There is no such thing as 'defenceless'.

Nice house when it's not obscured by wicker-smoke.

A spontaneous night off last night. One of the side effects of clearing the crap-hole that is my garage/workshop is finding things I'd forgotten about. I found a box of DVDs I thought I'd lost forever. A few Red Dwarfs, some Vincent Price hamtastics, the John Hurt version of 1984, the Wicker Man with Ed Woodwoodwood and more. So I was fully videoed out last night.

Today I considered talking about the budget but this one has been leakier than a shotgun-treated sieve so everyone already knows. Smokers get another kick in the nuts, no surprises there and no concern here. I don't buy mine from the taxed shops. Man with a Van will increase his prices because criminals don't do things for the benefit of others, they do it for profit. Like politicians. He will increase his price, maintain his price differential and do more business than ever. The more they clamp down on smokers, the better the criminals will do. Well, with a bit of luck, this time next year I'll be starting on my own crop and I can ditch Man with a Van too. I think I'll also try Rose's mead with the apple starter, perhaps refined with an isolation on Sabouraud-dextrose agar followed by alcohol acclimatisation because well, it's my job. I think I might also build a wicker man in the garden, just in case it's ever needed for something.

Sod the budget. It's all fiddling around with other people's money, no matter who is in charge. Ozzy will still give money to the Dreadful Arnott and Donkey Shagger so they can sneer at and denormalise those he's taken the money from to give to them. Nothing will change, at least nothing that actually matters.

Instead, let's have a little story.

A long, long time ago in a place far, far away, there lived some peasants. These peasants had no money because they were taxed on the basis of how much they earned so the more they earned, the more they paid. As a result, nobody ever managed to save any money because no matter how hard they worked and how much they earned, they ended up with the same amount anyway.

Now it would seem obvious that they should do the least amount of work needed to earn enough to live on after tax. Of course it's obvious. Why would anyone bust a gut to get the same pay as Lazy Keen Meng who sleeps under his coolie hat half the day and picks a tenth of the rice everyone else picks? The clear result must surely be that everyone works at the pace of the slowest. The word of the day would be Mae win-ti, every day.

Ah, but the peasant-owners have Enforcers, equipped with very sharp swords and bows and really snazzy armour and the peasants aren't allowed any weapons. The Enforcers make sure the peasants work as hard as possible even though the pay is actually the same whether they try or not.

Oh, but these peasants must surely revolt? They must rise up and overthrow their masters, it must surely be so? Ah, but remember, peasants cannot own weapons. No weapons at all. Not even defensive ones. So what can these peasants do?

In that land, long ago and far away, the peasants learned to fight without weapons. They learned to use themselves, and anything available, as a weapon. Today we call their methods by names such as 'karate' and we think it's all very cool and trendy to learn. We think 'numchucks' are a fancy weapon when really they are a tool to dehusk rice. We think the three-pronged short swords look really cool when they are just tools for lifting hay.

The peasants learned to fight back using the things they were already proficient at using. Their hands and their tools. Dehusking rice with a flail is dangerous if you don't have control of the flail - but when you do have control, it can dehusk more than rice.

The peasants were not allowed to own swords or bows or knives or any weapons at all. They did not become weak and subservient. They learned to turn the everyday, and themselves, into weapons.

Banning weapons achieves nothing more than a redefinition of 'weapon'.

So what of today? What do we have? Computers? Well, blogs have become weapons of a sort but they are a weapon the peasant-owners can simply switch off. It's not as easy as they would like, as Egypt discovered, but it's a weapon that can be at least easily blunted. It doesn't help much against a backstreet mugger, either, unless you have an early Amstrad laptop that was heavy enough to brain a rhino.

The old saying, 'the pen is mightier than the sword' is self-evident bollocks to anyone who owns both. Even if you have a really good Parker pen filled with the best Windsor and Newton ink, the sword will win every time. Even if it's a first-time sword user against Shakespeare and his well-practised quill skill. However, 'the pen is easier to hide than the sword' is always true.

I have carried a steel-barrelled pen on every flight I've been on and nobody has ever even questioned it. Try getting on the same flight with those Inquisition-style eyebrow curling devices. The worst you could do is give someone unusually curly eyebrows. With a deft push and twist, a pen (even a cheap Bic) could be right through your heart in a second. A HB pencil will work just as well, even better as they can be sharp, and they come with rubber ends so you don't even bruise your palm.

There are places you can hit a human body that will cause pain, unconsciousness, disability (temporary or permanent) even death, agonising or instant. You don't have to be Chuck Norris to do it. The papers often have stories of someone who 'killed with one punch' when it's clear they didn't intend to. They just hit the right spot by bad luck. They should still be punished anyway, because they are too stupid to realise just how much of a weapon they are.

As should those who ban weapons. Give someone a gun and they might miss or inflict a flesh-wound. Give them a sword they don't know how to use and they are more at risk of being cut than the one they're attacking. Likewise a knife. The best way to fight with a knife is not to use the knife. If you hold it in your left hand, way out from your body, your opponent is focused on the knife and will never see the right hook coming.

I'e never taken a self-defence class. I learned the hard way, which isn't recommended because although it's quickly effective, it does hurt a lot and can cost a few teeth. Favourite line from a long-ago dentist visit - 'There are gaps in these teeth that aren't in your record' 'Yeah, well, I don't always win'. I still have my unnaturally big canines, and I'm pleased about that. They've got me out of a few potential fights over the years.

I also learned from friends who worked as pub bouncers and were taught what not to do. Now, if you come at me with a knife, it'll likely end up in your chest with only your fingerprints on it. My fingerprints will be on your hand and elbow.

I have never set out to harm anyone. All I have ever been interested in is in learning ways to not have the crap kicked out of me. So far I have never come across anyone persistent enough to need a total stop.

So I can't carry a gun. I don't care, I don't own one and never have. What troubles me about the ban is that every backstreet mugger can be certain I don't have a gun on me. I didn't have one anyway but before the gun ban, they couldn't be sure. Now they can.

Burglars now know I have no gun in the house. Muggers know I have no Crocodile Dundee blade up my shirt. Both know I have no defensive weapons because all forms of self-defence are illegal. As is interfering with a criminal in the course of his duty.

And so history turns on a wheel. Once again we are denied all weapons, and denied the right to defend ourselves. Once again we are the peasants pressed down by the enforcers.

Out there, everywhere you look, are the means to defend yourself. Often, it's the thing your assailant holds in his hands. Or the cigarette you're smoking, the paper cup of hot coffee, the pencil in your pocket.

You take the risk in defending yourself. Sometimes you lose and you take the dents. If you wake up breathing then on some level you've won.

If you give in and bow down every time then on every level, you've lost.

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There’s No Such Thing as Homemade Ice Cream

03/19/11 In the freezer section of the grocery store, there’s Vanilla Bean, French Vanilla, and yet another vanilla flavor called Homemade Vanilla. Now, come on! I’m in the store here, looking at rows and rows of commercial products produced by a vast capitalistic machinery, a cornucopia of frozen goods made by advanced industrial technologies, made from goods and services that require a global division of labor and a sophisticated trading and price system rooted in private property and replete with entrepreneurial risk at every stage of production.

There’s nothing “homemade” about anything here, and surely everyone knows that. It’s just marketing – not that there’s anything wrong with that.

But it got me thinking. What is real homemade ice cream? Oh, I’ve made it before. It has always struck me that you can’t really make real homemade ice cream with an electric machine. Electricity is so artificial, and if you are going to plug in a machine, in what sense are you actually making the stuff? Pouring ingredients into an electric bucket and waiting isn’t really “making” anything. You might as well let someone else do that and buy it from them. You might as well make a trip to the freezer section of the grocery store.

Nope, homemade must be hand cranked all the way, so the “elbow muscle” does the hard work. And it can be exhausting. You turn and turn and crank and crank and it seems like it will never become thick like ice cream. Then when it finally happens, and you are tired out, the turning gets harder and harder until you have to throw your whole body into it and finally you just can’t turn it anymore. At that point, it is ready to eat.

Is it worth it? That’s a subjective judgment. But consider: how many of the ingredients themselves are homemade? Is the stuff that makes the ice cream really homemade and truly authentic? We’ve already dispensed with the need for an electrical plant in your backyard by settling on the hand-cranked method. This is a great step toward homemade.

But what about the rock salt, a product that seems useful for either breaking up ice on the sidewalk or for making ice cream but not much else? I bought my packet at the store. This is clearly a compromise of the seeming need for autarky in ice-cream production, so what if we made this ourselves?

Wikipedia says that rock salt:

…occurs in vast beds of sedimentary evaporite minerals that result from the drying up of enclosed lakes, playas, and seas. Salt beds may be hundreds of meters thick and underlie broad areas. In the United States and Canada extensive underground beds extend from the Appalachian basin of western New York through parts of Ontario and under much of the Michigan Basin. Other deposits are in Ohio, Kansas, New Mexico, Nova Scotia and Saskatchewan. The Khewra salt mine is a massive deposit of rock salt near Islamabad, Pakistan. In the United Kingdom there are three mines, the largest of these is at Winsford in Cheshire producing half a million tonnes on average in six months.

All I can say is, Yikes, I’ve got some traveling to do. And some crews to hire. And then I have the problem of packaging the stuff and shipping it back from Islamabad or Winsford or wherever. But wait, it seems like Morton sells a product that might be the same thing but, in any case, markets itself as Ice Cream Salt, as distinguished from just plain rock salt for driveways and the like. What the difference is, I don’t know. But I’m not taking any chances, so more research on this point is clearly necessary.

Then there’s the problem of milk. I could buy a cow but that’s a lot of upkeep. I understand that you have to milk one of these things regularly whether you are making ice cream or not. And there’s the problem of feed and waste and many other issues. Raising and keeping this animal healthy might turn into a full-time job, with no time left over for making, much less enjoying, ice cream.

Of course you need refrigeration and ice, without which matters are rather hopeless. It took most all of recorded human history to invent the refrigerator, which only became common in American homes in the 1920s and 1930s, and so it is pretty presumptuous for me to assume that I could construct one on my own. Plus, these things run on electricity, and I thought I had dispensed with that in the name of authenticity. So long as I’m using electricity to store the milk and ice, why not just let electricity turn the crank too?

I’m back to plan A: get a generator. I’ll pretend not to notice the problem of making homemade gasoline to power it. After all, I could use a river (need to get one of those) or erect a giant windmill (prepare for dead bird carcasses to litter up the yard), but then there’s no power on windless days. How about a solar-based generator? Break out the Windex (can I make that at home too?). This is getting expensive.

Of course you need eggs, which means chickens, which I wouldn’t entirely rule out, but everyone I know who has tried to raise chickens for eggs eventually throws in the towel. It is a disgusting job, fully of unexpected headaches, like getting rid of varmints and keeping the chickens warm and buying expensive feeds and dealing with filthy critters and chicken coops.

It is doable, provided I wanted to quit my job into order to raise a cow and chickens. But there’s still the problem of sugar and flavor. Sugar can be had in many ways. I could raise bees or sugar cane or extract it from fruit and many others processes, each rather daunting. It would be far easier just to buy some, but then what about authenticity and that important “homemade” aspect of my ice cream?

Now let’s talk about vanilla. Apparently this derives from a bean grown in Mexico and Madagascar, and, says Wikipedia, “extensive labor required to grow the vanilla seed pods.” Now I seem to have bumped up against an impossible problem. I live in neither place, and apparently my climate just can’t do the vanilla-growing thing. Maybe I need a greenhouse. Artificial vanilla would require a chemistry lab out back.

I’ve said nothing about the ice-cream maker itself, which uses stainless-steel gears and a crank. In the whole history of humanity, steel as we know it only became economically viable in the 19th century, and stainless steel is very much a modern invention. It would require vast study for me to even figure out the metallurgical aspects of this. And at the least, I would need a blast furnace out back, and one wonders how the cow, the chickens, the electrical plant, and vanilla-producing greenhouse would fare amidst that.

Once I have the steel I would still need to form it. Then there’s the problem of the wood for the maker too, so I would need to cultivate trees and mill them and somehow shape them into round slats. Already, it would appear that I need a backyard full of stuff from all nations and all times, not to mention the physical impossibility of maintaining all these contraptions without a vast labor force that included engineers from many fields and experts in a huge range of tasks. Bankruptcy would begin even before this operation began.

The division of labor – global and involving thousands and even millions of people – is looking ever better, all beautifully coordinated by the price system and given forward motion by entrepreneurs at every stage, operating in coordination from all parts of the world.

In fact, it is pretty clear that there is no such thing as homemade ice cream, and that we use the phrase only in the most metaphorical sense. Thank goodness. In this case, I’m seeing the point: the store is just the last stop in a huge and extended process that emerged over centuries and requires the involvement of people all over the world.

They can call their vanilla ice cream homemade if they want to. Given what they go through to get us good food at good prices, capitalists have more than earned the right to stretch the language a bit when trying to persuade us to buy their products. We are the beneficiaries of a remarkable system of human cooperation.

Regards,

Jeffrey A. Tucker
for The Daily Reckoning

Jeffrey Tucker is the editor of Mises.org and author of Bourbon for Breakfast: Living Outside the Statist Quo. This above speech was given at the Mises Circle, Colorado Springs, Colorado, September 18, 2010.

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OECD agrees with the British public that sorting out the public finances is the right thing to do

OECD agrees with the British public that sorting out the public finances is the right thing to do
Matthew Sinclair  •  Economics 101  •  Wednesday 16 March 2011

The OECD has released a new report on the state of the British economy.  It has a number of interesting recommendations – for example more autonomy for schools to improve performance – but the central message is that the fiscal consolidation is right and necessary.  Spending cuts planned are vital to build a sustainable economic recovery.

Bumper receipts from the booming financial sector obscured the scale of the problem before the financial crisis, but it is now very clear that a substantial change is needed.  While the unions and some politicians are still trying to mount an irresponsible opposition insisting no cuts are necessary, they have lost the argument.   The Guardian’s poll on Monday revealed that the public support spending cuts too.  The real debate now is about how we can best manage that process.

“The UK economy emerged from the 2008–09 recession with elevated public and private debt and high unemployment. Strong growth and macroeconomic stability in the run–up to the crisis had hidden a build–up of significant imbalances, influenced by overreliance on debt–finance and the financial sector, and booming asset prices. These imbalances need to be addressed to ensure a sustainable and balanced recovery. The government is pursuing a necessary and wide ranging programme of fiscal consolidation and structural reforms aimed at achieving stronger growth and a rebalancing of the
economy over time.

A broad based recovery started in end–2009, but faces significant headwinds during 2011, which can be mitigated by monetary policy remaining supportive. The planned fiscal consolidation is needed to ensure that the fiscal position will be sustainable over time. Nonetheless, it adds to the headwinds from weak real income growth and a fading rebound in global trade. Monetary policy should hence remain expansionary, even if headline inflation is significantly above target, to support the recovery.”

Their argument for a permanent fiscal framework is one important area where the Government could improve.  In the book How to Cut Public Spending (and Still Win an Election) we looked at how expenditure targets could help to deliver a more effective fiscal consolidation.  They should still be put in place.

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