reject that conclusion every day [well OK, not *every* day]. While it takes relatively little effort of thinking to grasp that anarchy, properly understood, is by far the best way forward for mankind, it takes monumental effort in persistence to keep trying to explain it to others in a manner so that they may embrace it too. Some days ‘most any excuse to quit is good enough, and that sentiment may be enough to tip the scales.

I have another index card on which I wrote the following: “The journey of understanding can be halted by the tiniest of obstacles. The work of the mentor is to identify and expose that obstacle for the student to see and overcome.” Obviously there can be many obstacles and in rapid succession, but there likely is only *one* that is causing the blockage *now*. If I limit my effort to one person and one obstacle at a time, I can persevere a little longer. Even a tiny success is better than none at all.

Cordially,
Don

I endorse a government by the consent of the governed, and understand we have a lot of work to do, considering the divisiveness that has fractured our country into warring factions. And what particularly annoys me here is the simplistic approach on the part of some people to think we can just get rid of government and magically end up in some sort of frontier paradise, where every hombre defends his ranch with a six shooter and a rifle.

You can’t have a government without enforcing some measure of authority on those who want to bring it down. To me, the USA is remarkably lenient. We don’t have a draft, we don’t put (too many) political prisoners in the dungeons and we don’t line folks up en masse and shoot them. As nations go, we’re not the worst.

Not to our own at least. What we do, though, is sponsor autocratic third world dictators who then run death squads to keep their societies in perpetual turmoil. We keep civil wars alive so they never end, by backing one side against the other forever if needed. Look at Colombia. Half of it occupied by the Army, the other half by the rebels. None of it safe.

Don’t worry about your power to articulate your ideas. They come out just fine. What I like is that unlike many others, you have some. So we can have a civil dialog, and ultimately mutual understanding.

The subject under discussion was not what led to Hitler’s rise. It was what would have happened had we not entered the war on England’s side.

So I have not just pretended that WW II “started on whatever date is most convenient for me.” Nor is the following accurate:

“They were direct responses to the English/American Empire (itself the result of mundane evil).”

Evil as all empires may be, Germany didn’t just decide to rule the world because they hated the British Empire. And America’s empire was nothing much in those days. Maybe the Germans coveted our occupation of Puerto Rico? The Philippines? Germany’s competitive rise initially came about because they wanted to dominate the world economically and militarily. So did all the other ‘advanced’ nations. Ask Otto von Bismarck about this.

It is, however, the case that the Nazis rose to power in a tide of resentment against the terms they were obliged to accept at Versailles. This was much the same as the way the Iraqi public stood by Saddam all the more after the onerous terms he was forced to accept after the Gulf War. There is indeed a message there for all conquerors to heed: a little forbearance in victory can save a whole lot of trouble later on.

Then there’s this:

“You speak of Russia as if it were a doormat. They won the second installment of the Great War with a little help from fools like you, they may well have fought the German Empire to a standstill without it.”

The USSR was militarily incompetent at the advent of WW II. Stalin had nearly wiped out his general staff during the purges of 1938. He had hardly any generals left. And his troops were so sparsely equipped that when the Soviets invaded Finland in the Winter War, they surrendered in droves to the plucky, well equipped Finns just to get hot meals and real boots. POW conditions were better than what Stalin had given them to win a war! Not to mention the fact that their patriotic spirit was so low they had special political units standing behind them with machine guns, just to force them to charge forward, not disappear into the underbrush.

The Soviets crumbled under the Nazi advance, although much personal bravery was exhibited. See Valery Grossman’s excellent war diary, A Writer at War: A Soviet Journalist with the Red Army, 1941-1945. Or his masterful novel, Life and Fate. What saved their butts was American lend-lease. And they know it. When I was in Russia, many years later, half the people I met still remembered to thank me (as an American) for helping them save Russia. Without our equipment it’s likely they would have saved their territories beyond the Volga. I doubt they’d have been able to retake European Russia or the Ukraine from the Wehrmacht. Both sides were exhausted after Stalingrad.

Oh well. Onward. “Germany would never control these populations. The Ukrainians for instance gladly welcomed them for about 5 minutes until they got to know their “liberators”.”

This isn’t even good revisionism. The Ukrainians hated Stalin so much they mostly all went over to the German side, even knowing they were just switching conquerors. Not to mention 3/4 of a million Russians. You don’t recall Vlasov’s Army (aka the Armed Forces of the Committee for the Liberation of the Peoples of Russia)? At war’s end, well over a million remaining members of this army surrendered to the Brits and the Yanks in Austria. And were treacherously handed over to Stalin for execution or the camps.

Hitler had the drive and momentum. His big downfall was turning on Stalin, overextending himself and expending his strength at Stalingrad and Kursk. I will accede that at that moment, lend-lease had not yet kicked in and the battles were won largely with only grit. But still it was apparent to all that without US involvement, the world was in grave peril from the Nazi war machine.

BTW I will still have to protest your constant ragging on me for “my” invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan, etc. You can’t pin that one on me. I was against it from the start.

This will sound harsh, but before the world will see anything resembling a free society, most of these people are going to have to die of old age or in the catastrophe that *they* are mindlessly bringing on. They are very well trained slaves. This isn’t exactly the idea, but it’s really close:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mbv41abhC3c

I chose the word “bristle” to be charitable to you, and others.

Please accept my apology for not making my meaning clear. “Any plan for an anarchic society… it must be perceived as desirable” The singular “it” refers to any one of a multitude of plans. Any plan must be desirable in order to be accepted.

By ‘ruling elite’ I mean natural leaders. Mostly, they happen to be ‘ruling’ in the setting of a state because there is no effective competition to the state at this point in time. If the natural leaders can be convinced that anarchy can provide a better result for everyone and at the same time require much less effort on their part, perhaps it may actually be implemented someday. It will be necessary to convince them that it will be better for them too. Not an easy task.

I have many friends, dear friends that I would like to retain as friends, who have ideologies that are practically interchangeable with michael’s. I need all the help I can find to enable me to at least competently explain to them what libertarianism and anarchy is in a manner that will help them understand and accept it. I have found so far that if I cannot demonstrate how anarchy offers a clear and direct benefit over the current statist arrangement, acceptance is nil. This site provides a treasure trove of ideas from which I may choose.

Including yours.

Cordially,
Don