Links to Consider, 3/14

Erik Torenberg on insincere egalitarianism; Rob Henderson on same; Thomas Fazi on Crisis and Leviathan; Timothy Taylor on the Fed's plans for its balance sheet

Erik Torenberg writes,

You need to speak a big game about egalitarianism to have popular support, but you need to be ruthlessly meritocratic in your organization to make sure you have great results. Without egalitarianism, a military won’t have popular support. Without meritocracy, a military won’t function. 

If you are sincerely meritocratic, you will have too many enemies. If you are sincerely egalitarian, then you will be a chump.

Rob Henderson writes,

Elite colleges are eliminating standardized tests before they eliminate legacy admissions. Tells you all you need to know.

Thomas Fazi writes,

by 2020, the biosecurity complex had burgeoned into a mammoth of terrifying power and proportions, encompassing the world’s largest pharma and biotech companies, the biometrics industry, social-media giants, traditional media conglomerates, national security (military and intelligence) apparatuses, global and national public-health organizations such as WHO, the World Bank’s health division, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Institutes of Health and their equivalents in other countries, private philanthropies such as the Gates Foundation, and trans-Atlantic planning groups-cum-think tanks such as the WEF as important intermediaries between the various actors.

…its members understood very well that such an event was likely to lead to a rollback of democracy and civil liberties, and a restructuring of societies along more authoritarian lines—and openly called for this kind of response.

…We have entered an era in which Western establishments need to constantly invent new nightmares to maintain their power; and when enough people with enough power start to dream the same nightmare, it’s only a matter of time before it comes true.

Pointer from Niccolo Soldo. I hope that my readers are not new to the idea that government officials are inclined to manufacture crises in order to justify power grabs. If this is new to you, then you need to pick up Robert Higgs.

Timothy Taylor writes,

Back in 2013, you’ll remember, Aldolfatto and Li argued that the first wave of quantitative easing was not “monetizing the debt,” because it wasn’t a permanent step, and debt held by the Fed was being phased down. Now here were are in 2023, and even if the Fed manages to stick to its plan of phasing down its Treasury debt holding in the next three years, total Fed assets would still be about $7 trillion by 2029. What looked like a slow phase-down of Fed assets back in 2013 will be starting to look like a permanent and generally rising pattern of Fed assets by 2029–which was the working definition of monetizing the debt.

It was never “quantitative easing.” It was always facilitating large deficits. Now the Fed admits that this "temporary emergency” policy is no longer going to end as promised. It will certainly not end well.

Substacks referenced above:

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Saturday Commentary and Review #115

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Dropping the SAT Requirement Is a Luxury Belief

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How Slave Morality Won