“Selected Art” ———>

Just created a new page based off of my visits to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.  I’ve selected my favorite art, which might give you a few ideas of what to look for should you ever decide to visit.

Man’s Modern Bridge to Nowhere

“For it was the mastery of man over his environment which heralded the dawn of the new age, and it was in the stress of expanding economic energies that this mastery was proved and won.”

- R.H. Tawney

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Some thoughts I had while listening to another pro free-market rant in my History of Economics class.

New poetry

Just updated the Original Poetry section with something new.

I haven’t done much blogging on here lately, but my investment blog has seen a little bit more action.

One week.

One week and I will be back in New York City. I cannot begin to describe how radical of a shift it is moving from the slow-moving, tree hugging Oregon community to the focused, fast-paced, electric atmosphere of New York City.

Still, I’m ready. I don’t know what this year has in store – success or failure? I do know, however, that I’m going to give every responsibility that I have as much energy as I can muster. What responsibilities are those?

1. Guiding the House of Bonhoeffer through the year, ensuring that the house is healthy, competitive and growing in both the short and long terms.

2. Leading the King’s Debate Society into a a position of financial and social entrenchment at TKC.  Focused vision, increased competitiveness, a more Christ-centered organization.

3. Growing my stock portfolio, keeping my long term financial prospects strong, and having a good time while I’m doing it.

4. Focusing in my studies, chewing the meat and spitting out the bones. Taking every bit of knowledge I can, mulling it over, debating, pondering, and clarifying.

5. Never forgetting the least advantaged. Never forgetting to love people, to give them my time, energy, and heart.

6. Through all of the above, staying on my knees and remembering Who it is that should be the driving force behind my actions and motivations.

I’m ready. Let’s do it.

I’m now a 50centinvestor

Just a heads-up. I’ve started a new blog to follow my investment experiences and observations, as well as to post my thoughts and stock picks. You can find that at here.

New poetry, and back to NYC

Posted some new poetry the other day. The front page of the blog hasn’t been active for much of the summer, but the poetry section has been updated every week or two with new musings.

In other news, it’s been a great summer, but I’m definitley ready to get back to King’s, and New York City. It’s going to be a big year, and I’m ready to get started. I’m also ready for my mouth to stop hurting, I got my wisdom teeth pulled just a few days ago.

Ciao.

I’m still alive.

I took a few days off. I just added a new page called “[Essential] music”.  I’ll post [essential] music whenever I can find it. You can visit the page to read what I mean by “essential.”

Also, more posts in original poetry and selected poetry.

Phew. Got done reading poetry for an hour and a half. Shakespeare is a genius, Thomas Gray made me laugh like an idiot in the middle of a crowded coffee shop.  If you’ve got a second to spare, go read “Ode (On the Death of a Favorite Cat, Drowned in a Tub of Goldfishes)”

Was it Really Reagan?

In a recent op-ed, columnist Paul Krugman declares Ronald Reagan the architect of the financial meltdown. Singling out Reagan’s support of the Garn-St. Germain Depository Institutions Act, Krugman writes:

The more one looks into the origins of the current disaster, the clearer it becomes that the key wrong turn — the turn that made crisis inevitable — took place in the early 1980s, during the Reagan years.

Krugman extends his argument:

We weren’t always a nation of big debts and low savings: in the 1970s Americans saved almost 10 percent of their income, slightly more than in the 1960s. It was only after the Reagan deregulation that thrift gradually disappeared from the American way of life, culminating in the near-zero savings rate that prevailed on the eve of the great crisis. Household debt was only 60 percent of income when Reagan took office, about the same as it was during the Kennedy administration. By 2007 it was up to 119 percent.

All this, we were assured, was a good thing: sure, Americans were piling up debt, and they weren’t putting aside any of their income, but their finances looked fine once you took into account the rising values of their houses and their stock portfolios. Oops.

…

But it was the explosion of debt over the previous quarter-century that made the U.S. economy so vulnerable. Overstretched borrowers were bound to start defaulting in large numbers once the housing bubble burst and unemployment began to rise. 

I don’t claim to know anything about Garn-St. Germain Depository Institutions Act, and I’m certainly not one to criticize Krugman for narrowing the first sign of regulatory trouble to a single piece of legislation, but Krugman seems to be implying that Reagan’s deregulation forced American’s into investment decisions that they couldn’t afford.  

What do you think? If we grant that Reagan’s deregulatory record opened the doors for American’s to spend beyond their means, do Reagan and his advisers bear responsibility for Americans who willingly spent and borrowed irresponsibly? Was it Reagan, or irresponsible Americans?

Faulty Reasoning and the Intellectual Conscience

           Ever met someone so much smarter than you that it just makes you feel dumb? Anyone who has knows it can be a harrowing experience. You know how the story goes: while meeting a new acquiantance, a discussion of some topic surfaces, and after mounting a defense of your beliefs, you come to find that your positions aren’t quite as reasonable as you thought. Excitement is replaced with apprehension and confidence dissolves. 

            That’s been the story of my life for the last few days. I’ve had the pleasure of conversing with a brilliant gentleman studying political science, and I’ve been challenged in a number of ways, mostly in providing well researched analysis and establishing causality in support of my beliefs.  During these conversations, I’ve found myself embarrassed with my inability to defend my positions, and have more than once identified with how Thrasymachus must have felt debating justice with Socrates.

            Still, for all of my ignorance and embarrassment, these conversations have been overwhelmingly positive. For one, it has sparked in me an obsession with logically validating the ideas that I have throughout the course of my day. After some thought, I realized a striking resemblence between the active validation of ideas and the validation of moral decisionmaking. So, I’ve decided to label the habit of logical validation the development of intellectual conscience.

            Let me explain what I mean. The common use of “conscience” involves moral consideration—or, put more simply, it is the little voice in your mind that gives you moral suggestions. What I’ve learned recently is that although my moral conscience is healthy and strong, my intellectual conscience with relevance to logical consistency is not. With some of my beliefs, it seems that my enthusiasm for their underlying first principles has led me to make faulty assumptions and logical leaps. To illustrate this, I’ll use an example from one of my recent conversations regarding capital gains taxes.

            In an op-ed that I wrote on the capital gains tax, I claimed that a decrease in the capital gains rate would pay for itself and actually provide a net increase in government capital gains revenue. My Socratic friend asked me to elaborate and support my beliefs, and after a brief discussion, I found that although many of my facts dealing with the 1997-2005 tax revenues were correct, I had made an assumption on the causality of lower rates and historical increases in revenue. In my enthusiasm for free market economics, I had silenced my intellectual conscience, that little voice in the back of my mind that upon introduction to the Laffer theory once asked, “aren’t there other factors at play here?” Unfortunately, it also seems that just as the moral conscience can slowly fade by being ignored, so it is with the intellectual conscience.

            The painful accountability of the discussion described above showed me that I need to have an intellectual conscience loud enough to hold me to logical consistency just as I need a moral conscience loud enough to keep me making the right ethical decisions. I’ll continue to weed out bad assumptions and faulty logic,  and maybe learn to heed my intellectual conscience as urgently as I try to obey my moral one.

Israel & Palestine: Two Practical Steps to Peace

Since its establishment in 1948, Israel has been under constant criticism for its conduct toward Palestinians living in Gaza and the West Bank. The newly formed UNHRC (United Nations Human Rights Council) has passed three resolutions condemning Israel, most recently for a November rocket strike that killed 18 Palestinian civilians. As conflict continues, cries for reform and compromise grow louder. With the election of Israel’s new conservative prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, however, it is safe to say that Israel will not embrace the most sweeping reforms proposed (the most radical being the creation of an internationally recognized Palestinian state). Still, Israel’s new prime minister can deflect international criticism and move to cool fighting by adopting practical measures to improve economic and humanitarian conditions in Palestinian territories.

A Palestinian child fills a water jug

An oft ignored catalyst for resentment and violence in Palestine is rampant water shortage. Israeli citizens live with cheap, plentiful running water. Where Israeli citizens live in first world comfort, however, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians have no access to clean running water. According to B’Tselem, over 225,000 Palestinians live in communities without access to running water. Lack of sufficient or sanitary water supplies commonly leads to dehydration, especially during summer months when water shortages are particularly severe. Water shortages also make it difficult to maintain proper hygiene, leading to disease and illness. The resulting inability to irrigate crops and provide for animals also aggravates resource shortages that are chronic in Palestinian areas. Even in districts connected to water networks, damaged infrastructure leads to massive quantities of water being wasted. In the district of Hebron, over 40% of the total 2007 water supply was lost from defective pipes and theft.

With an annual budget estimated of just $70 million, the Palestinian government is ill-equipped to deal with the problem of water shortages. By partnering with Palestinian authorities and investing in aqua infrastructure, Israel can improve its international image and reduce Palestinian resentment.

Second, the Israeli authorities should work to ease the blockade on foreign trade in Palestine. Before the 2007 import-export ban, almost 4,000 factories employed 35,000 Palestinians. Immediately after the blockade, the number of factories dropped to 195, with the number of Palestinians employed by factories reduced to 1,750. By July of 2007, unemployment jumped to 45%, one of the highest unemployment rates in the world. Unemployment and economic stagnation caused by the Israeli blockade push the Palestinian people deeper into poverty, and angry, resentful, and unemployed men closer to the violence quietly encouraged by Hamas and other anti-Israel groups. By easing the blockade, Israel can allow Palestine to develop a basic economy to provide for the basic needs of its people. As unemployment and poverty decrease, Israel can expect a substantial decrease in the influence that extremist groups have on young Palestinian men.

Neither of these policy changes would require fundamental shifts in Israel’s stance toward Palestine, or threaten Iraeli sovereignty. Improving aquatic infrastructure in Palestine would  carry costs in the millions of dollars, but for the act of goodwill on the international stage, and the fact that Israel would not sacrifice its sovereignty, the benefits of saved lives would likely outweigh the monetary cost. Reducing the import/export ban could carry with it security risks (such as increased arms trade from Iran). However, the resulting explosion in employment will both create a more prosperous Palestine and lower the incentive for young Palestinian men to join extremist groups.

 

The more breathing room that Israel gives to the Palestinian people to provide for their basic sustenance, the more breathing room Israel will have from extremist groups that feed on anti-Israel sentiment. As rockets continue to bombard Israel from Gaza and the West Bank, Israeli leadership must consider the most effective ways to battle the extremist ideology empowered by Israel’s crippling economic and military policy.

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http://www.btselem.org/english/Water/Index.asp
http://www.btselem.org/english/Water/Statistics.asp
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israeli–Palestinian_conflict#Resource_distribution
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1006282.html