Alex writes that "the real virus with libertarianism is tragedy of the commons". Nah. The real problem with libertarianism is the kind of people it appeals to. C. Van Carter put it best when he wrote that "libertarianism is applied autism", but if you need it spelled out in more detail, here's Kathy Shaidle:

Most libertarians I've met are twitchy overgrown adolescents who are one step up from Trekkers on the appealing personality scale. They are curt, bitchy, brittle and huffy. When you're around a libertarian, it's always Thanksgiving dinner and they're the teenaged cousin with the giant anime collection who's read one book too few and stays coiled in his chair, waiting to blurt out some "shocking" comment he thinks is ahead of its time but is actually two hundred years old, in a boorish, loudmouth Penn Gillette way.

I just don't like them. They bug me.

It doesn't matter if libertarians are right about freedom, Austrian economics, and everything else. Neither they nor their ideas will ever have any influence or power anyway. Even people who agree with them will resist joining them, and there's always the sneaking suspicion that unhappy people with below-average social skills are inaccurate in their understanding other people and society... so you can't really trust their advice, can you?

Watch the below rap video on the subject of economics, ideally with the sound off. It's the reason I got to thinking about all this.

The Hayek character has no confidence and no swagger, and he ain't much to look at, either. Girls aren't into him. Maybe the real F.A. Hayek was like that, and the real John Maynard Keynes was a handsome ladies' man, I don't know. But do you really have to make it that painfully obvious in your propaganda video? Especially considering this is rap which has no use for losers, values swagger and allows a lot more blatant self-aggrandizement than other music genres (probably the main reason why I love working in the hip-hop scene - I don't have to be subtle). A lot of money went into this video, and it's done quite well, but that money is pretty much wasted because "we are a bunch of losers with sound arguments" is not a good message to send to anyone except, well, losers.

A lot has been written about Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab the Underwear Bomber. People tend to write a lot about you when you try to blow up an airliner these days. One thing I haven't read, though, is liberatarians saying how happy they are. Not with the bombing attempt, of course, but with the way it failed. I mean, sure, centrally planned government security failed to stop it, but the unplanned free market provided a solution which seems to have cost a lot less and work a lot better than the government's attempts.

Isn't this powerful evidence that individuals free to make their own decisions unrestrained by central planning do everything better than government?

(Despite my misrepresentation: the emergency code for the UK is 999, not 911. I am surprised the Politically Correct Brigade hasn't thought to push for changing that 9/11 number.)

Being in medical school, any idealism about your role is systematically ameliorated and deconstructed. When we submitted our personal statements outlining precisely why we wished to pursue the arduous path of medicine (an admittedly mad decision), a common piece of advice was not to present a picture of unrealistic idealism: they wanted some evidence of the understanding of precisely what a doctor's role actually is, specifically within the framework of the National Health Service. Still, the primary reason for choosing the doctor's role over other professions for most who do is in finding that is worth doing, worth getting out of bed for, worth the comparative loss of sanity, sleep and income to other fields open to you. A role that is both compatible with your personal ethics and perceived to be of inestimable worth to society.

You are allowed to retain some version of naivety and self-righteousness -- sorry, encouraged to be ethical and good -- insofar as it allows you to justify any action to yourself within the safe knowledge that you are doing it either in the best interests of your patient or out of respecting their autonomy: that is, for them to make their own decisions even if you disagree with them.

You are allowed to do a lot of good as part of the medical profession: vaccination, treatment, easing suffering. This is what happens most of the time.

However, there are grey areas. Or even black areas. A problem with being part of a nationalised service or any organisation is that you are essentially an agent of their interests; you may disagree with them but your enforced job is to remain in line with them. You are a slave to political trends and helpless to powers beyond your realistic control.

What faces the future doctor?
We have the financial consequences of the recession, although finances were a problem already. Latest figures from the office of statistics place the public debt at 7.7 billion, compared to surplus at the same time last year. Contributing to this figure is the cost of bailing out banks; figures for the cost of this ranged from billions to over a trillion.

Cost-cutting measures in the nationalised health service are happening and will happen, leading indirectly to loss of life. This can't be avoided.

Euthanasia is currently illegal in the United Kingdom. A matter darker than this is that there is and will be increasing clamour for legalisation and laxity around anti-euthanasia measures. Not only will this benefit the strained coffers of the NHS but the demand increases: as we lose the soft, warm and comforting blanket of the comforts of deranged consumerism, more of the population will find the idea of living intolerable as well as the idea of being a 'burden'. More people will want to be helped to die and it will be easier to say 'yes'.

This is an issue wherever economies are affected and not just a local one.

I wonder -- as an aside -- what the USA motivations for pushing health care reform measures leading to an increase of control by governmental institutions might be amidst a tenuous economic climate? Will Obama's administration abuse this control? Will the next administration?

Again and again, I question and reflect: will I be able to recognise when I'm doing what a good doctor should be doing or am I rationalising that what the NHS wants is precisely what a good doctor is?

Well, we are far away here from the idealistic pre-medical student state where the role of the doctor is to 'save lives.' It is to ease suffering. Like healers before me, I may include dispensation of death within the purview of my role: even though it offends the very foundation of what I intended to study and fight to preserve.

Easing suffering (where do we draw the limit for suffering?) or not: will I be able to make the decision to kill? That remains to be seen.

A lot of people like to say that art isn't/shouldn't be/can't be "just a product". Although I tend to think of art in very cynical, functional terms, I actually agree with them to some degree. If you buy into Denis Dutton's ideas about the purpose of the arts being to provide people with glimpses into the souls of other people, art is an unusual and slightly fuzzy product. In addition to the physical medium (or reproduction), the product that is art also contains a little glimpse into the mind and personality of its maker. It's not "selling your soul" in the way Faust did, but it is renting out access to some part of it. In this way art works the same way prostitution does. (I wouldn't suggest they're morally equivalent, though. Most prostitutes are much nicer and more useful people than most artists nowadays!)

This is why protesting that "I'm only in it for the money", "I'm only doing what the people buy", "it's not my band, I just work here", "I don't have a soul" and so on will never really work. Even if you believe it, the public never will. They will always assume that you are giving them a window into yourself. Conversely, that doesn't mean that talking about revealing the depths of your soul makes you any better than anybody else - all art does that anyway. Explicit soul-baring doesn't make you any more artistically valid and if you overdo it you just end up being annoying.

In the classic "Foreigners Around The World", PJ O'Rourke wrote of the English that "their shabby, antiquated, and bankrupt little back alley of a country slowly winds down like the ill-crafted clockwork playthings of which their undersized children are so fond". This winding down continues, as Britain's entire economy is sinking in the world rankings, getting passed by the likes of China and Italy and set to fall behind Canada and India by 2015... yup, that would place it behind at least three of its former colonies.

As we point and laugh at these losers, we should also look for someone to blame. I blame Britain's rulers, not for being evil or incompetent or corrupt, but for being nice and making their subjects' lives less troublesome. To quote from a speech Charles Murray made earlier this year:

Almost anything that government does in social policy can be characterized as taking some of the trouble out of things. Sometimes, taking the trouble out of things is a good idea. Having an effective police force takes some of the trouble out of walking home safely at night, and I'm glad it does.

The problem is this: Every time the government takes some of the trouble out of performing the functions of family, community, vocation, and faith, it also strips those institutions of some of their vitality--it drains some of the life from them. . .

A man who is holding down a menial job and thereby supporting a wife and children is doing something authentically important with his life. He should take deep satisfaction from that, and be praised by his community for doing so. Think of all the phrases we used to have for it: "He is a man who pulls his own weight." "He's a good provider." If that same man lives under a system that says that the children of the woman he sleeps with will be taken care of whether or not he contributes, then that status goes away. I am not describing some theoretical outcome. I am describing American neighborhoods where, once, working at a menial job to provide for his family made a man proud and gave him status in his community, and where now it doesn't. I could give a half dozen other examples. Taking the trouble out of the stuff of life strips people--already has stripped people--of major ways in which human beings look back on their lives and say, "I made a difference."

Read the whole thing - it's a good summary of Murray's central ideas. And then shed a tiny little tear for our co-blogger Alfred...

A while ago I was having fun arguing with some pretentious twat who proceeded to make an analogy claiming that commercial pop music is like fast food. Of course I couldn't resist correcting him and pointing out that commercial pop music is much more like expensive fancy French cuisine. Fast food tends to be made by young people with little skill, basic equipment, and little idea of how or why what they're doing works. I'd say it's kinda like all those underground indie bands, except that those are more independent in their operations - more like that small kebab shop on the corner that makes really greasy crap and will shut down in three months due to a lack of customers. Fancy French food, on the other hand, is made by people who make decent money, have great expertise, use good equipment, and draw from centuries of tradition - exactly like commercial pop music. With music we get something even better because recordings can be duplicated and distributed inexpensively, making them available to people who aren't wealthy.

Of course I had no idea what I'm talking about as I rarely eat either kind of food and have never worked in a restaurant of any sort beyond playing music there, but who cares? Crappy analogy or not, the argument seemed to work anyway. Reflecting on this afterwards, though, I realized that when it comes to the most important aspect, the pretentious twat was right. Commercial pop music is exactly like fast food in a way which separates them from the vast majority of other human endavors. Both produce something which is enjoyed by large numbers of customers, but also provide free benefits for people who aren't their customers by giving them a way to display their moral and cultural superiority by preening about their dislike of the product and its customers.

Creating something of value for your customers is quite an accomplishment, but also creating value for people who never buy anything from you - that is quite a rare feat. It really makes the world a better place for everyone.

How much do I hate government subsidies for art? Perhaps surprisingly the answer is "not much". On the long list of stupid crap governments do, this is near the bottom. Compared to most of the business of government arts funding is relatively cheap and annoys few people - even shitty art installations in public places aren't all that annoying. Also, I do occasionally get my hands on a little of this money.

It does sometimes deliver something of value, though, such as when Beatboxer Schlomo says he "could easily save the world". I have no idea what this guy does, if he beatboxes or if that's just a name, but whatever... save the world? Easily?

Ha ha.

Some months ago one of my bands was discussing business with the owner of our label and mentioned that we were going to play at a certain arts and music festival during the summer. He said that the people who win that festival seem to never go on to have much of a career, and if any do show up on TV it takes them years. I didn't give it much thought, but having later gotten to know someone who did win that very festival the previous year I now understand why this happens.

These kinds of festivals don't seem to exist in Western countries, they are very much a Communist holdover, so I will briefly explain what they are. They are usually open for anyone to enter, and those who have their entries picked (usually by passing regional eliminations) can go to the main festival. They get room and board, but don't even get travel costs covered. At the festival everyone gets to play a concert, put on their play, display their art or whatever, and the jury selects one winner who gets a decent amount of cash, plus possibly some other smaller prizes and/or honorable mentions.

So what kind of person wins these festivals? Well, the guy I know told me he finally played a gig with his band that he was really happy with at a certain bar. Playing at the same bar a month later, I had mentioned that to the guy who booked the gig. It turned out this had been a charity gig to raise money for some sick young woman's medical expenses. At that point I realized I've never even heard of this guy playing a normal gig on the capitalist free market where a venue pays him money to attract people who will buy tickets and/or alcohol. Everything he does is government-funded, government-subsidized or charitable. Even his "day job" is working for a government cultural agency.

It all became clear to me. The reason these festival winners never have much of a career because like this guy they don't want to whore themselves out on the free market, even though they are willing to work quite hard to promote themselves in the arts-and-culture circles' government-funded institutions.

Now... he's not really an evil person or an incompetent. He's just... well, he's free from the bonds of commercialism. That's the only thing that's wrong with him. He doesn't play in bars where his band would function as an advertisement for alcohol. He's all about promoting culture, not promoting beer. In other words, he's a career bureaucrat in a centrally planned government enterprise. To quote Ilkka:

...he is a ward of the state, of course, which is why these pros are the most conformist and defensive people in their panicky grasp to institutions that support them. You can take it to the bank that if some cause is supported by hordes of artists and the "cultural" crowd, it opposes freedom or anything really new or revolutionary.

Freedom from commercialism may sound nice, but I should try to talk him into trying freedom from cultural institutions sometime.

Talking about the factors most important to the success of a business enterprise, Arnold Kling writes:

I personally would emphasize a desire to sell. If you cannot overcome your fears and insecurities about selling (and who doesn't have those fears and insecurities?), then you are very unlikely to be successful. The notion that you can have such a great idea that it will sell itself (or "go viral," as they say) is very seductive and in my view almost always wrong.

I don't know how many businessmen are seduced by this idea, but I know ridiculously large numbers of musicians are. All of them would be better off if they dropped this concept and stopped being ashamed to sell themselves. Even if your ideas and your music are really, really good there are thousands of other bands out there competing with you. At least some of them also have ideas that are really, really, really good, plus have charismatic personalities. To have a shot at getting anywhere you need to have good ideas, at least one person with a ton of charisma, and the willingness to self-promote (in non-stupid ways, of course). Your ideas will sell themselves only if you are extremely lucky or working in such a small niche that you don't have much in the way of skilled competition.

This goes double for bands that aren't in it to make money and prefer other rewards. They suffer from this delusion the most. Most of the members of my middle-class avant-pop band certainly do, but luckily they have a shameless pimp like me to provide a reality check.

Once you get over those fears and insecurities, selling your ideas and selling yourself feel pretty damn good. So go for it!

My favorite open-minded progressive wrote something very progressive indeed in yesterday's column about whether athletes who play for American univerisities should get paid:

Surely if one considers only star players such a Durant, the NCAA is indeed benefiting from a free-labor system. But is that the way we should look at matters?

During Durant's college season, 2006-07, there were 343 Division I men's basketball teams, each awarding 13 full scholarships, and 270 Division II basketball teams, each awarding 10 full scholarships, for a total of 7,159 men's basketball scholarships. (The numbers are now slightly different.) The following season, Durant's rookie year, there were 55 NBA players who had just left college, either early or as seniors. Since 55 from that college season advanced to the NBA, we can roughly judge that 55 of the 7,159 major-program basketball players that year were being exploited financially, while the other 7,104 were not. The other 7,104 players were coming out way ahead financially, as they were receiving free college educations -- if they had enough sense to go to class -- plus experiences that might help them in later life, especially in the business world. ("Wow, you played basketball at Boston College?")

He actually made $4.3 million in his college season -- it's just that the money was donated to others.Divide 7,159 by 55, and get 130. So each player from Durant's college season who might have been earning an NBA salary was supporting the college educations of another 130 players. This is the key thought missing from free-labor complaints about college basketball. Yes, the tiny fraction of players capable of advancing to the NBA do perform for far less than their market price, but they create economic value that lets large numbers of others go to college on scholarship.

The thinking behind that argument is downright scary, but typical of the ways open-minded progressives justify forcing weird totalitarian policies on others. It basically can be summed up as: it's all right to steal value from people who are probably going to be rich anyway, giving them only crumbs (university courses they neither need nor want), if the money they generate is spent to give other people something most of them neither need nor want, as long as it's something that progressives value such as education.

Progressives especially love to heavily tax athletes because they like to think that athletes are overpaid - in other words, they believe they know what the "real" value of the athlete's performance is better than the team the athlete works for. The whole thing is a great example of the sort of idealism that I'm glad ran out of money and gave up running my part of the world 20 years ago - we know what's good for you better than you do and we feel good about forcibly taking that money from you to pay for it for other people, too, and while we're at it we'll pay some bureaucrats for administration and enforcement.

I suppose conservatives can be just as conceited and creepy but at least they tend to use their own money when they want to influence the way sports teams are run.

When it comes to the actual issue at hand, I don't like the way American high schools and universities act as de facto lower tier leagues for the NBA and NFL shrouded in amateur student-athlete idealism. I don't much care for idealism, and I don't care at all for enforced amateur status.

Steve Sailer writes about an LA Times article on US Marine training and gives us an excellent excuse to make fun of guys who like video games.

Military researchers have found that two groups of personnel are particularly good at spotting anomalies: those with hunting backgrounds, who traipsed through the woods as youths looking to bag a deer or turkey; and those who grew up in tough urban neighborhoods, where it is often important to know what gang controls which block.

Personnel who fit neither category, often young men who grew up in the suburbs and developed a liking for video games, do not seem to have the depth perception and peripheral vision of the others, even if their eyesight is 20/20.

Picking on gamers is way too easy, though. The article also shows that having a significant chunk of the population hunt for sport is very useful in war. This is a case where American culture and society are clearly superior to Europe - in most of the US a lot of regular folk hunt because it's often cheaper than buying beef from a butcher, whereas in Europe hunting is an expensive elite hobby. I know that if every villager could cheaply hunt in Europe we'd soon eat all our deer because our population is too dense except for parts of Scandinavia and maybe some of the former Soviet bloc. Large numbers of rural hunters are, unfortunately, just not a possibility for most European countries - the lower supply of game animals per capita necessarily drives up the price of hunting.

The article does point out an alternative which is readily available to European governments, and that is to make their cities so crime-ridden and hostile that their inhabitants develop good threat-assessment skills. I doubt that it's worth the downside, however.

Here's to American redneck gun culture, then!

Ilkka Kokkarinen writes about the excellent Hall of Douchebags:

"badass musician" is an oxymoron, and I'd say that is the best and most succinct way to put it. A successful career in music requires tons of discipline and practice and thus a middle class value system, to say nothing of having the financial means and a place to practice, which is why these days bands tend to come from suburbs.

Well... he's right and he's wrong. Successful musicians are definitely more reliable and organized than badass, but they're not really all middle class. At least where I live most cover bands, especially the ones which play weddings, are made up of working class dudes, while most bands that write their own songs and lose money are middle-class. Pointing out one more example of how the working class tends to be more interested in chasing material well-being while the middle-class is more interested in seeking status isn't interesting, but the bit about a place to practice got me thinking about a tangent.

Having somewhere to practice is especially important for drummers. In a densely populated city where real estate is expensive and scarce it can be very difficult, which is why drummers are easier to find in small towns or out in the country (or, I suspect, in sprawling American cities such as Houston). That doesn't mean that big city music tends to have worse drumming than small-town music - successful bands end up with a good drummer one way or another - but it does make a real difference in another way. Big city drummers are usually forced at some point to learn to control their volume, not only so the neighbors don't call the cops when they practice but also so that they can play in tiny big-city pubs without being so damn loud that the band will never be hired to play there again. I think that's why city bands are more likely to rely on variations in tone color - think of all those post-rock bands with guitarists with a dozen effects pedals which are very much a city phenomenon. If you've got a loud-as-fuck drummer and need to crank your amp all the way, it will make no difference whether you've got some knob on some effects pedal set to 4 o'clock or 3 o'clock. With a more restrained drummer, small differences like that can be perceptible. Hell, maybe you can even use a dulcimer in a few songs without the idea getting murdered by feedback problems. You rarely see that kind of thing in small-town rock bands.

Also notice that the most urban of genres - hip-hop and R&B - often use sampled or programmed drums, meaning it's possible to work on it even if you live in the middle of a city and don't know anyone with a drum kit. I don't think that's just a randomly cultural development, I think it's caused in part by the economics of urban real estate which affects the economics of music and therefore the sound of city music.

Middle-class people are a lot weirder than you probably realize. For example, all my neighbors are middle-class and all have a really freakish attitute towards fruit trees. They treat them as decorative shade trees which just happen to have colorful things growing on them. They don't even pick the low-hanging fruit as there is no low-hanging fruit anymore - the trees, not having been trimmed in decades, grew tall and don't have any low branches anymore. The inhabitants of one house doesn't even bother picking the grapes growing right on the balcony - I guess they must really hate grapes.

I guess they prefer to spend their time doing things other than trimming trees and picking fruit, then just go buy some fruit at the store. That even includes the people who spend a lot of time working on their flower beds and lawns. They just like their trees as trees, I guess, whereas I like trees as a source of food and will cut down any tree which is not productive enough. I know that eating store-bought fruit is healthier, and I'm sure some of them laugh at me for basically acting like we're still living in a socialist country complete with food shortages, but to me they're just a bunch of weirdos who have food growing right outside their windows and don't eat it.

An anonymous commenter wrote something worth looking deeper into:

I think this applies to all of us in the local music scene...I like the attention I get from gentlemen in between sets...usually other musicians...and I make a lot of friends that way...but the big shows with big stages (yes, I play these too)...most of the people are in awe of a woman who is not a "chick singer" and they don't know how to approach me...

It definitely is easier to meet people and make new friends at some types of concerts than at others. For maximizing opportunities for sex with groupies the dynamics are different, but I will uncharacteristically ignore sex while I write this post and just stick to the subject of forming friendships.

Playing music in public is a great way to "be somebody" and make other people interested in you. Some of those people will want to meet you, shake your hand and get to know you. Yet they do this a lot more at some kinds of concerts than others. Anonymous writes that large stages and large venues keep this from happening because they make you seem less approachable. I agree that playing in auditoriums and concert halls will generally make you fewer friends than playing clubs, but I don't think that venue size is the major part of the story. I suspect the venue's design and purpose has more to do with it than size. If it was really just about venue size, artists would make fewer new friends at exhibit openings in large galleries than in small ones. I don't think that's true, though if any artists know how it works from experience please let me know in the comments.

I think it's easier to meet people and socialize in places which are designed primarily for selling alcohol, such as pubs. Notice how it's considered unusual and almost rude for band members to pack up and go home as soon as they finish their last set - the normal expectation is that you'll at least have a drink and spend some time being social with fans and other band members. It's also perfectly normal for audience members to hang out at the venue afterwards, even for many hours if an afterparty develops. There is also plenty of opportunity to talk before the gig and during breaks. The more time everyone spends in the venue the more drinks sold and the happier the owner.

That kind of thing just doesn't happen in auditoriums, theaters and arenas whose lifeblood is ticket sales not alcohol sales. There the audience basically leaves when the show ends as there isn't much else to do. Some will stand around chatting for a little while but not for too long. Also the band will usually disappear somewhere into the back after they tear down which makes them more difficult to locate. You can still make few friends at that kind of gig, but it'll mostly be among the organizers, other bands etc. Even if you're out in the audience during someone else's set the seating arrangements facing the stage don't facilitate socializing and the amplification is more likely to render attempts at conversation pointless.

There are ways to play big stages and make plenty of friends, though. One is to plan an official or semi-official afterparty at a nearby pub. Another is to play various non-music festivals. For example, those tourism-promoting civic fests don't really revolve around alcohol sales or socializing but their purpose is to give people something to do for a few hours or even for the whole day, and that provides plenty of opportunity for people to approach the band they dug.

I guess much of the above probably also applies to making new friends when you're part of the audience, but I attend concerts where I'm not playing so rarely (once every few years) that I wouldn't really know.

Continuing my last post's subject of the exploitation of scantily dressed attractive young women, Gregg Easterbrook thinks NFL cheerleaders should be getting paid a lot more:

Cheer-babes dancing in short skirts, or posing for swimsuit calendars, is not exploitation. After all, you're supposed to look at the cheerleaders! Professional athletics is foremost a form of entertainment, and the scantily-clad dancing girl has a long history as integral to entertainment in theatrical arts as well as sport.

It is, however, objectionable if everyone involved in an NFL contest is making buckets of money, except for the cheerleaders. That's the case, and that is a form of exploitation. The NFL will have about $8 billion in revenue this season, and Green Bay, the one team that discloses financial information (the Packers are publicly owned), showed a profit of $20 million last year. There's plenty of money in professional football. But only crumbs go to the cheerleaders. NFL teams are believed to pay cheerleaders approximately $100 per game. (Several teams used to post cheerleader audition FAQs on their Web sites that included such info.) Some throw in two game tickets. Don't spend it all in the same place!

Cheerleader squads practice twice a week, and in most cases, cheerleaders are not paid for practicing. Some are charged to audition. They make unpaid charity appearances. In order to become cheerleaders, they sign away "subsidiary rights" to their images -- use in advertising, on swimsuit calendars and so on. Being a NFL cheerleader is glamorous and can entail exciting travel. Many women who take up this very time-consuming hobby would rather be cheerleaders receiving only token pay than not be cheerleaders. But that should not be the choice. "Do it cheap or we'll find someone else who will" is manipulation. Cheerleaders are professional performers and deserve decent pay.

His argument certainly has its appeal. The problem (if it really is a problem) is that there's no shortage of attractive young women willing to do the work almost for free, and $100 a game is probably pretty close to the actual free-market price for NFL cheerleading services. I'm sure having "NFL cheerleader" on a resume helps these young women tremendously when it comes to landing better-paying jobs in modeling, acting etc. and the high status greatly boosts their social lives, so they're getting a lot more out of cheerleading than just the crappy money. Libertarians think the current arrangement is great.

Still, though, it just somehow feels wrong for such a huge and profitable enterprise to pay highly visible employees who generate a lot of value so little. Should the government or the league force a price floor for cheerleaders' services upon NFL teams? I don't think I'd want that. Still, though, if a team paid cheerleaders $1000 per game plus some cut of things like calendar sales I would applaud it. Sure, one could argue that this is amounts to charity directed at attractive young women who don't need it, but to me it just feels like the best resolution on an instinctive, emotional level.

The entire situation reminds me of my dealings with some younger musicians who are perfectly willing to work for free. It's their right, but if I'm using someone for something I'm getting paid for, I'm going to pay them even if they say it's against their code of ethics to get paid for music. I just had one of these conversations with a violoncellist on Sunday, and after we agreed on an amount she admitted flat out that in other situations she's perfectly willing to charge other people an arm and a leg just for recording three notes, but because she likes what I'm doing she's got no problem working for a lot less and would do it for free. It's basically the same question, just at a small-business level, and my answer seems to be to voluntarily overpay out of a (possibly misplaced) feeling of moral obligation. I sure as hell wouldn't want a government or musicians' union forcing me to overpay, though.

What do you think and how do you feel about this? Are NFL cheerleaders underpaid or not? Should the teams pay them the pittance they do now, should they pay more voluntarily, or should someone force them to pay more?

My favorite leftist writes about the uselessness of Unesco in this week's Tuesday Morning Quarterback:

Last week, Bulgaria's Irina Bokova bested Egypt's Farouk Hosni to become the new head of Unesco, the United Nations cultural agency. The vote was politically charged because Hosni was accused of anti-Israel bias, of which there is already way too much at the United Nations. Then again, to the Arab world this looks like a determination that it's fine to denounce Muslim governments but criticism of the Israeli government makes you persona non grata. There is a simple alternative to avoid future clashes of this nature: abolish Unesco. Why does the United Nations even have a cultural agency? Culture is and ought to be a free realm where individual artists and national or regional groups create and safeguard their own ideas. It's ridiculous that the United Nations claims a role in deciding what aspects of culture are worthy and what aren't. When Unesco was founded in November 1945, global communication was close to nil -- maybe back then there was a valid international purpose in attempting to spread cultural information. Today, in an era of Wikipedia and instant global MP3 downloads of all forms of expression from seungmu dancing to Iranian techno-pop, Unesco is a wasteful tax-subsidized anachronism that does little but provide a luxurious lifestyle to a self-absorbed U.N. aristocracy. People don't need their culture supervised for them -- the whole point of culture is that people create it for themselves. Let's get the United Nations out of an arena where it has no business.

This is an excellent point, and applies just as well to all governments, not just the UN. Sure, some forms of art are still expensive to produce and not economically viable without either government support or private donors - symphony orchestras come to mind - but so much of culture has gotten far cheaper to produce over the past decade or two that it really doesn't need to be supported. It doesn't even matter whether it's useful or not. We can laugh at Sweden's rulers for financing "feminist porn", but really the need to subsidize just about any kind of filmmaking is gone. It's gotten so cheap that one of my bands is getting a simple promo video made for nothing more than copies of a few of my other bands' releases and a shirt.

Any member of the upper middle class in a developed country can afford to produce a full-length film these days. Plenty of them are pretentious enough to do it, too. They no longer need to be encouraged with your money anyway.

A lot of markets have a prominent luxury segments. We can buy clothes, cars, bathroom tiles etc. which signal to others that we're not too stupid or lazy to make good money, not too cheap to just hoard that money, and not too tasteless or socially clueless to spend it on "the wrong things". There is really no luxury market for books, though. There are valuable first editions, signed books etc, sure, but that's a collector market, not a market for brand-new luxury goods. I suppose there must be some fancy limited editions which cost a lot, especially of art books, but they're a tiny fringe of the market.

The odd thing is that there used to be a market for "luxury books" only a few years ago - expensive encyclopedia sets and atlases signaled that one has money and education. That market has been destroyed completely by digital technology - first Encarta, then Internet seach engines. I suppose that's a good thing. We have plenty of other ways of signaling wealth and the world isn't a worse place because one of them vanishes. We can still use books to signal our taste and refinement. (And, of course, a few of us might actually use them as reading material, too.)

Music is kind of similar - though big stars' concert tickets cost a lot, their albums and band shirts cost about the same as those of less popular singers, not ten times as much.

The White Nationalist movement, for those of you who haven't yet noticed, is a club of desperate socialist goof balls pretending to be anti-leftist. Yet their entire view on State and society reeks of socialism. One of their hallmarks is that they can never get along, so they start up five new parties and websites every other month. Their latest deal is "antikap.nu," a Swedish website that claims it's anti-globalist, but not leftist.

Unsurprisingly, their analysis of the financial crisis in the West becomes a subtle way of blaming it all on Jews and America. Here's how I countered one of their readers:

Alex: Everyone cannot be anti-capitalists, some need to be liberal like you or else capitalism wouldn't exist and thus no anti-capitalists, no struggle, no heroic idealism. In other words we'd be weak couch potatoes without you!

The Social Democrats are for EU/UN/IMF etc., and thus not protectionists.

You exclude the fact that the Social Democrats outright owned large chunks of the private market via the government: http://www.brusselsjournal.com/node/4059

You seem to have forgotten that the Swedish crown increased in value in relationship to the dollar during the financial crisis? It is more intelligent now to talk about a recovery of the dollar than to talk about a falling crown, even if both claims naturally are correct in mathematical terms. But your way of expressing yourself is manipulative and evil since today's exchange course is completely normal, historically.

The Swedish crown increased in value in relationship to the dollar, not in regards to its historical value: http://www.riksbank.se/templates/Page.aspx?id=26813

"Our" (not mine, I'm a land owner) economy was built around Ericsson, Volvo and others going to Lehman Brothers once in a quarter to borrow money from those gamblers, and using this money as a sort of "pre-payment on the salary." After the collapse of Lehman Brothers and the pyramid selling scheme of certain other Jews, an important part of the business model of the Swedish companies fell.

The business model didn't work. Why you bring up Jews in all of this remains unclear.

If capitalism was superior to planned economy it's a bit strange that all capitalist nations suddenly become planned economies during world wars? Even USA and England reduced their capitalism and introduced "war economy," i.e. a form of planned economy. Kennedy claimed that the planned economy of Soviet Union most likely was superior to America's capitalism and wanted to take away the capitalist's authority to print people's money. Sure, Soviet Union collapsed when the Trotskyists regained power, but that could equally be explained by looking at their race materialism... That one economy would be "superior" to the other is a hard claim to make. Though one can claim that an honest, easily understandable and transparent economic system minimizes the risk for "bubbles" and "crashes."

Why would increased protectionism during war necessarily mean that a planned economy is superior to market economy? Here you lump Keynesian and Monetarist theory together, and that's intellectually dishonest. There's not just one brand of capitalism.
Race materialism, what?
Capitalism has dragged almost all of Eastern Europe, China, Russia (currently) and South Korea out of poverty and low GDP, I think that speaks for itself. The crisis you talk about is not due to capitalism itself, but that it's been poorly implemented and followed (see above).

Really, that sounds like hocus pocus.. Inflation is the product of an increase in the money supply by those who print money, banks and the stock market: When someone takes a loan the amount of the money in the world increases and the prices then go up, same thing when stocks "increase in value," then people get richer and pay more for their potatoes due to market economic high school math.

Inflation has gone up thanks to a government allowing banks to regulate the economy via interest rates. If you're not a Keynesian, you deem this is wrong, even if you believe in capitalism.

We who are neither liberals nor socialists, but Conservative nationalists, visit www.CORRUPT.org

Pentti Linkola makes an interesting observation about welfare:

Every example throughout the history of humanity shows that only deprivation and struggle create a human life worthy of the name and that material welfare leads only to despair.

Obviously he's got a larger point to make; people don't necessarily feel happy with life just because they own a lot of things or live a safe life. Struggle, competition, and non-material goals seem essential to human existence. Yet, what happens if we take this point too seriously and blame capitalism and material prosperity for making our lives less worth living?

Lefties often say - and seem genuinely to believe - that free-marketeers are obsessed with economic data to the exclusion of all else. But I have yet to meet a conservative who thinks that you get more happiness from a bank account than from, say, listening to Beethoven, or walking in the English countryside, or watching your child take his first steps. The argument isn’t about what makes people happy; it’s about what governments can do about it.

Governments can’t legislate to make us listen to Beethoven, or enjoy the landscape, or spend more time with our children. What governments can do is to provide a framework in which happiness can be pursued. Indeed, one way to think of economic progress is as a series of labour-saving developments. Because we can afford a car, and no longer have to queue for the tram, we have more time to listen to Beethoven. Because we have a dishwasher, we can switch it on and go for a walk instead of spending the afternoon in the kitchen. Because we no longer have to work on Saturdays to feed our children, we can spend more time playing with them.

Again, here we find both a larger important point to be made, and a catch. Of course we'll become obsessed with money and material welfare if we feel we're lacking in these departments. Poor people dream of a better life. This is why riding a bike to work in ex-Soviet republics like Belarus is still a sign of poverty today: when you know what it means to be poor, you'll do everything to escape it.

The catch: when we acquire a certain level of basic material welfare, we're often left wanting more. Welfare-ism becomes a drug. So we end up like most people in Western society today, constantly chasing material status. This is what Pentti Linkola warns us about, although he misses the bigger point, which is that the removal of welfare itself won't solve the problem. Similarly, all forms of labor don't necessarily make us less happy; some, like cooking, I argue, help to make life richer.

We need to establish and maintain a good level of welfare, but minimize government interference and push social responsibility over to the community. Culture and social values need to become more important than the consumption-hysteria sponsored by societies, rich but hollow inside. Living a poor life in starvation isn't an ideal, neither is a life too fat on money and gadgets. That is why we defend free markets and free minds in the context of a new Conservative era.

Last week I witnessed a band spend more than a half hour soundchecking so they could play one song at the finale of a festival. The director and all the techs were quite irritated by the combination of incompetence (forgetting to bring cables etc.) and primadonna behavior (for example asking for dozens of changes to the monitor mixes). The lyrics about respecting your brothers were hideously hollow in this context. Unsurprisingly the band didn't sound nearly as good as one which followed later and managed to get everything set up and soundchecked in ten minutes - the sound techs being only human worked much more enthusiastically to tweak the knobs for people who make their job easy and don't delay their lunch break. It's not that the later band were all veteran professionals who just produce a big tone - I know them quite well.

Naturally the primadonna band refused to use the backline amps and insisted on using their own. (Yup, they brought full stack amps, but no cables for the synths.) The justification is always that "the amp is important to my sound". That got me to thinking - whose sound is it, really? You make the sound, but you sell, trade or give it away to the venue. It then belongs to the venue owner. The venue then sells it to the audience who bought tickets, or perhaps gives it away in order to attract people who will buy drinks. In both an economic and a philosophical sense it's the audience's sound, not yours.

If you take a step back and think of it that way, which amp should you use? How can you bring the best possible sound to the audience? Even if the sound coming out of your amp would be somewhat better, the sound which reaches the audience will be better with the backline amp - maybe not the sound of your actual instrument, but if you set up quickly and don't make a fuss you will get much better EQ not only for yourself but also for the vocals and drums, as well as better lighting.

I know that anyone who puts a lot of effort into crafting something can become emotionally attached to it and want to see it treated well; a tailor who makes a suit probably cringes when he sees his client in the street wearing it with a poorly chosen shirt and tie. Still, sometimes the best thing you can do is to put a little distance between yourself, your work and your tools and let go of the attachment as much as you can.