The core idea of Hayek’s famous “The Use of Knowledge in Society” is the claim that prices act as signals that compress vast amounts of dispersed, rapidly-changing information into something that ground-level decisions-makers can use without knowing the underlying details. You don’t have to know anything about oil or gas production to know how much gasoline you can afford to put in your car, or how much driving you should do between paychecks, etc. Likewise, a gas station manager doesn’t have to know anything about geopolitics or warfare strategy or the Strait of Hormuz to know that a shortage is coming, and that he has to up the price of gas at his tank. The resulting reduction in epistemic burdens is supposed to be the great virtue of the free market pricing system. Continue reading
Tag Archives: middle-east
I’m Rooting for Iran
As the United States continues to lose the war to Iran, expect American journalists to employ increasingly bizarre but instructive circumlocutions to misdescribe obvious but unpalatable realities. This piece in The Wall Street Journal is a classic in the genre. “Iran uses asymmetric warfare to inflict pain from a weakened position.” Translation: “Iran is using asymmetric warfare to win the war.” Continue reading
Dire Strait
Consider one of the antinomies, or self-contradictions, of international relations.
For decades now, the conventional wisdom in international relations has held that the closure of the Strait of Hormuz was a low probability event, and that if it happened, it could very likely be dealt with by the U.S. Navy. For documentation and a literature review, see Caitlin Talmadge’s paper, “Closing Time: Assessing the Iranian Threat to the Strait of Hormuz,” International Security, vol. 33:1 (Summer 2008), pp. 82-117. Continue reading
Malley and Wertheim on Iranian “Responsibility”
When people commit crimes, they often invent elaborate rationalizations to conceal or dilute the moral turpitude of the offense. Rapists notoriously claim that their victims asked to be raped, or enjoyed it during the act. Murderers cite the imperatives of retributive justice. Etc. When it comes to ordinary crimes, most people can see the gaslighting involved for the deception it is. Unfortunately, this tends not to be true of crimes by nation-states. A nation-state can commit an obvious, egregious crime in the plain light of day, lie about it in an obvious way, and be believed by millions of people. Continue reading
This Be the Hearse
David French on the “legal and moral justifications for war” against Iran:
There is little question that we have many legal and moral justifications for war. When Trump spoke about Americans killed by Iranian-backed militias in Iraq, that struck home for me. We lost men in my own unit to Iranian-backed militias using Iranian-supplied munitions. I knew those men, and I will never forget the terrible days when they fell.
In other words, twenty years ago, the United States initiated a war of aggression against Iraq premised on florid, systematic lies. The victims fought back, killing some of the aggressors. In answer to those acts of self-defense, we’re now obliged to initiate yet another war of aggression, this time against Iran, eliciting yet another round of defensive attacks by the successors of yesteryear’s victims. Continue reading
When Self-Defense Is “Terror”
A recent article in The New York Times by its so-called “national security correspondent” is an indication of how incompetent mainstream journalists are, and how unreflectively eager they are to do the bidding of the national security establishment they supposedly cover. The article is “Iran Could Direct Proxies to Attack U.S. Targets Abroad, Officials Warn,” by Eric Schmitt. Nothing in it is newsworthy or news. All of the work in it is done by its brainless and tendentious reliance on the term “terrorism.” Continue reading
Loyalty and Academic Freedom
The case of Jonathan A. C. Brown
A friend is circulating an Open Letter to Interim President Robert Groves of Georgetown University in defense of Professor Jonathan A.C. Brown, the Alwaleed bin Talal chair of Islamic Civilisation in the School of Foreign Service. Apparently, during the recent US-Israel-Iran war, Brown made this comment on X:
“I’m not an expert, but I assume Iran could still get a bomb easily. I hope Iran does some symbolic strike on a base, then everyone stops,” Brown wrote on X.
Brown has tenure and a chaired professorship at Georgetown, but apparently the comment was regarded as frightening enough to call for his suspension. The President forced Brown to delete the tweet, and he’s now been suspended. He’s also been removed as chair of his department, which I believe was intended as punishment. Continue reading
Davenport et al on Regime Change in Iran
PoT’s own John Davenport has a piece in The Defense Post attacking the idea of regime change in Iran. John argues, reasonably enough, that a war with Iran is ill-conceived, partly because it’s based on Israeli deceptions, and partly because it’s likely to lead to terrible, even catastrophic consequences. Continue reading
Thy Kingdom’s Will Be Done
I had a conversation the other day with a woman associated with a very liberal Protestant church who’d been organizing a charitable event for Gaza. The event was a dinner intended to raise money for a well-known medical relief organization. The event was a success, but she told me with chagrin that she had to be careful to advertise it in such a way as to avoid mentioning it to those members of the congregation who might have objected.
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Policy of Truth 