LAWRENCE: I — killed — two people, I mean two Arabs. One was a boy — this was yesterday. … I led him into a quicksand. The other was a man — that was, oh let me see — before Akaba anyway — I had to execute him with my pistol. … There was something about it I didn’t like.
ALLENBY: Well, naturally.
LAWRENCE: No. Something else.
ALLENBY: I see. Well that’s all right. Let it be a warning.
LAWRENCE: No. Something else.
ALLENBY: What then?
LAWRENCE: I enjoyed it.
I killed two people, I mean, two Arabs. One was a boy. That was -- yesterday. I led him into a quicksand. The other was a man. That was -- before Aqaba, anyway. I had to execute him with my pistol. There was something about it I didn't like.
When men are imbeciles, the one who is mad dominates the others.
“I am old, Peter. I am ever so much more than twenty. I grew up long ago.”
“You promised not to!”
“I couldn’t help it.”
1984 is back in the news. Orwell’s estate recently authorized a 75th anniversary edition of the timeless classic, with a new introduction by literature professor Dolen Perkins-Valdez.
Perkins-Valdez’ introduction spends little time talking about authoritarianism, and a lot of time talking about race and gender in the story. She complains about Winston’s misogyny. She bemoans the fact that the story doesn’t focus on matters of race, writing that “a sliver of connection can be difficult for someone like me [Perkins-Valdez is black] to find in a novel that does not speak much to race and ethnicity.”
Perkins-Valdez’ introduction has sparked a firestorm. Novelist and essayist Walter Kirn calls it a “trigger warning” and blasts the imposed “permission structure” of an introduction designed to tell readers how they should feel about Winston’s sexism and Orwell’s statement that racism didn’t exist in Oceania.
I actually disagree with Kirn’s characterization. Perkins-Valdez does grapple with Winston’s sexism and the lack of nonwhite characters, but in both cases she chooses to press on and gives her reasons for doing so. If that’s a trigger warning, it’s a very strange one. But nonetheless, Perkins-Valdez’ introduction represents an enormous missed opportunity.
The past several years of American life have been some of the most authoritarian in living memory. Online life created a digital panopticon not unlike the two-way televisions in every home in Oceania: everyone is being surveilled, all of the time. Many people, especially on the far left, used this surveillance and the new power of the online mob to silence their political opponents. People were fired for supporting J.K. Rowling or for dissenting from the Black Lives Matter agenda or even for not knowing what a bodega is. Yelp flagged businesses that disagreed with BLM, and PayPal and Etsy froze the accounts of center-right authors. Like the Inner Party, this new online movement punished people for Thoughtcrime. It found and made examples of its own Winstons and Julias, over and over and over again.
And like the citizens of Oceania, most of us were cowed into silence. In 2020, 62 percent of Americans agreed that “the political climate these days prevents me from saying things I believe because others might find them offensive.”
In an example eerily reminiscent of the Party’s rewriting of history, academic papers were unpublished and memory-holed, not because they were academically flawed, but because they violated certain left-wing shibboleths.
It’s not just culture; top government officials have acted in increasing Orwellian ways. The Biden administration and its allies in the media spent years gaslighting Americans about Biden’s deteriorating health. They dismissed videos of Biden acting his age as “cheap fakes” and mocked first-hand accounts of Biden’s decreasing cognitive ability as right-wing propaganda. Why? There were several reasons, but a big stated one was the fear that, if voters knew the truth, then Trump would get reelected in 2024. In Wisdom of Crowds, political philosopher Samuel Kimbriel reported that, right after Biden’s disastrous debate performance, “Mike Madrid, co-founder of the Lincoln Project, gave a hot-in-the face two minute rant about how anyone made uncomfortable by what they’d seen on the debate stage was ignoring the actual danger to democracy.” This was Orwellian doublespeak at its finest: in order to save democracy, we have to lie to the American people. Saving democracy requires not letting the democratic process function.
And then there was the previous administration’s attacks on free speech. The Biden administration leaned on social media companies to blacklist or shadowban prominent opponents of its lockdown policy. The same administration sought to create a Disinformation Governance Board so that the government could decide what was true and what was false. What is that but an American version of Oceania’s Ministry of Truth?
And then there’s the Orwellian behavior on the right. Trump, who ran against political correctness run amok and who put out an executive order proclaiming his support for freedom of speech, has sued news outlets and law firms for the supposed crime of supporting his political opponents. As the right reacquires political and social power, it’s rediscovering the utility of cancel culture and of using the power of government to punish Wrongthink.
And of course there’s the behavior of Trump himself. Orwell describes doublespeak this way: “to know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them.”
That’s a good description of many of Trump’s antics. As Jonathan Rauch writes in The Constitution of Knowledge:
One day he said his impeachment was hurting the stock market, then the very next day he bragged that the market was reaching new heights. He called government statistics showing unemployment declining under Obama ‘phony,’ but said the statistics showing unemployment declining in his own tenure were ‘very real.’
Believing all of Trump’s contradictory statements at the same time requires the same self-hypnosis as believing that Freedom is Slavery or that 2+2=5.
On the left and right, in government and in our popular culture, we are starting to manifest disturbing echoes of the world of 1984.
A better introduction to Orwell’s masterpiece might try to grapple with our recent lurch towards authoritarianism. It might ask us questions: what causes a rise in authoritarianism? What psychological conditions led the people of Oceania into totalitarianism, and what psychological conditions kept them there? If we want to curtail so-called “hate speech” (as many Americans do), where’s the line between that and the government persecuting people for Thoughtcrime—or is there a line?
Such an introduction might prompt us to reflect on our own tendency towards authoritarianism. It might talk about the importance of courage, and whether Winston and Julia’s rebellion was wise or ultimately foolish. It might wrestle with that peculiar feature of American exceptionalism, the idea that we and we alone could never fall into authoritarianism; and prompt us to see that for the comforting lie that it is. Such an introduction might prompt us to be more on our guard against authoritarianism, both from the online mob and from the government. It might tie the story’s eternal themes to our current circumstances, so that the novel can help inculcate us against authoritarianism in the way that Orwell intended.
Instead, Perkins-Valdez chose to focus on the novel’s depiction (or lack thereof) of minorities and the main character’s (temporary) sexism. It focused on minutiae that Orwell himself seemed to consider unimportant, rather than on the enduring need to heed Orwell’s warnings and protect ourselves from falling into an authoritarian regime. That’s an enormous missed opportunity.
People understandably have misgivings when someone injects the Bible into a discussion of economic issues. The Bible certainly is not an economics text. Its treatment of economic themes is desultory and brief, lacking in detail and depth. Not surprisingly, then, the Bible’s economic implications are perceived in many different ways.
The Bible touches upon economic themes in ways that are sometimes descriptive (value-free) and sometimes prescriptive (value-laden, normative). These distinctions are crucial.
For example, the Bible is being purely descriptive in relating an episode that features the law of supply and demand in operation during the Syrian siege of Samaria (2 Kings 6:24-7:18). When supply decreases, prices rise; when supply increases, prices fall. The Bible offers no value judgment about the operation of supply and demand. The economic law is neither right nor wrong; it is simply the way the world works, as value-free as to say that fire burns wood.
The Bible is also merely descriptive in its treatment of voluntary exchanges, treating transactions that buyers and sellers make at mutually acceptable prices as a commonplace feature of life on Earth – e.g., Abraham’s purchase of a tomb for Sarah (Gen. 23:15) and King David’s purchase of supplies for a burnt offering (1 Chron. 21:24-25). Even usury (the charging of interest) is treated in a nonjudgmental way when Jesus, in his parable of the talents, tells the unproductive servant that he should at least have used the money entrusted to him to earn interest (Matt. 25:27).
It is when we turn to the prescriptive (normative) aspects of economic phenomena in the Bible that controversies about how to interpret the Bible sometimes arise. Central to Bible teachings are what Jesus called the two great commandments (Matt. 22:36-40), telling how humans are to relate to the Deity and how they are to relate to each other. Indeed, those two commandments are a condensed version (early CliffsNotes?) summarizing the Ten Commandments (Ex. 20:3-17), four of which tell us what we owe to God and six which provide rules for how humans are to treat each other.
Of particular relevance to economics are the Eighth and Tenth Commandments, “Thou shalt not steal” and “Thou shalt not covet.” Those are unequivocal statements mandating adherence to the principle of private property. (Incidentally, you don’t have to believe in God or the Bible to endorse the principle of private property. Ludwig von Mises, for example, through his entirely value-free economic analysis, concluded that it was logically demonstrable that if people desired prosperity, then an economy based on private property was the most effective means of achieving that end. It is interesting, though, that Mises came to the same conclusion via analysis that Moses came to via revelation – namely, that human beings are better off by honoring private property.)
Some individuals have invented a concept called “Christian socialism” that is built on sophistries. They cite Bible verses such as Jesus’ statement in the Sermon on the Mount to give your cloak to the person who has stolen your coat, or the passage in Luke where the rich Lazarus suffered in the afterlife because he had not shared his earthly wealth with the poor. It is certainly true that Jesus repeatedly warned us about becoming too entangled in material comforts and that he urged us to be charitable toward others.
Note, though, that humans were to be subject to the dictates of their own conscience about how much wealth to accumulate and not subject to the dictates of other humans. For example, when a man asked Jesus what he needed to do to inherit eternal life, Jesus told him to give all his wealth to the poor. When the man declined to do so, Jesus let him depart in peace. Jesus had essentially offered him a voluntary contract, and he respected the man’s right not to accept that contract. (See Mark 10:17-23.)
Similarly, when another man pleaded with Jesus to tell his brother to share his inheritance with him, Jesus declined, saying, “Man, who made me a judge or divider over you?” (Luke 12:14) If the Son of God (or the most loving, moral person who ever lived, if you are more comfortable with that characterization) wouldn’t deny a man his property rights, then who are we to deny anyone those rights?
Where many self-described Christians err is in regard to helping the poor. They assert that Christians should support government programs, whereby taxpaying citizens are compelled by law to support the less fortunate. Again, Jesus undoubtedly would endorse helping the poor, but the end does not justify the means. Try as you might, for all the exhortations in the Bible to be charitable, you will find no verse telling believers that the way to get into heaven is to make other people perform good works. Charitable deeds are to be done voluntarily, out of an inner impulsion of a loving spirit and heart, rather than in response to external compulsion, such as governments using the threat of fines or incarceration to raise taxes to fund welfare programs.
Jesus provided the model of Christian charity in the parable of the good Samaritan (Luke 10:30-37). When he encountered a man who had been badly hurt by robbers, the Samaritan personally attended to his wounds and spent his own money to provide food and shelter to the victim. When he had to leave to attend to his own pre-existing commitments, he promised to pay the innkeeper to care for the man.
Thus, Jesus illustrated the two forms of Christian charity – first, giving aid personally and directly; second, rendering assistance indirectly by donating to those who have the time and skills to minister to those in need when we can’t do it ourselves.
Let’s try a thought experiment: Suppose that the Samaritan, after spotting the wounded man, raised the funds he subsequently spent caring for the victim by imposing a toll on passersby on the road – a toll that they had to pay if they didn’t want theSamaritan to bash them on the head with his staff. The man in need still would have received the help he desperately needed, but would we still regard the Samaritan as a paragon of Christian virtue and charity? Is it genuine charity to be generous with other people’s money? Is it charitable to help some by threatening to hurt others?
This is the murky moral territory into which many Christians stray in the name of “social justice” or the social gospel. The desire to help those in need is laudable, but the means employed by advocates of “social justice” are not. They vitiate a Biblical principle when they call for government to redistribute wealth to the poor, the sick, the widow. Government necessarily introduces the additional factor of compulsion into the equation, for government is organized force. While it is Christian to be charitable, Jesus never mixed charity with compulsion, nor did he teach his followers to resort to force.
For the Christian, private property is one of the central pillars of God-directed social morality. For the economist, private property offers maximum utility for promoting social prosperity. In that crucial sense, the Bible and economics do not conflict, but harmonize.
Last week, Alex Shieh, a student in Brown University’s class of 2027, testified before Congress. The hearing was focused on antitrust violations in higher education and surging tuition prices.
Shieh’s testimony came just weeks after Brown University opened an investigation into him for creating a website that scrutinized how the $93,064-a-year institution allocates its funds.
Shieh, inspired by Elon Musk, launched the DOGE-style project in March. Working from the basement of his dormitory — a “room that floods whenever it rains and thus has plastic tarps, industrial fans, and wet floor signs permanently set up” — he discovered a “small army” of administrative staff who work at the Ivy League school.
Using AI, he compiled a comprehensive list of university positions, then ranked them by operational importance with a custom-built program. He published the results on a site called Bloat@Brown — but Shieh didn’t stop there. Identifying himself as a journalist, he emailed staff members asking them to describe their roles, detail recent tasks, and explain how students would be affected if their positions didn’t exist.
Shieh’s project was no doubt cheeky. Anyone who has seen Mike Judge’s movie Office Space knows employees don’t like having to justify their jobs. (Who can forget the Bobs?) And its results were predictable. Only twenty or so employees responded, two of whom told Shieh he could perform a sexual act on himself (one suggested he use “an entire cactus”).
Less predictable was Brown University’s response.
First, Brown sent out a memo to employees instructing them not to respond. Then, according to The New York Times, officials informed Shieh “he was under investigation for possible violations of the university’s code of student conduct, including its prohibitions on invasion of privacy, misrepresentation, and emotional or psychological harm.”
Though Shieh and his associates were eventually cleared of wrongdoing, the episode is yet another demonstration of the intellectual and bureaucratic rot that afflicts America’s elite universities. As Joshua Pederson, a professor of humanities at Boston University, wrote in Slate, the intent of Brown was clear: “They came to bury Shieh, not to praise him.”
The university took this action even though Shieh was highlighting a genuine problem. Pederson cites a report by Paul Weinstein Jr. of the Progressive Policy Institute, which documents a dramatic rise in non-faculty hiring at the top 50 US colleges. There is now one administrative employee for every four students.
“The results of this research underscore that non-faculty employees at universities, both public and private, have grown considerably and without necessary oversight, under college presidents and their boards,” Weinstein wrote. “While some of this growth may have been necessary, there is no doubt that much of it has not.”
The problem is particularly acute at Brown, where the non-faculty employee-student ratio reportedly is 1 to 3.
Officials at Brown may not like their hiring decisions being questioned by a mere undergrad, but it’s not outside the boundaries of academic inquiry. Indeed, Pederson says Shieh deserves applause for launching a project that is quite impressive for an undergrad.
“If I’d had the opportunity to work with Mr. Shieh, I would have begun by praising him for identifying and focusing on a pressing problem for American higher education in a time of rising tuition costs: administrative bloat,” writes Pederson, adding that he doesn’t necessarily agree with Shieh.
Brown, unfortunately, chose another route, opting to launch a clumsy investigation into the rising junior. In doing so, the university elevated Shieh’s research, highlighting the administrative bloat that is putting college out of reach of many students and leaving countless others saddled with immense debt.
The surging cost of higher education stems from various factors, but Shieh’s project homed in on one of them.
“I discovered that much of the money is being thrown into a pit of bureaucracy,” Shieh wrote at Pirates Wire.
Shieh — as a student, journalist, and taxpayer — was well within his rights to investigate how Brown University spends his and others’ tuition dollars. But instead of defending his academic freedom, Brown University chose to launch a punitive investigation, going so far as to accuse Shieh of trademark infringement for using the word “Brown” in an article headline!
It’s hard to imagine a more self-defeating response. What began as a student research project became a full-blown PR disaster. Brown was publicly rebuked by The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression(FIRE), which stated that the university’s actions “clearly infringe on his expressive freedoms and further violate Brown’s robust guarantees to protect free expression consistent with First Amendment principles.” Shieh’s work has since attracted national attention, including his invitation to provide congressional testimony.
Like many elite universities, Brown receives hundreds of millions in federal funding each year despite its $7.2 billion endowment. Unfortunately, the university’s response is the latest evidence that US universities are broken, dysfunctional, and unworthy of public trust and support.
In a recent speech delivered in Seoul, South Korea, Federal Reserve Governor Waller offered unique insights into how monetary policymakers should think about the effects of tariffs on both inflation and inflation expectations. His remarks come at a time when trade policy is once again at the center of national debate, and concerns about inflation remain top of mind for households, firms, and policymakers alike.
Waller focused on three key areas: the immediate inflationary effects of tariffs, why those effects are unlikely to persist, and the divergence between household inflation expectations and market-based measures.
To frame his discussion on tariffs and inflation, Waller revisited the two tariff scenarios he introduced earlier this year: one large and one small. In both cases, he assumed — consistent with standard economic theory — that the tariffs would lead to a one-time increase in the price level, temporarily raising the inflation rate as the economy transitions to a higher price path. Once this adjustment occurs, Waller explained, inflation should return to its underlying trend, based on his view that longer-term inflation expectations remain anchored.
In Waller’s large tariff scenario, he assumed that the trade-weighted tariff on goods imports would be 25 percent, which, he noted, was not far off from where things stood following the 90-day suspension the administration announced on April 9. In this scenario, Waller assumed the tariff would remain in effect for some time, which he predicted would lead to inflation — as measured by the personal consumption expenditures (PCE) price index — peaking at around 5 percent annualized later this year, assuming firms passed through the full tariff to consumers. If, on the other hand, firms passed on only part of the tariff, he projected inflation would peak at around four percent. Regardless of the degree of pass-through, Waller believed that the unemployment rate would rise to 5 percent in 2026 under the large tariff scenario.
In his small tariff scenario, Waller assumed a 10 percent tariff on goods imports that would remain in place indefinitely, with higher country- and sector-specific tariffs falling over time as the administration negotiated trade deals. In this case, Waller predicted that inflation might rise to an annualized rate of three percent but, as before, would eventually return to trend. While output growth would slow, Waller thought it unlikely that unemployment would rise, as it would under the large tariff scenario.
Given recent developments in trade negotiations, Waller noted that his base case for tariffs is a 15 percent rate on goods imports — splitting the difference between his large and small scenarios. In his view, the likelihood of the large tariff scenario has fallen, given the administration’s recent negotiations. He noted, however, that there remains significant uncertainty about the ultimate outcome of the administration’s trade policy, making it difficult to know exactly what the economic outlook will be.
Making matters more uncertain is the divergence between “hard” and “soft” data on the tariffs’ effects. Waller observed that the hard economic data so far is generally positive, showing little evidence that tariffs have meaningfully affected inflation or overall economic activity. By contrast, surveys of households, firms, and investors point to slower growth and higher prices. Waller appears to share those concerns, noting that he sees downside risks to both sides of the Federal Reserve’s dual mandate in the second half of this year — especially on the employment side, as tariffs are likely to reduce spending and prompt firms to cut payrolls. He emphasized, however, that these risks will depend on how the administration’s trade policies evolve in the coming months.
On the price-stability side of the mandate, Waller noted that before the recent upheaval in US trade policy, the Fed had been making progress — albeit uneven — toward bringing inflation back down to its 2-percent target. Waller now expects that tariffs will push inflation higher later this year, but observed that the surge in imports earlier this year makes the precise timing of that increase difficult to predict. Nonetheless, whatever effect the tariffs have on inflation, Waller expects it will be temporary. The size of the rise, he emphasized, will depend not only on the ultimate scale of the tariffs, but also on how both importers and exporters respond — something that remains highly uncertain.
One aspect of that uncertainty is the extent to which firms will pass on the cost of tariffs to consumers. Based on his conversations with business leaders, Waller expects the burden of a 10 percent tariff would be shared roughly equally among consumers, importers, and exporters. Under that assumption, the tariffs would temporarily raise inflation by 0.3 percent. If tariffs end up being higher than 10 percent, however, he expects firms will pass more of the cost on to consumers — which he sees as likely, given the limits on how much of the additional cost businesses can absorb. In that case, the effect of tariffs on inflation would be greater.
Waller also addressed concerns that firms might use tariffs as an excuse to opportunistically raise prices — i.e., “greedflation.” He argued that such behavior is unlikely, since firms that raise prices without justification risk losing market share to competitors and alienating loyal customers. In short, Waller does not see greedflation as a significant driver of inflation beyond the direct effects of the tariffs themselves.
The term “transitory” has become something of a dirty word in inflation debates, Waller acknowledged, given the controversy surrounding the Fed’s use of the term during the post-pandemic inflation surge. Nonetheless, he believes that any inflation caused by the tariffs will, in fact, be transitory. He pointed to three factors that contributed to both the severity and persistence of COVID-era inflation — none of which, he argued, are likely to apply in the current context. First, the pandemic led to a significant and prolonged reduction in labor supply, which drove wages — and prices — higher. Second, the associated supply chain disruptions lasted much longer than expected. Third, the scale of fiscal stimulus, combined with the Fed’s accommodative stance, overstimulated aggregate demand.
Waller concluded his remarks with a discussion of diverging inflation expectations. He noted that surveys of household expectations differ significantly from both market-based measures and the projections of professional forecasters. Recent surveys suggest that households anticipate inflation as high as seven percent in the near term. If those expectations were accurate, Waller argued, we would expect to see workers demanding higher wages, along with a rising quits rate as they search for better-paying jobs. We would also expect to see a pickup in household spending as consumers try to make purchases before prices rise further.
As Waller explained, these patterns are not evident in the data. Although wages are rising, they are doing so at a pace consistent with long-run trends. Moreover, the quits rate is now below its pre-pandemic level, and Waller notes that his business contacts have not reported an uptick in wage demands. Similarly, there has been no surge in consumer spending; in fact, it is growing more slowly than in the second half of 2024.
Market-based measures of expected inflation, along with projections by professional forecasters, are much lower than those reported in household surveys. These indicators point to inflation averaging between 2.2 and 2.4 percent over the next few years. Waller explained that financial institutions have strong incentives to forecast inflation accurately, since their profitability depends on incorporating expected inflation into the interest rates they charge. If they were failing to do so, he argued, we would expect to see a surge in loan demand for interest-sensitive goods like homes, automobiles, and other durable goods. But current data from the financial sector shows no such surge. For these reasons, Waller places greater weight on market-based measures and professional forecasts.
The upshot is that, in Governor Waller’s view, inflation expectations remain well anchored — despite the divergence across different measures. Given that, and his expectation that any tariff-induced inflation will be temporary, he believes the Fed should look through the effects of tariffs on the price level when making policy decisions. He concluded by stating that, if tariffs settle closer to his small-tariff scenario and underlying inflation continues converging toward the Fed’s two-percent goal, he would support cutting the policy rate later this year.
[This article from 2005 is of utmost importance in understanding the recent Israeli attack on Iran.]
Revelations by Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter Seymour Hersh about secret Pentagon plans to destabilize Iran and neutralize its potential nuclear threat may be linked …
The post Twenty Years Ago: George W. Bush Should Not Push Israel To Do Dirty Work in Iran, “Secret Pentagon Plans to Destabilize Iran” appeared first on Global Research.
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