오늘 조선일보의 기사 제목이다. 케인즈 식의 인플레 정책은 자본을 엉뚱한 곳에 투자하게 만들어 경제를 왜곡하고, 양극화를 조장한다. 나의 책 <대한민국, 이렇게 망한다>에서 케인즈의 정책을 4대 망국 요인 중의 하나로 비판했다. 아마추어 경제학자 케인즈의 잘못된 이론이 그 사후에도 힘 없는 서민들을 괴롭히고 있다.
미국 역시 케인즈를 따라가려 하고 있다. 아래는 트럼프의 말
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이제부터의 한국의 역사는
대한민국 망국사가 될 가능성이 높아졌다.
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법에 의한 통치라는 허구
국가에 의해 제정된 법의 통치라는 말은 허구이다. 의회에서 제정된 법률은 그것을 해석하는 사람들의 편견과 현안에 종속될 뿐만 아니라, 권력자들에 의해 그런 방식으로 강제된다.
존 하스나스 교수는 “법률이 상반적인 규칙과 원리로 구성되어 있기 때문에, 정당한 법률적 논거를 이용해 어떤 법률적 결론도 내릴 수가 있다. 따라서 법률 자체보다도, 판사의 성향이 사건의 결과를 결정한다.”고 주장한다.
따라서 법률은 질서를 지키고 사회를 다스리는 중립적인 규칙들이 아니라, 총을 들고 위협하는 하나의 의견일 따름이다.
법률이라는 허구는 사회의 정치 권력 구조를 지지하도록 대중의 감정에 호소하는 것이다.
과거 왕권 신수설(神授說)의 허구가 깨졌지만, 국가 권력자들을 위한 새로운 허구가 필요했다. 그래서 탄생한 허구가 “법에 의한 통치”라는 것이다.
법에 의한 통치라는 허구는 사람들을 국가 권력에 종속하도록 하고, 나아가 국가 권력 행사의 공범이 되도록 한다.
The Myth of the Rule of Law
•Robert Taylor
Any state, no matter how powerful, cannot not rule solely through the use of brute force. There are too few rulers and too many of us for coercion alone to be an effective means of control. The political class must rely on ideology to achieve popular compliance, masking the iron fist in a velvet glove. Violence is always behind every state action, but the most efficient form of expropriation occurs when the public believes it is in their interest to be extorted.
Mythology is necessary to blunt the violent nature of state power in order to maximize the plunder of property — and, most importantly, provide an aura of legitimacy. The perception of legitimacy “is the only thing distinguishing a tax collector from an extortionist, a police officer from a vigilante, and a soldier from a mercenary. Legitimacy is an illusion in the mind without which the government does not even exist.”1
State authority, and public obedience to it, is manufactured through smokescreens of ideology and deception. These myths sustain the state and offer an illusion of legitimacy, where orders, no matter how immoral or horrific, are followed because they are seen as emanating from a just authority. The state cannot implement violence against everyone everywhere and overwhelm the host, so the battle is waged against the hearts and minds of the public. Fear is exploited, language is distorted, and propaganda is spread, while narratives and history are tightly controlled. The gulag of state power, first and foremost, always exists in the mind.
If the mythology of state power is smashed, then the state is exposed for what it is: institutionalized violence, expropriator of the peaceful and productive, and entirely illegitimate.
The Myth of the Rule of Law
In order for a society to have peace and order, there needs to be a set of largely uniform and neutral laws in which the vast majority of the public agree are fair and just. Throughout the history of Western law, a decentralized process of trial-and-error, competing courts, and private arbitration achieved these rules. A monopoly power was not necessary, nor desirable. Before the rise of the modern bureaucratic, democratic nation-state, the monarch was the symbol of monopolistic order, and his power consisted mostly in enforcing the private common-law tradition that had already developed over centuries.2
Eventually, the nation-state model we see today grew and absorbed this decentralized tradition into a monolithic, top-down coercive regime imposed by legislatures, state police, and bureaucracies. The “rule of law” became the propaganda term used to justify this radical departure from the Western tradition of common-law and private arbitration. The law was now political in nature, subject to the usual array of corruption and disincentives inherent in any political order. With the monopoly state now in charge of law, the idea that a coercively imposed system of justice — in which everyone is governed by neutral rules that are objectively applied by judges — became a powerful myth for states to exert control over society.
As a myth, however, the concept of the rule of law is both powerful and dangerous. Its power derives from its great emotive appeal. The rule of law suggests an absence of arbitrariness, an absence of the worst abuses of tyranny. The image presented by the slogan “America is a government of laws and not people” is one of fair and impartial rule rather than subjugation to human whim. This is an image that can command both the allegiance and affection of the citizenry. After all, who wouldn’t be in favor of the rule of law if the only alternative were arbitrary rule? But this image is also the source of the myth’s danger. For if citizens really believe that they are being governed by fair and impartial rules and that the only alternative is subjection to personal rule, they will be much more likely to support the state as it progressively curtails their freedom.
The rule of law, imposed by the state, is simply a myth. There is no such thing as “a government of laws and not people.” Legislative edicts are always subject to the biases and agendas of those who interpret them, and will be imposed in this manner by whoever currently wields the power of the monopoly state over society.
For example, despite the US Constitution’s very clear language in most of its passages (there are some dangerously vague sections, of course), the most trained and brilliant legal minds can come to completely opposite conclusions over the exact same clause. Whether it is a particular amendment in the Bill of Rights or the particular language of executive or legislative power, a liberal and conservative judge could use sound reasoning and cite historical precedent to make their case — and they would both be right. “[B]ecause the law consists of contradictory rules and principles,” argues John Hasnas, “sound legal arguments will be available for all legal conclusions, and hence, the normative predispositions of the decision makers, rather than the law itself, determine the outcome of cases.”
The law, then, is not a neutral body of rules to help keep order and govern society; it is merely an opinion with a gun. Whenever the state is in charge of anything, the outcomes, process, and administration are always political in nature. There can never be a system of definite, consistent rules that produce determinate results because these laws, no matter how they are written, will always be subjected to the biases, prejudices, and discrimination of those who interpret and enforce them.
The idea that the law is not neutral or determinant is not a revolutionary doctrine and should not be entirely shocking. Over a century ago, former Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes argued that certainty in law is an illusion; judicial decisions rely more on the language of logic than they do on objective enforcement. Since at least the 1970s, the Critical Legal Studies movement has recognized this, and even they are just reviving the legal realists who made these same insights decades before them. The idea of determinate law is actually an undesirable feature — even if we were to overcome the impossibility of making it so — as the strength of an effective legal system lies in its ability to have certain amounts of flexibility. This is why the decentralized, private law tradition was able to produce several codes of uniform laws — do not murder, steal, assault, or initiate aggression in general — while providing the room to adapt to social change and distinct cultures.
When the law is under the dominion of a top-down, coercive state it is transformed from a system of governance to a body of expropriation. Whether through the use of logic or emotional appeals, whoever wields the state apparatus says what the law is and they will dispense their armed enforcers to make sure their law is fulfilled.
If an objective rule of law is impossible, then why does this myth persist? To ask the question is to answer it. “Like all myths,” notes Hasnas,
it is designed to serve an emotive, rather than cognitive, function. The purpose of a myth is not to persuade one’s reason, but to enlist one’s emotions in support of an idea. And this is precisely the case for the myth of the rule of law; its purpose is to enlist the emotions of the public in support of society’s political power structure.
If the public views the law as a neutral and objective arbiter, then they are more willing to support state power and its violent expropriation and parasitism. We are more willing to accept the comfortable delusion of objectivity and the need for predictable laws than deal with the frightening alternatives of supposedly unpredictable anarchy. “Once they believe that they are being commanded by an impersonal law rather than other human beings,” people “view their obedience to political authority as a public-spirited acceptance of the requirements of social life rather than mere acquiescence to superior power,” notes Hasnas. Tyrants of the past used to claim that their rule was inspired by Divine Right to mask the fact that their rule was an exercise of naked aggression over their subjects. When this doctrine became discredited, a new myth was needed, and the rule of law was born.
No matter how impossible the rule of law may be, the state has a heavy interest in promoting this myth.
Before the rise of legislative law, the private, decentralized, and polycentric common-law system was effective at promoting peace and public order because it lacked the monopoly power of a centralized state. Under both models, laws are never determinate or universally objective. But under a private law system, bad decisions that were not accepted by the public or viewed as overreaches could not be coercively imposed on society. This system of checks and balances allowed laws beneficial to the protection of private property to flourish while weeding out the bad laws.
Under a state system, however, it is much harder, if not impossible, to fix bad laws as there now exists a political incentive to keep the law on the books, while most judges serve lengthy or even life terms. If the judge, legislature, and police are all part of the state apparatus, they will tend to find expansive definitions for state power with limited definitions of individual freedoms.
“The myth of the rule of law does more than render the people submissive to state authority; it also turns them into the state’s accomplices in the exercise of its power,” concludes Hasnas. “For people who would ordinarily consider it a great evil to deprive individuals of their rights or oppress politically powerless minority groups will respond with patriotic fervor when these same actions are described as upholding the rule of law.” While the state does indeed provide some law and order under its jurisdiction, the “rule of law” has been used as a propaganda tool in order to help cement and legitimize state power.
존 하스나스 교수의 논문을 볼 수 있는 주소
John Hasnas, “The Myth of the Rule of Law.” http://faculty.msb.edu/hasnasj/GTWebSite/MythWeb.htm
본인의 책 <대한민국, 이렇게 망한다>에서도 하스나스 교수를 잠깐 언급했다.
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멩거, 미제스, 하이에크, 로스바드 4 명의 죽은 경제학자들의 목소리에 귀를 기울이자
Listen to Dead Economists
•Jeff Deist
The late economist Friedrich Hayek, celebrated earlier this week on the anniversary of his birthday, left an enduring body of work and a place in history as the reluctant winner of a Nobel Prize he thought suited only to the physical sciences.
But exactly how enduring his work and his legacy will remain is an important question, and not just for Hayek. The mood in the West is not friendly to intellectuals, much less dead intellectuals. We prefer social media and short videos to books and lectures. We want someone else to provide easily-digestible ideas, concepts, and news, rather than seeking original sources for ourselves. We don’t have time for context or nuance. With limited knowledge of history, we tend to fetishize new over old, modernity over tradition, and data over theory. In our hubris, we imagine ourselves in a new era where old knowledge and wisdom no longer apply.
But we do so at our own peril. The accelerating pace of technology lulls us into believing human development is linear. Technology, not dusty old ideas from another century, seems the primary driver of change. But technology cannot answer the age-old question of whether humans choose compulsion or cooperation: it cannot create a “third way” between liberty and intervention. Ideas still rule the future, but sometimes we mistake new technology for new ideas.
Still, exciting developments abound in the physical sciences. The expanding boundaries of quantum mechanics promise to dramatically increase computing power. Biologists discover thousands of new species every year. Mathematicians prove new theories about prime numbers. Physicists and engineers make the possibility of affordable private space travel closer to reality every day. Meanwhile, advances in artificial intelligence, computer science, and information technology promise to radically alter our physical world through an emerging Internet of Things. If there’s one thing that still excites the Western imagination, it is the possibility of radical advances in technology — all due, at least in large part, to advances (and applications) in the physical sciences.
By contrast, the social sciences and humanities are moribund, reduced to hyphenated studies and manufactured “intersectionality” disciplines. Academic work in the soft sciences is shrill and brittle, far more concerned with political and cultural crusades than teaching students or engaging in serious scholarship. Music, cinema, modern art, and literature suffer under the weight of their own pretensions and heavy-handed messaging. Historians whitewash history, English professors ignore English literature, and sociology devolves into a definitional science. It is no exaggeration to say that there is nothing new under the sun in these disciplines, at least in terms of real scholarly or professional advancement.
Then we have economics, the orphaned social science that masquerades as a physical science. Economics has become the unwitting cousin of math, statistics, and finance, which explains why so many universities have shunted it off onto their business schools. Empiricism, and the jealous impulse to apply scientific methodology to problems of human action, insists that economists have value only to the extent they successfully test and “prove” their hypotheses.
As a result, economics has been corrupted into a predictive discipline that fails to correctly predict anything; into a prescriptive discipline that prescribes the wrong policies, and into an empirical discipline that collects data but misses the point.
This conflation of economic science with business and politics was a grave mistake, as Ludwig von Mises witnessed so clearly:
If it were possible to calculate the future state of the market, the future would not be uncertain. There would be neither entrepreneurial loss nor profit. What people expect from the economists is beyond the power of any mortal man.
The very idea that the future is predictable, that some formulas could be substituted for the specific understanding which is the essence of entrepreneurial activity, and that familiarity with these formulas could make it possible for anybody to take over the conduct of business is, of course, an outgrowth of the whole complex of fallacies and misconceptions which are at the bottom of present-day anticapitalistic policies.
Mises, perhaps more than any economist of his time, understood economics as a theoretical science. That understanding is at the heart of Austrian economics, and it is why the world desperately needs dead economists today. Carl Menger, Mises, Hayek, and Murray Rothbard, four dead horsemen of the Austrian school, have more to teach us than a thousand university professors or Ivy League PhDs at the Fed. These were serious scholars, from a time before the Pikettys and the Krugmans turned economics into a form of pop entertainment and a vehicle for promoting interventionism.
We don’t revere dead economists to maintain their place in some academic hierarchy, or to satisfy an atavistic desire for an unchanging intellectual order. We revere them because their ideas still have purchase, because their work yields knowledge that is sorely needed today. We read them and promote them in order to understand the world as it is, filled with billions of purposeful but often irrational human actors. We need dead economists to save us from ourselves and to refute the stubborn myths of collectivism. We need them most of all because their work and their insights are far superior to those of most economists alive today. There is no "New Economics," only new academic work that painstakingly advances the knowledge bequeathed to us.
One caution: ignore the critics, gatekeepers, and filtering by lesser minds. Go to original sources. Menger, Mises, Hayek, and Rothbard are all great thinkers who are best understood in their original and unadulterated forms.
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과학을 위한 행진은 좌파들의 의제를 전파하기 위한 운동이었다. 그들의 목표는 현실이 사회적 의견에 의해 결정된다는 주장을 관철시키기 위한 것이다.
The March for Science Attacks Free Thought
04/27/2017•Carrie Burdzinski
“Science,” the method by which we understand the world and apply knowledge to improve human existence, is the latest casualty of the Progressive agenda. On April 22, 2017, several million people gathered at March for Science rallies across the United States to “stand up for science.” But surely science needs no publicity stunt in the industrialized world, where the benefits of scientific advancements — cars, electricity, cell phones, and the internet — are widely accepted. So what exactly are these demonstrators promoting?
The first goal of the March for Science is to supplant the correspondence theory of truth with the consensus theory of truth — the belief that reality is determined by social opinion. As described in their Core Principles, “Political decision-making that impacts the lives of Americans and the world at large should make use of peer-reviewed evidence and scientific consensus.” However, consensus-based thinking is the antithesis of science; it is a groupthink approach to controlling public debate, as individuals with contradictory evidence are effectively censored. To the detriment of public health, consensus science sways dietary recommendations.
For example, contrary to widely accepted medical opinion, dietary cholesterol has little impact on the development of atherosclerosis and heart disease. But the government-sanctioned Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics (formerly the American Dietetic Association) retains a legal monopoly on peddling nutritional advice, barring other individuals from obtaining licensing to provide alternative dietary consulting services.
Regardless how one comes down on this question, the fact remains that the quality of a scientific theory is determined not by consensus or the number of people who believe it, but by its correspondence with reality.
Science as Just Anther Type of Social Justice
If the purpose of science is to discover facts about the world, then we needn’t be concerned with an individual scientist’s alleged minority group membership. But if the purpose of the new science is to advance an egalitarian political agenda, then group representation matters more than true scientific achievements. Indeed, issues that used to remain in the sludge of sociology are now encompassed by the scope of “science.” The Marcher’s statement continues:
Analogously, the March for Science is just a pseudonym for a particularly savvy branch of the Progressive agenda, and should be exposed as such.
(발췌)
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우연히 아주 오래 전 열광했던 작가 토마스 울프가 생각나서 구글링을 했더니, 그에 대한 짤막한 전기가 올라왔다. 귀한 사진 자료가 풍부하다. 혹시 토마스 울프에 관심 있는 분들은 한 번 볼만한 비디오.
토마스 울프는 고등학교 때 시를 많이 읽어서 그의 소설에는 시와 같은 문장이 너무나 많다. 그래서 미국의 출판사에서는 그의 문장 중에 시적으로 아름다운 문장만을 모아서 따라 출판하기도 했다. 국내에서는 그의 대작 소설 4권 중에 2권만이 번역되어 있다. 나머지 2권은 내가 알기로는 아직 번역되지 않았다.
<시간과 강물 Of Time and the River> <거미줄과 바위 The Web and the Rock>
천재 토마스 울프가 37살에 요절하지 않고 좀더 오래 살았다면, 얼마나 놀라운 작품을 써냈을지 생각하면 안타깝기 그지없다.
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NassimNicholasTaleb
It is easier to fool someone perceived as "intelligent" than a doorman. Just use abstract words in your argument.
몇 마디 추상적인 단어를 사용하면 지적인 사람을 바보로 만들 수 있다.
세상을 살아갈 수록 작은 지식이 위험하고, 선무당이 사람 잡는다는 말이 절실해진다. 대학 다닐 때 들은 몇 마디 좌파 용어로 세상을 어지럽게 하는 한국의 좌파들을 보면 더욱 그렇다.
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경제적 폭락은 경제에서 나약한 회사와 진부한 관념들을 청소한다. 재정적, 인적 자본을 재배치 함으로써, 경제적 폭락은 기업들이 살아남기 위해 혁신하도록 하고, 적응하지 못하는 기업은 도태시킨다.
---나심 탈레브의 <앤티프래질>
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